On the Misery of the (Late) Bourgeois Discourse on “Freedom”
1.
It is not five to twelve, but five past twelve, to quote the philosopher Slavoj Žižek (Žižek 2021, 219). The fact that climate change is indisputable (even if its nuances continue to be debated) and represents a serious threat to the future of humanity should be clear even to the last fool by now.[1] What is more, it is now obvious that emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases will need to be radically and rapidly reduced if the climate catastrophe is not to assume an even more catastrophic proportion. This means not only a complete transformation of our infrastructure, but also a complete change and upheaval in the way that we produce and live. It is thus a program of abolitions and shutdowns that we must demand. The “locomotive” of the development of productive forces burns everything in its path. Pulling the “emergency brake,” as Walter Benjamin put it, is inevitable, unless one wants to risk or accept the death of the “passengers” (see Böttcher 2023).
Apart from the questions of how the capitalist mode of production could be abolished, how a corresponding “transformative movement” could be set up, or what kind of “transitional society” (?) would have to be dealt with (since “the train” would only be stopped), there is also the problem of the affective rejection of these facts by many people. What they should already know and that which should lead to a rethinking and a “re-action” is affectively pushed back. The (decades-long) downplaying or denial of climate change and the dissemination of propaganda and disinformation by think tanks, corporations and the media fall on fertile psychic ground (see Quent, Richter, Salheiser 2022).
Criticizing one’s own identity (and therefore work, consumption, home ownership, etc.), which is necessary to rethink and change one’s actions, is avoided by invoking a vulgar bourgeois concept of freedom. Freedom is reduced to the freedom of the consumer, which, like the freedom to produce what is to be consumed, must not be restricted under any circumstances. (Bourgeois) freedom, on the other hand (see Lepenies 2022), originally had to do with “responsibility”; it was about limiting and modernizing domination (checks and balances, protection against arbitrary state or judicial power, freedom of religion and publication, enforcement of private property, production of security, etc.), it was about shaping and disciplining people to become “useful” parts of a community or society.[2] The freedom of one citizen ended where the freedom of another citizen was violated. It was not about unlimited consumption, but about renunciation of consumption, inner-worldly asceticism, affect control. This was interpreted by some as a process of civilization.[3] Many philosophers believed that man could not be free if he indulged his passions without restraint. He who is at the mercy of his passions, who follows them directly, is not free but a slave. However, passions were not only judged negatively, they could also prove to be “useful” for the state and the economy, if they were guided by “reason.”
Now, “developed capitalism” (since about the Fordist boom) no longer depends on ascetic subjects who (have to) try to limit their consumption, but on consuming subjects who want to buy all the bullshit that is produced[4] (and even sensible things turn out to be bullshit in capitalism: planned obsolescence and the like – so that money is fed into the valorization process M-C-M” as soon as possible). The spectacle of advertising, with which whole world is littered (today mostly “individualized” in the form of “apps” etc.), serves as a propagandistic “means of motivation” (so that the now mass-produced goods can also realize themselves as value) for this. Work, performance and “well-earned” consumption became the central identity of modern capitalist societies (especially of the “middle class”; the car as a famous “status symbol” see Kurz 2020 & Koch 2021). Self-denial and discipline in working life were rewarded or “compensated” by the fact that one could privately carve out a “successful life” for oneself through one’s own performance, which found its confirmation in being able to afford or buy this and that (a vacation, car, house and the “cricket on the hearth”). The ecological costs of Fordist mass consumption were usually of no interest (or were dismissed as left-wing propaganda, as in the case of Ayn Rand: Rand 1971).
This consumerist self-centeredness has been intensified by neoliberalism, under which people have been thrown back on themselves and urged to constantly optimize themselves in order to “freely” and “self-determinedly” submit to the imperatives of the (labor) market as “responsible citizens” who do not allow themselves to be “patronized.” The “responsible citizen” finds his freedom in submitting to the dictates of the capitalist crisis in a fully enlightened and self-determined way, and still interprets this as self-realization and self-optimization. The freedom to consume is supported by the freedom to realize oneself in submission and to shit on all those who can’t keep up (anymore); those who are considered “underachievers” or even “work-shy” and fail in the competition are just “unlucky.” The society of total competition (i.e. competition on all levels), i.e. of “individual self-responsibility,” of the “entrepreneurial self” is a breeding ground for antisocial affects of all kinds. The narcissistic social character proves here to be the precondition and result of unrestrained consumer capitalism (see Wissen 2017 & Jappe 2022).
