The Left Berlin News & Comment

This is the archive template

Category: Uncategorised

So, just who are Volt?

In the run up to the Berlin elections, Ciarán Dold from the Corner Späti podcast introduces us to one of the weirder parties running.


04/02/2023

I need you to cast your mind back to Spring of 2019, the days are warming up and the world has proven that they are ready for the seamless blend of rap and country music, but a far less significant event than Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” was underway. That’s right, the 2019 EU elections. A very important event that I’m sure everyone remembers and cares about. Ignoring the results for now, there was something about the campaign, the Wahlkampf, that people here in Berlin noticed. A new small party called Volt got their posters up in every district early, even before many of the major German parties. The posters were royal purple references to other cities and countries in the EU, printed well and in full colour. Appealing to some people but for those with the ability to think for more than five minutes it was suspicious. 

Germany is a country where there are effectively only six parties, and smaller parties are starved for resources. This is especially true for new parties who haven’t had the chance to meet electoral criteria that grant them state funding. New parties in Germany tend to rely on cheaper printing methods, mostly white posters to save money on ink and even then they will lack the money to print multiple designs and to print enough to cover every neighbourhood in Germany’s capital. So how could Volt afford this? What was going on? Surely everyone was thinking this, this couldn’t be the mad internal monologue of someone scarred by having to pay for their own printing costs while doing a graphic design degree. Nope, I’m definitely normal. Let me prove how fucking normal I am by writing about how I went down a rabbit hole and became The Foremost Expert on Volt™.

WIE IN WIEN?

Did I mention I have a podcast? I’m one of society’s heroes, the marxist ideal of a worker because I giggle and fart into a mic for two hours every week with my friends. You’re welcome. Anyway, I bring this up because, shortly after the 2019 EU election we did an episode on Volt where I go into an absurd amount of detail about this party. That was the joke. At the moment of recording there was a revolution occurring in Sudan, a general strike in Brazil and an uptick in anti-Muslim attacks in India but we, as a group of goofballs, decided to do an episode on a party that got one MEP. However it wasn’t until various state elections and the 2021 federal German election were on the horizon that we knew that Volt would become a regularly occurring character on the show. People would regularly post that they didn’t know who to vote for and when someone mentioned Volt our episode would get linked to, it turns out that we were the only people to ever report on them beyond a puff piece that would gawk out how young they were (for politics, not like objectively). This upset members of Volt online and they would try to debate us on Twitter, making an all too common German Liberal mistake which is thinking Twitter is the Greek agora-like free exchange of ideas rather than what it really is which is a place to make jokes, bully Elon Musk and post pictures of pregnant Sonic photoshopped into a Subway ad. Congratulations Sonic, I will Eat Fresh.

Through researching for the few episodes we’ve done on them and through their angry responses (which to be fair, I was asking for) I’ve learnt far more than I care to about Volt. On their own terms, Volt is a “Pan-European, Progressive and Pragmatic” political party that attempts to run in multiple European countries with the ultimate stated aim of creating a federal Europe. Founded in 2017 in response to Brexit, populism (vaguely defined of course) and to a lesser extent Trump  by three former McKinsey & Co employees. Italian Andrea Venzon, the boyfriend of French co-founder Colombe Cahen-Salvador and finally German co-founder Damian (Hieronymus Johannes Freiherr von Boeselager). The name Volt was picked because it’s a word in all European languages (they were originally gonna be called Vox but em, whoops). Damien was elected in Germany to the European Parliament in 2019 while Andrea and Colombe failed to meet the bureaucratic/financial requirements for Volt to run in Italy and France for the 2019 EU Elections. After these elections and after Andrea loses an internal Volt leadership vote to Damien, Andrea and Colombe would quietly leave to go on and to found Atlas Movement (where you see Andrea and Colombe dead-eyed in a zoom call with such political winners as Juan Guaido). Since then, Volt has enjoyed electoral successes in local and municipal elections in western Germany, they rode the coattails of other parties into the Bulgarian parliament and got three MPs into the Dutch parliament, their biggest success of all.

