Author: OlIver Blackwell

Nationalist Shadow Boxing

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Tomasz Konicz

About a year after taking office, the results of Donald Trump’s tariff policy are mixed and contradictory. The number of industrial jobs in the U.S. has actually declined slightly, as rationalization in the production process continues to advance, driven in part by AI programs.

In and out of tariffs – this is the only constant in U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policy. Last week, new U.S. tariffs of 10 percent on nearly all imports went into effect. They replace the tariffs that the Supreme Court had ruled invalid on February 20. In his initial angry reactions to the ruling, Trump had even announced a 15 percent tariff. The government is still considering further increases of this magnitude.

The only certainty is that the protectionist policy will continue, even though its legal basis has changed. The Supreme Court ruled that imposing the previous tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977 was unlawful. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent immediately announced that the government would simply rely on other trade laws instead. Currently, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 applies. It allows the government to impose tariffs for 150 days; after that, Congress must approve them.

Politically, too, Trump’s tariff policy remains controversial, even within the Republican Party. Just under a year ago, Trump began raising the U.S. average tariff rate, which stood at 2.4 percent at the time; at the end of last year, it was around 17 percent. Protectionism is intended to “make America great again” – specifically, to reverse the crisis-driven deindustrialization and loss of manufacturing jobs. But the results have been mixed.

Although Trump keeps touting ever-larger, astronomical figures purported to demonstrate a massive surge in foreign investment – in October 2025 he spoke of $17 trillion, and in his address to the nation on February 24, the figure had already risen to $18 trillion, which he claimed had been pledged to him through bilateral trade agreements, among other channels –these figures have little basis in reality. Instead, the administration adds together forecasts of actual high corporate investment in the context of the AI boom, non-binding letters of intent from governments interested in appeasing Trump, vague agreements on potential economic cooperation, and binding agreements—and thus arrives at an absurdly high investment volume that would amount to four times the annual investment activity of the U.S. private sector, which ranges from about $4 to 5 trillion. Foreign investment in the U.S. amounted to only about $151 billion in 2024.

But has the U.S. government actually succeeded in extorting substantial investment commitments through the threat of tariffs? Japan has committed to $550 billion in industrial investments by 2029; South Korea has pledged $350 billion; Apple plans to pour $600 billion into U.S. manufacturing facilities and actually manufacture a Mac Mini in the U.S. There are also binding commitments worth billions from TSMC, Nvidia, Honda, Hyundai, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Merck, and Roche. The list could go on, but it remains to be seen whether all these commitments will be fulfilled – and whether corporations are simply passing off investments they had planned anyway as a return to “Made in America” in order to gain political capital with Trump.

Huge U.S. Trade Deficit

The massive U.S. trade deficit has not shrunk – at least not yet. Trump said in late February that these investments would not yield economic results for “a year.” The annual trade deficit remained virtually unchanged at $901 billion in 2025. Looking solely at goods trade, excluding services, the deficit actually rose by 2% to a new record of $1.24 trillion, as the AI boom has been accompanied by rising imports, particularly of microchips from Taiwan.

However, the composition of trade flows has changed. Imports from China plummeted by 25% to just $242 billion, Japan’s exports to the U.S. fell by 12%, and those from Germany dropped by 9.4%. Canada also exported less to the U.S. in 2025: goods worth $291 billion instead of the previous $308 billion. Mexico recorded the largest growth last year, and with an export volume of $399 billion, it is now by far the leading exporter to the U.S. Moreover, the slump in imports from China was offset by nearly 50% increases in imports from Taiwan and Vietnam. At least part of these changes can be attributed to the fact that goods produced in China are simply being rerouted through countries such as Mexico or Vietnam to circumvent the particularly high U.S. tariffs imposed on China.

The picture is similarly ambiguous when it comes to production in the United States. Industrial production has indeed risen by more than 1% since Trump took office a year ago, yet the number of industrial jobs has declined slightly over the same period – by a good 108,000. This reveals the inherent limitation of capital – the market-driven tendency of capitalist commodity production to minimize wage labor in the production process through rationalization. Trump is shadowboxing, for the crisis process is by no means rooted in trade practices supposedly disadvantageous to the U.S., but will only be intensified by the current AI boom and advances in robotics.

No Boom in the Labor Market

Furthermore, while protectionism may benefit certain industries, it often does so at the expense of other sectors that rely on the smooth import of materials and parts as part of the internationally organized division of labor. U.S. steel tariffs, for example, have led to an increase in employment at steel mills, but this came at the expense of those sectors that had sourced inexpensive steel products from abroad and have now cut tens of thousands of jobs, as the New York Times calculates. Consequently, there can be no talk of an overall boom in the labor market. Despite economic growth of 2.2% last year, the number of jobs rose only minimally – even though the expected waves of rationalization associated with AI programs are still to come.

For consumers, tariffs drive up inflation because they are passed on in the form of higher prices. The New York Times cites a study indicating that the inflation rate last year was more than half a percentage point higher due to the tariffs. It stood at 2.7% in 2025, and 3.1% for food. The Trump administration implicitly acknowledged this by promising every U.S. citizen a one-time “tariff dividend” of $2,000 as compensation. Whether this will still happen following the Supreme Court’s ruling is questionable.

Above all, however, the tariff revenues were intended to finance government spending. Following the tariff ruling, Trump also imposed substitute tariffs because the revenues had already been budgeted. Last July, the Trump administration sharply reduced taxes – especially for the super-rich – with the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” causing the national debt to rise even more than it already had. In part, the customs revenue was intended to cushion that impact – in other words, a de facto consumption tax was meant to finance the tax breaks for capital and top earners.

The U.S. Dollar’s Status as the World’s Reserve Currency is at Risk

As of November 2025, revenue from the tariffs imposed by Trump totaled $236 billion, of which approximately $175 billion was collected under the IEEPA regulations that have now been declared illegal. These funds will now be the subject of protracted legal disputes; they are not available to the Treasury, as companies such as FedEx have already filed lawsuits to secure the refund of these paid customs duties.

Ultimately, Trump’s protectionism threatens the status of the U.S. dollar – which has been steadily losing value – as the world’s reserve currency. U.S. trade deficits provided an incentive for countries and economic regions with large trade surpluses, such as China, Japan, and Europe (which is economically dominated by Germany), to accept the dollar’s dominance. Now, the special status of the U.S. – which has been able to incur virtually risk-free debt in the world’s reserve currency – is in danger of becoming a thing of the past. This became clear, for example, during the disputes over Greenland, when U.S. bond prices plummeted on January 20 after several Scandinavian funds announced they would liquidate their positions.

The U.S. national debt now stands at more than 120% of gross domestic product, while yields on 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds – which averaged less than 2 percent during Trump’s first term – are now above 4%. At $1.1 trillion annually, debt service is now one of the largest items in the federal budget; it has doubled over the past five years and even exceeds military spending. Should, for example, the impending AI disruption once again necessitate trillions of dollars in government crisis measures, the U.S. would have little capacity to do so, unlike during the financial crisis beginning in 2007.

Originally published in jungle.world 10 in 03/2026

Natura denaturata

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Nourishing Humanity Through Capitalism

Robert Kurz

 You will no longer recognize the fruit by its taste or its shape.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Self-deception is not limited to individuals; states, social systems, and epochs are also prone to it. The commodity-producing system of modernity holds the world record in this respect. It considers itself the pinnacle of human history that cannot be surpassed. There is a very simple way to judge the true quality of an era. The state of nutrition is the best indicator. Food and drink provide the most reliable information about how people fared. After all, it is in this area that a culture demonstrates its most basic ability to meet needs. Naturally, modernity also sees itself at the forefront of progress in the history of nutrition. Only the wonderful market economy has satisfactorily solved the problems of providing sufficient food and improving its quality. However, this image is a mockery of reality. At the end of the 1970s, economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein and his team at the State University of New York published studies on the history of agricultural production and nutrition. Their findings revealed that: “In the long term, the prosperity of the world system and the entirety of the world’s labor force is declining — contrary to a very widespread assumption, it is not increasing.” This statement flies in the face of the prevailing free-market ideology and is well documented. This assertion seems completely implausible only because the official view is limited in three ways: first, to the short period of relative worldwide prosperity after World War II; second, to the few fully industrialized Western countries; and third, to the narrow social stratum of the respective market economy winners. However, if one considers the entire period of the history of modernization since the 16th century, then it is easy to prove that modernity as a whole has produced the greatest historical surge of a socially induced shortage of decent food and in this even far surpasses the oriental despotisms. Clearly, the unleashed market economy is dramatically tightening food restrictions once again at the end of the 20th century, leaving almost 6 billion people globally hungry, either permanently or temporarily. This is by no means an exaggeration. After the global food supply temporarily improved in the 1960s and 1970s, hunger and malnutrition increased again at the end of the 1980s. Africa is not the only region providing new horror stories. The specter of hunger is reappearing in places where it seemed to have been banished forever. Today, miners and their families in Ukraine or Siberia, pensioners in Moscow, and street children throughout Eastern Europe are starving, as are large sections of the population in Latin America and South Asia. According to a UNICEF report, more than seven million children worldwide die of malnutrition every year. The greatest neoliberal “success model” is the widespread adoption of soup kitchens. Hunger has even returned to industrial centers in the West. In the U.S., even if at least one family member has a job, 30 million people are “food insecure” due to “starvation wages.” Twenty-six million of these people rely on public or private food handouts each month. More than four million adults go hungry permanently or intermittently. Eleven million children are malnourished, and nearly one million households often go days without food. These are not atrocity propaganda claims, but rather data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and charities such as Second Harvest. Productivity has risen much faster than population growth this century. If it were only a question of productive potential, twice the number of people alive today could easily be fed well and abundantly. The social limit to the production and distribution of food is not determined by a lack of agricultural yields in relation to the number of people, but by the economic form of the modern commodity-producing system. The logic of economic profitability enforces an irrational restriction of resources, which is particularly evident at the most basic level of nutrition. In principle, people only have access to food if their labor can be used profitably. If this criterion cannot be met because a “too high” level of productivity has made their labor superfluous, they are put on starvation rations, even though the capacity to produce food has increased. While a bumper harvest promised at least temporary abundance for all in pre-modern societies, it appears as a disaster for agribusiness’s economic calculations because “oversupply” depresses prices. Therefore, it is normal for businesses in a market economy to destroy agricultural products on a massive scale or dispose of them through denaturation when natural yields are exceptionally high. Thus, hunger becomes the product of abundance itself. However, this same economic rationality creates mass hunger and depresses food quality. Even those who seem to have enough to eat suffer from a lack of vital nutrients. This is because cost-cutting logic means the food industry removes essential ingredients from its outwardly dazzling products to make them more convenient. Large food production corporations and medium-sized suppliers do not hesitate to deceive consumers in order to maximize economic profit. For example, pale pink shrimp in the freezer are often not made from crab meat but from cheap meat waste disguised with dye and pressed into shrimp shapes. In Italy, carcinogenic substances were found in pasta from the packaging materials. Half of the chickens sold in the European Union are contaminated with bacteria. Overall, the number of diseases and epidemics caused by denatured food is increasing. Even if the ingredients in food are not poisonous or harmful, their quality is steadily declining. This begins with a decline in flavor diversity because transcontinental distribution only allows for a narrow spectrum of standardized products bred according to packaging standards. Thousands of fruit and vegetable varieties and hundreds of farm animal breeds are dying out because they are “superfluous” according to abstract cost calculations. With legal approval, more and more agricultural raw materials are being broken down by new technologies in order to be enriched, colored, and preserved with additives. For example, beer can contain powdered animal hooves, and chocolate can contain dried blood. Food can be produced much more cheaply with synthetic “flavor components” than with real fruit. Denatured, tasteless biomasses are “inoculated” with flavorings. Capitalist man is also being dispossessed of his ability to taste. It is of little consolation that functionalist elites are largely responsible for the impoverishment of eating habits. Postmodern managers create eating on the run and breakfast in the car as fashionable trends. They consume substances that a medieval farmer wouldn’t even give to his pigs. Who could doubt that the market economy has led us to the glorious “end of history”?

First published on medico.de on 04/01/1999

Dangerous Waters!

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Population Growth as a Supposedly Central Ecological Problem

Thomas Meyer

It should always make us sit up and take notice when critique of the capitalist mode of production and way of life, which leads to ever-increasing consumption of resources and is based on indifference towards people and nature, is sidestepped precisely by making the real scandal the mere number or rate of increase of the human population (of course mostly in the “developing countries” – which undoubtedly also has a racist component). The horror of “overpopulation” was already propagated in the late 18th century by Thomas R. Malthus with his law of population. Supposedly, humans reproduce in a strictly geometric manner, whereas food production can only be increased arithmetically. For Malthus, therefore, caring for the poor would be irresponsible, as it would only worsen their lot. The poor would multiply even further and everything would get worse. The poor are, so to speak, the “unfortunate ones who have drawn the blank in the great lottery of life” (Malthus 1977, 94; on Malthus, see Kurz 1999a, 138ff.; see also Mielenz 2008). Malthus’s law of population and his perfidious justification and misinterpretation of famines did not remain mere theory. When, due to capitalist economic dynamics, the need for food could not be expressed as solvent demand and resulted in hunger, bourgeois ideologues were quick to justify mass death with “overpopulation” and the “struggle for existence.” Accordingly, they also refrained from combating hunger (for example, by banning food exports from the famine region and distributing food without regard for the amount of “work” that had been performed).[1] According to this cruel capitalist logic, humanitarian aid would prevent a market adjustment of “human resources,” i.e., no new “equilibrium” would be established if the “superfluous” were allowed to live.

In the second half of the 20th century, many people saw population growth as the main obstacle to the catch-up development of so-called Third World countries. Efforts were therefore made to reduce population growth in the “Third World.” To this end, development aid was linked to appropriate measures. These measures even included testing new contraceptive methods on women in the “Third World” that had not been approved in industrialized countries (see, for example, the essays in: Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis Nr.14).

In the 1970s, when ecological destruction became a topic of public concern, Malthusian ideas were linked to ecology. The “population bomb” was apparently endangering the planet and the “limits to growth” would allegedly soon be reached.

Such arguments have persisted to this day and, against the backdrop of the crisis and the general tendency to wage war on the poor and the “superfluous,” have taken on a threatening relevance. It is not capitalism that is the focus of critique, but people themselves who are the problem. Capitalism has been internalized and taken for granted to such an extent that it and its peculiarities go as unnoticed as air pressure (especially since capitalism is usually seen only as a sinister machination of the “top 1%” or similar).

Verena Brunschweiger, for example, argued along these lines in her book Kinderfrei statt Kinderlos [Child-Free Instead of Childless], which caused a sensation in 2019.[2] Brunschweiger sees herself as a feminist and rightly criticizes the ideology of motherhood, according to which a woman can only have a fulfilling life if she brings children into the world because that supposedly corresponds to her nature. In doing so, she criticizes the discrimination against childless or “child-free” women. Brunschweiger states that an anti-feminist backlash is taking place in Western societies, not least against the backdrop of a pro-natalist offensive by autocrats and their corresponding rabble.[3]

The insidious thing about Brunschweiger’s book is the link it makes between a child-free lifestyle and climate protection: “It is unreasonable to constantly demand explanations from childless women for their decision. We need a new social norm that, conversely, expects parents to explain why they believe they have the right to further endanger all of our lives on this planet” (Brunschweiger 2019, 50). In other words, we should refrain from having children in order to reduce CO2 emissions. She refers to various studies (such as Schrader 2019). She assumes that the sheer number of people is the problem and will ultimately lead to the ruin of this planet. The more people there are, the more flights and mountains of waste there are, so to speak. So if the birth rate is reduced so that the total number of people shrinks, the planet can recover. Not having children is also the right decision because “very few children will later, as adults, solve the plastic problem in the ocean or end the unjust distribution of resources on our planet” (Brunschweiger 2019, 130). She apparently rules out the possibility that modern consumerism could be criticized and overcome (ibid., cf. Greß 2022). Children will necessarily become as narrow-minded as their parents. So it would be better if they had never been born in the first place. Anti-natalism thus serves not only to protect women from the patriarchal prison of the family, but also to save the planet. The more people there are, the more misery there is, the more resources are consumed, and the worse off the Earth is. Consequently, she also refers to the anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar, who argued that it is morally imperative to “cause as little suffering as possible.” Therefore, according to Benatar, there is “a moral obligation […] not to reproduce” (ibid., 37 and 36). Fewer people, less suffering. A person who is not born does not suffer. It’s that simple. But it gets even better: Brunschweiger also refers to misanthropic associations such as the VHEM, the “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement,” whose followers are convinced that the biosphere would only have a chance to recover once humans had disappeared from it (ibid., 117). In an interview with the Westfalen-Blatt (March 13, 2019), Brunschweiger said that she found such a position “too extreme.” But, Brunschweiger continued, she “understands that there are people who would like that. Of course, it wouldn’t be bad for the rest of the biosphere if it could recover a little from humans and animals and plants could live in harmony. But if there were 38 million of us in Germany instead of 80 million, then one Earth would be enough. But at the moment, we need three Earths.” On the other hand, she suggests that the destruction of the environment does not depend solely on the sheer number of people; she mentions that a British “child pollutes the environment and wastes resources 30 times more than a child from sub-Saharan Africa” (Brunschweiger 2019, 112). She does not pursue this idea further, especially since she implicitly presumes that greater prosperity also means greater alignment with Western capitalist states, with the corresponding waste of resources and production of nonsense and junk.

If the aim were to pursue a progressive population policy that is not misanthropic and does not deprive people of their very existence, social circumstances would have to be taken into account, since a high number of children is hardly due to a patriarchal ideology of childbearing alone, but above all to socio-economic living conditions (in addition to education, degree of urbanization, etc., cf. Bricker/Ibbitson 2019). Heide Mertens writes: “It is not the availability of appropriate contraception, but the social circumstances in which women have children that determine the number of children they have. It is not the number of people that determines the state of the environment, nor is it solely the level of technology used to cultivate nature, but the way in which people produce” (Mertens 1994, 182).

Nowadays, however, it is not the social system that is the focus of critique, but rather the people who are made superfluous by capitalism and then flee environmental destruction and war who are seen as the real problem. With regard to the present, the “overpopulation discourse” therefore remains extremely controversial, “because, especially in the current eco-movement, it is once again recklessly assumed that, firstly, there are ‘too many’ people and, secondly, that their unbridled consumption is destroying the earth” (Wildcat No. 104, 21).

These are by no means isolated or extreme cases. “The list of reactionary nonsense caused by climate change is long,” as eco-socialist Daniel Tanuro notes (Tanuro 2015, 128). Economists have seriously proposed “supplementing the market for greenhouse gas emission rights with a market for ‘the right to procreate’ (!) in order to control the impact of demographics in developing countries on the climate” (ibid.). Economists at the London School of Economics offset unborn human lives and their presumed CO2 emissions with the CO2 savings achieved  by green technologies. These ideological henchmen have calculated that “spending $7 on family planning per year would save more than one ton of CO2 by 2050. To achieve the same result using green technologies, $32 would have to be spent” (ibid. 130). Two so-called “experts” who wrote a study for the Pentagon in 2003 warn of a “flood of climate refugees” (!) and conclude that countries such as the US and Australia would “probably build fortresses.” They write “cold-bloodedly,” as Tanuro points out, “that ‘around these fortresses, the deaths caused by war, but also by hunger and disease, would reduce the size of the population, which would then adapt to the carrying capacity [of the ecosystem] over time’” (ibid., 127f.). A misanthropic discourse that blames “overpopulation” in the “Third World” for climate change amounts to nothing less than “the mass extermination of the poor, as if they were surplus lemmings” (ibid., 128). Such reactionary population policy discourses also come from the UN, which one might naively think “is above suspicion” (ibid., 128, see Abeselom 1995 for more detail with a focus on Ethiopia). Incidentally, the claim that the population will continue to grow is empirically untenable (this cannot be discussed further here: see Bricker/Ibbitson 2019, Trumann 2024, and Wildcat No. 104, 20ff.).

A “Malthusian discourse” has long since found its way into the ranks of eco-socialists and post-growth economists. In some cases, extremely reactionary positions are represented there. In German-speaking countries, for example, an “overpopulation thesis” is advocated by the eco-socialists Bruno Kern and Saral Sarkar. In his book (translated and edited by Bruno Kern), Sarkar cites numerous wars and violent conflicts and attributes them, using more or less biological arguments, to overpopulation (alongside nationalism and identities). Even the Middle East conflict (!) is said to have overpopulation as its main cause: “But most observers and commentators fail to mention the deeper cause of the conflict’s intractability, namely that it is a war over birth rates” (Sarkar 2025, 45, cf. in contrast: Wistrich 1987 and Tarach 2010)!