In developed capitalism, consumption is no longer primarily aimed atsatisfying needs shaped by the commodity-form, but above all at creating identity. Philipp Lepenies writes (citing to Zygmunt Bauman): “The individual no longer pursues his own needs, but satisfies desires that have been awakened in him by the producers and that, in extreme cases, obey only the pleasure principle. As soon as the longings for certain products can be constantly renewed and adapted, consumption becomes an endless vicious circle. Individuals succumb to the illusion that they can define their personality and identity, even their social status, through consumption. Consumption becomes an island of stability, one’s own identity a function of consumption. If a certain desire is denied, people perceive this as an attack on the person they want to be” (Lepenies 2022, 234, emphasis T.M.). Therefore, nothing enrages the bourgeois reactionary more than the fact that some “Left-Green” people question his unrestricted freedom of consumption or want to prohibit or even “take away” something from him (whereby one must also be able to afford freedom of consumption, which poor people cannot, see Mayr 2020). It is seen as an attack on one’s own identity (what a joke, when these people rail against the “identity politics” of the left or left-liberals at the same time). The bourgeois reactionary has earned all this himself, has worked hard for it, and therefore it is his “natural human right” to buy and consume what he likes. It is therefore unacceptable, in this view, for the “achiever” to be “patronized” by the state or by some alleged communists or eco-socialists (and yet at the same time he claims for himself the freedom to patronize the freedom of others, such as Hartz IV recipients, or to harass them).
2.
It is undoubtedly correct and necessary to criticize the bourgeois freedom of “earlier times” in the sense that it was effectively the freedom of the white and male propertied bourgeoisie and its realization had to take place within the framework of the capitalist “cage of bondage” (Max Weber). This will not be elaborated in detail here (see for example: Losurdo 2010, Hentges 1999, Kurz 2004 & Landa 2021). What is crucial here is that the appeal to one’s own so-called freedom has the effect of making one unwilling or unable to deal seriously with problems. The perspective of the individual’s freedom as a monad of consumption and work, of an immediate self-centeredness, prevents from the outset the ability to deal with problems that require a social perspective, i.e. one in which the “individual” would have to transcend his or her narrow-minded self-centeredness. Contradictions and dissonances are thus avoided and covered up with verbiage and affective indignation. Finally, the aggressive self-centeredness of “consumer freedom” and often accompanying defense of fossil capitalism – which, not coincidentally, is often part of androcentric identity, leading Cara Dagget (2018) to coin the apt term petro-masculinity – points to an inherent “possibility” of bourgeois freedom itself, that is, to the possibility of freedom turning into unfreedom. As Andrea Maihofer writes, “The common neoliberal rhetoric of the individual self-responsibility of each person now means that freedom is understood by many only as individual freedom. This can be seen in the current protests against the Corona measures, when people claim the right to the individual freedom not to wear a mask […] or to evade the requirements in general – regardless of the consequences for themselves or others – with the slogan: “My health! My choice!” […] In this way, freedom is not only understood exclusively as individual freedom, but also explicitly rejects any responsibility for the social consequences of one’s own actions. In other words, the concept of freedom is increasingly used in an explicitly anti-emancipatory sense. But this is not a new phenomenon. Not only has an authoritarian understanding of freedom always been present in (right-wing) conservative to right-wing extremist discourses, but this danger of turning into unfreedom has been inherent in the bourgeois understanding of freedom from the very beginning” (emphasis in the original). It is therefore not surprising that “in the name of freedom, right-wing conservative to right-wing extremist social actors not only legitimize growing social inequalities, social exclusions and divisions, but also claim the right to exclude and discriminate against others in the name of freedom” (Maihofer 2022, 327).