So what policy positions do they advocate for? They said progressive in their promotional material and they talk about Europe a lot, which most people just assume without explanation that that is good, in and of itself. Well, advocating for a federal Europe is one policy I guess but that’s probably (probably) not happening anytime soon and frankly I’m not sure I care too much about the size and shape of the government I live under as much as I care about what that government does. Like the size of Singapore doesn’t matter too much if you personally just love chewing gum.

Initially, they were a little vague, in fact I encountered the lovely little Dutch term “vaaglinks” used to describe Volt. The Volt website talked of their “5 +1 challenges,” a collection of platitudes arranged under the titles of “Smart State, Economic Renaissance, Social Equality, Global Balance, Citizen Empowerment and EU Reform.” I can disagree with these things as much as I can grasp the air around me. It was all very 90s, very ‘Blairism without the Labour Party.’ 

When they started running in various elections they were forced to make their position clearer on certain issues. As a young party that centres technology as a solution for political issues they have a tendency to fill in things like Voteswiper and Wahlomat with gusto. Here is where we arrive at the policy positions that have earned them the title in Germany of ‘Lila JuLi’ (Purple version of the FDP’s youth wing). Opposing the reintroduction of the wealth tax in Germany, being opposed to rent caps, being in favour of police conducting random spot checks in “dangerous areas” and not being opposed to the debt brake. In the Netherlands we similarly see bizarre policy positions for a party calling itself progressive such as opposing equal pay for primary school teachers and secondary school teachers, opposing the construction of social housing to alleviate the Dutch property crisis and, in a very 90s move, advocating for carbon credits as your climate strategy. Which is wild for the Netherlands, a country that could be underwater by the time you are reading this.

However, in the 2019 EU elections we seem to see progressive policy being presented in their “Wie in [EU country/city]” poster campaign. The idea is simple, what if we take a policy from one EU country and put it in another. Seems great, if I blindly assume all other EU countries are good and that Volt have gone and selected the ones that are the most progressive. Well…

One example of this is Vienna’s “one euro per day” public transport scheme. The €365 yearly ticket, which Volt is in favour of implementing in various comparable EU cities. But… eh… Tallinn has free public transport for all residents. Can we do that instead? No. That wouldn’t be Pragmatic would it? Can’t have nice things all the time can we? I have enjoyed their newest poster campaign in the Berlin elections which smugly states, “There are more important things than poster design. Good politics for example.” I especially enjoy it when it’s above an SPD poster advocating for a public transport ticket that undercuts their proposal by €17 per year.

To be fair the “one euro per day” ticket was not on the posters, but “Wie in Wien” was the title of their poster that alluded to Volt’s housing policy. This arrives at the issues with Volt’s transplanting of policies from one nation to another. The legacy of Red Vienna’s housing policy in the interwar period is exactly that, a legacy. It has resulted in a sizable portion of Austria’s capital city living in government owned or rent controlled apartments with little to no social stigma that you might expect in other countries but it is a product of a particular history that occurs in a particular place. To recreate that moment would at least require a government to “enteignen” a lot of private property to make it happen, but Volt is very opposed to DWcE. So we must assume they are for the other conditions that allowed Red Vienna’s housing policy to occur. A global stock market crash and a world war. 

SO HOW’D THEY PRINT THOSE POSTERS?

So glad you asked, me from six words ago. 

Volt originally advertised itself as being funded by “small donations and crowdfunding” and they have always championed transparency as a core tenant. This is true but the language was always a little misleading. Using the terms like “progressive” and “small donations” evoked similar campaigns we were seeing at the time in the USA (Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez in particular). The issue being that these campaigns did two things that Volt did not, 

  1. impose an upper limit on donations and 
  2. refuse corporate donations. 

This was a criticism first put forward in the Volt Ask Me Anything done on the Dutch subreddit. The Volt team did not respond. 

The crowdfunding campaigns are a little embarrassing. Volt ran 17 fundraising campaigns on the website GoFundMe, which is like Kickstarter but it allows you to do political fundraising and you can keep all the donations even if you don’t reach your stated goal which only happened once for Volt. On average, Volt only managed to raise 33% of the stated goals across these 17 campaigns. On the campaigns where donors are listed we can see other members of Volt making donations to the campaign and in one instance, the fundraiser for the Amsterdam assembly (where the manifesto was voted on), the average donation was €225. At this point I should say the USA has a limit of $100 donations for most political campaigns and as a country they’re famously known for not having money influence their politics.