Kern expressly distances himself from Malthusianism “in the sense of a ‘selection of the superfluous’” (Kern 2019, 37). According to Kern, overpopulation must be related to the “respective ecological footprint, and measured by this standard, it is precisely the rich industrialized nations that are ‘overpopulated’” (ibid.). This essentially means that “overpopulation” here cannot really have anything to do with the mere “number of people,” but rather with a destructive way of life and production.

On the other hand, Kern writes: “More people means more infrastructure cast in concrete and land sealing, apartments, hospitals, roads, factories, large-scale energy supply systems, etc.” (Kern 2024, 111). And: “It’s trivial: the more people claim resources for themselves, the scarcer they become” (ibid., 106). Consequently, Kern believes it is “essential to examine all possibilities for curbing population growth in a non-repressive manner” (Kern 2019, 38).[4]

Kern points to another aspect, namely the finite nature of agricultural production in general and the fact that the earth cannot feed an unlimited number of people (even in a society free of capitalism), especially since the amount of land suitable for agriculture is declining due to soil erosion and desertification (peak soil). Climate change will exacerbate this situation enormously. Projections showing that ten or more billion people could easily be fed “are based on false presuppositions, such as the current intensive agricultural use of the soil, which is obviously not sustainable.” According to Kern, sustainable agriculture would be “more extensive in terms of land use and less productive” (Kern 2015, 335).

This “argument” can be countered as follows: if, on the one hand, more and more regions of the world become uninhabitable due to climate change, i.e., ecologically ruined, we must prepare ourselves for unprecedented refugee movements and famines. The key point here is that demographic changes have a different timescale and it is therefore nonsensical to try to halt climate change through population policy: “Demographics are a factor that must be taken into account, but they are not a cause of climate change and even less a solution to the challenge of drastically reducing emissions, which must be done in an extremely short period of time” (Tanuro 2015, 129, emphasis added).

On the other hand, Mathusians should instead be asked the question: How can we ensure food security without declaring part of humanity superfluous or the world overpopulated? The fact that organic farming is sometimes less productive does not necessarily mean that there would be less food available overall if eating habits were changed (e.g., less animal products) and the sometimes enormous waste of food were stopped. This deserves attention, rather than talk of overpopulation (which in no way precludes sensible family, education, and sexual policies). What if the planet is really so ruined at some point that it is indeed no longer possible to feed many millions or billions of people (because large areas of agricultural land are devastated or washed away), and humanity does not overcome capitalism, or does so too late? It is doubtful whether the outcome would be any different if the world population had been lower: in this case, the Malthusian argument would no longer apply, because in a devastated world there would actually be too little to go around, as too much land would have been ruined, too little harvested, etc. Even then, it would be a fallacy to say that there were too many people.

Above all, if agriculture is retained as the substrate of capital’s valorizing movement, a decline in population would by no means relieve the burden on the planet (this is demonstrated, for example, by current and future rationalization drives in food production: cf. Becker 2025). The so-called overpopulation discourse never addresses the exact causes of hunger, in particular how hunger can be explained in the midst of abundance. Robert Kurz wrote on this subject: “The social barrier to the production and distribution of food is not determined by a lack of agricultural yields in comparison to the size of the population, but by the economic form of the modern commodity-producing system. The logic of economic profitability forces an irrational restriction of resources, which is particularly evident at the elementary level of nutrition. In principle, people are only given access to food on the condition that their labor can be used profitably. If this criterion cannot be met because ‘excessive’ productivity has made their labor superfluous, they are put on starvation rations, even though food production capacity has increased. While for all pre-modern societies a record harvest promised at least temporary abundance for all, it must appear disastrous to the economic calculations of agribusiness because such an ‘oversupply’ would depress prices. Therefore, it is normal market practice to destroy agricultural products en masse or dispose of them through denaturation when yields are exceptionally high. Hunger becomes a product of abundance itself” (Kurz 1999b, emphasis added).

Making population growth or the number of people the central problem therefore neglects the real reason for the destruction of the world: an irrational mode of production that views all nature as nothing more than raw material, that wants to incorporate all nature into the metamorphosis of capital M-C-M’, completely disregarding nature and its necessary characteristics, and thus increasingly striving to transform nature into a capitalist product (which tends to be synonymous with its destruction). It is the monstrous valorizing movement of capital that prevents a relationship between humans and nature and between society and nature that could enable long-term commitment or long-term reproducibility, not too many people. However, one should not go to the opposite extreme here: we should not consider any so-called “instrumentalization” or “domination of nature” to be negative per se and, in turning away from technology and industry, imagine a harmonious, romantic, and kitschy relationship with nature.

It should be noted that the usually misanthropic recourse to so-called overpopulation has repeatedly served as an excuse not to deal with the critique of political economy and patriarchy, but rather to reproach and deny the poor (especially those in the “Third World’”) their very existence (cf. Abeselom 1995; cf. also Kayser 1985). If capitalism rejects certain groups of people or masses of people in the sense that the labor market (or the world market) cannot absorb them, i.e., they cannot sell themselves as “labor” (and therefore their needs cannot be expressed as solvent demand), then the problem is not seen in the subjugation of people to abstract labor or in the destruction of their subsistence or expulsion from it – no – it is the people themselves, their mere existence, that is made into a problem. The decisive issue remains putting an end to the deformation and destruction of the world by capitalism. Making the number of people as such the central problem ultimately leads to reactionary waters.

Literature

Abeselom, Kiros: Der Mythos der Überbevölkerung als Mittel zur Wahrung der bestehenden gesellschaftlichen Strukturen – Die theoretischen Grundlagen der UNO-Bevölkerungskontrollpolitik: malthusianische und neo-malthusianische Wurzeln, Bonn 1995.

Autorenkollektiv: Wildcat Nr. 104, Köln Winter 2019/20.

Becker, Matthias Martin: Bodenlos – Wer wird die Welt ernähren? – Umbrüche in Agrobusiness und Tierindustrie, Klön 2025.

Bricker, Darrell; Ibbitson, John: Empty Planet – The shock of global population decline, London/New York 2019.

Brunschweiger, Verena: Kinderfrei statt kinderlos – Ein Manifest, Marburg 2019.

Familienplanungszentrum – Balance (Hg.): Die neue Radikalität der Abtreibungsgegner_innen im (inter)nationalen Raum – Ist die sexuelle Selbstbestimmung von Frauen heute in Gefahr?, Neu-Ulm 2012.

Greß, Johannes: Konsumideologie – Kapitalismus und Opposition in Zeiten der Klimakrise, Stuttgart 2022.

Guastella, Dustin: Eine Linke, die Angst vor der Zukunft hat, ist zum Scheitern verurteilt, jacobin.de vom 9.7.2025, online: https://jacobin.de/artikel/zukunft-antinatalismus-strategie.

Kayser, Gundula: Industrialisierung der Menschenproduktion – Zum faschistischen Charakter der Entwicklung neuer Technologien der Geburtenkontrolle, in: Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis Nr. 14, Köln 1985, 55-67.

Kern, Bruno: Das Märchen vom grünen Wachstum – Plädoyer für eine solidarische und nachhaltige Gesellschaft, Zürich 2019.

Kern, Bruno: Industrielle Abrüstung jetzt! – Abschied von der Technik-Illusion, Marburg 2024.

Kern, Bruno: Karl Marx – Texte – Schriften – Ausgewählt, eingeleitet und kommentiert von Bruno Kern, Wiesbaden 2015.

Kurz, Robert: Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus – Ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft, Frankfurt 1999a. Online: https://exit-online.org/pdf/schwarzbuch.pdf.

Kurz, Robert: Natura denaturata: Die Ernährung der Menschheit durch den Kapitalismus, 1999b, Online: https://www.medico.de/natura-denaturata-13898.

Malthus, Robert: Das Bevölkerungsgesetz, München 1977, zuerst 1798.

Mertens, Heide: Frauen, Natur und Fruchtbarkeit – Die Bevölkerungsdebatte und die ökologische Tragfähigkeit der Erde, in: Wichterich, Christa (Hg.): Menschen nach Maß – Bevölkerungspolitik in Nord und Süd, Göttingen 1994, 181-200.

Mielenz, Christian: Wie die Karnickel – Biologisierung und Naturalisierung kapitalistischer Phänomene am Beispiel der These einer »Überbevölkerung“, in: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft Nr.5, Bad Honnef 2008, 105-126.

Riesebrodt, Martin: Fundamentalismus als patriarchale Protestbewegung, Tübingen 1990.

Sarkar, Saral: Krieg, Gewalt und die Grenzen des Wachstums, Marburg 2025.

Sauer-Burghard, Brunhilde: Wie mann Frauen als Aggressionsobjekte unsichtbar macht – Fundamentalismen im Diskurs der patriarchalen „kritischen“ Wissenschaft, in: Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis Nr. 32, Köln 1992, 59-65.

Schrader, Christopher: Die Kinder und der Klimaschutz, spektrum.de vom 13.3.2019, online: https://www.spektrum.de/news/die-kinder-und-der-klimaschutz/1629194.

Tarach, Tilman: Der ewige Sündenbock: Heliger Krieg, die ‚Protokolle der Weisen von Zion‘ und die Verlogenheit der sogenannten Linken im Nahostkonflikt, Freiburg/Zürich 2019, 3. überar. Aufl.

Tanuro, Daniel: Klimakrise und Kapitalismus, Köln 2015, zuerst Paris 2010.

Tharoor, Shashi: Zeit der Finsternis – Das Britische Empire in Indien, Berlin 2024, zuerst Neu Delhi 2016.

Trumann, Andrea: Kostenfaktor Kind – Die Geburtenrate sinkt ungeachtet politischer Maßnahmen, jungle.world vom 16.5.2024, online: https://jungle.world/artikel/2024/20/geburtenrate-weltweit-sinkt-kostenfaktor-kind.

Wistrich, Robert: Der antisemitische Wahn: Von Hitler bis zum Heiligen Krieg gegen Israel, Ismaining bei München 1987.

[1] During British colonial rule, Indian journalist Shashi Tharoor documented numerous famines whose death tolls were similar to those caused by Stalin or Mao (cf. Tharoor 2024, 265ff.). Of course, these famines had nothing to do with alleged overpopulation.

[2] It should be noted that anti-natalist discourse is much more widespread in the English-speaking world than in Germany, so Brunschweiger’s position is by no means an “exotic opinion”; see also Guastella 2025.

[3] Wherever religious or ethnic extremists gain influence, there has always been an increase in patriarchal terror, which is repeatedly directed against reproductive rights (cf. Balance 2012), as demonstrated recently by Trump’s authoritarian restructuring of the USA. Religious fundamentalism has therefore been rightly described as a “patriarchal protest movement” (Riesebrodt 1990). However, the patriarchal core of religious fundamentalism has often been downplayed by its mostly male critics (see Sauer-Burghard 1992).

[4] I assume that Kern is referring here to eugenic measures or China’s former one-child policy.

Originally published in October 2025 on www.oekumenisches-netz.de

War as a Catalyst for Crisis

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

If the Iran conflict escalates, the region faces the threat of another wave of statelessness.

Tomasz Konicz

Trump went way back, all the way to the 1979 embassy takeover and the 1983 Beirut bombing against U.S. troops, to justify the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran in an initial statement.[1] Even though the U.S. president’s public statements have an increasingly short half-life, and Trump could claim the opposite as early as tomorrow, he did ultimately name two military objectives of the current bombing campaign: the extensive disarmament of the Iranian regime, particularly regarding its nuclear program, and – optionally – its overthrow, should opportunities arise. Washington and Tel Aviv appear to be planning a multi-day intensive bombing campaign against key officials, the state apparatus, and its infrastructure, which would significantly weaken the regime, in the hope that this would spark an uprising that – supported by the CIA, Mossad, and special forces – would bring an end to the mullahs’ rule. On the evening of February 28, Trump also kept all options open in a brief phone interview with Axios: from short-term bombing to hinder the Iranian nuclear program to regime change.[2]

The talk of regime change is strikingly reminiscent of the murderous disaster the neocons under George W. Bush wrought during the invasion of Iraq—but this time, appearances are indeed deceptive. This is not only due to the simple fact that no significant ground forces are ready for an invasion. The neocons did indeed have the democratization of Iraq in mind, with the aim of subsequently integrating the country into the U.S. hegemonic system; they made no compromises with the remnants of the swiftly defeated Saddam regime in order to rebuild state structures from the ground up. The bloody consequences are well known: anomie, state collapse, a bloody civil war, and its “freezing” into a sham state fractured along ethnic and religious lines. The U.S. easily won the Iraq War against the crumbling Iraqi regime, but it lost the peace after the anomic centrifugal forces in Iraq were unleashed.

No “Democratization”

Trump’s imperialism, on the other hand, has a completely different thrust; Washington has long since shed the ideological veil of human rights imperialism as practiced by Western centers during the neoliberal decades.[3] The Islamofascist mullah regime, which had thousands of demonstrators massacred just a few weeks ago, is to be replaced by a regime subservient to the U.S. This approach is easier to carry out, as large parts of the state and repressive apparatus can simply be taken over. The precedent here is the case of Venezuela, whose head of state was effectively handed over to the U.S., while the power structures characterized by racketeering otherwise remained untouched . The offer of “total immunity” that Trump made in his speech to the officials of the Iranian regime clearly points in this direction.

The authoritarian alternative to the mullahs, the Shah’s son Reza Pahlavi, seems to have been dug straight out of the CIA’s dustbin of history.[4] His father’s genocidal regime was swept away in the wake of the 1979 revolution. His supporters are currently attempting to gain dominance within the Iranian opposition through nationalism, intimidation, and threats, while specifically targeting leftist and feminist movements. A miniature dictatorship is already taking shape. Meanwhile, tensions are also coming to light between the Pahlavi camp and Kurdish opposition groups, which have been accused by the monarchists of separatist aspirations.[5] Even U.S. officials have told media representatives that the Pahlavi monarchists are causing them “fear.”[6] The would-be Shah has already held official talks with members of the Trump administration, such as Steve Witkoff.

Crisis and War

Venezuela, the Al-Qaeda state of Syria,[7] and now, prospectively, Iran – crisis imperialism is merely returning to its roots in its twilight years by once again relying on authoritarian regimes.[8] The human rights imperialism of the neoliberal era thus represents only a brief historical episode. The novel aspect, however, is the crisis process of capital, which, in its economic and ecological dimensions, shapes geopolitical developments as well as concrete imperialist aggression. Without the crisis, there would be no American attempt at regime change.

This is not an abstraction; the global crisis of capital is manifesting itself in very concrete ways. Iran is already on the brink of ecological collapse. In parts of the country, the water supply has collapsed; even in the capital, Tehran, with its ten million inhabitants, the water is occasionally cut off. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, an evacuation of the Iranian capital is now even being considered should no substantial rainfall occur by the end of the year, as its population can barely be supplied with water.[9] The increasing extreme weather events, the lack of rain, and the ever more frequent heat waves are all leading to slumps in crop yields in Iran, which already has to import food.[10]

Iran has been subject to various forms of sanctions for decades; the regime has experience in circumventing or mitigating this economic pressure. However, the decisive tipping point was the current ecological and economic escalation of the crisis dynamics. The sanctions imposed on Iran have exacerbated the escalation, but did not trigger it. The protests were triggered by a massive devaluation and a surge in inflation caused by the suspension of subsidies for basic foodstuffs. At its core, the uprising against the mullahs – which was brutally suppressed – was economically motivated, as even basic foodstuffs became unaffordable for an increasing number of Iranians. The rising demand for imports (and foreign currency) is met with dwindling revenues: China is the Iranian oil industry’s most important customer, yet Beijing purchased the energy resource at a steep discount due to sanctions, further exacerbating Iran’s economic situation.

Reasons for War

The timing of the attack is likely indeed linked to the mass murderous suppression of the protests. It is a window of opportunity that the U.S. and Israel wish to exploit, during which the regime is weakened and has lost its legitimacy among large segments of the population. The time lag between the Iranian uprising and the Israeli-American attack is due to the logistics of war: The U.S. had to assemble its forces in the region, secure their supply lines, etc., which takes weeks. The mullahs’ rule does indeed appear rotten, porous, and highly corrupt, as evidenced by the extensive penetration of the Iranian state by Israeli and Western intelligence agencies. The Israelis were not only able to eliminate part of the Iranian leadership during the 2025 bombing campaign; they have now managed once again to take out Supreme Leader Khamenei on the first day. Netanyahu is said to have been shown images of the body shortly after it was recovered.[11]

In Israel’s case, the reasons for war are obvious: Tel Aviv wants the end of the mullah regime out of pure self-preservation. Israel wants the government overthrown, since the “Islamic Republic” of Iran has elevated the destruction of Israel to a state doctrine. Since October 7, 2023 – the mass-murderous terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel, which was cheered by Iran and militarily supported by Hezbollah attacks – regime change appears to have become the guiding principle of Israeli policy toward Iran. Israel wants to prevent, at all costs, a repeat of an attack such as the one carried out by the Iran-backed Hamas. The current right-wing government in Jerusalem would likely favor a reactionary, U.S.-aligned regime under Reza Pahlavi, yet regime change appears to be the top priority – regardless of the succession debate. Israel’s minimum objective, intended to secure the survival of the Jewish state in a hostile region, consists of permanently preventing Iran’s nuclear program.

In the case of the U.S., domestic political reasons are usually emphasized: Trump wants to divert attention from the pedophilia scandal involving members of the U.S. ruling elite. Meanwhile, there is growing evidence that the president himself may have molested girls and children. The attack on Venezuela was already interpreted as an attempt by Trump to divert attention, similar to Reagan’s invasion of Grenada in 1983, which was intended to divert attention from the Iran-Contra affair. The military triumph in Caracas also simply led to the fascists in the White House – here, above all, Trump’s close confidant Steven Miller – taking a liking to the use of military force without consequences. They have simply gotten a taste for blood.

Yet at the same time, it is evident that the Trump administration is targeting China’s second “gas station” in Iran. Beijing is (and has been) the most important customer in both Caracas and Tehran. The deployment of the colossal U.S. military machine – following Trump’s dismantling of the remnants of American hegemony – effectively constitutes the last significant lever with which Washington can maintain its global dominance.[12] Precisely because the crisis is also breathing down the Trump administration’s neck, as the dollar increasingly loses its role as the world’s reserve currency and Washington faces mounting budgetary problems. The attacks on oil-producing countries that have broken away from the U.S. orbit also appear intended to consolidate the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, as the “petro-currency.”

Moreover – and this must not be overlooked in the era of oligarchic brutalization in the U.S.—Trump was encouraged to attack Iran by the Gulf despotisms, which showered his clan with “gifts” and deals worth billions. Saudi Arabia, in particular, pressed Washington in secret talks to carry out the bombing, while officially maintaining a neutral stance.[13] Iran’s attacks against the Gulf states are a direct consequence of this tactical acquiescence and support for the U.S. attack, which would also neutralize a key Shiite rival of the Saudis for the time being. Riyadh hopes to rise to become the leading regional power in the wake of the war.

Outlook and Prospects

Without substantial deployment of ground forces, the bombing campaign against Iran is likely to peter out after a few weeks without bringing about regime change. The regime is ailing; it is corrupt; and it can apparently be easily penetrated by intelligence agencies that can simply buy information. But it still has hundreds of thousands of supporters and fighters under arms, particularly in the militias, who will remain loyal without substantial military pressure for one simple reason: the regime provides them with material support. Their children are not malnourished; they can make ends meet for their families in the midst of a socio-ecological crisis in which this is no longer possible for ever-larger segments of the population.

Consequently, the organizational structures are likely to remain intact despite the barrage of bombs, the chains of command continue to function, and unreliable elements within the repressive apparatus were neutralized anyway during the brutal counterinsurgency at the beginning of the year. The machine guns stand ready in case spontaneous protests flare up again, which could easily be drowned in blood once more. The backbone of the regime is too strong to be broken by airstrikes and demonstrations alone.

