The Fear of the Roma Among Ordinary People

July 26, 2026 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

Antiziganism and Feeling Superfluous

In today’s left-wing circles, class struggle and traditional Marxism are all the rage. They pander to the average Joe willing to work and imagine a working class that has long since ceased to exist. In this predicament, they present themselves as representatives of “the 99%.” And all this at a time when AI is on the verge of swallowing up more and more jobs. Yet “unproductive” people are viewed with suspicion by this left. One group in particular rubs the average Joe – whom they populistically fawn over – the wrong way: Sinti and Roma – the largest minority in Europe.

Anti-Gypsy attacks and intensifying anti-Gypsy propaganda in the media have been observed in this country since the early 1990s. In 1992, pogroms took place in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, where the hatred was initially directed against Roma seeking asylum. Since then, reports have focused on crime, begging, and hygiene issues; in recent years, there has been an increased emphasis on organized welfare fraud and similar topics. Today, people prefer to speak of “Romanians and Bulgarians” because the term “Gypsy” is considered politically incorrect. However, this does not prevent anyone from drawing on the same stock of common anti-Roma stereotypes under this new label. Structural issues surrounding poverty and the housing crisis are ignored in the process. The right-wing shift over the past decade has only exacerbated this. Yet anti-Gypsy discrimination and persecution have a long tradition.

Modernity and Antiziganism

Sinti and Roma first appeared in Central Europe at the beginning of the 15th century. At the end of the 15th century, they were declared outlaws for the first time, a fate that would befall them repeatedly thereafter. The early modern period brought about profound changes. Feudalism entered a crisis, nation-states gradually took shape, and the Protestant work ethic came to the fore. From then on, nomadic groups were regarded as difficult to control and economically unproductive. For this reason, they were oppressed and persecuted, by no means only in Germany.

Until the Enlightenment, the image of the “Gypsy” fluctuated with that of the beggar, the vagabond, and “vulgar” traveling people in general. In the 18th century, a clear “racialization” of the stereotype took place. As is well known, the view prevailed during the Enlightenment that only the “white race” was capable of civilization. “Gypsies” were now declared a “primitive race.” As a result, social and racial discrimination became significantly intertwined in the Gypsy stereotype, which also encompassed romantic elements. “Gypsies” stood, in a diffuse way, for uninhibited freedom. This romantic dimension was fueled not least through music and dance (keyword: “Carmen”). As for the gendered connotations of antiziganism, the “Gypsy woman” was constructed as the antithesis of the chaste housewife, wife, and mother, who was conceived as complementary to the ideal of the disciplined wage laborer in the realm of reproduction. The “Gypsy woman” was primarily imagined as sexually seductive and witch-like.

Anti-Gypsy Measures in Germany

In the 19th century, “Gypsies” were considered “persons of inferior rights.” As early as the mid-19th century, files on “Gypsies” were systematically created. From the beginning of the 20th century, the aim was to register as many Sinti and Roma as possible, with photographs taken and fingerprints recorded. Under National Socialism, based on racist assumptions, it was assumed that “Gypsies” were no longer “racially pure.” Arising from the intermarriage of Gypsies with “racially inferior” Germans, “Gypsy half-breeds” in particular were deemed predominantly asocial. Sinti and Roma were forcibly sterilized and declared “socially mentally deficient.” The Nuremberg Race Laws, which initially applied only to Jews, were extended to them. In 1935, Sinti and Roma began to be interned in so-called “Gypsy camps.”

In 1938, Himmler ordered the “final solution to the Gypsy question […] based on the nature of the race.” In December 1941, it was decreed that “Gypsies” should be treated the same as Jews. Decisions regarding the manner of their extermination were left to the commanders of the Security Police and the Security Service, with the result that many Sinti and Roma were shot on the spot. In July 1944, the last gassing took place in Auschwitz, to which Sinti and Roma had been deported from numerous countries since early 1943.

In the postwar period, Sinti and Roma were frequently housed in dilapidated emergency shelters or settled on the outskirts of towns. So-called “Gypsy experts” were hired by government offices; likewise, records from the Nazi era were used – the special registration of Sinti and Roma continued. In various cities, policy documents were issued to prevent the presence of “Gypsies” (now called “Landfahrer”) at all costs.

The assessors of Sinti and Roma restitution claims were former employees of the Reich Health Office. In the 1980s, new guidelines were issued and modest reparations were granted. At the same time, some Sinti and Roma were no longer granted German citizenship. A precondition for these reparations was protest actions by the Sinti and Roma themselves, which also led to their recognition as an ethnic minority in Germany.

Anti-Semitism, Antiziganism, and Other Forms of Racism

In modern times, “Gypsies” are associated with a lack of ties and a refusal to work. But what, then, is the difference between antiziganism and antisemitism, which stands for similar things? In capitalism, Jews are primarily associated with power, domination, and a destructive civilization; “Gypsies,” on the other hand, are viewed as inferior and rooted in nature because they remind us of a possible life beyond the accursed labor society. Holger Schatz and Andrea Woeldike, commenting on this, write: “What they have in common, however, is the mechanism whereby the exclusion and physical persecution of the ‘non-identical’ supposedly provides psychological relief while simultaneously allowing repressed desires to be projected outward. What one cannot have oneself, no one else should possess either. The ‘idea of happiness’ must be driven out.”

We should emphasize here that, unlike antisemitism, antiziganism is a form of “romantic racism” (Wulf D. Hund). One might even consider to what extent “the Gypsy” corresponded far more to the (repressed) notions of happiness held by the masses – at least under Fordism – than “the Jew” did. Much of what is associated with the Gypsy stereotype – the soulful folk song, the fairground, the circus, the “coming and going” – was certainly closer to the feelings of happiness of “ordinary people” in the Fordist phase than the stereotypes regarding Jews, who were imagined as rich and powerful and also stood for a foreign, bourgeois culture, even if the common denominator can be found in the accusation of being “work-shy parasites.” In contrast to other “savages” (Native Americans, South Sea islanders, and so on), who are likewise equated with nature, the “Gypsy,” however, has long been an integral part of the culture and society in which one lives. For this reason, and because – unlike the “Black” person – they cannot be enslaved, they are persecuted; this is linked to the ever-present fear of one’s own descent into “asociality,” a fear of which the “Gypsy” is also a constant reminder.

Homo Sacer and the Gypsies

Giorgio Agamben’s legal-theoretical reflections can be fruitfully applied to the analysis of antiziganism. He is concerned with the relationship between rule and exception: “It is not the exception that eludes the rule; it is the rule that, by suspending itself, gives way to the exception; and the rule establishes itself as a rule by remaining in relation to the exception. The particular ‘force of the law’ derives from this ability to remain in contact with an outside.” Here, the individual is reduced to a mere body, to “naked life,” while it is the sovereign who rules over the state of exception. A decisive role in Agamben’s work is played by the “Homo sacer,” a concept derived from Roman law that gave his book its title. The Homo sacer is an outlaw who falls outside the law (but is precisely for that reason enclosed within it) and can be killed with impunity.

Something similar was expressed in the structures of persecution and internment of modernity, taken to an extreme in Nazism. Agamben sees the state of exception emerging once again today in the disintegration of state organizations, the establishment of camps, and “illegitimate assaults” (such as mass rapes). In such phenomena, which according to Agamben are precisely a fundamental precondition for the law, he sees an omen for the entire world. In these crisis-ridden processes of decay, all are thus potentially homines sacri.