The transparency claim is also one that is a little misleading. Volt does in fact list everyone who has made a donation of any amount over €3000, just not in the one place. Since Volt Deutschland, Volt Italia, Volt Netherlands, Volt Europa etc etc are all separate entities you have to visit each one’s individual website and find the donations page (Google Translate plugin switched the fuck on). As an example, only by visiting the German and European website can you see that Christian Oldendorff (of Oldendorff Carriers, a shipping company based in Hamburg) has donated over €100,000 to Volt.

However, this only works if you can still visit the donations page. Andrea Venzon seems to have taken the Italian donor network with him when he left Volt because all major donations to Volt Italia stopped at that point and the donations page was delisted, replaced with a crowdfunding platform exclusively for the Italian wing of the party. You can still see the big donations to the Italian branch but only if you know the URL and use the Wayback Machine. Donors to the Italian wing included directors from LVMH and members of the Agnelli Family just so you know.

Then the donations themselves are not super transparent, more than once do you have an individual making a sizable donation and then later making another sizable donation through a company they own, this is not marked or noted on Volt’s donations page. Nor is any relationship disclosed. The agency who designed Volt’s brand identity donated about €9,000 to the German branch in 2020 and several large donors listed are the parents of people running on Volt’s ticket.

THE EURO GENERATION

For all the puff pieces, ARTE documentaries and other attempts to portray Volt as young and hip they sure do seem to love posting a lot of embarrassing shit without any sense of how it might be seen as “cringe” or “peinlich.” Whether it’s their series of Volt candidate trading cards or announcing their Berlin manifesto as slam poetry. While funny, it helps paint a picture of entitled kids with no self awareness. Maybe this was obvious from the get-go to a lot of you, maybe you immediately saw the nice posters pop up out of nowhere and it immediately clicked for you. Maybe you rightfully assumed that any sense of “Europeanness” is only really possible for those who have the means to regularly travel and or are employed in an email job that hires from all over the continent. 

The term “erasmus generation” gets thrown around a lot, describing a generation for which the EU existing as it does now is the norm. This would include myself, born in Ireland, 1990, a founding member of the euro and often topping the opinion polls as “most pro-EU country” (sometimes Romania beats us). Using the term erasmus is a little too erudite for my liking though. Erasmus implies travelling, museums, cultural landmarks, multilingualism and learning and that’s not really what’s happening here. 

Despite the reality that what erasmus really is is mostly just college kids hooking up being largely facilitated by not speaking each other’s languages, I think what really defines this group, in two ways, is the euro. With the exception of Bulgaria, Volt’s electoral success maps perfectly onto the winners of the EU. Mostly North Western Europe, mostly within the countries known for being most opposed to intra-EU financial aid. Even within Germany, Volt has not been successful in the east of the country. The Linkedin accounts of those in charge of Volt Netherlands look like the google search results for ‘banks in Amsterdam’ and same goes for their parents and donors. But what separates them from their parents is, like me, they have only ever been paid in euros (just a lot more than me). Maybe you remember the mark or guilder as the currency of pocket money or buying sweets when you were young, but every wage you’ve received was in euro. You remember the switch over too, you remember the little calculators and coin collecting booklets, it was a big deal. Something was happening, change was coming but now, 20 years later that change hasn’t come and rather than deal with questions like, “well then what the fuck are we even doing then? What is the EU even for?” that the rest of us have to deal with, Volters simply say, “well surely I or my parents have enough money to make the change come.”

Why is Britain facing a strike wave not seen in decades?

Richard Brann, a socialist based in the UK, explains how a combination of ruling class arrogance, rising prices and government ineptitude means that British workers are finally fighting back


02/02/2023

From a foreign perspective, it would seem as if Britain is having a uniquely terrible time. A large number of separate issues have coalesced and condensed into a perfect storm of societal anger, economic discontent and anti-government action. The wave of strikes are the backbone of this perfect storm – one of the few remaining ways to stand up to a government seen as incompetent, hostile, and lacking any authority.