There are hardly any significant, powerful opposition groups that could challenge the regime militarily. The People’s Mujahideen, a left-wing Islamist splinter group of Iranian state Shi’ism, resembles a sect with some 3,000 followers that sporadically organizes attacks in Iran.[14] The Shah’s son, Pahlavi, has no significant battle-tested forces at his disposal. What remains are the minorities: the Kurds, through the Iranian successor organization to the dissolved PKK, have significant combat units; separatist aspirations – which could potentially be encouraged by Turkey – exist among the Azeris in northwestern Iran, as well as in Iranian Baluchistan in the southeast of the country.

However, these groups would likely strengthen Iran’s centrifugal forces, fueling instability and state collapse – while the U.S. would prefer to install a stable, U.S.-aligned regime in Iran. Turkey’s initial opposition to an attack on Iran stems precisely from Ankara’s fears that Iranian Kurds might fight for independence or autonomy (Washington’s betrayal of Rojava, in which the Kurds were sacrificed, which was overcome by Ankara’s resistance).[15] This scenario of a renewed wave of state decomposition in the region also seems most likely in the event of an escalation. The country, with a population of 90 million, could disintegrate into a gigantic, second Syria. In this case, however, it would not only be Iran where conflicts could erupt along ethnic or religious lines.

Iraq would also be affected; following the freeze in the Sunni-Shia civil war, it is little more than a hollow shell of a state, where militias effectively hold sway depending on the region. And Shias constitute the majority of Iraq’s population. Shia militias, most of which are backed by Iran, have already threatened attacks against U.S. military bases and other facilities. A resurgence of the civil war seems quite likely in the event of an escalation.[16] The Syrian Islamist regime, which emerged from the Sunni terrorist network Al-Qaeda, is already massing troops along the border with Iraq.[17] Turkish interventions are also conceivable, aimed at occupying the Azerbaijani regions of Iran or attacking the Kurds as part of Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman imperialism.

And finally, the conflict could very quickly trigger global economic upheaval if Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, which could happen simply through the threat of drone or missile strikes – a navy is not necessary for this. This would shut down one of the most important shipping routes for fossil fuels. As is so often the case with Western wars over the world order (Robert Kurz), the war would thus simply become a catalyst for crisis, accelerating the crisis process of capital in fits and starts—both in the region and globally.

I finance my journalistic work largely through donations. If you appreciate my writing, you are welcome to contribute—either via Patreon or Substack.

[1] https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2027654336138924410

[2] https://www.axios.com/2026/02/28/trump-iran-war-israel-off-ramps

[3] https://www.konicz.info/2026/01/28/verrat-aus-prinzip/

[4] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/02/24/reza-pahlavi-iran-trump-00793877

[5] https://apnews.com/article/iran-iraq-kurds-pahlavi-6beae57e9fdc3546a61ec8f1432eef4b

[6] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/02/24/reza-pahlavi-iran-trump-00793877

[7] https://www.konicz.info/2026/01/28/verrat-aus-prinzip/

[8] https://exitinenglish.com/2026/03/19/what-is-crisis-imperialism/

[9] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/15/how-day-zero-water-shortages-in-iran-are-fuelling-protests

[10] https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/507241/Climate-change-significantly-impacts-food-security-in-Iran-expert

[11] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/natenyahu-said-shown-picture-of-khameneis-body-retrieved-from-compound/

[12] https://medium.com/@ascentreact/everything-must-burn-862b983914a6

[13] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/28/trump-iran-decision-saudi-arabia-israel/

[14] https://esut.de/2025/04/fachbeitraege/58620/der-geist-der-volksmudschahedin/

[15] https://www.konicz.info/2026/01/28/verrat-aus-prinzip/

[16] https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/2026/02/28/iran-backed-militias-in-iraq-say-us-israel-attack-kills-at-least-two-fighters/

[17] https://x.com/ScharoMaroof/status/2027754904991781276

Originally published on 03/01/2025

What is Crisis Imperialism?

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment
And how does it differ from the classical imperialism of earlier eras?

Tomasz Konicz

Crisis imperialism is the state’s quest for dominance – carried out through economic, political, or military means – during an era of contraction in the valorization process of capital. The state apparatuses of the core of the world system strive for dominance in a systemic crisis fueled by constant advances in productivity, that, on the one hand, create regions of economic and ecological scorched earth – primarily in the periphery – and, on the other hand, make the emergence of a new regime of accumulation, in which wage labor would be valorized on a massive scale in commodity production, impossible. This crisis process is accompanied by a rise in debt that outpaces global economic output and leads to the emergence of an economically superfluous humanity, as illustrated, for example, by the refugee crises of recent years.

This also highlights the fundamental difference between crisis imperialism and the imperialism of earlier eras, since the latter took place during a historical phase of capital expansion – originating in Europe in the 16th century – that was driven precisely by the genocidal exploitation of labor. The plunder of resources – such as the gold and silver of Latin America – and the development of new markets in the Global South – sugarcane, spices, etc. – could only be realized through the mass valorization of “hands,” which in most cases could only be achieved through forced labor. The trail of blood left by this imperialist expansion of the capitalist world system – which integrated ever-new peripheral regions into the world market, often through military force – stretches from the genocide of the indigenous peoples of Latin and Central America, through the Atlantic triangular trade in African slaves and the British Empire’s exploitation of India, to the atrocities of Belgian imperialism in the Congo of the late 19th century, the effects of which are still felt today, when the failure to meet rubber quotas by forced laborers resulted in severe mutilations – such as the chopping off of hands.

The ultimately military drive for expansion by imperialist states is a consequence of capital’s valorization compulsion, whereby imperialist tendencies can gain momentum precisely in response to the internal contradictions of the valorization process: Overaccumulation of capital seeking investment, increasing social tensions intended to be mitigated through colonization, or capital’s demand for raw materials and energy sources that cannot be produced domestically often lead those states possessing sufficient means of power to pursue corresponding forms of imperialist expansion.

Following the 20th century, during which, due to the “Cold War,” practices of informal imperialism were more commonly employed – involving the installation of dependent, formally sovereign regimes in the periphery through economic pressure or intelligence-led coups – forms of direct imperialist aggression are once again gaining the upper hand in the 21st century, in conjunction with the imperial decline of the United States and the increasing tendencies toward state and social disintegration in the periphery. This also carries with it the danger of major wars waged between imperialist great powers.

During its historical phase of expansion, the capitalist world system was characterized by cycles of hegemony in which an imperialist great power was able to attain a hegemonic position that was, at least temporarily, tolerated by competing powers. The 19th century was marked by a British hegemonic cycle, and the 20th century by a U.S. hegemonic cycle of industrial rise and decline. The increasing number military conflicts today are an expression of the U.S.’s hegemonic decline, and the socio-ecological crisis of capital prevents the emergence of a new hegemonic power.

China, which is engaged in a global struggle for hegemony with Washington, is unable to succeed the U.S. as the “world policeman” due to the crisis-induced increase in internal turmoil (debt and real estate crises). The current phase of escalating military conflicts thus represents a bloody real-life satire of the talk of a “multipolar world order” demanded by all imperial rivals of the declining United States. The systemic crisis prevents the emergence of a hegemon, though many state apparatuses continue to strive – ultimately in vain – to become as powerful as the U.S., and the erosion of U.S. hegemony provides them with the necessary leeway for their own military adventures. Moreover, growing internal contradictions are once again fueling the drive for imperial expansion (e.g., Russia, Turkey).

A central concrete difference between today and the imperial quest for dominance in earlier centuries thus lies in the fact that the hunt for markets and “hands” that could be exploited through violent integration into the world market now plays hardly any role at all in the globalized world system due to the aforementioned systemic crisis of overproduction. In the late-capitalist crisis imperialism of the 21st century, the imperialist drive for expansion manifests itself in efforts to seal off the economically superfluous masses of the periphery – both in “Fortress Europe” and in the U.S. In this respect, expansion thus turns into the sealing off of the core from the periphery, which also plays hardly any role as a market.

The collapsed periphery, with its “failed states,” now plays a role only within the framework of extractionism as a supplier of raw materials, building upon the forms of decay of 20th-century “informal imperialism” by – as in the case of cobalt mining in the Congo – organizing raw material extraction independently through local post-state power structures (militias, gangs, sects, etc.) who do this on their own initiative, only to then channel them to the world market through shadowy channels and middlemen. Militarily, the core countries interact with the “scorched earth” regions only within the framework of “world order wars” (Robert Kurz), in which the periphery is either to be stabilized through state-building processes (“nation building”) or at least militarily neutralized as a disruptive factor. The global drone campaign of the former “world policeman,” the U.S., in the “war on terror,” or the – consistently failed – Western interventions in Afghanistan and Somalia fall into this category of the imperial core’s futile struggle against the social consequences of the systemic crisis – originating from the core – in the periphery.

Thus, the current era of crisis imperialism is characterized by the interplay between the state’s quest for dominance and the crisis process of capital, which exhibits a market-mediated, fetishistic momentum fueled by the internal contradictions of capital (which, in market competition, tends to divest itself of its own substance, value-creating labor). The functional elites of the state apparatuses find themselves confronted with the consequences of the crisis, which unfolds, mediated by the market, “behind the producers’ backs” (Marx), as if exposed to an external, natural force, even though the increasing contradictions and distortions (debt, social erosion, economic and environmental crises, etc.) are the unconscious product of market actors in their pursuit of the highest possible capital valorization. Capital has thus brought forth a social formation that lacks control over this blindly unfolding dynamic and is ultimately driven by it into social and ecological collapse.

The state-level competition arising from this systemic crisis of overproduction consequently leads to the formation of an economically grounded imperialism that strives for the highest possible trade surpluses. Through the trade surplus, the crisis of overproduction – as well as the accompanying compulsion to incur debt – is exported to countries that are running ever-larger deficits. In this regard, the Federal Republic of Germany was particularly successful following the introduction of the euro. The political dominance of the FRG in the eurozone stems precisely from the extreme German trade surpluses between the introduction of the euro and the euro crisis, which led to the southern European debt crisis and to deindustrialization in the indebted states, while the industrial base of the German export industry remained intact. After the outbreak of the euro crisis, German Finance Minister Schäuble was able to unilaterally impose the consequences of the burst European debt bubbles – which were accompanied by German trade surpluses – on the crisis-stricken states in the form of strict austerity policies, amidst fierce political disputes. This widened the economic gap between Berlin and “its” eurozone – and cemented Germany’s claim to leadership, while states driven to the brink of bankruptcy, such as Greece, had to accept extensive losses of sovereignty. The protectionism that has been on the rise in recent years, and which has become openly apparent since the Trump administration, represents precisely a reaction to this crisis-driven urge to achieve the highest possible trade surpluses. Before the open trade wars that Trump ignited due to the extensive deindustrialization of the U.S., many countries attempted to improve their trade balances through currency devaluation races.

The objective crisis process of capital thus unfolds through corresponding crisis-imperialist conflicts between state actors – this, the execution of the crisis dynamic through economic, geopolitical, intelligence, or military power struggles, constitutes the objective core of crisis-imperialist practice. This applies not only to the eroding core countries (such as in Southern Europe), but also to the periphery of the world system, where the crisis process has advanced further and widespread social disintegration is giving way to state collapse. The imperialist interventions in Syria and Libya following the “Arab Spring” – where failed modernization regimes, having degenerated into kleptocracies, found themselves threatened by desperate uprisings – make it clear how crisis-induced upheavals first open up opportunities for imperial interventions. Social tensions in the post-Soviet space, where Russia’s hegemony rapidly eroded until the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, gave rise to a similar dynamic of protest, uprising, and external intervention. Putin’s Russia chose to wage a war of aggression against Ukraine precisely in the wake of the uprisings in Belarus and Kazakhstan.

At times, states with imperial ambitions also exploit the consequences of crises directly –Erdogan’s Islamofascist Turkey, for instance, used the refugee flows into the EU as a lever of power to extort concessions and money from Brussels and Berlin. And Ankara also justifies its imperialist expansion in northern Syria and northern Iraq by claiming it intends to concentrate refugees in these regions in the future. Imperialism must therefore be viewed not only historically as an ideological and practical precursor to fascist excesses – the same process is also unfolding in the current systemic crisis.

Imperialist striving for dominance also interacts with the ecological crisis of capital, which, due to its compulsion to grow, is incapable of establishing a resource- and climate-friendly reproduction of humanity. This includes, for example, the tensions in the far north, in the Arctic, where the rapidly melting ice cap is opening up new shipping routes and making new deposits of fossil fuels accessible – and over whose extraction the neighboring countries of Russia, the U.S., Canada, and the EU are in dispute. The conflict between Russia and the West over Ukraine, which began in 2013 as a struggle between competing economic blocs (the EU and the US versus Putin’s envisioned “Eurasian Union”), now also has a climate policy dimension. Ukraine possesses highly fertile black soil, which is rapidly gaining value as a geopolitical lever of power in light of looming, climate-induced food shortages and impending hunger crises – food could become the oil of the 21st century.

The crisis is thus driving the late-capitalist state behemoths into confrontation in both its economic and ecological dimensions. Crisis imperialism thus resembles – to stay with the image of the climate crisis – a cutthroat competition on a melting iceberg, or a struggle on the sinking Titanic. Since the socio-ecological systemic crisis cannot be resolved within the framework of the capitalist world system, crisis imperialism finds its vanishing point in a major war, which would have catastrophic consequences due to the destructive potential accumulated under late capitalism. Without an emancipatory systemic transformation, the collapse of civilization threatens to descend into climate catastrophe and nuclear war.

I finance my journalistic work largely through donations. If you appreciate my writing, you are welcome to contribute on Patreon.

Originally published on konicz.info on 06/23/22

Crisis, Riots and What Next?

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

Thomas Meyer

The bourgeois discourse on violence is dominated by the attitude of condemning violence from the left. This can be seen very clearly in the condemnation of the climate protests of Last Generation, where the call for the heavy hand of state violence cannot be extreme enough (Konicz 2022). In contrast, violence legitimized by the state is not an object of critique. This applies all the more to structural violence (such as against refugees and Hartz IV recipients) or social catastrophes imposed by the IMF’s structural adjustment measures. Right-wing violence is trivialized, reduced to so-called individual cases or equated with left-wing violence, i.e. no significant distinction is made between violence against people (which often ends fatally) and violence against things or against the bourgeois property order (blockades & occupations). Naturally, such an attitude is suitable for preventing practical social critique and limiting “freedom” & “self-determination” to the approval of the existing. Right-wing violence appears to be less of a threat to the bourgeois order, especially as neo-Nazis often “improperly” do what the state does anyway through official channels – for example in the case of refugee deterrence (“properly” picking up and deporting “foreigners,” burning them in prison,[1] shooting them,[2] etc., instead of chasing them through the park and murdering them). In bourgeois discourse, the violence that appears to pose a threat to the bourgeois order is criticized, while the violent structures of bourgeois society are “taken for granted.” The violence legitimized by the rule of law does not even appear linguistically as such, or it is claimed to be “proportionate” or “necessary.” If violence is then exaggerated, it is once again only “regrettable individual cases.” The police powers acts passed in recent years are increasingly transforming the bourgeois constitutional state into a police state. Preventative detention was used against climate protests on the basis of these laws, i.e. the imprisonment of people who could presumably commit a “criminal offense” or participate (!) in climate protests (which are not even punishable in and of themselves). It should only be a matter of time before climate activism is equated with terrorism![3]

Riots cause particular outrage in the bourgeois discourse on violence, i.e. the usually “relatively spontaneous” uprisings (triggered by certain individual events, such as police violence, price increases for essentials such as bread, but also for petrol, tickets, etc.), which often appear pointless and aimless and are characterized by looting and excesses of destruction of other people’s property. Riots are therefore of a different quality than strikes, in the sense of orderly and formalized struggles for interests (as can be wonderfully observed in collective bargaining disputes). Their social causes are therefore often not understood or they are only interpreted as irrational excesses of violence, which are to be “dealt with” by even more police batons and early warning systems.

This irrationality is an expression of the irrationality of social rationality. “Rioting” people, often young people, are people who live within this society but cannot participate in it. They may be formally equal in legal terms, but they are treated differently (for example, if you come from a “problem neighborhood” or have a “foreign” name, you are more likely not to be invited to a job interview, despite having the same qualifications). They usually share the ideals and goals of society (work, consumption, family), but are excluded from their realization. That the promises of equality and happiness of bourgeois society can be fulfilled or that opportunities for advancement can be realized is increasingly becoming an illusion.  The social catastrophes in so-called problem neighborhoods (“ghettos” or suburban settlements) are not understood as the result of the social upheavals of crisis capitalism and its neoliberal crisis regime since the 1970s, but are racialized: There is agitation and claims that they are a “cultural problem” of black people, the result of “lack of integration,” represent a “foreigner and migrant problem” and/or a problem of “Islam.” Instead of understanding the social causes of the riots and the specific historical constellation in which they take place, they are externalized as a “problem.” A problem that is allegedly being brought into bourgeois society from “outside.” This unwillingness to understand is obviously far more irrational than torching cars or looting supermarkets. Robert Castel, for example, explains against the backdrop of the youth riots in the banlieues in France in 2005: “The problem with these young people is not that they are outside society. This is neither the case in terms of the space they inhabit (the suburban settlement is not a ghetto) nor in terms of their status (many are French citizens and not foreigners). But they are not within society either, because they do not occupy a recognized position in it and many of them are obviously not in a position to obtain such a position. If there has been a revolt of despair, it is in the conviction of having no future, of being deprived of the means necessary to be considered full members of society” (Castel 2009, 36, emphasis added).

In his book Riot Strike Riot, Joshua Clover examines this phenomenon and attempts to contextualize it theoretically and historically. He makes it clear that the bourgeois concept of violence that comes into play in the condemnation of riots is highly problematic: “That property damage equals violence is not a truth but the adoption of a particular set of ideas about property, one of relatively recent vintage, involving specific identifications of humans with abstract wealth of the sort that culminate in, for example, the legal holdings that corporations are people.” (Clover 2016, 11.). The violence to which those who are marginalized and made superfluous are exposed is ignored: “However, this insistence on the violence of the riot effectively obscures the daily, systematic, and ambient violence that stalks daily life for much of the world. The vision of a generally pacific sociality that only in exception breaks forth into violence is an imaginary accessible only to some. For others – most – social violence is the norm. The rhetoric of the violent riot becomes a device of exclusion, aimed not so much against ‘violence’ but against specific social groups.” (ibid., 12).

Clover distinguishes riot from riot prime. The former refers to riots before the labor movement, before the implementation of industrial capitalism (moral economy, resistance of the Luddites, etc., see also Kurz 1999, 125ff.). The historical background is, among other things, the destruction of the commons accompanying “original accumulation” (Marx) and the simultaneously increasing dependence on the market. While the strike sought to enforce the highest possible price for labor power in the factory as well as better and more tolerable working conditions, a rise in the price of goods on the market (bread riots) was a more frequent cause of a riot. Riots did not set the price of labor, but the market price of consumer goods (or they prevented exports so that bread would be sold here and now at a “fair” price and not at a higher price elsewhere). They did not interrupt production, but circulation; the riots were, in a sense, circulation struggles (Clover 2016, 15f.). They did not take place in industry, but in public space, in markets. This is to be distinguished from “riots” (hereafter “riot” again), i.e. those riots that have become more and more important since the 1970s, which is related to the never-ending crisis of capital since the 1970s. They are therefore qualitatively different from the riots in the early days of capitalism. What riot and “riot” have in common is the looting of goods, the spontaneity and disorderliness of their actions. The difference is that today the production of goods is fragmented across the globe, whereas in early capitalism everything necessary for life was still produced in close proximity. This change makes it impossible for a riot to “appropriate and take over” production. If riots are playing a greater role again today, in contrast to the declining importance of strikes, this does not mean that there is a return to older forms of protest. Clover emphasizes that the historical dynamics of the valorization of value are of decisive importance in the theoretical assessment of riots. Even if riots interrupt circulation today, this is not the same as the circulation of the 18th century. With Clover, we can establish the fact that concepts themselves have a history (as, of course, does the thing to which they are supposed to refer), that similar phenomena that occur in the history of capitalism are not a recurrence of the same thing. This must be taken into account in the analysis.

Clover’s explanations have been criticized (Armstrong 2021) that his historical “tripartite division” (“riot-strike-riot prime”) is too schematic, that he does not, for example, address the militant struggles of slaves (which did not take place in the sphere of circulation) and that his distinction between riot and strike is not tenable, look at past mass strikes or wildcat strikes where there was an overlap between struggles in circulation and production (sabotaging trains, disrupting “supply chains” to support striking factory workers).

