58th edition – Control – Pike & Hurricane

Eternal Putin

Maya Diekmann — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 18:33:49 +0000

How does one leave the Kremlin after nearly two decades in office? And can one leave it gracefully and even more importantly—perhaps—alive? Russia’s Vladimir Putin has little to learn from his predecessors. Of the nine de facto Russian leaders since Lenin, five died in office, two were more or less officially exiled and eradicated from the Russian political scene, one became one of “the most reviled men in Russia”, and the last one remains nothing but the drunk memory of Russia’s chaotic stumble into the 21st century. Putin, the founding father of post-Soviet Russia, surely has no interest in following in his immediate predecessors’ footsteps or becoming yet another Russian leader among many.

Till death do us part

Recent constitutional reforms in Russia, initiated by the president, have commentators pointing to the possibility that Putin might in fact be choosing the more popular mode of transportation out of the Kremlin—that is in a coffin. With the annulment of his presidential terms, Putin could seek reelection in 2024 and technically stay president until 2036, ensuring him a de facto presidency for life, given that the life expectancy in Russia averages 67.75 years for males—an age which Putin has already exceeded.

Putin’s legacy is withering away, unless he makes one of two decisive moves: Tightening his grip on power or—almost unimaginable—letting go.

But why go to such lengths of reforming an entire constitution to be re-elected president if playing a game of musical chairs with a designated side-kick, in Putin’s case Dmitry Medvedev, is just as effective? Unless, of course, the partner is increasingly weak and no longer suitable for the game, as Medvedev’s plummeting approval ratings after 2014, from which the former Prime Minister never managed to recover, indicate. Only after Medvedev resigned upon Putin’s proposition for constitutional changes, and Mikhail Mishustin assumed his position, have the approval ratings for the new Russian Prime Minister started to recover. Perhaps, Putin has found a new president-in-waiting in Mishustin. Though this still wouldn’t explain the constitutional reform.

More realistically, Putin may have realized that his own image might just never fully recover either, after the 2018 anti-government protests—least when the organizer of these protests and Putin’s main political opponent almost miraculously survives a “mysterious” attempted assassination. And only so many political opponents can end up poisoned before an explanation to the Russian people and the international community is inescapable. Approval ratings will unlikely ever reach those peaks of Putin’s early presidency and opposition is only likely to grow louder. In other words, Putin’s legacy is withering away, unless he makes one of two decisive moves: Tightening his grip on power or—almost unimaginable—letting go.

The last responder

If Putin does in fact want to be reelected in 2024, he needs to have sufficient support from the people of Russia, meaning he needs to stabilize his approval ratings. Those are in fact looking pretty stable—albeit not great—even if one accounts for a temporary corona-induced low. Yet, if he actually plans to retire, doing so with such mediocre ratings—a far cry from his heydays—would leave a bitter aftertaste for the man who has been ranked Russia’s second greatest leader after Stalin by the Russian people. Whenever and however Putin leaves the Kremlin, he will want to do so on a high note. Since Putin first assumed power he has only experienced two major crises in approval ratings—not counting the most recent one triggered by the Kremlin’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. The first were the large scale anti-government protests between 2011–2013, that were, among others, motivated by Putin’s decision to run for reelection. It was essentially Russia’s suspiciously successful performance at the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi—cue: the 2017 documentary “Icarus”—that propelled Putin’s ratings back up after these protests.

The second were the large-scale anti-corruption protests against the government between 2017–2018 and although not immediately linked to Putin’s reelection, these—once again—occurred in the year of the Russian presidential elections out of which Putin would emerge victorious. Unfortunately for him, there were no more major sports events scheduled in the near future that could prove handy to Putin’s agenda. If the Kremlin wants to keep an already strained Russian population under control for the next presidential election—or even just until then—they need to find a remedy for the dissatisfaction. And how better to please the opposition than to give them what they have been asking for ever since the President circumvented the constitution in 2012: a Russia without Putin.

A Piece of Eternity

Enter the constitutional reform. However near or far the amendments project the end of Putin’s reign, it does project it. It is almost a guarantee for no one like Putin to ever happen to Russia again. And Russia was thrilled about that: A sweeping 78 percent of Russians approved Putin’s suggested reforms, even in a time where the President’s popularity itself was scraping at a corona pandemic induced near all-time low, and even at the risk that Putin might in fact run for another term. At least the end is in sight.

“But Putin’s reform might just prove successful, regardless of future presidential terms or even approval ratings.”

Had the corona pandemic not happened, Russians might have even been thankful enough for their president offering his own head, to spare some more positive opinions towards him, too. Then Putin’s master plan might have worked out––he could have left with a bang or ridden his wave of approval a bit longer. But Putin’s reform might just prove successful, regardless of future presidential terms or even approval ratings. In the end, the reforms have gifted Putin with one thing: He has enshrined his legacy—his rediscovered Russian greatness—into the heart of the Russian state, while ensuring that no president after him will even come close to this legacy. And that itself is a piece of eternity for Putin.