There is the ballooning inflation and energy prices resulting in an entrenched cost of living crisis. There is the discontent resulting from a clumsy Brexit that has seen supply chains disrupted at a level unseen by any other country in Europe, with lines of lorries stuck at Dover.

Most of all, there is the total disdain for the Tory government that has, since the Brexit referendum, clattered as if in a stupor from one sleazy scandal to another, from one unelected Prime Minister to the other, from one state of delusion to a newer, deeper state of farcical inability to maintain any shred of respectability.

The scandal surrounding Chris Pincher, whose sexual harassment allegations were disregarded by former PM Boris Johnson when he appointed him as Deputy Chief Whip, brought down the short-lived government formed in 2019 and continues to be investigated.

Speaking of short-lived, Johnson was followed by the now- infamous Liz Truss, whose plan to cut benefits and increase bankers’ bonuses in her “mini-budget” crashed the value of the pound in an already contracting economy and resulted in a “moron premium” being imposed by investors on the yield of government bond transactions. Her reign lasted 44 days. It was barely enough time to see the death of Elizabeth II in a moment that seemed horribly symbolic of the total collapse of British national self-confidence.

The last and current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, have had free rein over the fragile economy despite having never faced a general election. Astronomical energy prices, inept governance and dire economic recession have produced an atmosphere to rival the legendary “winter of discontent”, a wave of strikes that shut down Britain in 1978-9 in response to the failure to control inflation. Here, a similar climate under a far more unfit government has seen the British strike movement surge in momentum.

The first of these major strikes came in June of 2022 with one of the quickest-growing unions, the RMT (Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers), voted to strike over pay that failed to match the rate of inflation, threatened redundancies and proposed reforms that would dramatically cut staff numbers. These strikes have had a revitalised union leadership and a sense of momentum.

At a time when the government was transitioning between the barely-concealed corruption of Boris Johnson’s reign to the unelected and uncharismatic Truss administration, the General Secretary of the RMT, Mick Lynch, appeared frequently in interviews and gave the strike movement a much-needed shot of plain-speaking charisma and blunt anti-government appeal.

Since then, other union leaders have risen to prominence – Pat Cullen of the RCN (Royal College of Nursing) has been a similar figure of widespread appeal, representing nearly half a million medical professionals in her negotiations and boasting massive public support in comparison to the plummeting popularity of the current government.

Strikes have been coming thick and fast – starting with the railway worker strikes, Britain has now seen bus network strikes as part of the wider Unite union, strikes of barristers in the Criminal Bar Association, nursing and ambulance worker strikes, ongoing strikes of teachers in the NEU (National Education Union) and further action on behalf of the EIS (Education Institute of Scotland).

The late summer saw a waste pile up in Edinburgh as refuse workers took action too. Firefighters have planned strike action approaching, postal workers have been on the picket lines, and even journalists at the BBC have walked out over planned cuts. Will more be announced by the time this article is released? Probably.

The simple truth is that Britain is at breaking point in its public services and the government is not equipped to deal with it. A single article just isn’t enough to list the grievances behind each strike, of which there have now been more than a dozen, but they all stem from the same matrix of factors. There’s the historically low pay, that has stagnated since the Conservative policy of economic austerity implemented after the 2008 financial crisis, compounding the cuts to public services and pay freezes that were introduced.

There’s the failure of pay rises to keep up with explosive inflation hitting a high of 10.7% that many blame on government ineptitude. There’s the ongoing cost of living crisis and the related energy crisis that have made the simple costs of living and working in Britain go up while incomes fall by 4% on average. These are pressures that are breaking the backs of staff in the public sector, many of whom are already working unbelievable hours, such as medical professionals.

And who else can working people really blame but the government? Britain has been in the hands of the Conservative Party for 12 years now, through the disaster of Brexit, the constant political scandals, the collapsing benefits system, and despite government attempts to blame the war in Ukraine for the ongoing crisis, Britain has recently been forecast by the IMF to be the only G7 country to see continuing recession this year. Even Germany, with its intricate ties to the energy crisis, is forecast to see growth in 2023, but not Britain. Democratic governance is a two-way street. The public expects appropriate leadership in exchange for their support during the stresses of the past few years and responsibility for this crisis cannot be avoided by the current occupants of Downing Street, who refuse to call a general election despite the public having had no say in the country’s past two leaders or any check on their policies or power.