Robert Kurz takes up Agamben’s reflection on the relationship between legal form and exclusion and links it to considerations regarding the “constitution of politics and the economy, of abstract labor and the state apparatus” in modernity. The space of “excluding enclosure, of reduction to naked life” was still called the “house” in early modernity: “The poorhouse, workhouse, prison, asylum, slave house – the ‘houses of horror’ in which, as an example for society as a whole, the training in externally determined abstract labor took place, a process intensified in the camps of the later modernizing and crisis dictatorships. This original state of exception has become the modern normal state that underlies all rule of law.”

The global crisis of the third industrial revolution today differs from earlier crises in that sovereignty itself is beginning to “dissolve, because the space of enclosing exclusion is also dissolving. […] Sovereignty, to the extent that it still exists, reacts reflexively with its customary crisis measures, even though these come to nothing.” Forced labor, low wages, the camp, the management of people, and so on are now being reactivated for the superfluous in the crisis of the working society at a new level of decay. Yet the general threat is expressed in differences in the exclusionary measures and ideologies. Even today, “enclosing exclusion […] takes place in the polarized pattern of racism and anti-Semitism” (Robert Kurz).

These discussions, however, fail to address the specific anti-Gypsy syndrome. Alongside the Jews, it was precisely the “Gypsies” who were not only regarded as foreign in race, but who, over the course of centuries, were repeatedly declared outlaws in the very sense Agamben describes. In modern times, a permanent state of emergency was effectively imposed on Sinti and Roma, insofar as they were constructed as the absolute antithesis to the modern disciplinary process and to “Protestant ethics” within one’s own society. Although the “Gypsies” are “Homines sacri” par excellence, as their history of persecution proves, they are generally forgotten even in critical accounts of racism; and it is precisely in this act of forgetting that the fact is expressed that the “Gypsy” represents, so to speak, the Homo sacer of the Homo sacer. Constructed as the embodiment of “asociality” and “foreignness,” regarded as the “scum of humanity” (as the Enlightenment “Gypsy expert” Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb Grellmann put it in the 18th century), and thus representing the quintessential cautionary example for the “normal” person: He shows them where they will end up if they do not conform and comply, but instead behave “like the Gypsies.” Even integrated Sinti and Roma are buried under a mountain of stereotypes in everyday life if they “admit” to belonging to this group.

Structural Antiziganism

Quite a few Roma work in the low-wage sector under precarious conditions and/or are dependent on basic social assistance, including the prospect of “forced labor,” as this now increasingly threatens “ordinary” people as well. In the context of the new mass migration, refugees who need “welfare” are already in the classic “Gypsy position.” The problem of “undocumented status” is also already anticipated in anti-Gypsyist policies.

Here, general and specifically anti-Gypsy measures of crisis management intertwine with a mass anti-Gypsy ideology. The more the middle classes face the danger of social decline, the more they recognize themselves in the prototype of the superfluous and outcast in European societies: the “Gypsy.” Just as one can speak of a structural anti-Semitism that manifests itself not least in attacks on the financial markets and in the imagination of a global conspiracy, even when Jews are not mentioned at all, so too can one speak of a structural anti-Gypsyism when, in the fear of one’s own downfall, decline in status, and a slide into antisocial behavior and criminality, the antiziganist stereotype implicitly comes into play, even when “Gypsies” are not mentioned at all. The oscillation between social discrimination and racist exclusion makes the Gypsy stereotype particularly suitable for this purpose.

Structural antiziganism, however, is harder to recognize than structural antisemitism because it is rarely addressed or, at best, treated only marginally. After all, the modern subject would have to recognize itself in the mirror with its Homo Sacer fear. That is why it looks away from the start. On the other hand, it has always known that the “Gypsy” is the “very last,” as surveys show.

Contemporary antiziganism is also a reaction to the massive crises of capitalist collapse. The impending decline of the middle classes is now compounded by galloping inflation, a housing shortage, and so on. Linked to this is the spread of racist ideologies from both “above” and “below” – that is, an “alliance of mob and elite” (Hannah Arendt).

Today’s regressive mainstream left, with its traditional focus on the respectable and decent wage laborer, implicitly targets the so-called lumpenproletariat as the “dregs” of society – and thus also the “Gypsies,” who, in the racist narrative, rank even lower than the “native” lumpenproletariat.

Originally published in Konkret No. 3 in 2026.

The Cost of Artificial Fertilizer

July 26, 2026July 26, 2026 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

Tomasz Konicz

The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, skyrocketing fertilizer prices, and climate change threaten to trigger a global food crisis. Late-capitalist agriculture is existentially dependent on fossil fuels and produces not only food but also the very conditions of its own destabilization.

At first glance, it seems absurd, but the inhabitants of the late-capitalist world system are, in a sense, feeding themselves on fossil fuels. Without artificial fertilizer – which has played a central role in the agricultural industry since at least the so-called Green Revolution in the second half of the 20th century – global crop yields, which have risen sharply since then, would plummet. Most scientists agree that more than 40% of the world’s population could not be fed without synthetic fertilizers.

Three components are essential in mineral fertilizers: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Nitrogen fertilizers are based on ammonia, which is produced from natural gas using the energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process – a process responsible for about three percent of global CO₂ emissions. Sulfur, which is necessary for processing phosphate rock and on which phosphate fertilizer production depends, is a byproduct of oil and gas extraction. The production of mineral fertilizers is thus linked to the extraction of fossil fuels. About 50% of food production costs are now attributable to the energy consumption of the highly automated agricultural industry. As a result, rising oil prices are also driving up the production and distribution costs of food – for example, due to more expensive diesel.

The Gulf states, which are now suffering from the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, have managed – as part of their diversification strategy – to emerge over the past decades as a major production hub for synthetic fertilizers and their precursors, as well as a central transshipment point for essential goods in the agricultural industry. In this so-called vertical integration, raw material-producing countries strive to dominate as large a portion of the industrial production chain as possible. And they have succeeded: About 43% of one of the most widely used nitrogen fertilizers, urea, is exported through the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf states were also responsible for about 45% of global sulfur exports. About 30% of ammonia production takes place in the region, primarily in Saudi Arabia and Oman. In total, the now-blocked region produces about one-fifth of all fertilizer used worldwide.

According to the Financial Times in April, a global food crisis is consequently unfolding that couldn’t even be mitigated if the Strait of Hormuz were to be opened immediately. For one thing, production capacities at competing fertilizer industry sites – such as in Russia and Belarus – are not large enough to compensate for these enormous shortfalls. Setting up new production sites would take years. The rapprochement between the U.S. and Belarus in March, which was accompanied by prisoner releases and a lifting of U.S. sanctions, was specifically aimed at promoting the production and export of Belarusian fertilizer to alleviate this supply crisis.

However, the decisive factor in the crisis lies in the simple fact that food cultivation is a seasonal industry. The time for sowing and the corresponding application of fertilizer has already arrived or passed in many regions of the world. And in many impoverished regions on the periphery or semi-periphery of the world system, agricultural producers are simply unable to cope with the rise in fertilizer prices. By mid-April, fertilizer prices had skyrocketed by 20% – and in the case of urea, by as much as 49% – compared to just before the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. This means that simply less fertilizer will be used, which will inevitably lead to a slump in expected crop yields. The poorer the region, the greater the crop losses.