Freedom is thus understood not as something social, as a historical social relation, something that could potentially be realized by hitherto oppressed and discriminated minorities or classes, but as something that an individual subject possesses and is willing to assert against others, regardless of the possible consequences (thus this “freedom” has a “business-like” character – consequences are “externalized” or ignored, see also: Amlinger & Nachtwey 2022). It is precisely the freedom to be autonomous, i.e. to make use of one’s freedom to submit to systemic constraints without the guidance of another. A fundamentally socially- and ecologically-ignorant “view of life” is almost a necessary consequence and prerequisite for successful “adaptive performance.” This freedom, as it has been propagated especially in neoliberalism as a “guiding culture” [Leitkultur], is thus nothing other than the ability to autonomously adapt to heteronomous conditions. The “autonomy” consists in flexibly taking into account the overwhelming dynamics of the valorizing movement of capital and the increasing existential insecurity, in order to always remain profitable and exploitable, so that one can count oneself among the “high achievers” and naturally derive certain claims for oneself from this. These claims can consist of “well-deserved” unlimited consumption (certainly limited only by the amount of money or credit available), or of feeling empowered to always see oneself as the actual victim. This is probably the origin of the blatant affectation (“prohibition politics,” “eco-dictatorship,” etc.) that we see when people talk about introducing a vegetarian day in the cafeteria, limiting speed on the highways, or abolishing domestic flights. Under no circumstances should one reflect on one’s own habits in any way, certainly not in connection with a particular mode of production that is destroying the planet. Philipp Lepenies comments again: “However, the planned measures that the irritating words “ban” and “renunciation” evoke today are – and this must be clearly emphasized – reactions to the decisive fundamental crisis of our time and to an increasingly urgent need for action. It is not a question of a complete change of behavior according to a certain ideology, nor of the homogenization and suppression of other ways of life. Behind the ban and renounce proposals is an attempt to mitigate or reverse the negative effects of our consumption patterns that have led to and continue to exacerbate the climate catastrophe. The idea that we should ban and renounce certain things does not stem from a perverse and sadistic desire to ban and call for renunciation for no reason. They are concrete proposals for saving our climate” (Lepenies 2022, 263f.).
Bans and restrictions can point out how certain types of production and consumption are environmentally problematic and should be abolished. In this way, they are similar to environmental protection measures: They are immanent stopgap measures that are (or must be) enforced by the state, but they do not point to a radical critique of the commodity form or the self-purpose of capital accumulation. It makes perfect sense to insist on the political enforcement of bans and restrictions if we want to prevent the ecological crisis from becoming even more catastrophic. It is important to make the immanent limits and contradictions recognizable in the process. Of course, such bans and restrictions can aim to merely “paint capitalism green” and place the responsibility on the individual, the supposedly autonomous individual (see Hartmann 2020). Also, debates about “healthy and sustainable nutrition” or the like can contain a paternalistic and puritanical moment (here, some liberal critics of nudging, etc. are partly right).[5] However, consumption cannot really be separated from production, both of which have a specifically capitalist character. Here, Lepenies could be criticized for writing about (and dwelling on) “consumer behavior” and its critical questioning. With regard to the “disintegration of production and consumption already inherent in the simple commodity form,” the consequence of which is the degradation of the “consumer competence of people,” Robert Kurz writes in his book critical of postmodern lifestyle leftists (some of whom were so narrow-minded in the 90s that they celebrated consumption as an allegedly subversive act – “the consumer as dissident,” they said in all seriousness): “Capitalist consumers are de-skilled precisely in this capacity because they have already been de-skilled as producers. As illiterates of social reproduction and/or specialized idiots, they consume in a de-aestheticized, functionally oriented social space. From the grotesque incomprehensibility of the often real-satirical instructions for use to the perpetual “uncomfortableness” of public spaces, this de-skilling expropriation of consumer competence is evident at all levels. The professional idiots are always also consumer idiots and vice versa. The universalism of commodities cannot therefore correspond to a universality of individuals […]” (Kurz 1999, 155ff.).