He was also criticized for focusing on Western countries. If one looks at the world as a whole, then there can be no question of the significance and number of strikes decreasing. Two of Clover’s critics therefore seem to conclude that Clover was apparently mistaken when he said that the crisis of capital has been insoluble since the 1970s, because “the global industrial proletariat has never been as large as it is today, and there have probably never been as many strikes as there are today” (Arps & García Doell 2021). For the two authors, this essentially puts an end to the discussion on crisis theory (see Kurz 2005 & 2012 and, specifically on China, Ming 2023 and the article by Tomasz Konicz in this exit!)

The historical-concrete context that Clover is elaborating is equally applicable to strikes. Fortunately, an increase in strikes has been observed in recent years (see for example Scholz 2022 and Autorenkollektiv 2023). The authors of Analyse & Kritik are undoubtedly right with this observation. However, it should be borne in mind that they are taking place against the backdrop of a tightening space for shaping the value-dissociation form and therefore have a completely different range of possibilities than strikes of previous generations (even if they are also more necessary than ever). It is therefore a little cheap to think that by counting strikes we have refuted Clover’s comments on the crisis.

Clover points out that workers” struggles are tied to the precondition of successful capital valorization and that they become obsolete when the valorization of value enters a systemic crisis (i.e. not a mere cyclical crisis). These are therefore struggles within the capitalist formal context, which as such is not called into question. In the crisis, such struggles then become more and more irrelevant, which makes their defensive and affirmative character clear. As Clover writes: “Labor’s historical power has rested on a growing productive sector and its ability to seize a share of expanding surplus. Since the turn of the seventies, labor has been reduced to defensive negotiations, compelled to preserve the firms able to supply wages, affirming the domination of capital in return for its own preservation. The worker appearing as worker in the period of crisis confronts a situation in which ‘the very fact of acting as a class appears as an external constraint.’ […] We might find a decisive moment by returning […] to Detroit and to 1973, where ‘for the first time in the history of the UAW, the union mobilized to keep a plant open.’ This will swiftly become the paradigm for labor organizing, wanted or not. […] Capital and labor find themselves now in collaboration to preserve capital’s self-reproduction, to preserve the labor relation along with the firm’s viability. […] We might call it ‘the affirmation trap,’ in which labor is locked into the position of affirming its own exploitation under the guise of survival” (Clover 2016, 30, 146f.).

A strike is dependent on economic growth. If certain factories or entire production sectors are no longer profitable, (surplus) value shrinks, there is also less surplus value to distribute that the workers could appropriate. In such a situation, trade unions – since they only represent people in their function as variable capital – advocate that the jobs are retained, usually under worse conditions, so that the factory remains profitable for the time being (possibly in contrast to a competing “location”), provided the workers accept all the necessary conditions. The scope for action within the value form narrows, the room for maneuver becomes narrower. As long as one does not question the wage system as such, but only ever stands up for higher wages (or for lower wages so that the store is not closed down), one participates in the organization of one’s own social decline (or that of other workers). Clover points out that since the 1970s, utilized labor in the production sector has increasingly declined and accumulation has shifted to the financial sphere. The result is the production of a “surplus population” (ibid., 26), which forms the social substance of the riots. People are released into superfluousness, yet they remain forced to reproduce themselves capitalistically: “Capital may not need these workers, but they still need to work. They are thus forced to offer themselves up for the most abject forms of wage slavery in the form of petty production and services – identified with informal and often illegal markets of direct exchange arising alongside failures of capitalist production” (ibid..).

If “normal” working conditions become the exception, the order that “well-behaved citizens” understand as “orderly” disintegrates. The surplus population becomes a “security problem.” In contrast to the 18th and early 19th century, this population is at the mercy of a highly armed police force “as a standing army within.” The state is waging a “war against drugs and terror” (ibid., 36). No wonder that riots are often sparked by police killings.

The shift of value realization to the financial sector and at the same time the intensification of transport and logistics (which shorten the turnover period of capital) could not stop the “stagnation and decline of global profitability” (ibid., 31). Clover sees no contradiction in the fact that individual companies are able to make a profit for themselves, prevail in competition, are extremely successful according to capitalist criteria and do not appear to be in crisis. Clover distinguishes the system as a whole and its crisis from the level of individual capital. He therefore does not make the serious mistake often made by many of today’s remaining Marxists (or followers of the New Marx Lekture) of inferring the state of the system as a whole from the characteristics of individual capitals (cf. Kurz 2012). The conclusion is then drawn: Yes, work is indeed being done, things are being produced, and exploitation is taking place! Where is the systemic crisis? On the contrary: “For Marx’s value analysis, the movements of profits are surface phenomena corresponding to an underlying shift in the balance of constant to variable capital: means of production to waged labor, or dead to living labor. Despite countervailing forces, this so-called organic composition of capital tends to rise over time as competition compels increasing productivity, iteratively replacing labor with more efficient machines and labor processes […]. Over time, however, the rise in the ratio of dead to living labor undermines the capacity for value production […]. The same dynamic that originally drives accumulation […] also undermines it, until manufacturing capacity and labor capacity can no longer be brought together, and instead empty factories and unemployed populations pile up side by side. […] Crisis and decline come not from extrinsic shocks but from capital’s internal limits” (Clover 2016, 133f.).

The inner barrier of capital has made emancipation within the barriers of capital (which is dubious anyway) more and more irrelevant. As a result, strikes are thinning out, almost disappearing from the scene, or are just spreading hot air, as what is being struck is becoming increasingly unprofitable (apart from the fact that strikes, which are not aimed at abolition, do not address the destructive nature of the capitalist mode of production and its catastrophic effects on the climate). When more and more people are put out of work, factories stand empty, suburbs and workers’ housing estates turn into “problem neighborhoods,” there is simply nothing left for many people to strike about. In order to “make their voices heard,” the circulation of goods is interrupted (looting, sabotage, blockade of highways, etc.), their own hated neighborhoods or police stations are torched.

A riot triggered by a singular event can spread within weeks to become a “conflagration” that expresses a fundamental rejection of the “ancien régime” and possibly seeks (and implements) its overthrow. As Clover emphasizes, a riot, just like a strike, does not have to be emancipatory as such (ibid., 191). This point is particularly important to emphasize following Clover, as it is now perfectly clear that the “practice of the riot” (or that which seems similar to it) is also one of right-wing radicals and conspiracy ideologues, as can be seen in the storming of the Capitol in the United States (01/06/2021) and the Parliament in Brazil (01/08/2023) (although this did not exactly happen spontaneously).

Since the Arab spring and Occupy Wall Street in the early 2010s,[4] riots have repeatedly involved the occupation of public spaces (although there is no necessary link) or the occupation of infrastructure (which is central to the circulation of goods), such as the occupation of the Port of Oakland (Occupy Oakland). In their dynamics, the riots obviously point to something that goes beyond looting and torching. The occasion may seem singular and the course of a riot chaotic and spontaneous. The question is what becomes or could become a “conflagration.”

A social struggle that seeks to improve the position of people or workers will come to nothing if more and more people can no longer really participate in the valorization process, but on the contrary exist more and more in an informal economy with no prospect of their lot in life ever improving. This by no means only affects people from the former factory proletariat, but also knowledge workers from universities (the internship generation, ongoing fixed-term contracts, etc.), i.e. also qualified workers. A riot that sets itself the goal of redefining prices is anachronistic today, given the global crisis of capital: “The public whose modality is riot must eventually encounter the need to pursue reproduction not just beyond the wage but beyond the marketplace” (ibid., 173). This necessity is all the more pressing because “attempts at appeasement” of all kinds are no longer effective today. While the riots of the 1960s in the USA could still be “pacified,” admittedly also by police batons and lead bullets, but also by integrative measures such as social programs etc., which could certainly improve the social situation, this effect has failed to materialize today. Social programs cannot erase the superfluousness of those who “benefit” from them. This is all the more tragic when a regime is actually successfully overthrown, but nothing changes in the social and material situation of the people, those who are “rioting” remain a surplus population and one gang is just replaced by another. As Clover writes, these attempts at appeasement were possible because in the era of Keynesianism, i.e. the expansion of the mass of value, social programs were initiated and could take effect. This has now definitely come to an end: “One could perhaps imagine demands in the present that would, if met, alter in substance the circumstances of the excluded. But the swelling ranks of the excluded is the same fact as the inability to meet such demands—the two faces of crisis. Just as the U.S. can no longer deliver accumulation at a global level, and thus must order the world-system by coercion rather than consent, the state can no longer provide the kinds of concessions won by the Civil Rights movement, can no longer purchase the social peace. It is all sticks and no carrots. […] The prolongation of the riots and of their fury is doubtless a measure of social pressures building around racialized policing and around the immanent violence applied to the management of surplus populations in general. It is also a measure of the fading appeal of moderation and optimistic compliance. This approach still retains some charisma […]. At the same time, the argument that the bottomless violence and subordination is structural, and cannot be resolved either practically or theoretically through redistributive participation, grows ever harder to refute” (ibid., 186).

So if the compulsion remains that the surplus population must of necessity reproduce itself capitalistically, the crucial question is how to initiate material reproduction beyond wage labor and beyond “just” prices. It would be important to create a different kind of “public sphere” that interrupts the “normal course” and addresses precisely this. Public space and infrastructure occupations could be a means to this end (the latter are becoming increasingly important in the course of climate protests: from road blockades to the sabotage of pipelines a la Malm 2021). The aim would therefore be to break open the formal shell of the economy and politics, i.e. to transcend both the riot and the strike in order to develop the reproduction of society beyond wage labor and the market. Clover uses the “Commune” as an institutional metaphor for this (ibid., 187ff., on the Paris Commune see also Kurz 1999, 237ff.). However, the problem, as became clear during the Arab Spring and elsewhere, is that the addressee may remain the state due to a lack of alternatives, thus reproducing a problematic orientation towards the state. The tragedy of this is that at best a regime change is achieved, i.e. a replacement of the functional elites or gangs, without this changing the social situation of the surplus population in any way (not to mention the meaning and content of production and consumption).

The material side of all this shit, i.e. the fragmentation of the production of all the necessities of life across half the world, makes “appropriation” impossible. Even an alternative public sphere or a general interruption of normality will not be able to change this (at least not immediately or in the short term), although they could at least address the problem “on a large scale.”[5] Unfortunately, Clover does not elaborate on the “material” side in his book (which is undoubtedly very difficult and because no one really has definitive answers). In theoretical terms, and in practical terms too obviously, there is still much to be done. In any case, Joshua Clover’s book on riots (the next ones are sure to come) makes an important contribution to understanding this phenomenon and placing it in its historical context.

Literature

Armstrong, Amanda: Die vergessenen Massenstreiks – Zu “Riot.Strike.Riot” von Joshua Clover – eine Kritik, in: Analysis and Critique No. 670, 20.4.2021, https://www.akweb.de/bewegung/joshua-clover-kritik-riot-streik-strike/

Arps, Jan Ole; García Doell, David Ernesto: Riots für Kommunist*innen – Joshua Clover bietet eine Theorie des Aufstands – hilft das für die politische Praxis in Deutschland?, in: Analysis & Critique No. 669, 16.3.2021, https://www.akweb.de/bewegung/joshua-clover-theorie-aufstand-praxis-fuer-deutschland/

Collective of authors: “The situation is serious – time to strike,” in: Wildcat No. 111 (Spring 2023), 42-49.

Castel, Robert: Negative Discrimination: Youth Revolts in the Paris Banlieues, Hamburg 2009.

Clover, Joshua: Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings, London 2016.

Konicz, Tomasz: No weather for climate protests, 2022, on exit-online.org.

Kurz, Robert: Das Weltkapital – Globalisierung und innere Schranken des modernen warenproduzierenden Systems, Berlin 2005.

Kurz, Robert: Geld ohne Wert – Grundrisse zur einer Transformation der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, Berlin 2012.

Kurz, Robert: Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus – Ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft, Frankfurt 1999.

Kurz, Robert: Weltordnungskrieg – Das Ende der Souveränität und die Wandlungen des Imperialismus im Zeitalter der Globalisierung, 2nd edition, Springe 2021.

Malm, Andreas: How to Blow Up a Pipeline, London 2021.

Ming, Shi: Fierce storms, terrible waves – The CP leadership prepares for social upheaval, in: Le Monde Diplomatique 4/2023.

Scholz, Nina: Die wunden Punkte von Google, Amazon, Deutsche Wohnen & Co – Was tun gegen die Macht der Konzerne?, Berlin 2022.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Oury_Jalloh

[2] Aydemir, Fatma: Police violence in Germany, taz.de from 12.8.2022.

[3] This text was written at the beginning of 2023.

[4] See also: Feuerherdt, Alex: Das Volk gegen ein Prozent – Der Antisemitismus der “Occupy” -Bewegung, jungle.world from 1.12.2011.

[5] By this I do not mean the “state of exception,” which is merely a continuation of normality by other means, with the aim of establishing a capitalist normality at a higher level by force or keeping the surplus population in check (see Kurz 2021, 320ff.).

Populism for the Poor

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment
A Polemic on the Post-Leftist Desire for self-deception in the midst of a manifest socio-ecological systemic crisis.

Tomasz Konicz

They are anything but modest when it comes to their ostentatiously displayed modesty. The leaders of the so-called “Left Party” (Partei dei Linke – hereinafter PDL), Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken, gave up part of their salary in the fall of 2024 in order to receive the statistical German average wage from then on. They wanted to “change the world,” and an “average salary” was perfectly sufficient for this, whereas “exorbitant salaries would lead to exorbitant politics,” the party leaders explained with all due modesty to any media representatives who wanted to hear it.[1] The money saved would be donated, and special consultation hours would be set up at the party headquarters to help people in need. No concern was too small, party leader Schwerdtner asserted. Populism for the poor and disenfranchised of this late capitalist world, so to speak.

Of course, this populist idea of becoming the advocate of the “little man” did not grow on the dung heap at Karl Liebknecht House (to stay with the populist jargon). The original left-wing populist can be found in Austria and goes by the name of KPÖ. The website of the Communist Party of Austria in Graz states that – surprise, surprise – “exorbitant politicians’ salaries… lead to exorbitant politics.”[2] The KPÖ in Graz uses the money it collects in this way to help people in need – meticulous records are kept of this, and the relevant data is publicly available. The crucial difference to the PDL, however, is that the Austrian communists oblige all elected representatives to limit their salaries to the average wage of a skilled worker in order to be able to use these funds for social policy.

The KPÖ’s strategy should therefore be taken seriously. It is a form of left-wing populism that genuinely strives to help people in the midst of a manifest systemic crisis, while at the same time taking the wind out of the sails of opportunism within its own ranks. Because, let’s not kid ourselves, the salary cuts are primarily intended to deter careerists and their cliques, who have already taken over many left-wing projects as soon as they became successful – starting with the Fischer gang and the Greens. The PDL, on the other hand, is staging a populist charade that is only concerned with external impact and showmanship in order to achieve electoral success and lead as many of its old boy networks and Rackes as possible to well-paid feeding troughs (always stay populist!).

The difference between populism and melodrama lies precisely in the salary cap that would have to apply to the entire party, its apparatus, and above all to the foundation that misuses the name of Rosa Luxemburg in order to be taken seriously. This would actually add up to a considerable sum of money that could be used to help many people who have fallen on hard times during the crisis. In Graz alone, several million euros have already been raised in this way. If the Left Party were to introduce a similar salary cap for all office holders and employees, similar sums would be raised every month, which could actually be used to provide concrete help to a great many people in need – be it soup kitchens or food banks, which are now barely able to meet the growing demand.

The critique of German post-left populism, which has now become almost hegemonic, is thus a critique of this charade performed by actors hungry for power and position. After only a few months, the PDL’s electoral success is thus turning out to be a disaster for all that remains of the left in Germany.[3]

But even as a consistent, sincerely meant strategy, such as that pursued by the KPÖ, populism must be subjected to radical, fundamental critique, as its basic assumption is false. The voice of the people, the vox populi, which populism seeks to capture and transform into politics in order to assert the interests of the people, is preformed by late capitalist crisis ideology and how subjects are socialized in capitalist society. The internal interests articulated by populism are therefore an expression of adherence to a practice of false immediacy in the midst of the capitalist systemic crisis – that is, the doomed post-leftist effort to realize the political goals that impose themselves as “immediate” surface phenomena (welfare state, work, climate protection, democratization, etc.).[4]

Populism can therefore only operate within the framework of internal capitalist interests, which are subject to a crisis-induced process of erosion – and it merely parrots society’s brutalizing ideological self-image. The guiding principle of populist politics is thus not the harsh, uncomfortable reality of the crisis, but the false ideological illusion that the crisis produces through cultural-industrial mediation by means of the vox populi preformed by late capitalism. This is particularly devastating because of the rapidly unfolding systemic crisis, which has now also engulfed the core of the world system, and which makes a radical, transformative critique of late capitalist society, with its contradictions and prevailing crisis ideology, essential for survival—and not parroting it, as is characteristic of populism.[5]

This subjugation to the imperatives and “practical constraints” of the permanent crisis inherent in populism has now driven the imposition of a party foundation that has hijacked the name of Rosa Luxemburg (RLS) to the point of real satire. In its strategy paper entitled Linke Triggerpunkte (Left Trigger Points), the RLS simply argued that all issues that contradict the right-wing, pre-fascist hegemony in the FRG and would thus “trigger” right-wing reactions should be avoided. Don’t rock the boat, is the motto of the – well – Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. In particular, the issues of refugees and the climate crisis should be avoided so as not to alienate potential voters (and, by the way, this says it all about the crazy, old-left fixation on wage earners and “proletarians” as the “revolutionary subject,” who in fact, in their function as variable capital, act more as its last resort, as the RLS implicitly admits in its right-wing “strategy paper.”[6]

Ultimately, the aim is to avoid addressing the systemic crisis that is currently destroying the social and ecological foundations of civilization in order to remain compatible with late capitalist politics. And the PDL is sticking to this line. It is in fact an ideological declaration of surrender, with which the PDL simply enters into populist competition with the AfD, without even being able to conceive of a counter-principle to fascism in the manifest crisis. Other bogeymen are constructed (bigwigs, the rich), alternative historical periods are romanticized as a “golden age” (the “social market economy” of the second half of the 20th century) – and at the same time, any hint of radical, categorical criticism of the disintegrating foundations of late capitalism evaporates. Phrases and posturing take the place of critique. Women and men strike a Che Guevara pose when they demand higher tax rates for “fat cats.”

Wagenknecht’s Heirs

So what does the new German left-wing populism in the form of the PDL want? It wants to return to the past, back to the social market economy, to the Rhineland prosperity capitalism of the post-war period. The social question is at the center of populist propaganda. The Left Party strikes a pose as the advocate of the little people, demanding an expansion of the welfare state, higher taxes for the rich, and a greater role for the state in the economy—just as was the case in the economic miracle of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Not only strategically, but also in terms of content, the new left-wing populism thus turns out to be a mere copy of the policies of Sahra Wagenknecht and the National Socialist forces that formed the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW).[7] Ms. Wagenknecht explicitly formulated the crazy idea of being able to return to the second half of the 20th century by means of populist politics in her book Die Selbstgerechten (The Self-Righteous) shortly before the split.[8] The Left Party is the populist heir to Wagenknecht’s Querfront populism, pursuing left-wing conservative policies, to use Wagenknecht’s apt oxymoron, although the PDL at least refrains from parroting the crisis-induced rise in resentment, xenophobia, and racism that characterizes the BSW.

And the whole thing is obviously – to return to populist jargon once again – a single lie and a deception, a kind of popular deception committed by pseudo-populists, which the PDL performs with all its false immediacy. There is no going back to the social market economy; the clocks cannot be turned back. The crisis process stands in the way of this populist anachronism. The crisis as a fetishistic process, eating its way in fits and starts from the periphery to the centers, driven by the internal contradictions of capital, is now evident. Everything is obvious—and it is almost impressive to see the mental contortions the German post-left still manages to perform in order to ignore this evidence.

It is obvious: the trade wars that Trump started are the political consequence of deindustrialization in large parts of the United States, where the internal barrier of capital manifests itself.[9] The fetishistic self-movement of capital on a societal level, generated by competition between market subjects, becomes evident in the climate crisis.[10] There is no capitalist interest behind the fact that the compulsion to valorize will soon render entire regions of the world uninhabitable. The self-destructive irrationality of the capitalist system, which uses instrumental rationality to turn the whole world into material for its boundless valorization process, is self-explanatory when one takes a cursory look at global CO2 emissions.