Why, with so much anger from different sources, have strikes been the way that Britain’s working class have expressed their hostility towards an openly contemptuous government? Sadly, it’s of the only ways left. The Conservatives have systematically introduced laws like the 2022 Policing Bill to combat protest action and have tried to clamp down on strikes with the 2016 Trade Union Act, limiting the ability of unions to call strikes.

But causing economic harm is also one of the only ways to make the government – accused by union leaders of refusing to listen – actually sit up and negotiate, although there has been little success so far. Barely a week ago, Tory minister Huw Merriman admitted that acquiescing to striking rail worker demands would have been more economically beneficial than allowing strikes to continue.

The minister for safeguarding, Rachel McLean, has called on people to simply “get better jobs”.Rishi Sunak and his party refuse to appear weak in the wake of two recently collapsed governments, even if that would ease this economic struggle.

It seems hard to concede that this standoff between underpaid and suppressed workers and an unelected government that refuses to appear weak will continue until the next general election in 2025. However, the pressures on public sector workers are immense. The attitude of the Conservative Party is one a constant state of defensiveness and hostility towards strikes following recent disasters that have demolished its reputation and left it trailing in polls behind Labour. With both sides so entrenched, this battle seems set to continue well into 2023.

From a German perspective, these issues would seem to largely stem from the unique characteristics of the British Parliament, which allows enormous changes in policy and personnel without real public accountability, making it a situation that wouldn’t be as likely to happen in Berlin. That being said, anger and unrest against a government that fails to live up to its promises is nothing new or unique to the UK. In these times of economic uncertainty and international instability, the German government could do well to use Britain as an example to be avoided.

France: Movement to defend pensions building up steam

Eye witness report from yesterday’s protests


01/02/2023

In Paris and in 267 other towns around France, there were angry protests on Tuesday 31 January against Macron’s attempt to raise the standard retirement age from 62 to 64. This is eighteen more towns than mobilized ten days ago in the previous day of action. And in every town, numbers were considerably bigger than last time (and last time even the government said more than a million people had hit the streets).

Rail and metro workers, civil servants, energy and oil workers, construction workers, culture industry workers, town hall and hospital workers, and many more struck. Many dozens of high schools were blockaded by school student protestors in order to allow pupils to go on the demonstrations. In dozens of universities, mass meetings are beginning to bring students into action on the issue.

Lorry drivers joined the protest by blockading ring roads earlier this week. Even at football matches, banners defending pensions could be seen. Collections for strike funds, rare in French strike movements, are becoming more common. And in a couple of dozen towns there were evening torchlight demonstrations last week in an aim to keep up momentum. So the movement is still building up steam, despite the refusal of union leaders to call for more than one day strikes.

Three years ago, eight successive huge days of action over a couple of months, and longer strikes in some sectors, pushed back Macron’s attack on pensions, forcing him to make concession after concession before shelving the whole plan. Macron pretended that his retreat was because of the pandemic, but striking workers knew better. To win this time, more determined strike action will be needed.

Macron is shaken. He has just decided to abandon a particularly vicious attack on vocational high schools which would have put them under the control of business interests. This is because the pensions revolt is bigger than he was expecting. Still, three days ago, Prime Minister Elizabeth Borne declared that the plan for two years more work before retirement was “not open to negotiation”.

Macron’s new right party does not have a majority in the National Assembly. To pass the law he needs the support of the traditional right-wing Republicans. They had looked solid, but are now wavering as big demonstrations march in medium sized, traditionally conservative towns across the country.

The latest polls show that Macron’s plan is even more unpopular than it was a couple of weeks back. 61% of the entire population support the strike movement, and the opposition to the movement is concentrated among richer people and those who have already retired. Electricity and oil workers have started a series two and three day strikes, and rail workers are intending to launch a “renewable strike” (where mass meetings of strikers decide every day or two whether the stoppage will continue) next week.