What is to be consumed is present in a reified form, it is the materialization of the value abstraction; the “addressee” is the incapacitated, isolated and alienated subject. “Use-value,” often asserted only as a promise of use-value, is shaped and realized by managerial rationality. The goal is not the common production of use-values that can be collectively consumed. On the contrary, the objective is that on the managerial level a single capital asserts itself in competition via the successful sale of commodities and thus registers “profit” for itself, in order to then be able to continue with the production and realization of (surplus) value forever (M-C-M’-C’-M’’…). The goal of production is mediated on the level of society as a whole with the irrational and abstract goal of the overall capitalist process, to increase capital/money for its own sake. What happens to the goods after the sale, whether the promise of use value is really redeemed – if this was not only clumsy propaganda anyway – where the individual parts for the production of this commodity came from and in turn how they were produced, etc., is of no interest to the individual capital, nor is their disposal and all of the corresponding ecological consequences (these appear to the individual capital only afterwards in the form of state interventions and regulations – if at all!)
The consumer has the freedom to insert himself into this process and to buy what is for sale. What can be chosen for consumption has long since been “decided” by the valorization process of capital. In the words of Robert Kurz: “On the other hand, however, the general capitalist commodity form expropriates not only the competence to consume, that is, the ability to use things universally in their social context and their sensuous qualities, but also the determination of the content of what individuals have to consume. Since they produce what they do not consume, and consume what they have not produced (even if only in the sense of an institutional communal determination of the content of production) even in consumption they become objects of managerial rationality, from which nothing is further removed than human self-determination” (ibid.).
There is no social understanding about the content of production and consumption. The freedom of the consumer is therefore a chimera. It is a mirage that one must be able to afford. It is the reverse of the “freedom of the assembly line worker.” The “responsible consumer” can only choose what has already been put in front of him anyway: “Demand never determines supply, it is always the other way around. If it were otherwise, then the members of society would have to agree in advance how to satisfy their needs and then organize production accordingly; in other words, in the social-institutional sense (not directly from the activity of the individuals), there would have to be an identity of producers and consumers. Then, of course, demand would no longer be demand for commodities, but rather the direct social discussion, negotiation and realization of the structures of need” (ibid.). This is where a critique of consumer behavior would have to start, however, if it does not want to advocate for bans and renunciations alone and appeal to an abstract common responsibility or to a kind of socio-ecological common sense.
When we talk about needs and their realization, we must do so in the context of the form determination of needs by capital. For certain needs, the compensatory character of consumption is obvious. However, necessary social and material needs and their realization are also determined by capital. Out of necessity, the realization of necessary needs must still be demanded and fought for in the capitalist form (affordable housing, for example), but it is by no means necessary to perceive them in this form or to naturalize their capitalist form. The question here is what “necessity” actually stands for. Adorno notes in this regard in his Theses on Need (2017): “The notion, for example, that cinema is as necessary as housing and food for the reproduction of labor power is “true” only in a world where people are organized by the reproduction of labor power, a world that also forces their needs into harmony with the profit and domination interests of employers [or, at the level of the overall social context, with the imperatives of capital accumulation, T.M.].” Necessity is thus relative, since it implies a necessity for the bourgeois subject.
On the one hand, needs are compensatory, since their realization through freedom of consumption promises identity and self-realization – and are thus necessary for the conditioning and reproduction of people as variable capital; on the other hand, the form determination of capital thwarts the realization of actually necessary social and material needs. Their realization, to the extent that they are at all sufficiently “materially” available or affordable for those in need, is capitalistically adjusted, as can be seen, for example, in the capitalist housing system. On the one hand, for the better-off, a fenced-in bourgeois home of one’s own (i.e., the idiocy of the socially isolated bourgeois nuclear family), the construction of which is defended by some as an elementary human right; on the other hand, concrete boxes constructed in such a way that the individual “housing units” can have nothing to do with each other socially. Both are depositories for containers of labor power – housing goods.
Housing and food are necessary, in contrast to, say, air travel and individual transportation, because they relate to the generic traits of human beings. But “generic traits” here are not to be understood in a naturalizing way. In the words of Agnes Heller, ““natural needs” […] refer to the simple maintenance of human life (self-preservation) and are “naturally necessary” simply because, without satisfying them, man is not able to preserve himself as a mere natural being. These needs are not identical with those of animals, because for his own self-preservation man must also have certain conditions (warmth, clothing) for which the animal has no “need”. The necessary needs for sustaining man as a natural being are therefore also social […]: the mode of satisfaction makes the need itself social” (Heller 1976, 31).