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Kremlin, Luigi Selmi, CC BY-SA 2.0

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Tightening the Grip: Is Experience Necessary for a Successful Autocrat?

Filip Zahariev — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 18:21:01 +0000

Right-wing populists and autocrats do not accept defeat. Challenged by reality, they clamp down—their position is rigid, very often averse to even the slightest possibility of change. Truth has been devalued, facts are treated as opinion, those who possess knowledge and expertise are treated with contempt. We live in an age of rampant anti-intellectualism, where the divisions on social issues are widening instead of narrowing. Consensus has never been further away, as the divisions on social issues show, ranging from equality to freedom of speech and the press to racism to xenophobia.

The Man Who Would Be King

This has been illustrated full well over the last month. Look to the USA. After months of sowing doubt about mail-in voting, Trump lost because of it. He has not conceded—and he never will. It’s likely he believes the baseless accusations he spouts; populists and autocrats are ever prone to the worst bouts of paranoia. If the political crisis in Belarus has hammered a point home, it is that no would-be autocrat is willing to go quietly into the night. Even if Trump himself is aware of reality, his rhetoric has made certain that a sizeable number of the seventy-three million Americans, who cast their votes for him, will never accept Joseph Biden as their legitimate president.

Seventy-three million. That is the number of souls who have voiced unconditional support for the conduit of the United States’ forty-fifth president. For the strongman whose approach has placed loyalty first, second, and third, and made competence not even a necessity. This approach has flourished on all levels of Trump’s White House, decreasing America’s prestige in the eyes of its old allies, while encouraging others of Trump’s ilk––the elected despots who lead ever more “illiberal states,” if we use the term Hungary’s Viktor Orban employed some years back.

America’s Favourite Strongman

Orban himself has much to teach us about control, more even than Trump. While one flaunts his inexperience in public office, the other is an old hand at politics. Following the European Union’s attempt to rein in Hungary and Poland’s “waning of democracies” via a rule of law mechanism, both countries’ leaders have vetoed the EU’s budget for the next seven years—a move that might very well bring about a full-blown political crisis in the bloc. It would come as no surprise if the Union blinks before Orban does—the individual member-states of the EU are desperate for the financial relief this new budget will provide them, to deal with the aftermath of the coronavirus.

Orban has used every excuse he can to centralise authority on his own person; his popularity has suffered little for it. He has curtailed judicial powers and independence, has blamed many of the issues that plague the country on outside influence, most commonly George Soros—who has long been a political foe and critic of his—and immigrants, including when the coronavirus first reached the country. Orban continues to be viewed as a hero, in the highest echelons of the European Union but elsewhere, too; his past accomplishments are compelling. There is ample reason why Viktor Orban has been described as “the American right’s favourite strongman”. He has shown a capacity for using any crisis to his ultimate benefit—something the current American president has attempted to emulate, to mixed results.

For the “elected despots” of the European Union, politicking has proven thicker than the blood of those who have viewpoints opposing their own.

His Polish counterpart, Jarosław Kaczyński, is no different. Rather than take a step back from the controversial abortion law that sparked the “Women’s Strike”, Kaczyński’s party has used these protests to draw a line in the sand, polarizing Polish society and enervating the Polish conservatives by painting the conflict not as one against the law itself but rather, as an attack on the Catholic church. The gall of another member of the ruling party PiS (Law and Justice) in “likening the red lightning symbol of the protests to the runes of Nazi Germany’s SS forces” shows the extent to which PiS is willing to stoke the flames of social strife.

For the “elected despots” of the European Union, politicking has proven thicker than the blood of those who have viewpoints opposing their own. The overall theme is the same: They are all nationalists quick to point a finger of blame, unwilling to backtrack. They are—unlike Trump, who ran as one—economic populists, which is where the vast amount of their support comes from. Peter Beinart writes for the NYRB:

“In 2019, Poland’s xenophobic and homophobic Law and Justice party won a dominant election victory in large measure because of its immensely popular payouts to Polish families, which, according to the World Bank, dramatically reduced child poverty. (Law and Justice’s popularity has fallen since then as many Poles have revolted against its draconian efforts to outlaw abortion.) In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has launched a New Deal-style public works program that gives hundreds of thousands of Hungarians government jobs.”

These are social policies that earn no small amount of goodwill, difficult to break despite raising discontent. And—as the Polish ruling party is all too willing to prove—social cohesion is not high in the list of priorities for the democratically elected despots, not when they hold onto the firm belief that they can energize a large enough percent of their populations to continue being reelected to office.

“The people” is not as inclusive a label as we might think; in the eyes of a caudillo, this concept extends only to those who are firm in their support. The opposition is the enemy—this lesson, at least, Trump learned well and early.