No one wants a revolution; there is no revolutionary subject. That, too, is obvious. And yet – even though almost all sections of the population cling fiercely to its forms of socialization – the system is collapsing. It is the capitalist compulsion to valorize in its agony that calls the system into question by breaking down under its own contradictions – while left-wing populism wants to make everything a question of distribution and clings to a society in dissolution in a reactionary manner. The right wing is, in a sense, acting in a forward-looking manner; it wants barbarism, it wants collapse, in order to approach fascist madness in a cleansing steel storm – the populist left is acting conservatively, clinging to the ideologically distorted ideal images of economic miracle capitalism.

But there can be no welfare state in late capitalism, because the whole of society depends on the pot of the valorization process, quite prosaically in the form of taxes and wages. The PDL’s moronic drivel about the welfare state is a lie. When the valorization process stagnates or simply collapses, when the economy no longer “runs,” then everything else is also up for grabs. Redistribution does not help when the mass of valorized labor in commodity production melts away, when the valorization process destroys its ecological foundations.

There will also be no peace in collapsing late capitalism, as the increasing internal contradictions and ecological upheavals almost inevitably drive the state monsters into external expansion and military adventures. The arms build-up in the West is not only a reaction to Russian imperialism, which launched a war of aggression against Ukraine from a position of internal instability and geopolitical weakness.[11] Increasing resource bottlenecks and raw material shortages will make ordinary wars of plunder necessary again wherever the process of capital valorization, with its boundless hunger for resources, is to be maintained. Food supplies are at risk in the medium term, which is already reflected in corresponding inflation. A catastrophic major war is only a matter of time. In the dark present of the 21st century, there is only war.

Late capitalist democracy is also a thing of the past. In times of crisis, fascist tendencies inevitably gain the upper hand, together with an oligarchic brutalization of the increasingly authoritarian state apparatus. This is not a prediction for the future; it is already happening: in the US, in parts of Eastern Europe, and to some extent also in Germany. What’s more, fascism is the subjective agent of the objectively already unfolding systemic transformation into post-capitalist barbarism. The optimization of the valorization process, realized through democratic discourse, which constitutes the Orwellian essence of capitalist democracy, is turning into an objective tendency toward self-destruction in the manifest crisis of the system, whose subjective political actor is fascism.[12]

The Stepping Stones for the Stepping Stones

Almost everyone knows, really everyone suspects, that the system is coming to an end. And yet the populism of the Left Party, with its obvious fairy tales, is quite successful. The PDL’s deceivers of the people (always stay populist!), who pretend that the systemic crisis does not exist in order to throw social democratic sand in people’s eyes, are simply pursuing their own intra-capitalist interests. The populist question of cui bono, of “who benefits,” which inevitably turns into ideology when considering the irrational, fetishistic crisis process, is entirely appropriate in the autopsy of populism.

Redefining the systemic question as a question of distribution simply opens up career paths in politics. There is a concrete need for this. The ideological taboo of saying what is, of clearly naming the self-destruction of the system, must be maintained even in its agony. However, the basis of capitalist ideology production, the naturalization of capitalism, can hardly be maintained due to increasing upheavals. The false narratives of left-wing populism, according to which the excessive greed and lust for power of a class of sinister puppet masters and bigwigs are responsible for this, create ideological outlets that alleviate the pressure for legitimacy. There is nothing that a few new tax rates and economic shifts toward Keynesianism cannot fix, according to the implicit lie of left-wing populism. The seemingly radical pose and hollow rhetoric conceal the gulf between the reality of the crisis and the anachronistic postulates of the PDL.

The Greens have twisted the urgent insight into the capitalist climate crisis[13] into a commitment to “green capitalism,” while the Left Party is doing something similar with regard to the internal barriers of capital and their social consequences.[14] The PDL thus offers itself to the capitalist functional elites as crisis managers. And this is not done metaphorically, but quite concretely –visible to anyone who wants to see it. Any pseudo-radical rhetoric from prominent figures in the PDL melts away immediately as soon as there is even the slightest chance of participating in politics.

The TikTok product Heidi Reichinnek, for example, jumped on the anti-fascist wave of outrage in early 2025 that was triggered by the taboo-breaking of the then CDU top candidate Friedrich Merz in the heated election campaign phase when the CDU used the votes of the AfD to push through tightening of immigration laws.[15] At the time, the chairwoman of the Left Party group in the Bundestag said that Merz had left the democratic center and had the AfD in tow.[16]  Just a few months later, the same Heidi Reichinnek and her parliamentary group enabled the election of the same Friedrich Merz as chancellor, who committed the greatest fascist “taboo breach” in German postwar history.[17] This was accompanied by the most pitiful phrases: “End the chaos,” “always ready,” “for the good of the country and its people,” always “cooperation possible.” Reichinnek can simply rely on the fact that the memory of her TikTok fan swarm has to be measured in seconds.

Why did the PDL enable the early election of Merz as a stepping stone? Why did the PDL members of the Bundestag effectively act as stepping stones for the stepping stones? To demonstrate their reliability in the political arena, to prove that they can be a reliable partner in “cooperation” in capitalist crisis management. And this decision by the PDL not to stand in the way of German pre-fascism was recognized and appreciated, within narrow limits. The CDU’s decision on its incompatibility with the PDL has been made, and the FAZ, as a kind of late-capitalist Izvestia, basically the central organ of the Federal Republic’s functional elite, ran a headline after the chancellor election that said the “Left Party” was no longer “suitable as an bogeyman.”[18] The path to normalization, to ordinary participation, has been paved since the chancellor election – the PDL’s anti-fascist campaign slogans were the opportunistic sacrifice that the party, which hatched Wagenknecht, was only too willing to make.

The leading PDL cliques are, to stay with populist jargon, an abyss of cheap phrases and ass-kissing towards the functional elites wherever possible. And this post-leftist imposition wants to do nothing other than the political business that is oriented towards ordinary, worn-out crisis strategies. The reactionary state fetish that characterizes a large part of the German old left forms the perfect ideological springboard for career planning in crisis management, since the state moves into a central economic position in manifest crisis phases in order to support the stuttering valorization machine.

Dysfunctional Hyper-Opportunism

However, as mentioned above, there are strict limits to the PDL’s participation. In return for its parliamentary function as a stepping stone for Merz, the PDL faction expected not only the “normalization” of relations with the CDU, but also a seat on the secret service committee. Our Heidi Reichinnek, who made it possible to quickly elect a chancellor who had the “AfD in tow” in order to “avoid chaos” in Germany, wanted to be on this committee for one reason only: to prove her reliability, “for the good of the country,” etc., etc. Well, that was too much of a stepping stone for the CDU and SPD. The already pitiful calculation of getting into the intelligence committee by means of the chancellor election did not work out, as Reichinnek failed to obtain the necessary majority in June.[19]

But that does not deter the opportunistic participation mania of the power-hungry middle-class snobs with proletarian tendencies who make up the majority of the PDL’s old boy networks – on the contrary. Opportunism escalates into hyper-opportunism, it overturns itself, becomes dysfunctional, stands in its own way, negates itself, so to speak. It is opportunism without an opportunistic chance, without opportunity, which virtually takes control of the bullying machines at the top of the PDL: No one demanded it of her, there were no government posts in sight, and yet Ines Schwerdtner, the imposition at the top of the “Left Party,” demanded an increase in the retirement age in August 2025, while expressing the usual “concerns.”[20]

This was a populist cardinal sin committed here without cause, with Ms. Schwerdtner simply telling the truth: not regarding the retirement age, but with regard to the character of the PDL’s “left-wing populism,” which simply lies to people. As I said, they do not believe in the social demagoguery they spew in the systemic crisis. The populists of the PDL lie; it is not ignorance. Ms. Schwerdtner just wanted to be part of the reactionary debate on crisis management strategies in order to signal her “ability to govern.” And that contradicts not only the PDL’s anachronistic social welfare rhetoric, but also the populist credo and tactics of social demagoguery, which is based on sweet-talking people until you are in power – only to then forget your promises and betray your voters. Schwerdtner overshot the mark and had to be called back, although the PDL can probably rely on the short attention span of its Reddit and TikTok brigades.[21]

And that’s nothing new, really. The PDL already stumbled over its dysfunctional hyper-opportunism during the 2021 election campaign. The man who reverently knelt before Wolfgang Schäuble, Dietmar Bartsch, then the party’s top candidate, declared much of the painstakingly negotiated election program obsolete during the heated campaign phase because the competition criticized it.[22] Following criticism from the SPD and the Greens on a number of program points, Bartsch threw a good part of his party’s program overboard in order to demonstrate the party’s ability to govern in the middle of the election campaign – instead of doing so, as is customary with every other party, only in the event of possible coalitions after the election.[23] Despite the change in leadership, much of the old left has remained opportunistic. Hyper-opportunism can thus be defined as a thirst for power and career advancement that stands in its own way.

The proletarian streak of the “Left Party,” its ostentatious display of love for the working class, for wage earners, is a quirk of the middle-class snobs who make up the majority of the PDL leadership.[24]  The internal capitalist interests of wage earners, which this pseudo-populism purports to represent, will be betrayed at the earliest opportunity. No question about it. Ms. Schwerdtner’s love of work goes so far that she would like to see the working life extended – as long as Ms. Schwerdtner herself does not have to work, of course. After all, why shouldn’t we apply the same populist categories to Ms. Schwerdtner as she does to her political rivals?[25] To evaluate Schwerdtner on the basis of her own work ideology: here, a middle-class snob who has never really worked is calling for the extension of working life so that she can provide her political clique with jobs and money as quickly as possible.

And it is no coincidence that the traditional German work ethic, which Ms. Schwerdtner aggressively propagates, is at the heart of this populist taboo-breaking, which only provides a glimpse of this ragtag group’s possible participation in government. The state fetish of the German old left in and around the PDL – which is reinforced by objective state-capitalist crisis tendencies – is complemented by the German work ethic. It is a product of the old left’s belief in the proletariat as a “revolutionary subject,” as well as a central ideologeme of late capitalist crisis ideology, to which the PDL is attached.

Labor, however – leaving the populist rubbish behind – is the substance of capital. The outright hysteria surrounding work, the relentless agitation against everything that does not contribute to the process of capital valorization, are expressions of the crisis of this very process of valorization, which is driving it toward self-destruction. That is why, in times of crisis, the potentially murderous work ethic manifests itself again and again, to the point of forced labor and starvation – even in the 21st century.[26] Everything must become work because work itself is breaking down.[27] The PDL, with its populist hatred of “profiteers” and “parasites,” which stifled any radical critique, is only one post-leftist current of this crisis ideology.

The Regressive Desire for Self-Deception

The PDL can thus already be understood as a post-left formation; they are opportunistic barbarians who dwell in the ruins of past emancipatory attempts. The actual intra-capitalist interest that drives these populist cliques thus materializes in figures such as Schwerdtner or Reichinnek: It is the panicky urge to find a place in late capitalist crisis management in order to become its subject. This also explains the dysfunctional tendency toward hyper-opportunism –time is running out, and the systemic crisis, which these opportunists are dishonestly framing as a redistribution crisis, is progressing inexorably. And they sense that time is running out for them to still “find a place.” As a result, there are hardly any taboos, even without gratification: stepping stones are paved to the chancellorship, promises of a welfare state are turned on their head, etc. The ridiculousness of demanding marginal improvements to a system in open dissolution in the midst of a manifest socio-ecological systemic crisis is blatantly obvious.

But this does not explain the evident popularity of the PDL’s pseudo-populism, which has in fact long since become hegemonic in the German post-left. Its hypocrisy is evident: Germany’s post-left populists polemicize against fascist stooges in order to pave their way into the chancellery a few months later; they engage in social demagoguery, which they refute without any opportunistic motive by demanding an increase in the working life. These populist lies, which can be easily exposed, nevertheless find open ears and receptive minds. Many old leftists and broad sections of the population simply want to be deceived. There is a widespread desire for self-deception that cannot be explained simply by demagoguery or the hope of followers for a warm place in crisis management. This pseudo-populist filth is so successful because it appeals to a widespread, irrational need that is rampant in the manifest crisis of the system.

This irrational, dark need, which takes hold of the masses in the wake of the fully revealed irrationalism of capital, is best illuminated by the concept of regression. The fear-induced relapse into earlier stages of development, often used to ward off traumatic experiences, corresponds to a variety of reflexes of ideological defense against the crisis in the disintegrating political sphere. In this magical thinking, the global crisis of capital is to be banished by making perceiving, reflecting upon, or discussing it taboo. Concretely, this manifests itself in the struggle of the post- and old left against radical crisis theory. It is a kind of taboo that is being established, a compulsive unwillingness to know – which, in view of the manifest crisis and the openly apparent fetishism of capital[28] increasingly often turns into ridicule: for example, when young PDL members demand “justice in the climate collapse,”[29] or when left-leaning German comedians issue ultimatums to billionaires[30] to put an end to the crisis, while the latter have long since had their bunkers built.[31]

The post-left regression that drives the populism of the PDL and the disintegrating BSW is related to the explicitly reactionary aspirations of the right, which has also been expressed concretely in the querfront efforts of recent years.[32] However, this preconscious and unconscious crisis reflex goes beyond a merely political dimension. The crisis of capital also affects the subjects whose own constitution and socialization are shaped by late capitalism. What capital does to wage earners, their constitution as subjects, as citizens and market subjects, is on the verge of dissolution. And regression wants to cling to this, to late capitalist identity, which – by the way – also explains the rampant identity mania that is merely an expression of dissolving identities. When everything is in flux, when things are in motion, subjects cling to what they still have left – to the identity they acquired through their socialization, even if this is also eroding.

Radical crisis theory and the resulting transformative practice, the escape from the capitalist prison of thought, thus amounts to a necessary, painful break with identity. And it is precisely this break with capital that the old left refuses, as crisis theorist Robert Kurz already explained in his examination of anti-German ideology at the beginning of the 21st century:

“The impending categorical break would be such a painful break with identity that the death throes of the old paradigm of critique consist primarily in devising avoidance strategies in this regard.”[33]

The post-left pseudo-populism of the PDL is thus not only an opportunistic career project in an era of open crisis management, it also builds on this unconscious crisis tendency toward regression, on the subjects’ fear of impending “loss of self,” so to speak. It is also a populism of the intellectually poor, to put it populistically. In this context, Robert Kurz spoke explicitly of a “reactionary longing for a return to the old familiar patterns of interpretation” in “large parts of the left.” The anachronistic talk of the welfare state, the zombie-like return of anti-imperialism in the form of post-colonialism, the praise of hard work in the face of the impending AI rationalization pushes, the ridiculous polemic about parasites and fat cats in the face of the manifest climate crisis – all these appeal to this regressive need among all the old leftists who have not yet openly defected to the right.[34]

The populist desire to march back into the idealized social market economy is merely a post-left expression of this general tendency toward regression, as exemplified by Wagenknecht.[35] It is literally an “avoidance strategy,” as Kurz put it. Or, to put it another way: the identitarian delusion – whether based on national or religious grounds – is an expression of clinging to late capitalist society, which shaped these identities through socialization.

And yet this regressive flight into identitarian delusion and class struggle stupidity will not stop the fetishistic march toward crisis. Every day, open crisis fetishism strikes a blow to the numb wannabe class warriors who can only smell sinister capitalist interests everywhere. It is obvious that the looming climate catastrophe, for example, also threatens to put an end to capital’s profiteering. The crisis will continue to unfold in its ecological and economic dimensions, even if populism and old-left dullness obscure or marginalize radical crisis theory. The fetishistic reality of the crisis cannot be mobbed away.

The categorical break that Robert Kurz predicted in his book Die antideutsche Ideologie [The Anti-German Ideology] is now very much on the agenda. Not because the fearful market subjects blinded by identity want it, but because it will inevitably take place in the course of the upcoming transformation of the system:

“On the historical agenda is the categorical break with the basic forms of the modern commodity-producing system as such, as announced by the concept of value criticism: the capital relation must be fundamentally criticized as value socialization. If, after the collapse of state socialism, the labor movement, and traditional Marxism, there is to be a renewed theoretical and practical critique of the ruling world system, its economic terror, its social impositions, and its processes of destruction, then this critique must become more radical; that is, unlike previous left-wing paradigms, it must go deeper, to the roots and to the categorical basis of commodity-producing modernity. This includes a critique of the fetishistic form of subject and interest, of ‘abstract labor,’ and of the democratic legal form: all of which are foreign concepts to the dying consciousness of the categorically immanent labor movement Marxism. Since one was oneself an integral part of the history of capitalist modernization, one cannot and does not want to break away from commodity-producing modernity.”[36]

Despite the ever-advancing dynamics of the crisis, nothing has changed in this regard over the past two decades. This old left is in fact the main disruptive factor in the establishment of a radical awareness of the crisis, which could only develop on the political left. Nowhere is this clearer than in the decaying products of “state socialism, the labor movement, and traditional Marxism,” which have taken on a populist form in the PDL – they are flesh from the ideological flesh of capital, its last resort in the disintegrating left, so to speak, which attempts to suppress any emancipatory impulse. Opportunistic calculation, old-left dullness, and general regression go hand in hand here.

Especially against the backdrop of the inevitable systemic crisis, which will necessarily lead to an open-ended systemic transformation, this post-left “identity populism” has a disastrous effect. Emancipation in crisis can only be the result of a consciously waged struggle for transformation.[37] On this point, Robert Kurz writes in The Anti-German Ideology:

“But that is precisely why the crisis leads to nothing but crisis, the failure of capital to function, and not to the self-evident demise of capital as a social relationship, as has become a false assumption in people’s minds. The crisis therefore never replaces emancipation, the emancipatory social movement, precisely because it is purely objective. Of course, there is no automatic, objective emancipation; that would be a contradiction in terms. And it is therefore completely open how people will react to crisis and collapse. In its objectivity, the absolute internal barrier of capital can become an external condition for emancipation as well as for social decay into barbarism, which capitalism has always carried within itself as a potentiality and as a manifestation.”[38]

The opportunistically motivated, regressive dullness propagated by the PDL within the dwindling German remnants of the left thus objectively blocks the necessary “categorical break with the basic forms of the modern commodity-producing system,” as Kurz put it.[39] This categorical break, however, would be a prerequisite for an “emancipatory social movement” that would consciously wage social struggles as part of the objectively imminent struggle for transformation.[40]

Telling it like it is – clearly and publicly articulating the crisis and the necessity of overcoming capitalism in order to survive – seems hardly conceivable anymore in the populist morass that has spread throughout the remnants of the left in the wake of the PDL’s catastrophic election victory.[41] Instead of radical critique of the frothing identity and work mania, which are only expressions of the crisis of labor and the market subject, instead of a conscious, forward-looking search for emancipatory paths to transformation, the PDL is staging a backward-looking farce that is blatantly obvious in its regressive hypocrisy. Incidentally, the PDL’s ideological-identitarian blockade extends not only to the left-wing media landscape, which has been largely brought into line, but also to left-wing discussion forums and social networks, most of which are moderated by people who do not have to work because they are paid by the PDL – as parliamentary assistants, party employees, volunteers, interns, etc. The fundamental radical discourse, the understanding of emancipatory ways out of the impending catastrophe, is being cut off at its root.

Emancipation requires a radical, categorical break with value-based society, both ideologically and identitarily, as a precondition for emancipatory transformative practice – precisely because value-based society is breaking down due to its contradictions. Regression, the comfortable opportunistic path of the PDL, on the other hand, acts as one of the breeding grounds for fascism. Fascism is an extremism of the center, which drives precisely what it finds in the center in terms of ideology and identity to extremes in response to crises.

This regressive openness to the right, which drove Wagenknecht to leave the National Socialist Party, can currently be best demonstrated by the largest populist hollow body in the PDL, party leader Jan van Aken.[42] Van Aken has developed the habit of having posters made for himself[43] in order to sell himself as a tribune of the people in populist fashion.[44] Here, the right-wing degeneration of a simplified critique of capitalism becomes visible as if under a magnifying glass: praise for the hard work that “keeps the country running” goes hand in hand with the personification of the crisis in a “clique of millionaires.” Mr. van Aken, similar to his co-chair, is someone croaking the praises of work even though he has never had to “really work” in the populist sense.

