A Delusional Way Out of the Crisis
“Enough…”
After the attack in Solingen on August 23, 2024, Friedrich Merz used this slogan to reflexively demand stricter deportation and asylum policies without a moment’s pause or even respect for the mourners. Criminals are to be deported to Afghanistan and Syria. The fact that the legal requirements for this are – for good reason – lacking did not play a role, even less so the fact that this would require cooperation with Afghan and Syrian terrorist regimes. Merz succeeds in driving the other parties forward with populist rhetoric. In a competition to outdo each other, the democratic parties are fighting for the refugee deportation national championship. They are praised by the AfD for finally doing what the AfD has always demanded.
“Authoritarian Temptations”
Back in 2018, the study “Authoritarian Temptations” diagnosed the “manifestation of a ‘raw bourgeoisie’”[1] and found “that authoritarian attitudes are hidden under a thin layer of civilized, genteel (‘bourgeois’) manners […].”[2] They manifest themselves in contempt for weak groups, the demand for privileges for the established and an orientation towards “competition and personal responsibility.”[3] “Authoritarian temptations are […] primarily to be interpreted as reactions to individual or social loss of control. They generate a demand for political offers aimed at restoring control through the exercise of power and domination as well as through exclusion and discrimination or group-related misanthropy.”[4]
The breeding ground for such “authoritarian temptations” is the worsening experience of crisis. They range from war and environmental destruction, terror, poverty and social division to social decline. In the face of such experiences, the neoliberal advice that everything will be fine with hard work and permanent self-optimization loses its plausibility. The impression arises that everything is “getting out of hand” and out of control. Authoritarian, identitarian and resentful attitudes are gaining traction and are combined with the illusion that this can reverse the loss of control and restore the threatened normality. “Concrete” solutions to “concrete” problems are demanded. They are determined by the search for stability in a mixture of authoritarian-repressive and identitarian strategies. Identitarian boundaries are marked between Germans and non-Germans, workers and freeloaders, friends and enemies and, where possible, enforced in an authoritarian and repressive manner.
“Germany, But Normal” (AfD)
The capitalist relations of production and dissociated reproduction, of work and life outside it, of production and consumption, of tension and relaxing recreation are assumed to be normal. This understanding of normality, which also applies to defenders of democracy, is interspersed on the right with what the AfD understands by “Germany, but normal.” This is primarily about ethnic and cultural identity. It essentially includes traditional gender dualism and the bourgeois family as well as a dichotomous world view that makes a clear distinction between those who belong and those who must remain outside. “Race” is replaced by ethnic and cultural identity as an exclusionary marker – occasionally concealed by the euphemistic talk of a plurality of ethnicities. But even this does not abolish the exclusion marked by identity, because every ethnic group should remain where it is or be “returned” to where it belongs. Exclusionary identity politics becomes the basis of “group-related misanthropy” (Wilhelm Heitmeyer). Strategies of exclusion aim to return to a confusedly imagined normality by regaining control.
A right-wing “culture war” along the lines of “nobody can take away our German identity” is in some ways replacing the “class struggle.” The socially disadvantaged, who feel respected and understood in their longing for German normality, overlook the fact that they too would be further marginalized by the AfD’s economic policy ideas. The “Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance” (BSW) closes this open socio-political flank. It combines the issue of social disparities and social exclusion with a German-national orientation, according to which the first priority must be social justice for Germans who have been left behind. People who have to flee their home countries because they are victims of all the crises that destroy the foundations of life – be it poverty, economic crises, collapsing states, wars or ecological destruction processes – compete with them.
Together Against the “Superfluous”
The current attempts to re-establish control are focused on migrants. They are stigmatized as the “mother of all problems” (Seehofer). The democratic center as well as right-wing and left-wing German-identitarian orientations agree on this. In contrast to the already unspeakable asylum debates in the 1990s, which were accompanied by attacks on refugee shelters, there is no longer even talk of fighting the causes of flight. This kind of talk was not meant seriously back then either. However, it was obviously used to relativize the so-called asylum compromise by referring to the “actual” problems that drive people to flee their home countries. In the meantime, the view has become so nationally and immediately narrowed that the global dynamics of destruction are no longer even in sight.