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Photo credits

Trump by geralt No attribution required

Viktor Orban by Łukasz Dawidziu CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

People in Groups by Sukanto DebnathlCC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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A Society of Control: The actuality of Gilles Deleuze’s thoughts in the 21st century

Franziska Fink — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 18:19:33 +0000

Eighty-eight years ago, in 1932, Aldous Huxley wrote his infamous dystopian novel, Brave New World. Huxley tells the story of a futuristic World State in which all citizens are constantly happy, as well as content with the social order. They have been conditioned from birth by an overarching powerful state apparatus to accept the role they have been assigned to. Injustices such as owning less than others or having to do dull work are thus not perceived as discriminatory, but rather joyfully accepted. Moreover, the citizens’ entire perception of reality and truth is generated and controlled by the state. Of course, the mechanisms of control are hidden away from the general public and are only known by a small elite of so-called World Controllers. They govern, respectively dictate, with the best intent, namely for the purpose of creating social stability by brainwashing everyone into happiness: “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”

Huxley’s World State shares many features with what Michel Foucault has termed a “disciplinary society”. Initiated by the systemic organization of vast spaces of enclosure, members of disciplinary societies can be constantly controlled as they move in between easily observable locations: from their home to school, to factories, possibly to hospitals and prison—all institutions that are placed under the state’s surveillance and, thus, subjects within those become easy targets to control. Foucault placed this kind of society in the 18th and 19th century, during a simpler time, when an ordinary person’s life probably did not entail more than going to school and later in life to work in a factory.

“I imagine Foucault terrified if he saw what kind of society we are living in nowadays.”

To people that have been brought up in a liberal democracy which cherishes plurality of opinions and ideas, this form of societal and political organization seems, unsurprisingly, repellent in its entirety. Not being able to express, not even being given the chance to develop, one’s own understanding and opinion of how our society should look, appears a drastic deprivation of fundamental rights.

I imagine Foucault terrified if he saw what kind of society we are living in nowadays. A society so complex and so intertwined with technology, yet nonetheless so young in regard to the proliferation of that technological hegemony, that there are simply no mechanisms in place that has the capacity to control these novelties. Yet, quite the opposite seems to be the case: We live in a society of technological control, so far-reaching that not even the godfather of this theory, Gilles Deleuze, could have imagined it.

“In contrast to Huxley’s World State members, people in our post-modern society of control are not controlled through psychologically conditioned beliefs, but rather trough the mechanisms of the “bubble” in which they move.”

While the individual in a disciplinary society was placed in different institutions of control, the contemporary individual living in a control society is in constant modulation, Deleuze states. With our phones, laptops, and tablets always within a short distance, we are constantly coerced in various forms of communication. On the one hand, this has triggered a new form of global interconnectedness and awareness. The revolution in information and communication technology spread power to the masses by creating a unique global space for human development. Local events can now instantly trigger global consequences, grassroots movements like Fridays for Future are only one telling example. Nevertheless, this new space can also be used for destruction.

In contrast to Huxley’s World State members, people in our post-modern society of control are not controlled through psychologically conditioned beliefs but rather through the mechanisms of the “bubble” in which they move. These are characterized and nourished by determinants such as our social environment, socioeconomic status and educational background, but also by our virtual interactions.

Our own personal truth and material reality is subsequently generated by algorithms which constantly provide us with the type of news we would like to see; disinformation and fake news determine election outcomes and people become more prone to conspiracy theories and dangerous movements.

“What is already clear, is that we will not end up with the benefits which the members of Huxley’s World State enjoy.”

What is unique about our contemporary society of technological control is that it appears as if there is no all-encompassing political agenda behind all of this. Of course, the technology is used by different political groups to realize their interests, whether this is done through the spreading of fake news about their opponents or through the hacking of foreign elections. But the ones who essentially developed—and are in charge of managing powerful and influential platforms like Facebook or Twitter—the actual puppet-players, seemingly have commercial benefits as their basis of interest, in contrast to sound political goals. The World Controllers imagined by Huxley or the ruling elites of disciplinary societies, exercised control predominantly for control’s sake. Yet, nowadays, thanks to the egalitarian mechanisms of the internet, everyone has the potential to become a powerful player and to use this control in their own interests. This automatically creates a kind of virtual anarchy, in which the means for control does not resonate with its ends.

Since this development is still so young, it is too early to predict how it will unfold. What is already clear, is that we will not end up with the benefits which the members of Huxley’s World State enjoy. Facilitated by a totalitarian state, they gain social stability, a great sense of community and a strong group identity. But they nonetheless pay for it with their rights of individual development and active political participation. In contrast, the post-modern version of Deleuze’s society of (technological) control in which we find ourselves, accelerated exactly these facets; it also makes us pay for it, in turn, with data, privacy and the complete dependency on our phones and laptops.