As mentioned, labor is the substance of capital – the rampant work hysteria that is once again giving rise to forced labor in the FRG is an expression of the crisis of capital, which, with the impending AI rationalization push, threatens to finally rid itself of its own substance.[45] Emancipatory practice would consist in fighting for the end of compulsory labor and the realization of automation in a post-capitalist society emancipated from fetishism. The German work mania, which escalated during the last severe systemic crisis in the context of National Socialist extremism from the center to the Auschwitz motto “Arbeit macht Frei” [Work makes you free], is currently flaring up in response to the crisis in almost all political camps. Van Aken reproduces this work fetish in a post-leftist variant by contrasting the proletarian masses with a clique of parasites.

The discourse hegemony of fascism in the FRG becomes particularly visible when van Aken expresses anti-fascist views and unwittingly lapses into fascistoid critique of fascism, imagining fascism as a sinister elite conspiracy (“bigwigs”) directed against national labor, against – surprise – the “hard-working people.”[46] Workaholism, personification of the causes of crisis, conspiracy thinking – all on one poster whose simplified critique of capitalism could also be found on a Nazi poster, if only “bigwigs” were replaced with “Jews.” This has nothing to do with a critique of the actual dynamics of the crisis, which are actually causing the distribution struggles to escalate on the surface. This is not an expression of a counter-principle to fascism, but merely its populist rival.

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[1] https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/linken-vorsitzende-schwerdtner-van-aken-gehalt-spende-100.html

[2] https://www.kpoe-graz.at/tag-der-offenen-konten-2023.phtml

[3] https://www.konicz.info/2025/03/23/alle-werden-wagenknecht/

[4] https://www.untergrund-blättle.ch/politik/theorie/emanzipation-in-der-krise-7306.html

[5] https://jungle.world/artikel/2025/14/autoland-ist-abgebrannt

[6] https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/Studien/Studien_3-24_Linke_Triggerpunkte_web.pdf

[7] https://www.konicz.info/2025/03/23/alle-werden-wagenknecht/

[8] https://www.konicz.info/2021/06/29/schreiben-wie-ein-internettroll/

[9] https://exitinenglish.com/2025/06/06/trump-at-the-inner-barrier-of-capital/

[10] https://www.konicz.info/2022/01/14/die-klimakrise-und-die-aeusseren-grenzen-des-kapitals/

[11] https://www.akweb.de/politik/russland-ukraine-konflikt-kampf-auf-der-titanic/

[12] https://www.konicz.info/2024/01/13/e-book-faschismus-im-21-jahrhundert/

[13] https://www.konicz.info/2024/05/29/aktualisierte-neuausgabe-klimakiller-kapital/

[14] https://www.konicz.info/2025/11/01/understanding-jd-vance/

[15] https://www.konicz.info/2025/01/28/schwarz-brauner-durchbruch-in-der-heissen-wahlkampfphase/

[16] https://www.zdfheute.de/video/zdfheute-live/reichinnek-bundestag-redebeitrag-debatte-migrationsgesetz-video-100.html

[17] https://x.com/antonnft6/status/1919821830660976804

[18] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/kommentar-zum-unvereinbarkeitsbeschluss-die-cdu-sollte-ihr-verhaeltnis-zur-linken-aendern-110466519.html

[19] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/geheimdienst-gremium-reichinnek-afd-100.html

[20] https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Linken-Chefin-haelt-Erhoehung-des-Renteneintrittsalters-fuer-moeglich-article25948019.html

[21] https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/rentenalter-linke-schwerdtner-aussage-korrektur-100.html

[22] https://www.wsws.org/de/articles/2024/01/04/link-j04.html

[23] https://www.konicz.info/2021/09/24/linkspartei-wagenknecht-statt-kampf-um-emanzipation/

[24] Workers are so underrepresented that the party had to introduce a quota in 2025. https://www.freitag.de/autoren/sebastian-baehr/die-linkspartei-will-eine-arbeiterquote-einfuehren-kann-das-klappen

[25] https://x.com/fr_dr_kniffel/status/1992268626490269713

[26] https://www.konicz.info/2013/03/15/happy-birthday-schweinesystem/

[27] https://exitinenglish.com/2025/06/06/trump-at-the-inner-barrier-of-capital/

[28] https://exitinenglish.com/2023/01/23/the-subjectless-rule-of-capital/

[29] https://x.com/tkonicz/status/1992636311359172882

[30] https://x.com/tkonicz/status/1928306598717403243

[31] https://konicz.substack.com/p/the-exodus-of-the-money-people

[32] https://www.konicz.info/2024/06/06/linkspartei-querfrontschrecken-ohne-ende/

[33] Robert Kurz, Die antideutsche Ideologie, Vom Antifaschismus zum Krisenimperialismus: Kritik des neuesten linksdeutschen Sektenwesens in seinen theoretischen Propheten, Münster, 2003, p. 14.

[34] https://exitinenglish.com/2024/08/03/ai-the-final-boost-to-automation/

[35] https://exitinenglish.com/2024/08/10/the-great-regression/

[36] Robert Kurz, Die antideutsche Ideologie, Vom Antifaschismus zum Krisenimperialismus: Kritik des neuesten linksdeutschen Sektenwesens in seinen theoretischen Propheten, Münster, 2003, p. 14f.

[37] https://exitinenglish.com/2023/02/22/emancipation-in-crisis/

[38] Robert Kurz, Die antideutsche Ideologie, Vom Antifaschismus zum Krisenimperialismus: Kritik des neuesten linksdeutschen Sektenwesens in seinen theoretischen Propheten, Münster, 2003, p. 227.

[39] In the US, the Democratic Socialists of America and the regressive rag Jacobin fulfill a similar crisis-ideological function.

[40] https://www.untergrund-blättle.ch/politik/theorie/den-transformationskampf-aufnehmen-fuer-ein-kaempferisches-krisenbewusstsein-009092.html

[41] https://www.konicz.info/2025/03/23/alle-werden-wagenknecht/

[42] https://x.com/tkonicz/status/1995044050798612824

[43] https://x.com/tkonicz/status/1995108620632002741

[44] https://x.com/tkonicz/status/1995110373213536561

[45] https://exitinenglish.com/2024/08/03/ai-the-final-boost-to-automation/

[46] https://x.com/tkonicz/status/1995107787139936504/photo/1

Originally published on konicz.info on 11/30/2025

The Aesthetics of Modernization

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment
From Detachment to the Negative Integration of Art

Robert Kurz

The separation of life and art is an old theme of modernity. All artists who want to express a truth and who consume themselves existentially in their creations have always suffered from this separation. Whether art shows well-proportioned beauty or, conversely, the aesthetics of ugliness in its various representations, whether it criticizes society or seeks to rediscover the wealth of forms in nature, whether it is realistically or fantastically oriented: it always remains separated from everyday life and thus from social reality as if by a glass but impenetrable wall. Artistic creations are either ignored or they are world-famous as museum objects, dead before they are even born. The artist thus resembles a figure from the tragedies of antiquity: just as water and fruit forever recede before the thirsty Tantalus, so life recedes before him; just as King Midas had to starve to death because all objects turned to gold under his touch, so the artist as a social being must starve to death because all objects turn into pure exhibits under his touch; and like Sisyphus, he always rolls his stone in vain – his work remains disconnected from the world.

All attempts by art to break out of its glass ghetto have failed. Sculptures set up in factories and paintings on the walls of offices remained foreign bodies; literary readings in churches or schools never got beyond the character of compulsory events. When the Dadaists resorted to provocation out of desperation and dragged toilet bowls or rusty iron pipes into the sacred halls of art to mock the bourgeoisie, this offer was accepted with animal seriousness as an art object and cataloged like Michelangelo’s sculptures or Picasso’s paintings. The tautological definition is: art is everything that society perceives a priori in a separate space, in a reservation called “art,” and which, therefore, in its impregnated artistic objecthood, can be collected independently of any content, like stamps or insects. It doesn’t matter what the art wants and how it presents this, its effects are always defused and trivialized. For the capitalist elites, the artist is not even a court jester, but at best a special supplier like the wine merchant or the confectioner. You wouldn’t buy a used car from him, and you wouldn’t want him to be your son-in-law. At least that is his status in classical modernity.

Modern society has always seen its own mode of existence and its categories as supra-historical and universally human. If there is something rotten and actually unbearable about this system, then it is never supposed to be a historical problem that can be overcome through critique, but always an irrevocable condition of existence per se, which humanity unfortunately has to live with. Modernism also perceives the dilemma of the separateness of art and life through this lens of false ontologization. People pretend that in ancient Greece the artist was just as much a seller of his possibilities as he is today and that even the ancient Egyptians exhibited their images of the gods in galleries and museums or put price tags on them at auctions.

But in ancient civilizations there was no separate social department called “art” or “culture” in the sense that we understand them today. The modern structure of separate and mutually independent spheres, which also determines our language and our thinking, was completely alien to all earlier societies. Whatever human deficits, problems and social power relations they had, they did not divide their existence into separate functional areas. Such a division of social life only developed when the so-called economy was detached from the rest of life in the modern era; an elementary change that cannot be emphasized enough. Recent systems theory regards this as “progress” and the previous state of humanity as a lack of “differentiation,” axiomatically assuming a measure of primitiveness: The more integrated a society is through an overarching cultural context, the more primitive it is from this perspective; and conversely, the more “differentiated” a society is, the more it has split into separate spheres (based on the independence of the capitalist economy), the more “developed” it appears and the more “opportunities” it supposedly offers. This way of thinking has become so self-evident that it no longer seems absurd to see the highest achievement of social evolution in the fact that the functionally reduced human being only represents an intersection of systemic structures.

In reality, however, pre-modern civilizations were not primitive, but highly differentiated; only this kind of differentiation does not correspond to the concept of it accepted today. The old, predominantly agrarian societies did not have a culture, in the way that one “has” an external and random object, but they were a culture. This is even expressed in our scientific language, albeit most of the time unconsciously: we readily speak of the “culture” of ancient Egypt, antiquity, the Middle Ages, etc. and, as a rule, we indicate in this way both the special artifacts and artistic representations of sculpture, painting or literature and, on the other hand, the respective civilization, accompanied by its social structure and its relationship to the world in general. On the other hand, when we talk about “modern culture,” we only mean that particular aspect of artistic forms of expression that have been relegated to a separate sphere and never the social context as a whole. So we unconsciously “know” that culture used to be the whole and not a functionally separate sphere for the edification of the money-earning individual on his Sunday trips to the museum.

In fact, the Latin word “cultus,” from which our concept of culture derives, means both “planting” and “agriculture” as well as “worship,” “way of life,” “sociality,” “education” and even “clothing” (for certain occasions). This multi-layered terminology points to the culturally integrated character of ancient agrarian civilizations. The differentiated contents and forms of both their “metabolism with nature” (Marx) and their social relations and aesthetics did not fall apart as “subsystems,” each with its “own logic,” but were always only different aspects of a single and coherent cultural mode of existence. In modern terms, the description of this culturally integrated existence must sound confusing: production was aesthetic, aesthetics was religious, religion was political, politics was cultural and culture was social. In other words, the social aspects that are distinct for us were intertwined, and each area of life was to a certain extent contained in every other.

One might perhaps be tempted to speak of these agrarian cultures as religiously constituted, because religion was apparently the strongest integrative element of such a “society as culture.” It is well known that not only all kinds of artistic crafts, but also the theater and sporting competitions emerged from cultic acts; more precisely: they were cultic acts of a special kind. But even the quite ordinary activities of everyday life had a fundamentally cultic character; even humor and irony were cultically integrated. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to single out “religion” as the systemically defining moment of such societies, because in doing so we are already thinking of our functional concept of separate spheres. But religion was not a religion in the modern sense either, not a mere “belief,” not a limited opportunity for transcendental thoughts, and certainly not a “private matter.”

We must therefore not simply imagine the religious character of ancient cultures as a restrictive, irrationally coercive relation. The religious was at the same time the public, the so-called politics, the form of debate. It is not for nothing that the Latin word “privatus” has a rather negative, derogatory meaning, which becomes even clearer for us when we look at the corresponding ancient Greek term: there, the “privatus,” who does not participate in public life on a daily basis and as a matter of course, is the idiot. The fact that the religious aspect is both the form of public life and encompasses the whole of everyday life is not, however, an index of the limitations of this society, as the ideology of modern self-legitimization claims. Conversely, it could just as well be said that such a civilization had much more publicity and debate than the modern system, in which most of society’s affairs are settled automatically and without debate through the mechanics of the “detached” economy. Whichever way we look at it, our modern self-image does not allow us to come to terms with the existence of a culturally integrated society. We have no concepts for it.

This modern blindness to the character of pre-modern conditions has created yet another major misunderstanding. At the center of what we call “religion” is basically, in all cultures, the problem of human mortality and death as a process, event and “goal of life.” Along with religion, modernity has also relegated death to a special functional sphere, thus separating it from life just like it has done to art. In this way, the modern secularization of society did not lead to a different and possibly more reflective approach to death, but rather to its being repressed and ignored. What religion had meant in the old societies was not overcome and positively abolished, but merely functionally reduced to an irrational remnant for the private sensibilities of the abstract individual. With regard to bodily mortality, modernity went even further: just as old people who have become “useless” for capitalist reproduction appear even to their own children as mere “waste” and are locked away in institutions separated from normal life, the dead are also “disposed of” like garbage and industrial scrap.

Once modernity had repressed death, it could only understand the earlier integration of life and death as a frightening “fixation on death.” The fact that the ancient Egyptians attached so much importance to their tombs and to embalming the dead is usually interpreted as a sinister death cult, as if they had been preoccupied with nothing else. Modern man is even more disgusted by the widespread Neolithic custom of burying the bones of the dead in the middle of the house under the fireplace. In reality, all these people must have been extremely fun-loving, as ancient studies can now prove in many respects. The natural integration of death into everyday life only seems strange to us because the problem of our own mortality has been “outsourced” to a place that is invisible in ordinary life. Various cultural critics have repeatedly made this separation of life and death, as well as the separation of art and life, an agonizing topic in the history of modernization, without, however, ever radically criticizing the underlying social structure.

 In a “society as culture,” which was even capable of integrating death, “art” was necessarily always part of everyday life and was therefore completely unthinkable as an exhibit of a sterilized and dead sphere “behind glass.” But that is precisely why it was not art as art, but a specific moment in an integrated social context. The “artist” could therefore only be an artist and be recognized in the sense of a technical ability, but not as a social representative of “the” art. The problem of functional divisions, which so preoccupies modernity, arose with it in the first place and could not even have been formulated before. The question therefore arises as to where this systemic “differentiation” actually comes from.

The process of modernization has by no means divided up society evenly and equally. Rather, a certain aspect of human reproduction, namely the so-called economy, was split off from all other aspects and from life in general. It is therefore no more possible to speak of an economy in our sense of the word for the ancient agrarian civilizations than it is to speak of an art or religion, even though the term originates from antiquity. However, while in ancient Greece, as in all pre-modern civilizations, “oikonomia” was a household economy in an integrated cultural context, a factual prerequisite and a means for cultic and thus social or aesthetic purposes, in the modern age it developed into an absurd end in itself and the central content of society. Money, as capital, was coupled back onto itself and thus became a blind “automatic subject” (Karl Marx) that is eerily presupposed for all human and cultural purposes.

As this “valorization of value” (Karl Marx) or abstract economic profit maximization split off from life as a dynamic end in itself, a separate, independent “functional sphere” emerged for the first time, like a foreign body in society, which began to rise to dominance and become the center. And it was only the existence of this detached and simultaneously dominant sector that made all other aspects of social reproduction left over from the capitalist economy appear as separate “subsystems,” that are, however, without exception of merely secondary importance and subordinate to the assumed economic end in itself.

Under the dictates of the independent economy, productive activity has mutated into abstract “labor” in an alienated functional space separate from life, which is only regulated secondarily and under the compulsion of its own uncontrollable “system legality” by the equally separate special sphere of politics. Such a “politics” split off from the culturally integrated society must therefore have been just as unknown to pre-modern civilizations as the “disembedded economy” (Karl Polanyi) of the capitalist self-purpose and the corresponding positive concept of abstract “labor” outside an integrated context of life. Modern politics and the associated institutions of the state and law cannot be equated with the apparently corresponding pre-modern institutions, which, just like “religion,” did not have the character of separate functional sectors. Only in the process of modern social disintegration through the “disembedded economy” did politics, the state and law emerge as complementary “subsystems” of the second order and thus as the first servants (ministers!) of the mute a priori of the capitalist economy.

When the central content and purpose of society has become a split off end in itself, then life must necessarily sink to a mere remnant. Expressions of life beyond the systemic divisions and complementary functional spheres of market and state, economy and politics, competition and law have been degraded to the residual waste of “leisure”; and somewhere in relation to this diffuse remnant, not only religion but also art and culture are located in a special sphere. All things that were once crucially important to people, all existential questions, all associated aesthetic purposes and forms of expression have become this meaningless “remnant” and their representatives have to scramble for the crumbs that fall from the table of monstrous self-purpose.

The situation of art and aesthetics in general is particularly absurd. Although every manifestation of life in itself always has an aesthetic moment for humans, capitalism has negated this elementary fact and separated aesthetics into a separate space, just like all other moments. “Work” is not aesthetic, the economy is not aesthetic, politics is not aesthetic; only aesthetics is aesthetic. It is as if the aesthetics of things lead an abstracted, ghostly existence of their own alongside things; just as the social nature of products leads an abstracted, separate existence alongside the products in the abstract form of money, which has become an end in itself, and abstract formal logic, as the “money of the mind” (Marx), becomes independent and stands alongside the concrete logic of real relationships.

The modern artist’s glass prison consists precisely in this structural separation of the aesthetic. Art flounders helplessly back and forth in this prison; it is no longer the artistic form of a social content, but a dissociated “formality” – either form without content or content as mere form. Art must therefore ape the end in itself of capital, which, as an abstract form (money) that feeds back on itself, would prefer to emancipate itself from any material content, without ever being able to realize this absurdity. “Art for art’s sake” is only the culmination of art as an involuntary caricature of capital, without being able to solve the dilemma at the heart of the capitalist system.

But if, through its own distress, it has become a delusional, self-obsessed end in itself, art, in its unreconciled separateness, can give rise to social hubris: Instead of understanding itself as the product of a system of divisions and mobilizing the radical critique of this destructive self-serving structure, art begins to “aestheticize” the division itself and its functionalist manifestations. Not only its own dilemma becomes an aesthetic subject, but also the glaring capitalist schizophrenia as a whole. However, if the capitalist structure is not criticized but aestheticized, then bodies torn apart by grenades, raped women, starving children and the obscenity of power can also appear as merely aesthetic objects. The detached aesthetic does not return to the social content, but only illuminates it in cynical reflection. An “aestheticization of politics” within the unresolved capitalist system thus leads not to emancipation, but directly to barbarism. Aesthetically staged politics was the secret of fascism’s success and Hitler was the prototype of the artist as politician, who did not reintegrate the separate spheres but stylized their disintegration into a bloody Gesamtkunstwerk.

The precarious situation of art in the capitalist structure of divisions also has a gendered aspect. In order for the “disembedded economy” of capitalist self-purpose to establish itself at all and produce the modern separation of spheres, an elementary precondition was necessary: Everything that was not absorbed into this system of divisions had to be primarily dissociated in its turn. And these were those aspects of life that were once culturally integrated but were then shifted onto modern women: family, “housework,” childcare, caregiving, “love,” etc., along with their associated characteristics. This also included a supposed special receptivity to aesthetics: women, as “natural beauties,” adorn themselves and the homes of their loved ones. This social space, which could not be completely absorbed by capitalist structures but nevertheless remained necessary for human reproduction, emerged as a separate kind of privacy in contrast to the entire social structure of capital and the internal divisions it contained. A paradoxical “separation from the overall system of divisions” (Roswitha Scholz) thus emerged, which forms its “dark reverse side” and is connoted as “female,” while, conversely, the official system as a whole is occupied and dominated by “masculine” elements.

This realization of the elementary and primary gendered dissociation, which emerged from feminist critique, points to a peculiar gendered relationship between the private and public spheres, which also affects the detached aesthetic sphere of art and culture. In the culturally integrated pre-modern societies, there were indeed strong patriarchal moments, but not in the “differentiated” and exaggerated modern form. The culturally integrated differentiation, for which we no longer have terms, did not separate “privacy” and “publicity” in the way we understand them today. In modern terms, much of what is considered private today was public, and vice versa; insofar as the public sphere was “male,” it remained limited, or there were “male” and “female” public spheres simultaneously and in parallel in the cultural context.