One of Macron’s reactionary ministers, Darmanin, says the Left is trying to “screw up the whole working of society” and blames the protests on “lazy bohemian leftists”. We need to pull out all the stops to make him panic even more.

Two more days of action have been called for Tuesday 7th and Saturday 11th February. I will be reporting on these on theleftberin.com in the coming weeks.

Andrew Tate used Neoliberal Eastern Europe to enable his Sexualized Violence

Tate did not choose Romania as a base for his sickening business randomly


30/01/2023

When people hear I am from Romania, they often tell me about the trips they took there at some point. Some people travel to Romania because clubbing is cheap in Bucharest. Others visit Transylvania’s beautiful medieval towns. Outdoors types still hope to find some untouched wilderness in the Carpathians.

Andrew Tate, former kickboxer, self-proclaimed misogynist, and founder of Hustler’s University, had special reasons to go to my home country. “I like living in countries where corruption is accessible for everybody,” he said in an interview. “I like living in a society where my money and my influence and my power means I’m not below or beholden to any of these bullshit laws.” In case you’re wondering which laws exactly, Tate provided the answer in a now deleted video. “40% of the reason” he moved to Romania was that “in Eastern Europe none of this garbage flies.” The garbage? Police believing the victims of rape in the MeToo era.

On December 30th 2022, the garbage did fly, and Andrew Tate, his brother, and two Romanian collaborators were arrested for human trafficking, rape, and forming a criminal group. Even though the poetic-justice version of the story, involving an unrecycled pizza box and Greta Thunberg, is not true, there has been enough coverage of the investigation to reach even those lucky enough not to have heard about Tate before.

Some of Tate’s followers are fanatic enough to take to the streets and fight against the “agents” of the “Matrix” who arrested their idol. The rest of us might find such sci-fi possibilities less concerning than the actual miscarriages of justice. It recently came to light that in 2015, before moving to the Wild East, Tate was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault in the UK. But the Hertfordshire Police waited four years before passing the case to the Crown Prosecution Service, who then promptly decided not to pursue the investigation.

Before his recent arrest, it had perhaps been easy to dismiss Tate as an online grifter and his followers as impressionable boys. Even now, when World Vision Romania sketched a profile of the audience susceptible to Tate’s appeal, it only referred to rural male teenagers, affected by poverty and looking for a way out, who receive insufficient attention from their parents. These boys see themselves as superior to women and as deserving more than they get. The only place for them to turn to for validation is the internet – where they receive it in a systematic manner.

Misogyny in Romania

This portrait will not be unfamiliar to anyone aware of the conditions in post-socialist Europe. Neoliberal transitions precaritized millions and left them grasping at individual solutions of upward mobility. Upward or outward. The unofficial estimate of Romanian children with at least one parent working abroad is 350,000. Because of migration or other reasons, many Romanian boys may lack “positive role models,” as the World Vision study puts it. Does that make them vulnerable to being sucked into online worlds of misogyny and grifting? Undoubtedly. And it is essential to properly recognize the systemic economic pressures that have shaped younger generations in a semi-peripheral Romania. But that should not lead us to ignore the fact that Romania is a deeply patriarchal country where violence against women is itself a structural issue, and a hotbed of human trafficking in the EU.

Because, after all, Tate was not wrong in his vile optimism about Romania’s law enforcement. The FILIA Center, a Romanian feminist organization, notes that in 2021 around 75% of the rape and sexual assault cases in the country were closed by dropping the charges. Another study shows that in 2016, out of 27,000 complaints of domestic violence, only 1,467 went to trial. The same source estimates that three quarters of women who suffer from sexual abuse at the hands of a partner or former partner do not register complaints. Romania is a country where silence and coverups are still the norm, due to the lack of material resources, of crisis centers, and of support systems, and due to the egregious behavior of the police themselves.

Tate’s declarations show that this, for him, is a business opportunity. A Romanian commentator reacted to the World Vision study by agreeing that the problem it highlights is real. But the violent entitlement to women’s bodies is not isolated to the Romanian countryside. He notes that Tate is selling not only power over women, but also financial power. This draws in both the Romanian youth lost in transition and the young men who have (temporarily) won at the neoliberal game. They hope that Tate will show them not only the secret to sex, but also how to use their money to make more money.