Although nature and thus “natural needs” cannot be dissolved into “discourse” or understood only as something “socially constructed,” both are always already mediated by society and history. In Adorno’s words: “Each drive is so socially mediated that its natural side never appears immediately, but always only as socially produced. The appeal to nature in relation to this or that need is always merely the mask of denial and domination.” (2017). Naturalizations usually had to do with the legitimation of domination. While in the Middle Ages, for example, domination and hierarchy were justified with “God,” in “enlightened” bourgeois society this was done with “nature” (or with what one thought one understood about it). In this way, racism, sexism, eugenics and other things were “scientifically” justified (see for example Reimann 2017, Gould 1996, Weingart et al. 1992, Honegger 1991).
It is precisely the specifically capitalist socialization of needs and their realization that must be the focus of critique if certain forms of production and consumption are to be restricted or banned. These bans and restrictions on their own may be as ineffective as state environmental protection laws, but that would not change the fact that the corresponding discourses as to why we need such abolitions and shutdowns are linked to the climate catastrophe and the urgent need for action – and it is precisely this insight that is affectively repelled from the outset. But an abolition of the capitalist mode of production, of the self-purpose of capital accumulation (and thus also of all senseless or insane consumption), cannot be envisaged or even made conceivable if people cannot detach themselves from their “consumer identity” (and from their identity as “achievers”), do not reconsider their affects and also justify their bigotry with a completely stupid concept of “freedom”; a concept of freedom that always means their freedom and is meant to maintain and enforce their status quo (if need be, with exclusion and violence, see Koester 2019).
3.
The realization of needs that are not offered by the market and/or are not profitable, and the planning and discussion of what to produce when this “what” is not determined by the valorizing movement of capital, are not part of bourgeois freedom. As Kurz writes: “the aspiration to deliberate, conscious cooperative sociality is represented as a sin against the Holy Spirit of an anti-social and blind social machine which has again and again been proclaimed as the law of nature” (Kurz 1999a, 645). Any attempt, even any claim or thought, to want to plan production and not leave it to the so-called spontaneity of the market (which implies nothing other than fundamentally short-term thinking) was always suspected of totalitarianism. A concept of freedom that included freedom from social need was considered by bourgeois ideologues like F. A. Hayek as a path to servitude (ibid., 644ff.). Instead, Hayek sees submission to the imperatives of the market as the epitome of freedom. Anything else, he argues, leads to the gulag (so simply can Hayek’s redundant works be summarized). The framework in which bourgeois freedoms are realized is the valorizing movement of capital: “Nothing may be thought, written, done, or made that would go beyond this society […]” (Adorno 2017). One receives recognition (and even this has to be fought for and is by no means a matter of course – even worse than having to be a subject is not being allowed to be a subject, although so far there is no alternative to having to be a subject), provided that one successfully proves oneself as an agent of abstract labor. Civil liberties and human rights are thus valid only with reservations (if they are valid at all – as is well known, capitalism also runs without them). Their validity and enforcement depend on a successful accumulation of capital, during which people are incorporated as variable capital, and on a financing state, by which they are administered as subjects of the state. These reservations become particularly evident in the crisis, when people”s existence should be profitable. Bourgeois recognition thus presupposes a fundamental non-recognition of people as corporeal beings. This can be seen very clearly in the debates on euthanasia (in addition to the situation of refugees and the “punishment of the poor,” see Böttcher 2016 & Wacquant 2009). For example, active euthanasia has been legal in Canada since 2016. Initially, this was intended for people who are terminally ill and whose imminent death is foreseeable. However, the choice of assisted suicide is by no means “only” for the terminally ill, but has long since been extended to people who are lonely or poor, who do not want to be a burden on their family, or who simply see no point in living.[6] Economists rejoice that this reduces the costs of the health care system![7] Euthanasia, which is anything but “self-determined”, does not even stop at Long Covid patients (!): “The Canadian Tracey Thompsen (50) suffers from Long Covid and is unable to work. For two years, the former cook has had to struggle with chronic fatigue and other severe symptoms. She can hardly cope with her everyday life. As a result, she has now applied for active euthanasia. The reason she gives is that her savings would only last for five months. She doesn’t really want to die, but the hopelessness of her situation and the lack of financial support have made her do it.”