Neither of these alternatives sound too attractive to live with. What to do? After having discovered the perversion of the system in which he lives, one of the protagonists of Brave New World dealt with his newly gained knowledge by leaving civilization behind and fleeing into the woods. Sounds intriguing? Yes, but let’s all promise not to do a live-Instagram story of the beautiful sunsets we will find.

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Artificial Intelligence – Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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The Swedish COVID-19 pandemic strategy or: The Comeback of the “Ättestupa”

Oliver Ösmark — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 17:08:06 +0000

A saying attributed to the ever-chipper Joseph Stalin goes: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Seeing death and knowing death are two very different experiences. And it can be argued whether those in charge, untouched by the pain suffered by people who have known and loved the lives of those prematurely stolen by tragedy, can fully grasp the terrible weight and burden of their duties. Logic level-headedness and ardent stoicism are admirable qualities in leaders where others might crack under pressure, but where the person becomes translated into “1”, there is room for indulgence in terrible calculus. While, at times, there is little alternative not to employ statistical methods, the impact of the moral hazard afforded to government officials dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden has been difficult to process.

In the case of Sweden’s response to handling the COVID-19 pandemic, models and wishful thinking have cost the lives of over 7,000 people, most of which, due to their old age, were denied access to treatment in favor of palliative measures to help avoid hospitals becoming overwhelmed. During the first wave, the virus wreaked havoc in nursing homes, where nearly 1,000 people died in a matter of weeks. Early in March, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) sent a directive to Stockholm hospitals stating that any patients over 80 or with a body mass index above 40 should not be admitted to intensive care because they were less likely to recover. Other reports describe sick care home residents being administered a palliative cocktail of morphine and benzos, because the homes were not equipped to administer oxygen, something some doctors have described as “active euthanasia.”

People in nursing homes were triaged out of healthcare and given “No Hospital” notes on their journals even before they got sick. But these interventions were not only reserved for patients who were suspected of having COVID-19. A person with a urinary tract infection in need of hospitalization would not get much needed care either. They received palliative medicine instead. The number of patients in need of intensive care no doubt increased, but as did the number of hospital beds. In early April there were over 300 intensive care units and on the 9th of April 79 of them were vacant. Thus, there was no reason to comply with the tough priorities recommended by the National Board of Health and Welfare.

Critics of the Swedish government’s approach, made up of doctors like Andrew Ewing, a professor at the University of Gothenburg, have given damning appraisals of Sweden’s response to the pandemic. Ewing is a member of a 200-strong scientific collective in Sweden who call themselves the Science Forum COVID-19. Since March they have been outspoken critics of Sweden’s unique approach to the pandemic, which has been notably out of sync with the rest of the globe. After his criticisms were published in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet he received wave after wave of hate mail from members of the public unhappy with his remarks. “Some of us even got death threats, for ‘damaging the reputation of Sweden,’” says Nele Brusselaers, another member of the Science Forum.

Cloud cuckoo land

Chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist and the architect of the national response, has described the decision to keep society open as a holistic approach to public health, aiming to balance the risk of the virus with avoiding the long-term consequences of closing schools and businesses—a popular view among many Swedes. The government controversially refused restrictions early on and this approach was even lauded by none other than the World Health Organization back in April as a “model” for battling the coronavirus. Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO’s top emergencies expert, said then there are “lessons to be learned” from the Scandinavian nation, which has largely relied on citizens to self-regulate. “I think there’s a perception out that Sweden has not put in control measures and just has allowed the disease to spread. Nothing can be further from the truth,” Ryan told reporters.

It is dangerous to have such strong convictions about an approach that over 2,000 medical doctors, professors, and researchers objected to as lacking credible data to support it. They’ve called on the government to introduce more stringent containment measures. Dr. Cecilia Söderberg-Nauclér—professor of immunology at the Karoliska Institute—said: “It is almost a tradition in Sweden to trust the authorities and trust their experts. But I am a scientist, and I don’t trust the authorities, I trust data. The problem with herd immunity is that we do not have any data on it yet, and I don’t think that we should be the first ones to test it. It is an experiment that I did not give my informed consent to and many with me have not done that either. The data that we do have access to and the developments in other countries just say that this is not a safe path to take. Nothing is safe here because many people are going to suffer […] We must establish control over the situation, we cannot head into a situation where we get complete chaos. No one has tried this route, so why should we test it first in Sweden, without informed consent?”

Herd immunity is when a large part of the population of an area is immune to a specific disease. If enough people are resistant to the cause of a disease, such as a virus or bacteria, it has nowhere to go. Individuals can become immune by recovering from an earlier infection or through vaccination. As vaccines have yet to be readily distributed to the public, one has had to rely on exposure—allowing enough members of a population to be infected, recover and then develop an immune system response to the virus. But herd immunity must be achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it haphazardly. Especially when the extent of the harm done by the pathogen is not yet fully understood.