Sub-Saharan Africa is particularly affected, where financially strapped farmers can barely afford enough fertilizer to optimize their yields anyway. Here, fertilizer price increases almost automatically lead to reduced consumption and, consequently, falling yields. Regionally, the East African countries of Kenya, Somalia, and Tanzania are particularly dependent on overseas fertilizer shipments from the Gulf region, where transportation costs have risen by up to 300%.

Sudan, a devastated post-state entity, on the other hand, is the epicenter of the coming hunger crisis – though due to the civil war: About 21 million people there are threatened by acute food insecurity, and approximately 375,000 residents are starving. According to the United Nations World Food Program, the number of extremely poor people suffering from acute hunger could rise by 45 million this year to a record 363 million due to the war on Iran and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Billions of people are likely to be affected by a deterioration in the nutritional situation, such as an increase in malnutrition.

In the semi-periphery of the capitalist world system, India and Brazil are suffering most from the war-induced cut in fertilizer exports: More than half of the fertilizer imported by India has so far been transported through the Strait of Hormuz; for Brazil – one of the world’s most important agricultural producers – the figure was 45% before the war broke out. Australia even imported 70% of its fertilizers from the Gulf region. In the case of India, the world’s most populous country, the situation is particularly dire: Domestic fertilizer production relies heavily on natural gas, which currently cannot be transported through the Strait of Hormuz in the fragile liquefied natural gas tankers – where attacks or sea mines would result in massive explosions. In early May, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on his fellow citizens to reduce their consumption of cooking oil, fossil fuels, and fertilizers. Similar dependencies on Gulf gas also exist in fertilizer production in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

In the core of the world system, the situation appears less dramatic at first glance: If the blockade drags on into the summer, the Financial Times estimates that food price inflation in the U.S. – currently around four percent and already factored into prices – could rise into the “double digits.” A similar scenario is likely to unfold in the EU. The U.S. agricultural sector – which is essential for global food security and whose workers, if they are U.S. citizens, form part of Donald Trump’s core electorate – is already suffering from the tariff and trade wars waged by its far-right president, and now also from rising energy and fertilizer prices in the wake of the war with Iran. The former alone led to a 46% year-over-year increase in farm bankruptcies in 2025. In 2024, the U.S. was the largest exporter of agricultural goods, ahead of Brazil, and it leads the world in corn and soybean production.

And then there’s global warming

These consequences of the geopolitical crisis are intertwined with the climate crisis caused by capitalism, which, although largely ignored by now, nevertheless increasingly undermines the ecological foundations of civilization. Meanwhile, historical records for maximum temperatures and the duration of droughts are being broken one after another – as was most recently the case in March in the U.S. – without this even being widely acknowledged by the public anymore. Capital’s fetishistic compulsion to accumulate value – which fuels the ceaseless clamor for growth and jobs – has long since prevailed in public opinion over the real physical constraints of the climate crisis – from Trump to the Left Party.

The rise in food prices in recent years has already been driven by increasingly frequent and prolonged extreme weather events – such as droughts and heavy rains – that are characteristic of the manifest climate crisis: Affected crops include cocoa in Africa and South America, olive oil in Europe, vegetables in the western United States, rice in Japan, and onions and potatoes in India – extreme weather events have been increasing in frequency over the past half-decade.

At the same time, the United States is currently experiencing a historically unprecedented spring drought that has affected about 60% of its farmland. The southeastern United States has been hit particularly hard, especially Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, where farmers have in some cases stopped planting due to the high costs of diesel and fertilizer, as well as the Midwest, where, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, wheat acreage is expected to shrink this year to its lowest level since 1919, resulting in a smaller harvest. In Kansas and Oklahoma, more than 40% of wheat-growing areas are reportedly in “poor or very poor condition.”

In the EU, after years of prolonged droughts, the situation is not much better: nearly half of the cropland is threatened by drought, and an additional 17% is even experiencing acute drought. Nearly all EU member states, as well as the southeastern part of the United Kingdom, are affected to varying degrees. Following a historic lack of rainfall in March and April, Poland is emerging as a drought hotspot, where crop yields are likely to plummet due to low soil moisture. The same is true for eastern Germany, southeastern Europe, Spain, and France. In fact, Europe is in a prolonged phase of drying out – the climate crisis is a reality.

In April, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned that rapidly increasing periods of “extreme heat” were pushing the global food system to the brink of collapse. Further climate shocks are on the horizon in the short and medium term. According to scientific forecasts, this year’s El Niño event could be particularly intense. During such events, water temperatures in the eastern Pacific rise at an above-average rate, which can lead to droughts in countries bordering the western Pacific, in South Africa, or in the Amazon region, while causing flooding in western Latin America – with corresponding consequences for crop yields. Extreme drought in many regions of the world has already led to wildfires consuming more and more forest area each year.

In the long term, the weakening Gulf Stream – part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – is also likely to become one of the most significant factors contributing to climate crises in Europe and North America. Scientific studies have confirmed the long-standing rule in climate science that the most pessimistic forecasts are usually the ones that most accurately reflect climate reality. The Gulf Stream carries warm Caribbean water into the North Atlantic, where it slowly sinks and flows back southward like an assembly line, giving Europe its relatively mild climate – compared to the same latitude in Siberia, for example. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet threatens to weaken this already waning circulation – which is based on density differences between saltwater and freshwater – by introducing freshwater; according to studies, this could happen as early as the end of the century. However, there is a high degree of uncertainty. The consequences would be severe climatic upheavals, such as a drop in temperature and desertification – particularly in Western Europe – to which the ailing late-capitalist agricultural system would be barely able to adapt.

Capital vs. The Climate

Capital, with its boundless drive for valorization, is not only the cause of the climate crisis, as evidenced by CO₂ emissions rising almost in parallel with global economic growth. The increase in productivity of the agricultural capital machine does not lead to the conservation of remaining agricultural soils and resources, but rather to the establishment of an agricultural system that is not only ecologically ruinous but also harmful to health. It is a system that, for example, responded to the explosion in corn yields with the invention and widespread use of high-fructose corn syrup – a sugar concentrate that has replaced ordinary sugar in food production and is considered partly responsible for the obesity epidemic in the United States.

The orientation of food production toward the irrational end in itself of maximizing profits is making the agricultural sector increasingly unstable and vulnerable to crises: monocultures, soil depletion, low genetic variability in livestock populations, and the near-extinction of insect populations in many intensively farmed regions are the consequences.

The climate crisis is a capitalist climate crisis in two respects: Capital is the cause, and it exacerbates the social consequences of its own ecological crisis. All of the factors mentioned above increase the system’s vulnerability to crisis, which actually necessitates a rapid course correction. Even the Financial Times has recognized this, advocating for a shift toward sustainable agriculture in which monocultures would be replaced by crop rotation. Increased use of natural fertilizers would be just as necessary as prioritizing “soil health” over short-term yield increases. Added to this would be the necessary extensive debt relief for all peripheral countries, which will be hit particularly hard by the coming food crisis.

Just how likely such a reformist shift is in a late-stage capitalist system – one that, not only in Germany, is responding to its manifest crisis with an intensified flight into the fossil-fuel-driven growth delusion – was made clear by the EU’s most recent major agricultural reform in 2020, which, despite some marginal ecological concessions, clung to the fundamentals of existing agricultural practices: 25% of EU agricultural subsidies were tied to farmers’ participation in climate measures, while member states were largely given free rein to define what they consider “climate programs.” This is arguably less than a drop in the bucket: According to the German Federal Environment Agency, emissions from agriculture in the EU declined more slowly (down 25% between 1990 and 2023) than the average for society as a whole (down 36% over the same period). Globally, CO₂ emissions continue to rise.