The swindled, not the swindlers

Some of Tate’s Romanian imitators and associates have indeed been successful, such as internet personality Vlad Obu, who has also come to the attention of Romanian law enforcement in January. But most of Tate’s fans are the swindled rather than the swindlers. 1,000 of them, lacking any sense of irony, paid $100 for a “Resist the slave mind” t-shirt. The website of “The Real World” (Tate’s continuation of Hustler’s University, shut down in 2022) claims 200,000 members – paying $49.99 a month. Tate does have a secret that helped him make millions. But that secret is convincing others that paying him money will make them rich.

If Tate is not offering actual money-making techniques, what is he selling his fans? The answer is masculinity and power. He is selling the illusion that he can help them get what they feel they have been denied: money, sex, power. Because violence and control over women secure men’s position in the family and the community, a demand for what men believe they are entitled to but do not receive. Tate made this clear in his reasons for coming to Romania. He is a man with immense fame and money and he believes that this entitles him not only to more fame and more money but also to literal ownership of women’s bodies, to power over others, and to a certain social standing.

Capitalism, pornography, and power

Tate is, after all, a capitalist, and his justified belief that in Romania he could treat women and the law as he saw fit was also a belief that he could gain money and influence in the Eastern European sex work market. Although the sexcam industry is a legal gray area in Romania, it is also booming. A studio manager gives three reasons for this: “poverty, an abundance of underemployed beautiful women who speak English, and exceptionally high-speed internet.” Although factually accurate, such a framework might play into neoliberal disguises of insecurity as flexibility and of constraints on opportunities. Some of the estimated 100,000 models in Romania have indeed found their ticket out of precarity. But many of them are stuck in the “intricacies of platform capitalism” and in “asymmetric staff power relations.”

Nothing makes this clearer than the investigation into Tate’s own sexcam business. The human trafficking accusations refer to the “loverboy method:” Tate would promise young women that he would marry them before forcing them into producing pornographic material on OnlyFans and TikTok. He did not choose to do this in Romania on a whim. Online pornography follows the same global structures of capitalism as other digital platforms that thrive in the periphery and semi-periphery. High inequality, lax law enforcement, cheap labor, all make Romania a key link in the “global value chain of the sexcam industry.” While sexcamming itself might be semi-legal, it depends on a dark underside of trafficking and constraining young women (and sometimes men) into an informal infrastructure of studios. A dark underside that is by no means exclusive to online pornography: either industrial or sexual, forced labor is an intrinsic part of the capitalist (semi-)periphery.

What Tate makes painfully visible is how capital depends on and benefits from structural gendered and sexualized violence. His case also shows that the state is far from innocent in all of this. It is not yet proven that Tate’s boasts about using corruption in Romania to his advantage were true, although I would be surprised if they weren’t. What we do know, however, is that many of his Romanian employees and collaborators were former police officers or special agents.

But this story has a happy ending, right? Tate has been arrested and will hopefully be punished. This shows that the sustained anti-corruption campaigns of the Romanian state and civil society are working, and things are changing. But while few would deny that Tate’s arrest is a good thing, the issues are much bigger. After all, anti-corruption in Romania has meant cementing the country’s integration into European and global capitalism – the same capitalism that made Tate’s success possible in the first place. Someone will soon take his place in both the sexcam industry and in the online manosphere, someone who will now know better than to boast publicly about paying off law enforcement and will fit right in. Andrew Tate is a symptom of global structures of capitalism and gendered violence. He might soon be gone, but the structures remain.

From all the untold and unnamed before and in between these names … to Emmett Till, …Rodney King… Eric Garner, Breona Taylor, George Floyd…

In 2023, Just Add Tyre Nichols


29/01/2023

After George Floyd’s death progressives the world-over hoped that things for black people in the hands of the USA police would improve. But we knew that without an on-going mobilization of working peoples and progressives, the outrage over Floyd’s death would not lead to adequate change. Following public pressure, bodycam videos have finally been released showing the brutal death of Tyre Nichols – on January 7th – at the hands of five black policemen in Memphis. It horrifies us again.  But what else should it do? We describe events briefly, and then reiterate why reformist measures are needed, but will not lift this oppression from the Black and Coloured people of the USA.