This is because a lot of people die under the scenario of herd immunity. The Swedish experiment has shown as much. More than seven out of ten of all those who died because of COVID-19 in Sweden have had some form of elderly care. 3,002 of the dead have lived in nursing homes and 1,696 have had home care. As of December 6, Sweden’s per capita death rate from the coronavirus is 21st place in the world, at 637.31 deaths per million. Compared to other Scandinavian countries, Denmark has almost 5 times less deaths than Sweden; Finland 9 times; and Norway almost 11 times less. As of December 6, 7,067 people in Sweden have died.

Although Sweden’s Public Health Service and Tegnell insist on the opposite, the core of Sweden’s strategy is generally understood to have been about building natural herd immunity. Both the agency and Prime Minister Stefan Löfven have characterized their approach as “common sense” (“folkvätt”) trust-based recommendations rather than strict measures, such as lockdowns, which they say are unsustainable for a long time—herd immunity was only a desirable side effect. Internal communications, however, say otherwise.

E-mails obtained between national and regional authorities, including the Public Health Agency, as well as those received by other journalists, suggest that the goal was indeed to develop herd immunity—documents of these communications are readily available online. An example that clearly shows that government officials had considered herd immunity early on is an e-mail sent from a retired doctor on March 15 to Tegnell, which he passed on to his Finnish counterpart, Mika Salminen. In it, the retired doctor recommended that healthy people be infected in controlled environments to fight the epidemic. “One point would be to keep the schools open to reach herd immunity faster,” Tegnell noted at the top of the email. Salminen replied that the Finnish Health Agency had considered this but decided against it, because “over time, children will still spread the infection to other age groups.” In addition, the Finnish model showed that closing schools would reduce the “attack’s share of the disease in the elderly” by 10%. Tegnell replied: “10 percent can be worth it?”

Three men make a tiger

Prime Minister Stefan Löfven

The majority of the rest of Sweden’s political decision-makers seemed to have agreed: the country never closed daycare centers or schools for children under 16 and school visits remain mandatory under Swedish law without the possibility of distance education or home tuition—not even for children with family members in high-risk groups. They effectively decided to use children and schools as participants in an experiment to see if herd immunity to a deadly disease could be achieved. Several outbreaks in schools occurred in both spring and autumn.

Löfven, his government, and the Public Health Service all say that the high death rate due to COVID-19 in Sweden can be attributed to the fact that a large proportion of these deaths occurred in nursing homes due to shortcomings in elderly care. But it was the high degree of infection throughout the country that was the underlying factor leading to many infections in nursing homes. As previously stated, many sick elderly people were not seen by a doctor because the country’s hospital implemented a triage system which included age and predicted prognosis. According to a study this was likely implemented to “reduce the burden on [the intensive care unit] at the expense of more high-risk patients—such as the elderly with confirmed infection—who die outside the ICU […] Only 13% of the elderly residents who died with COVID-19 in the spring received hospital care, according to preliminary statistics from the National Board of Health and Welfare, which was released in August.”

During the first eight months of the pandemic, Sweden did not quarantine infected households. Sweden’s official policy was that those without obvious symptoms are very unlikely to spread the virus even though evidence pointed to the risk of asymptomatic spreaders. Other countries rushed to obtain masks and personal protective equipment for care staff and providers in nursing homes, but Swedish authorities discouraged their use claiming that they give people a false sense of security and that social distancing is more important. But these two in conjunction are surely more effective than one measure on its own. There have been many reports that care personnel have been reprimanded or even fired for using facemasks at work, as it was considered to spread panic.

Statistics show that on May 24, Sweden conducted only 23.64 tests per 1,000 people, one of the lowest rates in Europe. When more tests were finally obtained in the summer, many were of poor quality. “Everyone wanted to test more, but there were no tests,” says Jonas Ludvigsson, an epidemiologist at the Karolinska Institute. “We did not make the equipment ourselves, and other nations had banned any export to keep all the equipment in their own countries. When Sweden finally got hold of test equipment from abroad, the quality was so poor that the tests could not be trusted.”

Still, the architects in the Swedish approach sell it as a success to the rest of the world. And officials in other countries, including at the top level of the US government, are discussing the strategy as one to emulate—even though in reality it will almost certainly increase the death toll and suffering.

Despite the relatively high deaths, reports of medical negligence in nursing homes, and test errors, Sweden’s COVID-19 strategy still has a relatively high degree of support among citizens. An opinion poll in September reported that 63 percent of those polled maintained confidence in Tegnell’s approach, although this was a slight decrease from a figure of 69 percent in April—support in the government’s response has sunk from 49 percent in May to 34 percent in September.

Yes, we can’t!