Originally published in Jungle World No. 22 in 06/2026.

Betrayal on Principle

May 29, 2026 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

A look back and ahead at the crisis-imperialist constellations within which the self-administration in northern Syria’s Rojava region must assert itself.

Tomasz Konicz

To understand the current catastrophe facing the Kurdish freedom movement in Rojava, it helps to look back at its geopolitical context during the height of the Syrian civil war. The United States, in the midst of its hegemonic decline, was the central factor here. There were two interventionist approaches toward Syria, which was sinking into civil war, that competed with one another within U.S. foreign policy. During the Obama administration, this conflict was also played out relatively openly.[1] While the CIA sought to instrumentalize “moderate” Sunni Islamist militias, the Pentagon relied on the Syrian Kurds in the emerging Rojava to break the advance of the Islamic State (IS).[2]

As is well known, the Pentagon prevailed. And this happened for one simple reason: The Kurdish self-defense forces were highly effective in the fight against the genocidal Islamofascism of the IS, as they were fighting for an emancipatory society.[3] Neither of these qualities could truly be said of the CIA’s Islamist-influenced militias, which mostly viewed IS as mere competition. The intense, militarily successful phase of cooperation between the Pentagon and Rojava spanned from the defense of Kobane in September 2014 to the liberation of Raqqa in October 2017.[4] This took place amid constant tensions with Ankara, as Turkey acted as one of IS’s most important supporters and was determined to destroy Kurdish autonomy in Syria.

Yet Washington’s support for the Kurds of Syria had always been fragile, rendering their geopolitical situation precarious. Even during the Obama administration, the decline of American hegemony was already underway, a process that Trump is now carrying through to its bitter imperial end. The deployment of American forces against the Islamic State took place during a phase in which Washington, as part of its pivot to Asia intended to focus more intensely on the struggle for hegemony against China and the containment of the People’s Republic in Southeast Asia.[5] Washington thus only reluctantly assumed its role as “world policeman” in response to the regional collapse in Syria’s “war of state decomposition” (Robert Kurz).

Washington’s reluctance had its reasons: The disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq, perpetrated by the neocons as part of their intended democratization of the Middle East, constituted the most significant tipping point, which immensely accelerated the gradual process of erosion of American hegemony. The rapid military victory over Saddam Hussein’s poison gas regime was followed by state collapse and a murderous civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. The neocons’ idea of cementing American hegemony in the oil-rich region through democratization backfired – accelerating the decline of American hegemony.

The crisis-driven surge of state decomposition in the region, in which Libya and Syria also collapsed in the wake of the Arab Spring, was thus effectively initiated by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Western hegemonic nation-building, which was forced through as part of the “wars for world order” (Robert Kurz) of globalization, failed across the board, as the global crisis of capital had long since stripped the ailing ruins of modernization in the periphery of their economic foundation: from Somalia, through Afghanistan and Libya, to Iraq. However, the chaos of state collapse also opened up spaces for the only significant emancipatory impulse that was able to hold its ground in the general process of disintegration in Northern Syria. What the neocons failed to achieve in Iraq suddenly seemed to be working in Rojava.

The remnants and ideological vestiges of this democratization approach within the U.S. state apparatus consequently supported Kurdish self-administration for tactical reasons, but these forces very quickly lost all relevance due to the disaster in Iraq. Rojava was only significant to the U.S. in the context of containing the Islamic State. Especially since the neocons’ democratization strategy was a democratic means to a hegemonic, imperial end aimed at the region’s fossil fuel resources: Democratization – which would effectively have been financed by oil exports – was intended to go hand in hand with the region’s integration into the United States’ hegemonic system, which meant Washington’s indirect, mediated control. This was intended to cement the dominance of the petrodollar. Rojava, with its marginal local oil reserves, could not serve this purpose; all that remained was the ideology of democratization, without the economic foundation of the neocons’ hegemonic calculus still being in place.

An Early Farewell to Human Rights Imperialism

In other words: The geopolitical value of the Syrian Kurds was rapidly declining following their victory over the Islamic State, especially as the old hegemonic mindset within the U.S. ruling elites gave way to a new, openly imperialist calculus personified by Donald Trump. As early as May 2017, Trump had his then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson deliver a keynote speech on foreign policy in which human rights were rejected as an ideological factor in American foreign policy, so that American interests could henceforth be pursued openly without the “ballast of human rights.”[6] Much of what Trump is currently practicing in terms of naked imperialist policy was already announced in 2017.[7] The betrayal of former geopolitical “partners” is thus the new principle of American power politics, whose open imperialism no longer needs to take into account the institutional and democratic façade of the old U.S. hegemony (under Obama, Washington still made an effort to appear as a “reliable” power factor in foreign policy in order to find willing proxies in the future as well).

About six months after this speech by the U.S. Secretary of State, which effectively initiated the U.S. transition from hegemonic policy to naked crisis imperialism – a transition completed by early 2026,[8] Turkey, with NATO backing attacked the Syrian Kurds in Afrin,[9] which was then under Russian influence. Shortly thereafter, a second Turkish invasion followed in the American sphere of influence in Rojava. The self-governing regions in northern Syria were practically sold off in an imperialist haggle: in early 2018, Vladimir Putin gave the green light for the invasion of the canton of Afrin, which was within Russia’s sphere of influence.[10] In October 2019, Donald Trump gave free rein to Turkey’s expansionist ambitions in northeastern Syria, allowing Ankara to establish another occupation zone in Rojava.[11]

These two military campaigns by Turkish Islamofascism in northern Syria, which were accompanied by ethnic cleansing, illustrate Erdogan’s imperialist expansion strategy, in which he played a high-stakes game, oscillating between Russia and the West to extract concessions from both sides for further land grabs.[12] Erdogan’s imperial leverage, as the controller of a strategically important country, is far greater than that of the Syrian Kurds, who were needed only to contain the Islamic State and serve as a counterweight to the Assad regime. Putin sold out the Kurdish region of Afrin for a nuclear and pipeline deal; with Trump, it was likely just an affinity for authoritarian figures and an effort to keep Ankara within the Western alliance.

With the collapse of the Assad regime in late 2024, the regional balance of power shifted further to Rojava’s disadvantage. The Islamist alliance – backed by Turkey, the U.S., and, to a limited extent, Israel – which swept away the shell of the Syrian state apparatus within days, achieved a strategic objective of the West and Israel in the region. The Shiite corridor, through which the Iranian mullah regime had been able to project its military power to the border of Israel, was severed; Hezbollah’s logistics were severely disrupted, and following its defeat by Israel, it was thus no longer capable of intervening in Syria.

In effect, this is where the CIA’s intervention strategy – mentioned at the outset – prevailed, as the agency ultimately struck a deal with the ideological and/or organizational successors to al-Qaeda in order to achieve a geopolitical objective. With the remnants of the Syrian state, the Islamists merely destroyed what was already in the process of disintegrating due to the crisis. And they were also so successful because they did not have to fight against their own kind, against the Islamic State, which had previously been defeated by the military forces of Rojava at great cost.

The al-Qaeda State

About a quarter of a century after the attacks on the World Trade Center, organized by an al-Qaeda leader named Osama bin Laden who had been nurtured by the CIA in Afghanistan, the United States brought the political heirs of this Islamofascist terrorist group to power in Damascus. For the U.S., this is part of its struggle for dominance against China. Washington views al-Qaeda’s Sunni extremism as a bulwark against Shiite Iran, which is part of the Eurasian alliance system centered on Beijing. Russia has indeed been pushed out of the region, and Iran has been weakened.