The paradoxical forms of disintegration based on the “disembedded economy,” however, have gendered the public and private spheres in a twofold way. On the one hand, there is the intimate space of privacy, in which “the woman” is the so-called fairer sex and at the same time responsible for the warmth of the nest, the comfort of the master, loving care, etc. – and for this very reason is considered inferior and “weak of spirit.” In contrast to this inferior private sphere, the entire system of capitalism with the “disembedded economy” at the top appears as the “masculine” sphere of bourgeois public life and as society proper. On the other hand, there is also a second internal split between the private and public spheres within this official “male” structure: absurdly, the activity for the subjectless end in itself of the system appears here as the “male” private sphere of the capitalist subject with specific interests, the “homo economicus” and money earner, while the complementary sphere of politics, which is also “male,” is defined as the public sphere. And the dissociated sphere of aesthetics or art and culture is merely an extension of this internal public sphere within the “male” capitalist pseudo-universe.

Therefore, “the artist” is in principle a male being within the capitalist public sphere, albeit in a particularly precarious place. There are also female artists, just as there are female politicians, entrepreneurs, scientists, etc. – but firstly, they are merely exceptions that prove the sociological rule; and secondly, they always have to adapt to the “male” rules of the game, which only proves that these are not biological conditions, but socio-historical attributions. The structurally “male” artist in his glass cage of dissociated aesthetics becomes a particularly schizophrenic being: On the one hand, he is a thoroughly capitalist “man” and moneymaker who rests on bourgeois privacy of the first order and needs “the woman” as an inferior caregiver in the background like any ordinary car salesman. On the other hand, within the “male” bourgeois public sphere, he represents a dissociated “female” element in the form of aesthetics itself, which is not absorbed into the functionalist system but is nevertheless part of the capitalist public sphere.

Only in the form of detached, sterile, museum-like art objecthoods can the “feminine” appear within the male pseudo-universe. The artist is thus the capitalist man who is the only one allowed to show his female side and even be homosexual if necessary – but only as the social aberration of the narcissistically self-centered aesthetic, who also robs “the woman” of her ascribed attributes and is thus the superman precisely because he even incorporates the “feminine” in a masculine way and degrades “the woman” as a model, object, or muse to a mere object of beauty. At the same time, however, bourgeois society chalks up his representation of the feminine in the masculine as a shortcoming and the “feminine inferiority” rubs off on him, so that he is regarded by his fellow car salesmen as a social exotic and is not really taken seriously.

However, this structure of divisions, which is the essence of modernity, is already perceived as a historical past. The capitalist dynamic has blown up its own social form and yet continues to proceed unabated. Mass culture and new media seem to level out the systemic “differentiation”: What critics denounced half a century ago as the “culture industry” (Adorno) is now celebrated by postmodernists as the reintegration of art and life. Mediatization is seen per se as emancipation from the constraints of capitalist reality; the world is declared to be a digital game. Everywhere is teeming with “opportunities” that can be seized in the spirit of media “democratization.” And in the amusing habitual masquerade of the sexes, the brave new postmodern world believes it has also overcome gender inequality. The transvestite is almost being proclaimed the new revolutionary subject.

The rhetoric of opportunity in postmodern cultural professional optimism, even if it sometimes presents itself as radical left-wing, is suspiciously reminiscent of the Orwellian language of neoliberal economists. In fact, it is not art that is returning to society as “democratic mass culture” but, conversely, the market is overstepping its boundaries and renewing its claim to totality harder than ever. Once the capitalist economy had detached from the cultural context of life and transformed its remnants into separate subsystems, its dynamics could not remain in this state of disintegration. While the sectors of art and culture, sport, religion, “leisure” etc. initially seemed to be able to assert a certain logic of their own against the dominant system of the “disembedded economy,” they are now being successively “economized” themselves.

These areas were dependent and secondary from the outset: if the structuring social context of society is determined by the end in itself of money, then priests, athletes, and artists must also “earn money,” whether directly as sellers in the market or indirectly through the state’s siphoning of money from market processes. But for a long time, this dependence was only external. As long as art was not subject to the economic laws of the market in its own production, it could not yet be a completely capitalist commodity, but only became so retrospectively in circulation. But the capitalist end in itself is as voracious as it is insatiable, and so it ultimately had to devour the already mutilated remnants of life: the detached art and culture as well as the meager “leisure time” and limited family intimacy.

Art only returns to life to the extent that life has already dissolved into the economy. Now art no longer has an existence of its own, not even as a sphere of a separate aesthetic, but has itself become a direct economic object and therefore its production is already taking place with a view towards how it can be marketed. In the boundless capitalism of the late 20th century, all objects in the world and in life no longer have any intrinsic qualitative value, but only the economic value conferred on them by their marketability.

What postmodernism would like to see as an emancipatory opportunity for art in capitalist mass culture is in reality its destruction. If the “cheerful positivists” (Michel Foucault) of postmodernism today want to place this prophetic insight of Adorno in the vicinity of conservative cultural pessimism, then they are only proving that they themselves have capitulated unconditionally to the economic imperative and are no less affirmative than the conservative pseudo-critics. If conservative cultural pessimism criticizes the destruction of art by the capitalist culture industry only from the point of view of its own past, when it was still a self-purposeful aesthetic in classical modernism, postmodernism twists the final push of the dissolution of art into economics into its re-appropriation by society. And while conservative cultural criticism mourns the bourgeois family and the elitist subjects of the old educated bourgeoisie, postmodernism misjudges the lonely media misery of the atomized “decentered subject” as an emancipatory spring. Some cling to the capitalist past, others to the capitalist present, both deny a new perspective for the anti-capitalist future.

Men and women, artists and car salesmen have become identical today only insofar as they have
all assumed the same empty identity of “homo economicus” and are no longer themselves as will-less agents of the “automatic subject.” The “differentiation” of sectorally split subjectivities is crushed by the market economy until everyone is a kind of car salesman, no matter what they do. The naïve belief in the cultural-industrial postmodern consumer democracy is disgraced under the dictatorship of capitalist supply. The culture industry is therefore not to be criticized because it is mass culture, but because it is absorbed in the alienated form of the “disembedded economy.” Its aesthetics are not the aesthetics of man, but the aesthetics of the commodity.

In the democracy of commodities, people as human beings no longer have anything to say. The aesthetics of commodities does not integrate the disintegrated individuals, but the commodities as ghostly pseudo-subjects. It is not the aesthetic form of a content, but the “design” of economic abstraction. This final stage of modern aesthetics can be described on several levels:

  • Firstly, it is an aesthetics of particularism. Contexts and connections are not taken into account. It ignores the fact that the whole is more and something qualitatively different than the sum of its parts. The design is the glittering aesthetics of the abstract single commodity for the consumption of the abstract single individual, while the whole of the landscape, the cities and the social space is transformed into a stinking garbage dump.
  • Secondly, this design corresponds to an aesthetic of arbitrariness. Form and content no longer have any relationship to each other, because the content itself is redefined as form. Capital is indifferent as to whether it valorizes itself through the production of pig carcasses, anti-personnel mines or laxatives. Art, which has been economized into design, must be just as indifferent to what it produces – if only it presents itself as marketable and capable of being staged in the media. This eliminates any yardstick. While conscious cultural integration must always develop standards, even if it is aware of their relativity and can change them, commodity aesthetics is a priori without standards – in keeping with the postmodern “decentered subject,” who literally “doesn’t care about anything.” A world without standards, which makes everything indifferent, can only produce one thing: endless boredom.
  • Thirdly, art and culture degraded to the design of the commodity world proves to be the aesthetics of simulation. The crazy postmodern idea of a media-induced de-realization of reality (Jean Baudrillard et al.) is only too eager to believe in the appearance of design because it produces it itself. Media simulation attempts to build a parallel virtual and dematerialized world in which capitalism no longer faces any natural or social barriers and the growth of the “disembedded economy” can continue indefinitely. In economic terms, the virtual illusory worlds of the media correspond to the casino capitalism of the last 15 years: the decoupled financial markets simulate an accumulation of capital that has long had no real economic ground under its feet. Capitalism continues to run on air, so to speak, after it has crossed the edge of the abyss. In this economic milieu of “fictitious capital” (Karl Marx) of stock market booms, debt, gambling, and “risk” sociology (Ulrich Beck), a zeitgeist has developed that wants to cover up the intolerability of capitalist impositions by “pretending.” In the simulative pose of media self-aestheticization, individuals act “as if” they were competent, successful, beautiful and reflective, while their real social relationships collapse.

Particularism, arbitrariness, and simulation reveal that destroyed art, through its mutation into commodity aesthetics, is only negatively integrated into a social life that is no longer life at all. The old problem of the separation of art and life has not been solved, but has become irrelevant because social man himself has become irrelevant. But even this irrelevance proves to be mere appearance, in which the “automatic subject” creates illusions about itself in people’s minds, so to speak. Capitalist reality must be de-realized because it has reached the absolute end of its development without any way out, while systemically conditioned people refuse to acknowledge this historical crisis. But behind the smooth design of commodity aesthetics, its true negative existence is relentlessly revealed. They cannot escape their real suffering, even if they try to de-realize themselves through the media.

The “disembedded economy” can only ever integrate itself tautologically into itself, but its claim to smooth totalization must fail, because although it can make real, sensual life negative it cannot incorporate it into its surreal world of independent abstractions – just as it is incapable of de-realizing death. The repressed does not return; it is always already there. Only on the surface of the design does the system of divisions appear to be dissolved into the economization of the world. Behind this appearance, however, the disintegrated real world becomes unbearable. Just as gender dissociation does not disappear in travesty, but rather the postmodern “feralization of patriarchy” (Roswitha Scholz) continues to shift the burdens of the social crisis primarily onto women even after the decomposition of the bourgeois family, the aesthetic misery of the functionalist world does not disappear in commodity-aesthetic design, but emerges all the more starkly in the desolation of economized public spaces.

When the real crisis can no longer be suppressed, media de-realization proceeds to “aestheticize” the unconquered and painfully perceived misery, even if this aestheticization of the crisis no longer takes on the political forms of the 1930s, but even appears “economized” in politics itself. But the motifs of fascism grin out of the commercial, commodity-aesthetic mediatization of poverty, violence and the degeneration of gender relations. The aesthetics of media de-realization and boundless arbitrariness is the aesthetics of civil war and barbarism, because they ultimately eliminate civilizational inhibitions.

There can be no return to classical modernism, just as there can be no return to the old agrarian forms of culturally integrated society. But continuing to live in capitalist disintegration is just as impossible. Art, too, can only positively transcend itself by consciously becoming the moment of a new social movement that goes beyond the old workers’ movement Marxism and exposes the root that has produced the system of divisions and functional separations. Cultural integration of society on a new, higher level of development will only be possible if the self-purpose of the economy is broken and the basic gender dissociation is abolished. The prerequisite for a new emancipatory debate today is self-defense against the capitalist economization of the world.

Originally published on exit-online.org on 01/11/2002

On the Altar of the Techno Gods

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment
Prospects for new forms of crisis competition in the looming authoritarian era of widespread late-capitalist scarcity.

Tomasz Konicz

 Competition is for losers – Peter Thiel[1]

More RAM! There simply cannot be enough memory produced after OpenAI secured a large share of the world’s production of this essential computer component in a veritable coup. Prices for DRAM[2] (especially DDR5, and to a lesser extent DDR4) are literally exploding,[3] hardware manufacturers are panic buying,[4] while memory producers are discontinuing their consumer products in order to supply only the corporate market caught up in the speculative frenzy.[5] It is an insatiable hunger for RAM, fueled by the current AI bubble, which was heightened to hysterical levels by OpenAI in October 2025 – and which has now spread to other components such as graphics cards (video memory) and SSDs.

What happened? In October 2025, OpenAI was able to simultaneously conclude two supply contracts for computer memory with two of the world’s largest manufacturers – Samsung and SK Hynix – securing around 40% of global production of this component in one fell swoop.[6] Altman managed to keep the content of the negotiations secret – neither Samsung nor Hynix were aware that OpenAI was concluding similarly gigantic deals with their competitor, which is likely to have had a positive effect on the AI company’s respective contract terms.[7]  DRAM manufacturers could have at least pushed through higher prices if they had been aware that OpenAI was going to buy up almost half of the industry’s memory output. The deals might never have come about.

After this coup – the contracts were signed within a few hours of each other – became known, panic set in, bringing back memories of the shortage economy of Soviet-style state capitalism: All relevant IT market players, competitors from the AI industry, scalpers, and ordinary consumers willing to upgrade rushed to snap up production capacities, wholesale stocks, and memory kits. This panic-driven surge in demand was only indirectly related to actual demand: No one knows what other secret deals are being hatched by AI companies swimming in investor money. As a result, everyone is trying to secure their memory supply by hoarding purchases – which is leading to a general memory shortage. This high-tech hoarding is thus a consequence of the gigantic AI bubble, in which the US in particular finds itself.[8]

OpenAI is the first company that comes to mind here, as the AI corporation does more than just buy up 40% of finished DRAM production in order to use this memory in its data centers for capital valorization in the context of AI services. Altmann not only buys finished memory modules, but also the preliminary products, the wafers, which are now stored in warehouses. Around 900,000 DRAM wafers are purchased by OpenAI every month and simply stored without being “cut” and processed into RAM.[9] It is unclear when, and if at all, this memory will be used in the AI industry, which is struggling with infrastructure bottlenecks and energy and water shortages[10],[11] – not to mention the persistent teething problems and practical application hurdles that arise during the actual implementation of AI techniques in the rationalization of real workflows in many economic sectors.[12]

Monopolistic Crisis Competition?

What Altmann is practicing with his memory deal could be described as monopolistic crisis competition. It is a crisis form of market competition that directly and immediately aims to achieve a monopoly or a dominant market position. OpenAI wants to go from startup to monopolist in one fell swoop. Control over a large part of RAM production is motivated not only by the expansion of its own AI capacities, but also by the sabotage and obstruction of competition. The memory, which is gathering dust as a wafer precursor in OpenAI’s warehouses, cannot be used by competing companies to expand their own AI models. It is not the development of the most efficient and reliable automation systems that is decisive here, but control over the necessary resources, precursors, and/or production capacities.

“Competition is for losers” – Sam Altman seems to have taken to heart the lecture given by right-wing billionaire and Trump supporter Peter Thiel, which he introduced at Stanford a few years ago under this title.[13] In his remarks on successful corporate strategies, Thiel argued in a somewhat involuntary Marxist manner, openly advocating monopoly as the ultimate goal of market competition. According to Thiel, capital-rich corporations/startups must quickly copy the innovations of the technological avant-garde and expand rapidly. Pumped full of investor money, they ensure rapid growth by offering favorable entry conditions for their products and services, so that once they have achieved a dominant market position, they can slowly tighten the screws. This is the blueprint for the often lamented “enshitification” of the internet, for the gradual deterioration of the terms of use of many online services.

Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon – there is no way around these tech giants in their respective market segments. This now leaves these companies, who often achieved their market dominance through temporary periods of loss, with all options open for profit maximization. On the one hand, OpenAI operates according to the same pattern, with the startup expanding its AI services as quickly as possible at great loss, even foregoing advertising revenue in order to push for monetization once it has established a dominant market position.

But the new factor here is the “scarcity strategy” that the AI company is apparently pursuing. It is also a kind of crisis hedging, a safeguard for the coming crisis. Sam Altman seems to be aware of the precariousness of his situation. The players in the current boom are well aware that many startups will not survive the inevitable bursting of this AI bubble. OpenAI is the “early bird,” the startup that—unlike Google, Meta, or Microsoft—has no profitable business lines that could feed the loss-making AI business. When the bubble bursts, when the gap between imminent profit expectations and bleak market reality becomes unbridgeable, OpenAI can at least hope to survive thanks to its control of 40% of memory production.

The End of Plenty

Altman’s attempt to hinder competition by buying up memory and thus dominate the AI market also highlights the state of industrial production conditions in the global high-tech industry. The market economy ideology of rising demand being immediately satisfied by rapidly growing market supply is currently colliding with oligopolistic reality in an industrial sector characterized by gigantic investment hurdles. Three corporations (Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix) are responsible for more than 90% of global DRAM production, whereby the construction of new manufacturing facilities would require billions in investments in highly complex machinery, workflows, and scarce skilled personnel as a presupposition. The aforementioned memory manufacturers are now in capitalist heaven: there appears to be a tacit agreement to fully utilize existing production capacities without pumping billions into new fabs, while DDR5 memory kits, which were available for around €80 six months ago, are now trading for just under €400.

As already mentioned, the IT industry is well aware that it has been caught up in a bubble. And that is precisely why there will be hardly any newcomers entering memory production, as no one can predict when the AI bonanza will come to a miserable end. The risk is simply too great to invest billions in factories during the boom only to find yourself in a market flooded with cheap memory once the boom is over. The tendency of late capitalist commodity production to constantly increase investment expenditure is particularly evident in the “inflexible” supply in the current memory crisis. This is precisely why OpenAI considered the strategy of “artificial scarcity” to be promising.

This artificial shortage created in the storage market is merely a reflection of the increasing actual scarcity of resources, raw materials, intermediate products, and energy sources that the late capitalist world system faces in its boundless drive for valorization. Microsoft, for example, is sitting on a mountain of unused, extremely expensive AI graphics cards that the company bought up during the current boom without ever using them.[14] There is simply not enough electricity or the necessary energy infrastructure to use all this computing power to train new AI models. The AI bubble, which consumes dystopian amounts of energy, could thus run out of hot air not only because of the discrepancy between gigantic investments and meager returns, but also because of bottlenecks in energy sources or resources. This fundamentally distinguishes the current AI boom from the US real estate bubble, which also fueled enormous resources in a speculative construction boom – but which collapsed due to its internal contradictions, namely the accumulation of bad mortgages by the exhausted US middle class.

The external, ecological barrier to capital thus also appears to set certain limits on the speculative bubble formation that has so far prolonged the systemic crisis in the 21st century.[15] However, shortages and undersupply are emerging in many other economic sectors, in raw materials such as rare earths or lithium, or in foods such as cocoa or coffee, which are already suffering from the climate crisis. Persistent inflation,[16] especially in food prices, is fueled not least by this “external barrier” to capital – while the capitalist drive for profit has only one answer to all these problems: more growth. Capitalism is thus degenerating in its old age into an economy of scarcity à la the GDR, minus the social characteristics and egalitarian population structure of state socialism.[17]

Efforts to control scarce or artificially scarce resources and/or intermediate products in order to achieve a monopolistic position are therefore likely to become a common competitive strategy in the future. What OpenAI is doing is only the beginning of a new era of monopolistic competition in late capitalism, whose compulsion to valorize is increasingly coming up against the external, ecological barrier of capital – the finiteness of resources and the full onset of climate catastrophe.[18] The differences between market competition and the usual geopolitical and crisis-imperialist strategies of resource plundering will thus become increasingly blurred.[19]

The Longing of IT Capital for an Active State

Until now, whenever a bubble formed in the 21st century, the state’s big moment came only after it burst, when it was time to cushion the devastating economic consequences with loose monetary policy and trillion-dollar crisis and investment programs. But this time, the AI gurus are calling on the state for help in the middle of the bubble. It is precisely the absurd, dystopian energy hunger of the AI industry, its inability to quickly modernize the infrastructure ruined during the neoliberal decades, that already necessitates an economically “active state.” The high-tech oligarchs are mutating into a real-life satire of Keynesian ideologues, as they wreak havoc in the milieu of old-left parties.

The industry – whose leaders normally have a penchant for right-wing libertarian market ideology – is seeking government subsidies, investments, or guarantees on several levels.[20] OpenAI has been pressuring the Trump administration, which is politically closely intertwined with the IT oligarchy, for months to extend tax breaks to the AI industry, specifically to infrastructure investments in data centers. The Bloomberg news service referred to this as Silicon Valley socialism.[21] Furthermore, taxpayers are to bear the risks of these investments in the form of government guarantees for corresponding loans, in order to reduce borrowing costs and expand investment activity.[22] The political interdependence between Silicon Valley and the Trump administration is to be followed by the economic interdependence of big business and big politics, as is characteristic of fascist forms of crisis in capitalist rule.