The Swedish government has not been entirely passive. On March 12, the government limited public gatherings to 500 people and the next day, the public health service published a press release telling people with possible COVID-19 symptoms to stay at home. On March 17, the Swedish Public Health Agency asked employers in the Stockholm area to let employees work from home if they could. The government limited further public gatherings to 50 people on March 29. Still, there were no recommendations for private events and the limit of 50 people did not apply to schools, libraries, corporate events, swimming pools, shopping malls or many other situations.

Minister of Social Affairs Lena Hallengren

As of April 1, the government restricted visits to nursing homes (which were reopened to visitors on October 1 without masks recommended for visitors or staff). Meanwhile, institutions were forced to make their own decisions: Some colleges and universities switched to online tuition, restaurants and bars spaced out tables and seats, and some companies introduced rules about wearing masks on site and encouraged employees to work from home. But the rules imposed by the temporary “crisis law” only lasted for three months until June 30 and, despite the fact that the spread of infection is now increasing at a rapid pace, there is no attempt being made by the government to renew the temporary law.

Why? Politics. The Swedish Minister of Social Affairs Lena Hallengren says that the government’s powers were limited and therefore did not become useful: “It was a big problem, because then it was a big job that had to be done. We wanted a mandate from the Riksdag (the Swedish Parliament) to be able to make decisions quickly. We did not get that mandate from the Riksdag. I think the Riksdag told us that they do not want us to have such a large mandate.” This is patently untrue.

The regulations announced by the government were to be presented “immediately” afterwards in the form of a bill for review in the Riksdag—”immediately” meaning a few days. But, as commented by a spokesperson for the main opposition party in the parliament, Tobias Billström, the government was given exactly the powers it asked for back in April when the Riksdag voted, almost unanimously, in favor of the government’s proposal. It was a government agency—the Council on Legislation—that wanted the government’s regulations on shutdown measures in retrospect to be quickly submitted to the Riksdag for review. According to Billström, writing such a bill in such a short time would not have been a big problem. The issue here is a lacking work effort by the government.

“The government has made it an art to blame everyone but itself.”

Indeed, the approval process was simple and efficient in the spring. In practice, it would have been enough for the government to send an A4 page with the reasons on their action plan to the Riksdag. This is something that the Government offices with its 4,500 employees should be expected to handle. Nothing is preventing the government from acting, but the government is choosing not to pursue another temporary law. Instead, Hallenberg began to develop a new and more elaborate pandemic law, which is planned to enter into force next summer.

The government has made it an art to blame everyone but itself. When their crisis management fails, it is the fault of the municipalities, the regions, authorities, the Swedish management model. The list goes on. The prime minister even gave a speech to the nation where he scolded the Swedish people for not following the Public Health Agency’s advice and recommendations without any hint of self-criticism. And now it is the Riksdag’s turn to be on the receiving end of Löfven and team’s finger wagging.

The experiment is over

Crisis laws are a sensitive issue because they affect citizens’ fundamental freedoms and rights—the freedom of movement in Sweden being guaranteed by constitutional law. “The government will continue to make all the necessary decisions to reduce the spread of infection,” said Prime Minister Stefan Löfven at a press conference on November 19. Clearly, the government has not been able to get the public to voluntarily limit themselves to staying at home. They are also still squabbling about whether or whether not face masks are effective protection against the virus (they are) which is going to waste more time, in turn straining more resources, putting more pressure on an already exhausted health care workforce.

However, the rise in infections has prompted the country to take more forceful action in recent weeks. The country has moved to ban the sale of alcohol in pubs and bars after 22.00 and Tegnell told Swedes this week that the government may be forced to impose travel restrictions across the country “just before Christmas”. The Swedish experiment may be over, but the pandemic is not. Only time will tell if what was not done was made right by what was. At the time of writing, much seems very wrong and much will need to be answered for.

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Photo credits

Anders Tegnell in 2020 (11 av 15), by Frankie Fouganthin, CC BY-SA 4.0

Stefan Löfven EM1B1409 by Bengt Nyman, CC BY 2.0

Socialdemokrat.Lena Hallengren 1c301 5973, by Janwikiphoto, CC BY-SA 3.0

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The Teacher Feature – Mikael Spång on Rights, Emancipation, and Domination

Maya Diekmann — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 04:00:11 +0000

Mikael Spång is a professor in political science at the Department of Global Political Studies at Malmö University. He teaches in human rights and democracy. In 2017 he published a book with the title “Emancipation, Democracy, and the Modern Critique of Law: Reconsidering Habermas” in which he addresses the dialectic of law as an instrument of both emancipation and domination.

P&H: Hello Mikael and thank you for taking the time to share some insights into your research with us. Let’s start with a simple question, that will reveal something about your professor-persona. Between Niagara, Gäddan, and Orkanen, which is your preferred building and why?