The biggest beneficiary of this al-Qaeda state – which will be just as unstable as the Assad regime – is Turkey, which has been able to massively expand its power base in the region as a result. The Europeans (especially Berlin), in turn, hope to soon be able to deport refugees back to Syria. That is why Berlin remains just as adamantly silent about the massacres and ethnic cleansing currently taking place in Rojava as it did previously regarding the jihadist mass murders on the Alevi coast or in the Druze region in the south. The country would thus become an open-air prison guarded by Islamists for the region’s economically superfluous population.[13]

There is no longer any talk of democratization or free elections in Syria; the human rights imperialism of the neoliberal era has also receded into the background in Europe. Brussels, Berlin, and Paris are following Washington with a time lag. The only goal now is to ascribe some sort of legitimacy and stability to the emerging al-Qaeda in Syria in order to be able to deport people there. In effect, this constitutes collaboration with fascism in its Islamic-clerical form; it is an effort to somehow pacify the crisis-ridden region through the murderous terror of the jihadists, to bring about a deathly silence. And – this prediction can already be made – of course, this European hope for Islamist graveyard silence will be shattered by Islamist terror (one might even ask whether Washington does not in fact intend this destabilizing factor as part of its now relatively open struggle against the EU).

After December 2024, there was effectively only one regional power left with an interest in Rojava’s existence: Israel. Tel Aviv appeared to support the overthrow of the Assad regime, at least tactically, yet at the same time, Israel immediately sought to limit the power of the Islamists in Syria. Sunni extremism was to be largely neutralized by autonomous regions controlled by minorities: the Druze in the southwest, the Alevis on the coast – and the Kurds in the north and northeast. Support for the Kurds thus stemmed primarily not from political or ideological sympathies, but from geopolitical calculation. Moreover, Israel finds itself in confrontation with Erdogan’s Turkey over supremacy in the region, where Ankara seeks to expand in the tradition of the Ottoman Empire. By the end of 2025, for instance, Greece, Cyprus, and Israel had formed an alliance clearly directed against Ankara, intended to neutralize Turkey’s quest for dominance in the eastern Mediterranean.[14]

So what has happened? Why is Tel Aviv now silent as an unstable, Islamist state closely intertwined with Ankara forms on its northeastern flank? For one thing, Washington has simply prevailed – it is U.S. soldiers who are stationed in Rojava. And Trump already sided with Erdogan and against the Kurds during his first presidency. The fascists in the White House feel closer to Erdogan, with his authoritarian hybrid ideology of nationalism and Islamism, than to the Kurdish self-administration focused on emancipation. Especially since Turkey, as mentioned above, represents an important – albeit increasingly problematic – link for the US and the EU in the region. Just how quickly the Kurds are being sold out to secure other concessions was made clear, for example, by French President Macron’s email to Donald Trump, which the latter simply made public. Macron, who had often spoken out publicly in support of the Syrian Kurds, suddenly found himself on the same page as Trump regarding Syria and Iran – only to then contradict him during the Greenland conflict.[15]

Iran as the new Syria?

Iran is the key word here. Today’s Iran exhibits a structure similar to that of Syria during the Arab Spring: an authoritarian, internally hollowed-out state in ruins, effectively in the throes of economic and ecological collapse (which is why it was easy for Israeli intelligence agencies to comprehensively infiltrate this eroding state apparatus). The last major wave of uprisings and protests, which could only be crushed through state-sponsored mass murder, claiming the lives of likely tens of thousands of demonstrators, was supported by broad segments of the population.[16] In addition to the usual suspects – the liberal bourgeoisie, which has long hated the moral terror – impoverished wage earners and small business owners, who are suffering from the currency collapse and inflation, also participated in the protests.[17] In parts of the country, the water supply is collapsing simply due to the manifest climate crisis.[18]

Washington – and Israel in particular – therefore want to seize the moment and overthrow the mullah regime. Although “overthrow” might be the wrong word, given the U.S. approach toward Venezuela.[19] There is no talk of democratization or elections in the case of Iran either; instead, the archaic institution of the Shah of Persia (of all things) is to be revived – that is, precisely the repressive, murderous regime that swept away the 1979 revolution, which failed due to fundamentalist mass terror.[20] The U.S. effectively wants to replace a hostile Islamic-fascist regime with one subservient to the U.S. After Venezuela, Iran would thus neutralize another of China’s supply hubs. For Israel, however, a central security policy objective is at stake. The regime that has elevated the annihilation of the Jewish state to a state doctrine, that publicly cheered and militarily supported the Hamas pogroms and massacres of October 7, could be overthrown.

And this regime reshaping, this regime design – as was made clear in the case of Venezuela – is far more cost-effective than the resource-draining efforts of the neocons to establish democratization and U.S. hegemony in the region through regime change. The goal is simply to eliminate the fundamentalist forces within the Iranian regime, while at the same time making appropriate offers to factions and cliques willing to cooperate in order to retain power.[21] The mass murderers within the Iranian repressive apparatus, on whose orders thousands of demonstrators were recently shot down, could thus retain their positions of power even after the intended “overthrow of the government,” provided they show themselves to be cooperative.

The crisis-induced erosion of state structures makes this approach toward individual cliques within the apparatus conceivable, after all – Venezuela serves as the blueprint for this new form of U.S. crisis imperialism, which has long since forgotten its isolationist campaign promises. Yet this by no means implies that this approach, which has been successful in Venezuela (at least in the short term), will also work against a regional power like Iran – at least not without war.

This “regime design” intended by the U.S. – the reshaping of the Iranian regime to align with U.S. interests – would most likely not proceed without prolonged military conflict. A brief Delta Force operation, like the one in Caracas, will not suffice. And this is precisely what Washington appears to be working toward. Shortly after the Syrian state Islamists launched their attacks against Rojava, representatives of the Kurdish self-administration reported that they had been urged by U.S. officials to fight against the Shiite militias in Iran, which would be mobilized in the event of a conflict. A mobilization of Iranian-Kurdish forces is already underway for a potential conflict in Iran, forces that would have to navigate between their geopolitical instrumentalization and the Kurdish struggle for liberation.

And this is precisely what brings Turkey into the picture, as it acts as one of the most important regional opponents of an overthrow of the mullah regime, since Iran – like Syria – has a large Kurdish minority, whose autonomy or self-governance, modeled after Rojava, Ankara seeks to prevent. It thus appears that Trump’s repeated betrayal of the Syrian Kurds is a geopolitical price paid to soften Ankara’s resistance to the intended overthrow of the regime in Iran. Furthermore, it can be assumed that Turkey has also been promised a buffer zone on Iranian territory, similar to its occupation zone in northern Iraq.[22] Once again, the Kurds are paying the price for imperialist deals between great and regional powers.

The crisis of the capitalist world system unfolds as a historical process in waves; following the wave of state decomposition triggered by the Arab Spring, Iran now stands on the brink. The Trump administration’s new crisis imperialism could be understood as a form of crisis adaptation by late-capitalist functional elites, in which economic upheavals in the semi-periphery are exploited to justify military intervention by the core.[23] Driven by unbearable socio-ecological contradictions, a new violent upheaval is looming in the region, though its outcome remains fundamentally open – just as it was in Syria and will continue to be, provided the Rojava project can somehow be kept alive. Those opposition forces in Iran that managed to survive the recent wave of massacres could thus soon find themselves in a situation where they are confronted not only with the eroding mullah regime, but also with crisis-imperialist efforts to establish a new dictatorial Shah regime amid the chaos.