“The police officers kicked Tyre Nichols in the head, pepper-sprayed him and hit him repeatedly with a baton, even as he showed no signs of fighting back. At one point, after Mr. Nichols stood up, one officer struck him with at least five forceful blows while another held Mr. Nichols’s hands behind his back. Soon, Mr. Nichols, 29, was on the ground — not far from the home he shared with his mother and stepfather — crying out in anguish: “Mom, Mom, Mom.”

New York Times 28 January 2023

That the officers were black themselves merely shows how the police system subverts the oppressed to assist in on-going oppression. As Mr.Nichols mother RowVaugan Wells said: “To the five police officers that murdered my son, you also disgraced your own families when you did this.. I’m going to pray for you and your families, because at the end of the day, this shouldn’t have happened. This just shouldn’t have happened. We want justice for my son.” (New York Times 28 January 2023)

Mrs Wells was extraordinarily gracious. While not wishing to add any hurt, prayers are likely not enough to change the systemic issues here. While these police officers were quickly dismissed and charged with second degree homicide, the officers may yet escape just conviction. That will in part depend on whether a ‘Special Grand Jury’ is convened to hear their case, the most likely option. That system has long been abused, and enables the authorities to escape their just desserts.

As ‘The American Bar Association’ told a hearing in 2000:

“The grand jury is a unique body in our legal system. It possesses awesome powers: The grand jury’s work is conducted in secret… Courts do not generally supervise its work closely…. But the grand jury has also come under increasing criticism for being a mere ”rubber stamp” for the prosecution without adequate procedural safeguards. Critics argue that the grand jury has largely lost its historic role as an independent bulwark protecting citizens from unfounded accusations by the government.”

Constitutional Rights And The Grand Jury; Reforms

Both the police and the legal systems are stacked against Blacks and African-American victims, and the working class. In ‘The German Ideology’ Marx and Engels warned that the law is only the expression of the will of the ruling class, it becomes the law of state: “The individuals who rule in these conditions – leaving aside the fact that their power must assume the form of the state – have to give their will, which is determined by these definite conditions, a universal expression as the will of the state, as law, an expression whose content is always determined by the relations of this class, as the civil and criminal law demonstrates in the clearest possible way.” (Volume 5 CW p.39; The German Ideology)

This pan-USA struggle pits the Black working class against the police. But African-Americans have not been silentover the last 50 years. Black populations have mounted repetitive resistance, nearly always precipitated by police violence:

“These types of uprisings have been a nearly perennial occurrence in the United States for more than fifty years. In the month following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., black uprisings erupted in more than 125 cities, leading to 50 deaths and more than 15,000 arrests. In the years that followed (1968–72), at least 960 segregated black communities witnessed 2,310 separate incidents of what journalists and state security officials described as “disturbances,” “uprisings,” “rebellions,” “melees,” “eruptions,” or “riots.”… this type of collective violence almost always started with contact between residents and the frontline representatives of the state—the police—and then quickly moved to other institutions.”

Elisabeth Hinton, The Minneapolis Uprising in Context

Marxist-Leninists understand that while resistance is primarily voiced by African-Americans it is also loudly echoed by non-Blacks – including many who are white. Such solidarity recognizes the validity of Marx’s dictum:“In the USA, every independent workers movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.” (Karl Marx, Capital Vol 1; Chapter 10)

Dr. Martin Luther King prophetically recognised toward the end of his life that only “social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention. There is no other answer. Constructive social change will bring certain tranquility; evasions will merely encourage turmoil.” (Cited by Elisabeth Hinton, The Minneapolis Uprising in Context),

But capitalism does not easily hear such words. The more far-sighted capitalists recognize there must be changes if the system is to survive. But again: “capitalism would not be….. etc”!

The problem facing the working class and its supporters is that there is no viable organised Marxist party to fight for a socialist path. Decidedly Biden and the Democratic Party is not that. They may make some reforms which we willingly take. But, they are always far short of what is needed. What is needed is a determined workers party both in theory and practice – that can assist in forging the needed links between all sections of a divided class of workers.

This article was originally written for the American Party of Labor