M: Out of the current buildings, I think that Niagara is a nice and beautiful building, but it is not the most functional building. It is very nice to have such a big atrium, but from a functional point of view it is a confusing way of having a building in which you take away all the floors that you could use for lecture space and office space and so on. I think it is also a problem that the construction is that you have locked sections where students may not enter.

P&H: Would you like to say something about your book before we dive into more specific questions?

M: The basic argument is that law is both condition for freedom and for domination and that this is relevant for discussing, for instance, rights. And to that extent, I address what I call “the modern critique of law”, which is partly relating to Hegel and partly to Marx. This critique concerns such dialectic of law and addresses a certain history of law that one would need to take into account. But it always runs into the problem of seeming to be reductionist in its argument. Either that law and rights become a sort of semblance—that is something which glosses over inequalities and relations of power—or in some historical or theoretical sense it gets reduced to the base superstructure construction. But these problems, I think, are not reasons to ignore the relevance of that kind of critique.

So that is really the background for writing it in this way. Additionally, I worked a lot with Habermas’ theories for my dissertation and onward. It’s been a very important set of theorisations—Habermas more specifically and the Frankfurt School in the broader sense. And I thought that Habermas’ analysis in The Theory of Communicative Action is pointing to something quite relevant, when he talks about “the colonization of the lifeworld”. But he fails to address this in his later work Between Facts and Norms.

P&H: You just mentioned that your critique builds on that of Marx. Could you summarise Marx’ main point when addressing the dialectic of law?

M: First of all, my two main examples are Marx and Habermas. Marx addresses the problem of labour contract, in the private law context, whereas Habermas addresses the problem of welfare state law.

For Marx the labour contract is a condition for freedom, in one sense. That lies partly in the idea of the contract itself, being between free and equal parties and in the historical transformation, where the transition to the labour contract—a defining characteristic of the capitalist mode of production—means a transition away from largely forced labour.

But then at the same time, there is the exploitation of workers within the capitalist mode of production. And in the labour contact this exploitation finds a legal basis. So, the labour contract is enabling the form of exploitation in a capitalist mode of production where labour is free. And that is the key thing: it is free but exactly that is also a constituting aspect of exploitation. You can’t say that labour is inherently free and exploitation is something that comes afterwards, depending on certain factors and circumstances.

It is something which has a legal basis and that means that one needs to attend to this enabling of exploitation.

The second point to keep in mind is that Marx is talking about this mostly in a private law context. He claims that in this sort of contract, where you have equal rights, it is force or power that decides. When Marx seems to be very, very skeptical of rights, we need to have in mind this exact context. Because otherwise one doesn’t understand why he is so critical, thinking that rights have a very limited value in terms of emancipation. That is sometimes taken—from our contemporary point of view—to be a certain Marxian scepticism of rights. There is a famous essay by Steven Lukes titled Can Marxists Believe in Human Rights?, but this is not the question. It is not whether Marx believed or didn’t believe in this kind of rights, instead he is trying to analyse how do they function within that context.

P&H: So where exactly lies the importance of considering private law, as well as public law, when we talk about rights?

M: I think this reading of Marx, as a question of whether Marx believed that rights are emancipatory tools or not, is a reading that considers rights from within a public law understanding and then reads that back as if Marx’ context was the same. And it is not the same.

The other thing is that when we want to understand how rights, including human rights, were formulated, we need to pay attention to two things: One is that rights have a history that is a private law history. The other one is that through a historical transformation from the dominance of private law to one of public law—through legislation and partly through collective bargaining—the labour contract is modified. So by the late 19th, early 20th century comes this idea that these parties, the workers and the capitalists—even though it’s not just these two—are in fact not equally powerful and we need to intervene through public law to regulate that contract in such a way that it regulates contracts for the workers. That means various forms of workers’ rights. And that transformation means that you start to dismantle this whole package and as such you enable a transformation where you can start to formulate something on the basis of public law.

P&H: And this is then where various labour rights and social rights enter the scene?

M: Yes, and all kinds of rights. It’s a whole slew of transformations. So what one begins to consider is, let’s say, what was called “public utility”—things like water provision or railways. If we look in the mid or late 19th century most of this in many European countries was privately owned. And then the situation arises that all of these private corporations are now providing something which is supposed to be enjoyed by the public. Regulating these things through public law is part of a very broad transformation that involves privately owned corporations performing public functions. Then you have another big chunk, which is the labour rights, and then comes what we call “social rights”.

P&H: Do you think Marx would be happy about these regulations we now find in public law? Would he be less critical?