The insane expansion of the industry, especially the industry leader OpenAI, also seems to be aimed at simply exceeding a critical mass above which, in the event of a crisis, corporate bankruptcy must be prevented for economic reasons. The dizzying borrowing, the $1.4 trillion investment projects that are having very real economic effects, the pursuit of the closest possible ties to government financial flows—all of this suggests that Altman simply wants to make his AI corporation too big to fail. This is similar to what happens with systemic banks in financial market crises. This strategy of growing beyond the possibility of bankruptcy is so obvious that Altman felt compelled to publicly contradict it.[23]

Another argument used by AI capitalists to legitimize government support consists of the usual geopolitical competition considerations. If the US does not pump billions of taxpayer dollars into the AI industry, China will win the race for new military-grade technology, according to the usual line of argument. The whole thing is garnished with the usual bootlicking and ass-kissing necessary to secure the goodwill of the Mad King in the White House. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang,[24] is not only keen to maintain the best possible relations with the military-industrial complex and the Pentagon, with whom the company cooperates in the development of AI-supported weapon systems.[25] Huang also had no qualms about paying homage to Trump in bizarre statements, by praising the US president for courageously standing in the way of the “demonization of energy.”[26] The CEO of the world’s largest corporation, who sounded like a troll lurking on Twitter or Reddit, was apparently cheering the US’s departure from any form of climate protection.

This seems to be the political operating cost of the AI bubble. All the major players in the AI bubble are aware that they are in a speculative bubble, the industry knows that a crash is inevitable – and a large part of their activity during this boom consists precisely of preparing for the coming crash, maintaining good contacts with a state apparatus, securing themselves as comprehensively as possible in order to survive the crash and then rise to dominance in the “cleansed” market. The industry is simply dominated by the hope of hitting the big jackpot as a survivor of this cleansing market storm.

Farewell to the Illusion of Consumer Capitalism

Why all this crazy effort, such as burning vast quantities of energy sources in the midst of the rapidly unfolding climate crisis? Critics of the AI industry contrast this massive burning of resources with the digital rubbish spewed out by generative AI to flood the internet. A new word has already been coined for this: AI slop. But this is only a by-product that is only significant for the culture industry.[27]

From an economic perspective, the holy grail of the industry is the production of AI systems that can take over as many fields of work as possible, either completely or at least partially – the AI gurus simply want to sell automation.[28] This is where the dizzying potential for growth and profit lies. This is the real jackpot. Those who survive the coming crash can hope to lead a total transformation of the late capitalist mode of production that promises fantastic growth prospects and profits.[29] But this is also where the insurmountable central contradiction of the capitalist mode of production lies, its internal barrier, which is becoming fully apparent and generally visible in the AI boom.

The crisis process that began with the stagflation period of the 1970s and the IT revolution of the 1980s, which was prolonged in the 21st century by means of the globalized financial bubble economy on credit now finds its crisis-ridden conclusion in the AI revolution.[30] The class struggle fetishized by the old left is only a surface phenomenon; it is an intra-capitalist conflict over the distribution of surplus value, fought between variable capital (“the working class”) and the capitalist functional elites. What is decisive, however, is the internal contradiction of the valorization process itself: the substance of capital is wage labor, but at the same time, due to competition-driven rationalization, capital strives to minimize wage labor in the production process. The decline of the industrial workforce in most industrialized countries, which was the result of the first IT revolution in the 1980s, is now spreading to large areas of the service sector and the IT sector.[31]

Since the implementation of Fordism after World War II, mass demand from a broad middle class was considered a central economic presupposition for the valorization process of capital; mass production had to find mass demand—and this illusion of consumer capitalism was maintained even during the neoliberal era within the framework of the financial bubble economy on credit. Even as the industrial workforce dwindled, the financialization of capitalism continued to generate demand and jobs, albeit at the price of increasing financial instability and periodic crashes. Capital needs solvent mass demand in order to complete the cycle of valorization in commodity production. Otherwise, the valorization process collapses in on itself.

And it is precisely this ideology of consumer capitalism, based on economically necessary mass demand, that is already becoming insubstantial and hollow in the rise of the AI bubble. Speculative fervor is leading to inflation, not to an expansion of consumption, as in previous bubbles. Consumers are already feeling this, especially in the high-tech sector and within the gaming scene. On the one hand, the current artificial shortage is making consumers realize that mass consumption is effectively being capped in a substantial part of the consumer electronics sector in order to fuel the AI boom. The market is simply supplying the most affluent customers – and those are corporate customers. And it is precisely this clientele that the AI industry is primarily targeting with its automation products.

However, this is only the beginning of the coming AI crisis, assuming the teething problems and start-up difficulties in the automation of wage labor actually be overcome, as the industry hopes. But there can hardly be enough consumers if wage workers are replaced by AI systems or paid less. The old Fordist equation, according to which workers constitute the sales market at the same time as their demand, will no longer work—precisely because the globalized deficit economy of the neoliberal era has exhausted itself. Programmers, for example, are already successfully using AI as a tool, resulting in substantial productivity gains that are reducing working days to working hours.[32] Strictly speaking, AI does not replace programmers in individual work processes; it only makes them more productive and reduces the demands of the profession. The labor market then takes care of the rest.

The AI Cult and the Automatic Subject

Capitalist consumers then simply become superfluous human material, while the corporations and companies that massively increase their productivity with the help of the AI industry can no longer find buyers for their goods and services. The subjectless rule of capital inevitably threatens to shatter on this internal contradiction, on its internal barrier, as soon as the AI bubble runs out of hot speculative air. It is clearly evident—even the old left, highly trained in crisis ignorance, can hardly overlook this.[33]

The doubly free wage laborer, as produced by capitalism, is thus acutely threatened with extinction in the current crisis. The system will consequently enter fully into the post-capitalist transformation that is already looming. And it is fascism that seeks to steer this inevitable transformation process in a barbaric direction: On the one hand, through the introduction of forced labor, as indicated in German pre-fascism or in the prison system of the US. On the other hand, through the marginalization, exclusion, deportation or – as a last resort – simply the extermination of the “superfluous humanity” that capital produces in its agony.

The growth mania, the breakneck expansion of the AI industry, also implies all too clearly that the IT princes of Silicon Valley – who effectively want to replace humanity – have already expanded the fascist death cult of the 21st century, as it bubbles up on both sides of the Atlantic, with their own facets. The AI industry’s growth mania, which exceeds anything seen before, is also driven by an ideological factor. The transhumanism rampant in Silicon Valley forms the perfect ideology for the openly misanthropic final phase of the capitalist systemic crisis, in which only blind delusion can obscure the evident destruction of the ecological and social foundations of human civilization under the most absurd ideological contortions.

Transhumanism does not need to do this; it sees humanity as nothing more than a starting aid, a bootloader for artificial intelligence, which is supposed to inherit humanity, so to speak. That is why transhumanists do not care whether the hunger for resources and energy of AI capital further drives the climate crisis, or whether data centers are draining groundwater from entire regions.[34] They see themselves in a race against time—the self-optimizing superintelligence known as singularity, the artificial AI god that transhumanism wants to create, is to become reality before humanity’s capital depletes the foundations of life.

In fact, transhumanism wants to transform the real-abstract automatic subject of capital into reality, to concretize it, to breathe artificial life into the fetishism of capital throughout society. If necessary, the world will be sacrificed to the desired techno god on the altar of the AI industry. And no one knows exactly what the IT titans are checking out in their AI labs, as the Trump administration, which is allied with the industry, gives them a free hand in this regard. As mentioned at the beginning, OpenAI has secured 40 percent of global DRAM production – and we can only hope that this is really just a monopolistic competition strategy.

I finance my journalistic work largely through donations. If you like my writing, you are welcome to contribute – either via Patreon or Substack.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_random-access_memory

[3] https://geizhals.de/kingston-fury-beast-schwarz-dimm-kit-32gb-kf560c30bbek2-32-a3164911.html

[4] https://winfuture.de/news,154997.html

[5] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/after-nearly-30-years-crucial-will-stop-selling-ram-to-consumers/

[6] https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal

[7] https://www.slashcam.com/news/single/OpenAI-s-Secret-DRAM-Deal–Is-Sam-Altman-to-Blame–19700.html

[8] https://www.konicz.info/2025/11/09/die-kuenstliche-intelligenzblase/

[9] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-stargate-project-to-consume-up-to-40-percent-of-global-dram-output-inks-deal-with-samsung-and-sk-hynix-to-the-tune-of-up-to-900-000-wafers-per-month

[10] https://jungle.world/artikel/2024/16/kuenstliche-intelligenz-energieverbrauch-klimawandel-mehr-hunger-mehr-durst

[11] https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal

[12] https://www.konicz.info/2025/11/09/die-kuenstliche-intelligenzblase/

[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k

[14] https://redmondmag.com/blogs/generationai/2025/12/microsoft-is-sitting-on-a-pile-of-unused-gpus.aspx

[15] https://www.konicz.info/2022/01/14/die-klimakrise-und-die-aeusseren-grenzen-des-kapitals/

[16] https://www.konicz.info/2021/08/08/dreierlei-inflation/

[17] https://www.konicz.info/2021/10/14/ddr-minus-sozialismus/

[18] https://www.konicz.info/2022/01/14/die-klimakrise-und-die-aeusseren-grenzen-des-kapitals/

[19] https://www.konicz.info/2022/06/23/was-ist-krisenimperialismus/

[20] https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/warren-presses-trump-administration-on-plans-to-prop-up-openai-and-big-tech-with-taxpayer-dollars-at-the-expense-of-working-class-americans

[21] https://news.bloombergtax.com/tax-insights-and-commentary/openais-tax-subsidy-efforts-amount-to-silicon-valley-socialism

[22] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/openai-floats-federal-support-for-ai-infrastructure-what-should-the-public-expect/

[23] https://www.ft.com/content/5835a5a3-36db-41d7-9944-d9823dbdffc5

[24] Nvidia graphics cards form almost the entire technical hardware basis of the AI boom. The graphics card manufacturer has now become the most valuable company in the world.

[25] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUrJVdF2me0

[26] https://gizmodo.com/nvidia-supercomputers-for-trump-2000678264

[27] https://exitinenglish.com/2024/07/07/ai-and-the-culture-industry/

[28] https://exitinenglish.com/2024/08/03/ai-the-final-boost-to-automation/

[29] https://www.konicz.info/2025/11/09/die-kuenstliche-intelligenzblase/

[30] https://www.telepolis.de/article/Die-Krise-kurz-erklaert-3392493.html

[31] https://exitinenglish.com/2024/08/03/ai-the-final-boost-to-automation/

[32] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/12/how-do-ai-coding-agents-work-we-look-under-the-hood/?comments-page=1#comments

[33] https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/bernie-sanders-calls-for-robot-tax-to-protect-workers-from-the-impacts-of-ai/ar-AA1O5s7I

[34] https://www.konicz.info/2017/11/15/kuenstliche-intelligenz-und-kapital/

Originally published on konicz.info on 01/05/2026

Is There Such a Thing as Confucian Capitalism?

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment
Comments on a Misunderstanding of Asia

Robert Kurz

The reciprocal influence of economics and culture in the broadest sense has long been a topic in the social sciences. Two main schools of thought can be observed: One assumes the general laws of capitalism and shows how traditional cultures are decomposed by the modern economy; the other, conversely, assumes a diversity of cultures and shows how capitalism is in turn culturally reshaped and how very different versions of its general logic emerge from the major cultural circles. This link between economics and cultural history, which has been cultivated particularly in Germany since Werner Sombart and Max Weber, has given rise to the concept of “economic styles” (Bertram Schefold). Today, this approach is highly regarded in the West. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu speaks of “cultural capital,” and the U.S. historian Samuel Huntington even sees a “clash of civilizations” on the horizon following the collapse of state socialism. At the same time, the new self-confidence of Asian capitalism invokes its own “cultural identity,” which is superior to that of the “decadent West.”

Max Weber, who is often regarded as the forerunner of this economic thinking in cultural categories, did not, of course, have the idea of capitalism in cultural plurality in mind when he wrote his sociology of world religions and examined the relationship of religiously determined cultures to modern capitalism. He was much more concerned with the historical emergence of capitalism itself and the question of the transition to modernity. For in all pre-modern societies, including in Europe, the social and economic motives were religiously determined and therefore incompatible with the abstract calculation of “homo economicus.” The theory had to explain why capitalism had emerged authentically only in Western and Northern Europe, while this mode of production had been imposed on other parts of the world from the outside. As is well known, Weber came to the conclusion that the religious ideology of Protestantism was the only one suitable for a transition to a capitalist mentality, while the other religious cultures, including Buddhism and Confucianism, could not provide a suitable cultural underpinning for the development of capitalism.

It is interesting to note how Weber justified this thesis. He was well aware that both Puritan Protestantism and Confucian ethics favored a strong work ethic and rationalist thinking. Why then should Confucianism not be just as suitable as Protestantism for bringing about capitalism? For Weber, as he writes in his “Economic Ethics of World Religions,” the decisive difference was the importance of social relations outside the economic system in the narrower sense: “The Confucian ethic intentionally left people in their personal relations as naturally grown or given by relations of social super- and subordination. Confucianism hallowed alone those human obligations of piety created by inter-human relations, such as prince and servant, higher and lower offical, father and son, brother and brother, teacher and pupil, friend and friend. Puritan ethic, however, rather suspected these purely personal relationships as pertaining to the creatural; but Puritanism, of course, did allow for their existence and ethically controlled them so far as they were not against God. The relation to God had precedence in all circumstances. Overly intensive idolatrous relations of men per se were to be avoided by all means. Trust in men, and precisely in those closest to one by nature, would endanger the soul. […] From this, very important practical differences of the two ethical conceptions resulted even though we shall designate both of them as rationalist in their practical turn of mind and although both of them reached ‘utilitarian’ conclusions.”

If one replaces the puritanical “God” with economic value or simply money, then the Western economic-liberal conception of man as an isolated egoist who sacrifices all personal social ties on the altar of abstract economic rationality and purely individual success becomes immediately apparent. And because Confucianism is fundamentally opposed to this impulse, Max Weber considered it unsuitable for capitalism, in contrast to Protestantism. It may be debatable whether the specific Protestant religiosity became secularized and thus gave rise to capitalism, or whether the emerging capitalism took advantage of the Protestant ideology and tailored it to its own image. In any case, it is certain that only this European amalgam of Protestantism and capitalism gave birth to the modern world of the total market, whereas in the much older cultures of China, Japan and the rest of Asia, capitalism was only imported together with foreign, European ideas and not developed from within.

In this historical sense, Max Weber can no longer be refuted. Nevertheless, his thesis about the incompatibility of capitalism and Confucianism (but also of Buddhism and the Asian mentality in general) is now regarded as false, because China, Japan and the “little tigers” today seem to be creating a specifically Asian capitalism that differs fundamentally from the Western version, draws on its own cultural traditions, and is regarded as extremely successful. So, is economic individualism without social ties, committed only to the “god” of money, perhaps not essential to the capitalist mode of production? Are we seeing the birth of a different, even superior capitalism in Asia, which draws on the “cultural capital” of personal and social loyalty? Recently, this idea has also been championed by the U.S. political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who became famous with his thesis of the “end of history.”

I believe that we are dealing with a great illusion here, which can only be explained by the historical non-simultaneity of development. Asian capitalism is not creating a new model, but is merely passing through a stage of capitalist development that was not alien to the West in the past. All pre-modern and early modern societies, including European ones, were characterized by a structure of authoritarian deference from the bottom up, by a system of personal loyalties and dependencies, and by rigorous morality. This is not an Asian specialty, but a general characteristic of the transition from agrarian societies to capitalism. If only the individualistic ideology of Protestantism was able to produce its own authentic capitalism, then it can hardly be assumed that the Asian countries, which have merely imported capitalism, will be able to preserve the stage of authoritarian ties and personal loyalty through cultural forms that did not accommodate capitalism in the first place. The new self-confidence of Asians is a self-deception, because they have already given up their independence by adopting capitalism.

The fact that the structures of Asian capitalism are historically backward and cannot economically withstand the world market in the long term may currently be concealed by short-term competitive advantages, which to a certain extent form the (temporary) “windfall profits” of historical asynchrony; but only for minorities in a few countries. The main factor here, however, is not specifically Asian forms of “cultural capital,” but high growth rates simply due to the low starting point, as was the case with other industrial newcomers such as the Soviet Union in the 1930s, without this becoming a permanent new “model for success.” Only against this economic background can authoritarian loyalty relationships play a supporting role in success for some time.

If both the relationship of individual citizens to the state and the relationship of wage laborers to entrepreneurs is reinterpreted as a kind of personal and reciprocal relationship of loyalty from “prince to servant,” then this is merely a mask for the capitalist objectification and anonymization of all social structures. Early European capitalism also knew patriarchal companies in which social dependency still appeared quasi-feudal as a relationship between “lord” and “vassal.” Similarly, the authoritarian intervention of the state in the economy and the promotion of corporatist associations in the service of the “nation” from absolutism to the modernizing dictatorships of the 20th century was only a pupal phase of modern capitalist democracy and its abstract individualism, which corrodes all social loyalty. Insofar as it favors a strong state moderation of the economy and a sealing off of its internal markets, Asian capitalism repeats the mercantilist epoch of the West, and a certain uniformity among citizens, the constant singing of the national anthem, etc. form at most a superficial cultural and habitual accompaniment to this process.

The transfer of such ritual exercises to the business management level in Japan, such as the quasi-military joint morning exercise of employees or the ceremonial singing of “company anthems,” has been misunderstood to the point of ridicule in the West as the “new secret weapon” of Asian management philosophy and mimicked by concepts of “corporate identity.” In reality, however, these are mere transitional phenomena from the feudal to the capitalist mentality. Under the pressure of globalization, state-moderated corporatism and patriarchal business loyalty are already in decline throughout Asia. The logic of competition is prevailing on the domestic markets, and the Asian “corporate identity” is being inexorably replaced by the arch-capitalist principle of “hire and fire.”

In the long term, things will not be any better for close blood ties and obligations, which are
also not specifically Asian. To this day, “large families” and clans remain to a greater or lesser extent as fossils of the history of modernization all over the world, in Arabia, Africa and Latin America just as much as in China or Singapore, without representing a “capitalist model.” Confucian familial small-scale capitalism in China may be responsible for some of the growth today, but it remains limited to secondary services and cannot replace state industry. In the medium term, it will be more of an obstacle to export industrialization according to world market criteria. Even the Asian immigrants in the U.S., who are praised as examples of successful entrepreneurship, for the most part only occupy economic niches in the retail and hospitality industries, which are by no means independent forms of capitalism. The principle of this success is simple: family loyalty is brutally exploited, including child labor and work without pay, in order to offer cheap prices. The same principle is often followed by southern European immigrants from Turkey, Greece, Spain, etc. as restaurateurs or grocers in Germany. But how many generations will this structure of family slavery last? Not much will remain of it.

The process of capitalist individualization, which is destroying the family bond, as Marx and Engels wrote in the “Communist Manifesto,” has now also reached the metropolitan centers of Asia. And it will not stop at the code of the Confucian moral police. In Singapore, I read, spitting on the floor and peeing in elevators is punished with caning. One wonders: Had the inhabitants of Singapore peed in the elevators as a habit before? Such regulations are fatally reminiscent of the German police regulations of the 16th century, when the European world was still on its way to the (capitalist) “process of civilization” (Norbert Elias) and even intimate life was regulated by the police. Late capitalist individuals do not pee in elevators even without the threat of the police; but just as they control their intimate reflexes, they also calculate their sexual lives beyond rigid, old-fashioned morality. It is not intoxication and uninhibitedness that have taken their place in the West, but the commercialization of sexuality and even feelings. It is absurd when the Asian newcomers, of all people, who are known to live not only from the export of their cars and chips, but also from sex tourism, want to establish capitalism based on Confucian morality. Together with the automatic subject of money, McDonalds and Hollywood, they have long since caught the virus of “Western decadence” themselves.

The United States in particular, but now also Europe, are demonstrating today that the final stage of capitalism is the complete dissolution of society into autistic, abstract individuals. More than 150 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that modern society would collapse as a result. Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole is not alone in invoking pre-modern and early modern ideals to avert this danger. Francis Fukuyama meanwhile looks to Asia in search of support for unrestrained capitalism “through certain aspects of traditional culture.” He wishes for a capitalism that is “infused with cultural traditions that spring from non-liberal sources”: a tempering of the pure market with the “social capital” of voluntary, civil corporations and a “general mutual trust.” Pious wishes, cold coffee. There will be no pious, vegetarianized Confucian capitalism because the secularized puritanical god of money does not tolerate other gods alongside him in any culture and directly binds naked individuals to himself. Max Weber will probably be right with his thesis of a lack of capitalist compatibility between Confucianism and Buddhism, not only for history but also for the future.

Originally published in Folha de São Paulo on 09/15/1996