However, the focus extends beyond Germany’s borders when it comes to recruiting migrants who are needed to compensate for the shortage of skilled workers in production and marketing, such as in the care sector. Foreign human capital is important so that Germany does not fall even further behind in global competition. In this way, the terror of deportation against “useless” people who exploit “us” is combined with the global hunt for usable human material that benefits “us.” A differentiation between superfluous “parasites” and “honest workers,” even among natives, is part of a consensus that is shared right up to the democratic “center” of society. Such selection also applies internally, albeit to a lesser extent. Analogous to the asylum debate in the 1990s, the rejection of migrants today is also linked to social cuts for locals and their stigmatization as “work refusers.”
The Fetishization of Work as a Social Consensus
The hatred of non-working migrants and “native refusers of work” is an expression of the fetishization of work in capitalism. Labor is not a contradiction to capital, but rather its substance as an indispensable source of value and surplus value. Therefore, work should not be affirmed, but criticized. It is no coincidence that the slogan “he who does not work should not eat” is a cross-class social consensus. Hatred of non-working people is a manifestation of structural antiziganism. It feeds on the rejection of Sinti and Roma, so-called gypsies, who have refused a modernity based on work, while structural anti-Semitism is virulent in the rejection of “rapacious financial capital” at the expense of creative capital, i.e. in a critique of capitalism reduced to the sphere of circulation à la “closing the casino” (attac). Both ideas are linked by the fetishization of work. They meet in the need to irrationally concretize crisis situations in terms of individuals or certain groups (who are then to be excluded), as well as in the illusion of being able to compensate for the loss of political control and regain political agency through regulatory and even authoritarian measures and orders.
The latter is a fanciful illusion. Even authoritarian governments cannot regain the lost controls. The barrier that even they cannot overcome is the logical and historical barrier of capital valorization. This barrier is set by the fact that – mediated by competition – less and less labor is used for the production of value and surplus value, and this decline can no longer be compensated for by cheaper production and the expansion of markets. However, the ability to act politically is tied to a functioning accumulation of capital. The more this accumulation collapses, the more clearly the political capacity to act, as well as legal capacity, including human rights, reach their limits. The extent to which legal capacity is tied to the ability to valorize labor as “human capital” is dramatically demonstrated in migration policy. The protection of the law is open to exploitable migrants, while those who are superfluous for the valorization of their labor are given inferior rights, if they are lucky, or end up being handed over to terrorist regimes without the right to live, locked up in camps or left drowning in the Mediterranean while sea rescue is criminalized.
Freedom, But Different
Against the backdrop outlined above, democratic and repressive-autocratic politics are moving closer together. In terms of content, both variants are confusingly similar, the more it is a matter of ultimately desperate attempts to extend even post-democratic control options beyond the crisis. They differ above all on the formal level of hostility or respect for democratic processes and institutions. The latter is no small matter and must be defended against attempts to undermine democracy. However, this should not obscure the fact that more is at stake if collapse is to be prevented, namely liberation from subjugation to the deadly and irrational end in itself of capitalist socialization, namely the increase of capital for its own sake. Freedom would consist of gaining control over the reproduction of life within the framework of an “association of free people,” instead of living or dying as an appendage to the machinery of valorization. “Under the spell of the tenacious irrationality of the whole” (Theodor W. Adorno), this may seem illusionary. Beyond this spell, however, nothing is more unrealistic than the supposedly “illusionless pragmatism” (Robert Kurz) to which so-called Realpolitik has committed itself in the face of the escalating deadly reality of the crisis. The more this continues, the more the catastrophe accelerates, instead of the “course of events” being interrupted and broken – irritated by the suffering of people and with a critical view of the social totality of capitalist socialization. Then “freedom […] could consist in the fact that the people who come together to reproduce their lives not only do so voluntarily, but also deliberate and decide together on the content as well as the procedure. […] Such freedom, which would be the exact opposite of liberal universal servitude under the dictates of labor markets, is in principle practically possible at all levels and aggregations of social reproduction – from the household to the transcontinental networking of production” (Robert Kurz).
[1] Wilhelm Heitmeyer, Authoritarian Temptations, Berlin3 2018, 87.
[2] Ibid., 310.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 84.
First published in konkret in 11/2024.
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