M: Yes, sure. But we may note that traditionally Marxists have huge problems to make sense of what we call “the welfare state” and social rights and so on, because they seem to run counter to not only the theorisation that you find in Marx, but also the prognoses he made. He foresaw what were likely developments of capitalism—that the impoverishment of workers was going to continue and be exacerbated—and for many people in the working-class movement in the late 19th early 20th century this starts to no longer make much sense. You don’t really see that severe impoverishment—at least of certain sections of the working class it actually seems to be the opposite. You don’t really see the polarization of two major classes and the disappearance of different classes that would eventually lead to an opposition between workers and capitalists. Again, it seems to be the opposite. Sure there is the disappearance of a strong peasant class in a lot of European countries but there is instead the rise of middle classes of different kinds.

So that might not be really answering your question. But if you want to understand a background for the formulation of what we call “reformism” within the labour movement, it is quite important how a lot of people from the late 19th century start to question these development tendencies. Besides a lot of other questions about strength, tactics and strategy and so on, this seems to play a role for a shift where eventually, not all but many, labour movement organizations would endorse this idea of social rights and welfare, even though they initially didn’t.

P&H: Perhaps this is making the best of the situation that presents itself. If the revolution isn’t coming you might as well work concretely with what you have.

M: Yes, and this becomes very important for many reformists. You need to show that you are doing something that produces tangible results in an ordinary situation.

P&H: You write that “the understanding of the political community as a legal community has played a key role in much of modern thinking about politics.” Do you think that there could be something problematic with this overall legal approach, perhaps that we are too quick in framing everything within our society through rights and freedom?

M: I think it is a characteristic and more of an observation. It certainly means that you understand the political community in a specific way. If you then consider the role of rights in that context there is a question concerning how much of the background to that—including private law—do you inscribe actually in the political community? If we think of a modern understanding of political community a lot of people don’t want to talk so much about, let’s say, the capitalist means of production or other problematisations of modern society. But obviously they are connected. The question is then, in which ways can you trace such a connection? One of the ways you can do it—though not the only—is through the idea of a legally constructed community as such. The question there, I think, is not so much what are the alternatives to that? but rather what are the consequences? Often we get this attitude that if you come with any sort of criticism you need to present alternatives. This is short-circuiting. It is short-circuiting the critical question which is asking what the consequences are.

P&H: Habermas is in the title of your book, so he deserves at least some attention here. You criticise him for giving law too much credit when it comes to emancipation of the individual. He does address—although in your view not persistently enough—something that he calls “the colonisation of the lifeworld”. What does he mean by this?

M: Marx and Habermas are similar in their criticism of the dialectic of law, although they are addressing different contexts. Welfare state law is emancipatory, for instance—if you keep to the Marxian question—vis-a-vis dependence on wage labour. For Habermas law dominates through normalization. This isn’t as sophisticated as the account of normalization that you find, for instance, in Foucault, but it is pointing into the same direction. Normalization here means that the individual becomes a beneficiary of rights but only in a specific standardized way.

This, according to Habermas, is due to a lack of involvement of those who have rights, in the process of drafting rights. That’s a very common criticism of bureaucracy: Bureaucracy offers this one size fits all approach from which one can select. This constructs a certain life pattern as “normal”, where other situations become a problem in terms of addressing or dealing with them. We can think of people with several different medical conditions. These often have more difficulties in the healthcare system, because usually, there is a certain way of how medicine and healthcare works. And if you then have two, three, four conditions, you are treated by one specialist on this, by another on that, and by third on the third thing. But taking into account these combined is something, then, that one would be less able to do. And that is, in a way, a form of colonization. You have a way through which administration can work with something and that constitutes the de facto right of certain people with multiple conditions, for instance, to healthcare.

I think Habermas is doing an important job with this problem in The Theory of Communicative Action. He says that the welfare state is “dilemmatic” in itself but then he retracts from that position. There may have been good reasons for him to reconsider the way he is thinking about colonization, but he doesn’t really bring aboard that problem in Between Facts and Norms. That is my basic “complaint”. He is not taking his own analysis seriously enough when he wants to construct the legal basis for democracy and the democratic community. And he reformulates his own problematization into one that fits the legal construction, namely as a question of factual and de jure equality.

P&H: You emphasise the limits of the legal medium as a means for acquiring political autonomy. Can we overcome these limitations and if yes, how? Sorry for asking you for alternatives, which you clearly criticised earlier on.

M: I think if I knew about alternatives, I wouldn’t be writing a book like this. I would try to do something instead or work with that in other ways.

P&H: Whom would you rather have over for dinner, Marx, Hegel, or Habermas?

M: Well, Habermas is still alive so that is one reason for why I would like to have him over. I also have some questions to him.

P&H: Is there another philosopher or sociologist that you’d invite to join?

M: To pick someone very different, maybe I would like to have Spinoza for a visit. He seems like a fascinating person.

P&H: Thank you for your time, Mikael, and some insightful answers! Take care

Photo credits:

Karl Marx | Карл Маркс, 1875, by Olga, modified under CC BY-SA 2.0

Jürgen Habermas, by Wolfram Huke, modified under CC-BY-SA-3.0

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