The disintegration of the late-capitalist world system, the systemic transformation, and the resulting struggle for transformation are, however, inevitable. For what remains of the Left – despite all regression, repression, and opportunism – there is consequently no alternative to the struggle for an emancipatory course of this transformation process. In Rojava as in Iran. And in the core whose neo-imperialism is fueled by the same crisis process that is ravaging the semi-periphery.

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[1] https://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-pentagon-isis-20160327-story.html

[2] https://www.kritiknetz.de/images/stories/texte/Islamischer_Staat.pdf

[3] https://www.telepolis.de/article/Allianzen-Almosen-Massaker-3366580.html

[4] https://archiv.telepolis.de/features/Kobane-in-Truemmern-Tuerkei-in-Flammen-3367844.html

[5] https://www.cnas.org/publications/commentary/obama-tried-to-pivot-to-asia-in-2011-we-must-succeed-this-time

[6] https://www.telepolis.de/article/Abschied-vom-Menschenrechtsimperialismus-3713257.html https://www.konicz.info/2017/12/11/abschied-vom-menschenrechtsimperialismus/

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

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

[9] https://ednews.net/en/news/politics/240234-turkey-has-right-to-act-in-self-defense-in-afrin-nato-chief-stoltenberg-says

[10] https://www.konicz.info/2018/01/21/afrin-erdogans-werk-und-putins-beitrag/

[11] https://www.konicz.info/2019/10/26/der-krieg-der-neuen-rechten/

[12] https://www.konicz.info/2022/12/29/das-vergessene-morden/

[13] https://www.telepolis.de/article/Outsourcing-der-Barbarei-3336631.html

[14] https://www.dw.com/en/greece-cyprus-israel-military-cooperation-explained-turkey-reaction/a-75394974

[15] https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-decoded-text-message-donald-trump/

[16] https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/ausland/krisen/id_101098128/massenproteste-im-iran-neue-opfer-zahlen-offenbaren-dramatisches-ausmass.html

[17] https://news.sky.com/story/why-are-people-protesting-in-iran-everything-you-need-to-know-13490639

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

[19] https://www.konicz.info/2026/01/11/die-herrschaft-der-terror-clowns/

[20] https://therealnews.com/how-irans-theocrats-allied-with-and-then-crushed-the-left

[21] https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/international-relations/as-us-forces-build-up-trump-weighs-limited-strikes-to-shake-iran-s-regime/ar-AA1V1Ksq

[22] https://www.konicz.info/2022/12/29/das-vergessene-morden/

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

Originally posted on konicz.info on 01/28/26

Zero Identity

April 18, 2026April 27, 2026 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

Robert Kurz

1.

If identity, as the Dictionary of Logic says, means “the equality of an object or appearance with itself,” then there is no such thing as identity: at least, there is no absolute identity. Not even a crab, as we know, can get into the same river twice, because neither the crab nor the river can remain absolutely identical to itself. Changes in everything and everyone are inevitable, as are losses of identity; and even that is an oblique expression, for eternal self-sameness can hardly be called a good thing. Bertolt Brecht’s Herr K. “turned pale” when it was said that he had not changed. On the other hand, of course, identity changes do not have to be positive. The transformation of curly-haired, dreamy Botticelli youths into bald, vicious insurance salesmen, for example, cannot be called either aesthetic or moral progress. And when former social critics become zealous statesmen and patriots, it is hard to call this change of identity a turn for the better. Nevertheless, we should not give up hope for improvement, because, according to all probability calculations, the general law of change and transformation cannot always lead us astray.

In any case, it is quite clear that, in the logical and philosophical sense, a fixed identity is not possible in the real world. Certainly, there is such a thing as personal continuity, represented by what we call memory; however, the unreliability of memory has been proven even in ordinary matters (a fact that, apart from Marcel Proust, every detective knows all too well). In this respect, one cannot even speak of a real “identity” on the level of the “person.” The question of what the relative identitarian moment actually is at the various levels of manifestation of nature and human experience of the world is indeed an interesting and, in some respects, speculative problem, but one that should have no significance for practical life, and certainly not for political life. This makes it all the more urgent to explain the fact that the “question” of identity keeps cropping up in contexts where it does not belong. And since no concept has ever become the object of ideological and socio-political skirmishes, battles and wars beyond the rather narrow circles of logicians and specialist philosophers for logical or specialist philosophical reasons, the so-called question of identity must above all arouse suspicion. Not even identity itself, as such, is identical with itself; for having fallen into the hands of ideologues and interest fighters, it must, in all probability, fall victim to the worst possible changes of meaning.

2.

Since the fleeting journey on earth is not possible for man as an individual being, but only as the famous Zoon Politikon, something like a (just as uncertain) collective or cultural continuity is superimposed on the uncertain personal continuity. But living together with other people, loving or hating them, being in a larger historical context, etc., has as little to do with “identity” in the logical sense as the personal memory tape. When someone says of himself, “I am German,” this is true only in a relative, non-identitarian sense, in the sense of a copula, as one of an almost infinite number of relative, ephemeral qualities. To have grown up speaking a certain (e.g. German) language, which in turn has a history, i.e. is ephemeral, or even to possess a certain passport, even if one is not a passport enthusiast: who would deny this?

On the other hand, if someone says: “I am German” in an absolute, identitary sense, in the existential or essential sense of “being,” then it can only be a kind of mad cow disease. He could just as well claim that he “is” Napoleon or a hippopotamus. But where does this bovine madness of essential national, regional, cultural or other political “identity” come from? Perhaps there is some confusion here too, perhaps it is originally a matter of some other desire, such as for security. Even in order to be able to argue terribly as a Zoon Politicon, one needs a frame of reference, a presupposed common ground, because in complete institutional emptiness and relativization, it would no longer be possible to argue at all.

The fact that this historical, cultural, institutional commonality, which “contains” the human individual, at the same time influences relationships of a completely different and more immediate nature, extending, for example, into the bedroom, keeping an eagle eye on even the most personal desires (or, as Deleuze/Guattari say, suppressing the “desire machines” of the unconscious), already points to the fundamental inadequacy of all hitherto known varieties of historical-cultural commonality. If this connection is redefined as a false essential “identity,” then its coercive character is fully revealed. Whoever has (or thinks he has) a fixed political or cultural “identity” is poor. He carries around with him an identity prison that makes any open perception of the world impossible.

Now it must be said in favor of all pre-modern forms of society, however horrible they may sometimes have been in detail, that at least they did not give rise to the “question” of (political, cultural, national, etc.) “identity.” Their traditions, customs and behaviors were simply too natural to them. If, in the process of modernization, the problems of social coherence have been glossed over with the false label of “identity,” then this can only be the overcompensation of a new and additional deficiency. The change in the form of historical-cultural commonality meant that it began to lose its “salvaging” function, without losing its coercive character; and for this very reason, out of anxiety over this change, it had to be immediately absolutized into “identity.” The so-called question of identity is thus linked to the loss of the self-evident, even within the (unabated) coercive nature of society.

3.