[8] Patients who cost a lot are persuaded or pressured to opt for the less expensive (!) euthanasia: “In fact, in Canada, people with severe disabilities can choose to be killed even if there is no other medical problem. Human rights groups complain that the country offers no safeguards. Families are not allowed to be informed. Instead, healthcare workers are urged to suggest euthanasia even to those who have not considered the procedure on their own. Unsurprisingly, this targets people who need expensive treatment but don’t receive adequate government support.”[9] So-called bioethicists and pediatricians (!) are still calling for an expansion of euthanasia: “Some Canadian pediatricians and bioethicists, for example, argue in an essay published in the Journal of Medical Ethics (!) that killing on demand should be classified as palliative end-of-life treatment and thus be part of health care. This would mean that the “treatment” would not have to be preceded by any special information or forceful determination of the ability to form a will. If euthanasia is now considered part of health care, the question arises as to why it should not be offered to everyone, including minors, according to the authors of the essay. Physicians should be encouraged to make patients aware of all the options available to them as part of health care – including active euthanasia. The authors further argue that minors who are capable of giving consent should be allowed to make decisions without parental consent, if necessary.” [10][11] The “self-determined” liquidation of people as “part of health care”! Orwellian newspeak really cannot get any more perfidious than this!!!
The euthanasia discourse in Canada thus followed a similar trajectory to that in the Netherlands (van Loenen 2009). However, it was “pursued more ruthlessly and rapidly” in Canada (Yuill 2022) than elsewhere. In the Netherlands, the legalization of so-called euthanasia did not lead to an end of the debate; rather, the debate then really took off: if euthanasia is granted to the terminally ill, why not to the disabled or mentally ill? If it is granted to the elderly, why not to the young? If it is granted to the terminally ill, why not to the depressed or simply to people who no longer see any meaning in their lives because they are lonely? Or because they are poor. Or at risk of homelessness (!!)![12] It is not chronic pain, disability or illness that drives some people to “euthanasia,” but poverty and lack of perspective. It is not that they want to die, but that they see no way out.[13]
Those who are superfluous for capitalism and those whose labor cannot be exploited in the valorization process are denied any right to exist; a denial that is above all – and this is especially disgusting – legitimized by bioethics and the like. How repulsive that euthanasia henchmen even dare to publish a propaganda brochure for children![14] So that children learn that it is “normal” for grandpa or their disabled brother to be murdered because of cost concerns? In the end, the “superfluous” and “human cost factors” are to be “disposed of” just like unsold tomatoes. Freedom under capitalism is in the last instance nothing more than the freedom to die!
So one still dares to speak of freedom and self-determination without recognizing and radically criticizing the logic of the capitalist social system at all, which always objectively questions both and makes the submission to and internalization of the valorization imperatives of capital the precondition of all freedom and self-determination! This applies all the more if by freedom and self-determination people really mean consumer freedom. No thought is wasted on how the capitalist mode of production (and thus the mode of consumption) prepares and destroys man and nature for the “monstrous end in itself” (Kurz 1999a, 648) of capital accumulation. For the bourgeois philistine, everything should remain as it is (although it is becoming increasingly obvious that nothing will remain as it is). Under no circumstances should one’s own freedom of consumption, freedom of vacation or the like be questioned. In order to stop or at least (!) slow down the climate collapse, however, all kinds of things have to be questioned…
If, on the other hand, we are to speak of freedom, then it should be in a completely different sense than it is at present. In the words of Robert Kurz: “Freedom would consist solely in circumstances in which the people who come together for the purpose of the reproduction of their lives not only do so voluntarily, but also discuss and decide both what they will do and how they will do it together. […] A freedom of this kind, which would be the exact opposite of the liberal universal serfdom under the diktat of the labor markets, is in principle possible, in practical terms, on all levels of social reproduction—from the household to transcontinental networked production.” (ibid.). There would have to be a social agreement on what, how and for what purpose production should take place without ruining the planet – and not in order to accumulate capital, even if it is “green” capital. Climate protection and economic growth are not compatible, as even some Greens have come to realize (e.g. the Taz editorUlrike Herrmann, who in her new book advocates a war economy, similar to that of Great Britain during World War II, as an alleged means to overcome capitalism and its destructive valorization dynamics; for a critique see Konicz 2022). The fact that people would no longer have to sacrifice themselves and nature for the monstrous end in itself of capital would be, so to speak, the basis for real freedom and self-determination, which, however, would have nothing to do with bourgeois freedom and self-determination (a fortiori not with the so-called freedom of consumption), since the latter are nothing other than the freedom to servitude and self-valorization, to self-stupefaction and finally – as the euthanasia debates show clearly – the freedom to die.
To evade the radical critique of the existing, and the crises and catastrophes that go along with it, by means of affectation and freedom mumbo-jumbo, in order to cling to a historical model that is on its way out, has indeed something suicidal about it in the medium to long term; “freedom to die” can thus hardly be an exaggeration. To conclude in Tomasz Konicz’s words, “The adherence of late capitalist ideology to the existing, which is obviously in the process of decay, thus comes close to a suicide, a suicide out of fear of the death of capital. In the end, death is unconsciously sought as a way out of the growing social contradictions that permeate every individual. The nothingness of death thus becomes the last resting place in the face of the escalating contradictions of the late capitalist permanent crisis and the accompanying abyss between the increasing renunciation of drives and social requirements that can hardly be fulfilled anymore. […] The death drive latently inherent in capital, manifest in its deadly crisis, wants to transfer the world into nothingness, into the yawning void that forms the concrete substance of the real abstraction value. It is a subjectless nihilism that unfolds due to the crisis: The world is to be made identical to the black hole of the value-form, which is at the center of the whirlwind of rampant accumulation of dead wage labor that has been devastating the world for some 300 years. Consequently, everything that cannot be pressed into commodity form and valorized by sale on the market is consigned to destruction in times of crisis rather than the grip of the world’s valorization machine on man and nature being loosened because of its decline. The destruction of unsaleable goods in times of crisis, which in the meantime are increasingly withdrawn from the access of impoverished people by corresponding legal regulations (e.g. by laws against “containerization”), is only the obvious outflow of this urge for self-destruction” (Konicz 2022a, 79f.).
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[1] https://www.deutsches-klima-konsortium.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdfs/Publikationen_DKK/basisfakten-klimawandel.pdf
[2] For a historical overview (with a focus on Germany), see Richter, Siebold, Weeber 2016.
[3] On the other hand, on the disciplinary history of modernity, see e.g.: Dreßen 1982, Pfeisinger 2006, van Ussel 1970 & Rutschky 1997.
[4] See, for example, the Chinese fast fashion group Shein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shein.
[5] See Consumer Issues in Focus – A Special Issue of Novo Arguments for Progress, 2016, https://www.novo-argumente.com/images/uploads/pdf/novo_plus_1_inhaltsverzeichnis.pdf
[6] https://www.imabe.org/bioethikaktuell/einzelansicht/kanada-sinnloses-leben-und-einsamkeit-sind-gruende-fuer-aktive-sterbehilfe
[7] https://www.imabe.org/bioethikaktuell/einzelansicht/sterbehilfe-spart-kosten-kanadas-oekonomen-favorisieren-sterbehilfe-ausweitung
[8] https://www.imabe.org/bioethikaktuell/einzelansicht/kanada-euthanasie-auch-fuer-long-covid-patienten
[9] https://www.stern.de/gesundheit/-haben-sie-schon-mal-ueber-sterbehilfe-nachgedacht–teure-patienten-offenbar-zum-assistierten-suizid-ueberredet-32628792.html
[10] https://jme.bmj.com/content/45/1/60?papetoc
[11] https://www.ief.at/kanada-ueberlegt-sterbehilfe-fuer-minderjaehrige/
[12] https://ottawa.citynews.ca/local-news/ontario-man-applying-for-medically-assisted-death-as-alternative-to-being-homeless-5953116
[13] How poverty, not pain, is driving some disabled Canadians toward medically assisted death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD0O_w3HzJg see also Yuill 2022.
[14] https://www.virtualhospice.ca/maid/media/3bdlkrve/maid-activity-book.pdf
Originally published on the exit! homepage on 05/24/2023.
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