No sooner has modern man begun to settle into some semblance of a home than everything is swept away again by a new whirlwind of “modernization” – one that isn’t even called “Anna” or “Angelica,” but has such strange names such as “war of liberation,” “construction,” “automation,” “creative destruction,” “location competition,” “market correction,” and so on. This life of endless impositions and disruptions, which, to make matters worse, does not take place within a reliable frame of reference to which one could become accustomed, seems to produce the strange desire for a fixed “identity.” There is, after all, a difference between engaging in reasoning about such a speculative question calmly over a cup of tea or a glass of wine on a long summer evening, and those reasoning – poor, naked, and on the run, habitually in the process of drowning – who are clutching at straws.

Modernization, that is, the total marketization of everything tangible and intangible, thinkable and unthinkable, born and unborn, is in a new potency inhuman precisely because of its accelerated dynamic character. While all previous institutional abominations were at least characterized by stasis, the modernized world, which continues to modernize in a mad tour de force, is, on the contrary, characterized by the institutionalization of change. This change, however, is not one that originates from within, springing from the direct human-nature process, constituted by independent experience – which might even make the shift in identity pleasurable – but rather an imposed, unmediated for the individual, blind and frenzied change that follows the fetish laws of capital. This is precisely what gives rise to the strange reciprocity of institutionalized change and permanent identity rupture on the one hand, and an “identity” ideology as a search for stability in the endlessly unleashed process of the crazy social fetish on the other.

But modernization also means emptying, namely an increasing loss of meaning. The structure that is unleashed and becomes a permanent whirlwind is, to make matters worse, contentless, the complete void; precisely the nirvana of money, but not as finally coming to rest, but as senselessly and restlessly plowing the world. Money not only has no meaning or purpose except the end in itself of its self-valorization as capital; it is also the paradox of a form without content. Emptied of even the last sensuous remnant of precious metals, which was itself already a decaying content, capitalized money becomes a tangible nothingness, a hard appearance, an eerily dynamic zero. Everything becomes attainable, an infinite world of things and possibilities becomes accessible, in contrast to the silly limitations of pre-modernity with its dress codes and elaborate special rights; but these infinite possibilities of things and relations can, in modernity, only be attained as commodities, in the form of total commodity production, i.e. stamped by the zero and thus provided with the sign of meaninglessness. In this form, however, their content decays, they become endless arbitrariness, in which no meaning whatsoever can be retained.

It is therefore not merely the institutionalization of external, blind, imposed change per se, but something far worse: an incessant change that historically increasingly unleashes contentlessness, meaninglessness, pointlessness, and absolute arbitrariness to the same extent that it forces all things and relationships into the commodity form and thus hands them over to the absurd self-valorization process of money. In the form of capitalized money, a voracious black hole opens up, swallowing up matter, sensation, the world and reality with increasing speed. The world is de-sensualized and de-aestheticized (a glance out of the window is enough), nature is destroyed. In modernization as a self-unfolding crisis, people squirm under the double assault of alienated change and growing lack of content; and with it, the identity problem produced by this structure itself intensifies.

For even an imposed change of identity might still be bearable if it were meaningful in content; but the progress towards total lack of content is unbearable. This state of meaninglessness – which is constantly emerging anew and intensified from the process –becomes, as the process continues, the inner state of the individuals and subjects themselves: their adaptation to this dynamic structure establishes them as total money-subjects. In other words, their identity now consists in having none. They find themselves in the form of an emptied, contentless subject: ready and able, even compelled, to absorb anything and everything, but only ever in this form of their own arbitrariness, as an appropriation to their own zero position of “hard nothingness”: eternally separated from sensual content and its enjoyment (Midas).

Thus, in a manner as perverse as it is paradoxical, absolute identity is ultimately achieved; the logical impossibility has truly come to pass – albeit at the price of an absolute zero-identity. The unbearable nature of this subject form gives rise all the more strongly to a desire for a substantive, significant, and meaningful identity that is simultaneously meant to escape the mad and ceaseless form of change or remain independent of it; but since one’s own zero-identity as a money-subject must nevertheless remain unquestioned, from now on it can only ever be a matter of synthetic pseudo-identities – in themselves and a priori untrue, laboriously propped up, and then evaporated once again by the restless nirvana of money, by the actual zero-identity.

4.

Yet, in contrast to the infiniteness of the commodity world, the synthetic plastic identities of modernization neither simply dissolve into total arbitrariness nor are they merely desperate acts of self-defense by subjects who have become meaningless. On the one hand, it is a matter of a historical process of assertion of dynamic nothingness against the static, pre-modern structures of the social imposition of generality. In this history of assertion, the black hole of money, of the “automatic subject” (Marx), was at first small and its process slow; only gradually did it enlarge and increase its process speed, eating and digesting faster and faster. t is only today that the black hole has, in a certain sense, become all-encompassing, and we find ourselves in it, skin and hair, i.e., our own interior has itself become a black hole, in which the dynamic nothingness again and again senselessly plows up sensual matter, eats it, digests it, and excretes it again.

In this history of the assertion of the insane end in itself, various synthetic transitional identities were formed that suggested ideological solidity reaching down into the unconscious, without really possessing it. Foremost among these is the nation, organized in the form of the modern nation-state. The ideologists, the historical sciences and the humanities have worked hard to ontologize this equally young and (in the historical process of the “automatic subject”) short-lived phenomenon, to give it a false beard, to endow it with a false ancestral passport, and so on. In fact, the nation, too, was only a kind of loincloth or foot rag of the “hard nothing” that kept working its way through the meager “identitarian” disguises of its history.

The nation was not arbitrary or random; that is why it seemed to possess significance. Yet it possessed this significance only as a function within the process of its own emerging total insignificance, a process in which it was bound to decay once more, so as to allow the naked, empty money subjectivity to emerge as the final stage. This transformation ultimately even led to the nation – though nothing more than a historical function of capitalism’s self-assertion, that is, a synthetic identity in this and no other sense – being ideologically mobilized as an identity against capitalism itself, which was growing out of it. In general, it seems to be a peculiarity of this structure that the respective past transit identities are invoked as synthetic “content,” because the “hard nothing” that becomes visible as the actual zero-content of the entire process of modernization plunges the subjects, who nevertheless “are” this meaninglessness themselves, into horror and despair.

On the other hand, a synthetic identity had to be formed vis-à-vis the non-European or non-Western structures, cultures, etc., that were not, or not yet, in the mill of money. Just as the identity construct of the nation mediated the competition between the emerging money subjects for a certain transitional period, so the construct of the “West” served to represent the common demarcation of the money subjects from the non-money subjects. And just as with regard to the nation, so with regard to the “West,” all the humanities, social sciences, and history worked as a collective forgery workshop to give this identity construct a semblance of plausibility and a false “uniqueness,” identitarian solidity, and self-importance. Begun in the 18th century, the 19th century saw the completion of a historical image that was racist and anti-Semitic in its foundations, spun out with ever greater subtlety and sophistication, still “valid” today, and dragged through the textbooks. For example, the black African origins of Greek antiquity were systematically erased (Martin Bemal, Black Athena), in order to cover the overall identity of the “hard nothing” with a false white skin of “noble simplicity, quiet grandeur” (Winckelmann), whitewashed like the once garishly painted Greek statues.

Falsified as identitary content and as cultural coherence from A to Z, the synthetic construct of the “West” became capitalistically functional in three ways. First, it served to dress up the European absolute zero-identity, the terrible shame of the West, in a grandiose theatrical costume. Second, Western European self-hatred, all too justified by self-submission to the fetish of the dynamic “hard nothing,” could be projected outward in the form of a false identitarian self-aggrandizement: as the construction of “races,” of “Blacks,” “savages,” “primitives,” etc., of allegedly foreign “identities,” in other words, whereby the shame of one’s own zero-identity became presentable as the inferiority of other people and cultures not yet participating in this zero-identity. Thirdly, the global campaign of destruction and annihilation resulting from the fetishistic worship of the zero-god of money-valorization could be given a missionary appearance: the senseless misery of capitalism, marketization, and “valorization” as a Promethean bringing of light (indeed: Lucifer).

Today, another century later, total, naked money subjectivity as a global system has become so entrenched that even its own identity constructs can no longer be taken seriously. The costumes, fake beards, and fake teeth have become so ridiculously obvious that no one really “believes” in them anymore. Just as capitalism has outgrown itself in its powerful nothingness, just as it has stepped out of its industrial form and out of itself as “modernity,” so it has also destroyed the nation and the “West” and, in general, every conceivable synthetic identity. What remains, however, is the impossibility of sublating (or overcoming) the unresolved absolute zero-identity, which today is more obvious than ever. And what also remains is the competition of the money monads in the ongoing process of the “hard nothing”; in its globalized form, more total and inexorable than ever.

So the completely worn-out, decrepit costumes of false identity are brought out again and again; and the hopelessly worn-out, thousand-fold resurrected, ghostly money subjectivity strives to continue “pretending” (simulation) in an endless loop. If there is talk of a “post-industrial society” and of “post-modernity,” then the fake, synthetic, shriveled identity that is always brought up with a wry grin should now be called “post-identity.” And this is perhaps the worst of all, because the increasingly infantile Indian Game of identities becomes the bloody seriousness of the “molecular civil war” (Enzensberger) at the historical end of the absolute zero-identity.

5.

The question of identity also has another aspect that pertains to the “how” of the systemic, procedural nature of the system. The false identity – which is, in truth, the absolute zero-identity of money – also implies a certain way of perceiving the world, one that is a moment of permanent capitalist “world-transformation” and its dynamic meaninglessness. As Sohn-Rethel and others have shown, along with money came theoretical, “conceptual” thought, which, unlike mythological, poetic thought, no longer has anything flowery about it. This double-edged progress brought advances in knowledge, but at the price of submission to the secularized meta-myth, to money’s “metaphysics of reality.” Only with its totalization since the 17th century has society been transformed into a machine of valorization, which is at the same time a conceptual “identification machine.”

The money-born “concept,” the scientific consciousness, which, after a long incubation period, only began its flight of fancy with the onset of the modernization process, does not give the world its proper names, in whatever fantastic form, but “identifies” it according to a grid that does not reproduce the world’s manifold peculiarities, but subjects it to an alien and external abstraction. Kant has shown that this abstract space-time grid, which makes natural science possible in the first place, is not something inherent in things, but the perceptual form of cognizant human consciousness. If this insight is not ontologized, as in Kant, but historicized, then it becomes clear that the abstract space-time continuum and the concepts emanating from it originate from the dynamic social form of money, the “hard nothing,” and thus did not become an object of reflection by chance, but only together with the unleashing of the capitalist mode of production. It is not a matter of Kant’s discovery of the “finally revealed” truth about human cognition per se, as he himself assumed in good Enlightenment fashion, but rather of the involuntary early revelation of the connection between the totalized commodity form and modernity’s thought-form.

Modern science, specifically natural science, contains at its most basic level the empty, contentless law of money. Its false objectivity corresponds to the false objectivity of money, which has become an apparent fact of nature. What is at stake in the simultaneity of the emergence of the total money economy (capital) and (natural) science is not a mere external parallel, but the common zero-identity that also belongs to the subjects of money and natural science. The restless impetus, according to the abstract spatio-temporal pattern, “to measure everything that is measurable and to make measurable everything that is not measurable” (Galileo) corresponds to money’s equally restless and abstract compulsion to valorize. The de-sensualization and de-aestheticization of the world occurs equally through money and natural science: they are two sides of the same coin. Scientific and commodity-based thinking “identifies” objects and phenomena according to its own zero-identity, stamps them with its abstraction, and leaves nothing in them that does not merge into that identity. Perhaps we are also dealing with two successive levels of “real abstraction” (Sohn-Rethel), which, according to Hegel, is “world-destroying”: scientific abstraction precedes the transformation of things into commodities, prepares them, as it were, for their entry into the infinite arbitrariness of the commodity world.

The only concession of the dynamic “hard nothing” to the sensual character of the world is the socio-historical construction of “femininity,” which has been made “responsible” for everything that falls outside the logic of abstraction of money/science; admittedly, only insofar as this dissociated, incomprehensible “rest” of the world is unfortunately functionally necessary for the process of valorization itself and cannot be substituted or adjusted in a scientific commodity-like manner. The construct of “femininity” is thus itself a system function, albeit in paradoxical entanglement; a flanking measure for the process of commodified-scientific “identification,” from which things are stretched onto the Procrustean bed of the “hard nothing.”

In this process, “femininity” is “identified” in its compensatory function as an object, just as, by the way, the “Black person” is, while, conversely, the dependent, itself fetish-constituted actor of the process identifies itself as a “subject” (and thus, correspondingly, destroys itself). The “identifying” thinking in the empty money-science form does not identify the “to-be” of identities, but it is “identical” with the construction of these identities; this thinking and the action corresponding to it represent a reality grid in which things and relations compulsively first appear as (synthetic, set out of the absolute zero-identity of the grid) identities without having been so before.

Here, the synthetic “identities” show themselves in their functional garb, preparing themselves and “the others” as juicy roasts for the ravenous black hole of the litigating, subjectless money. This applies equally to subject and object identity, to gender identity, national identity, and all the other synthetic identities of modernization: “identifying” thought establishes an alignment with the logic of zero, with the absolute zero-identity, always anew and at an ever higher level of development, by relegating the various functional, subject, and object identities (which at the same time feign content or something similar to content) to their places: the “woman,” the “Black person,” the “worker,” the “scientist,” and so on. Just as natural science “identifies” and presents the world as a kind of uniform white powder with different modes of reaction, so social science “identifies” human beings as carriers, subjects and objects of the commodity-producing system, uniform in money subjectivity but functionally and ideologically different. In both cases, there always a “residue” left behind that must be treated as waste.

Adorno and Horkheimer criticized this “identifying” thinking – and thus Hegel’s philosophy of identity – because they saw that in this process the world spirit of the concept by no means comes to itself through mere comprehension, but rather that this identifying comprehension must be understood quite literally: as a brutal shaping of the world according to the real-abstract essence of the concept, i.e., according to the totalitarian zero-identity of dynamic money. It is this actual context that makes conceptual thinking, as money-born and belonging to the process of money, the rape of things and relations; for this thinking can never remain mere thinking, its abstraction is immodest and murderous. Conceptual thinking, the only form of reflection achieved to date, should not, according to Adorno, simply be discarded (for instance, in an unreal, itself synthetic return to myth), but rather transformed together with its socio-historical foundation.

But how? Critical theory no longer saw an open possibility here, but only the self-contained system of “doom.” Frozen in the absolute zero-identity and then set in endless motion by it as mechanical pseudo-identities like wound-up dolls, people would remain trapped in the mental derangement of their identity mania, driving the capitalist process on ad infinitum. In his desperation, Adorno suggested fishing in the garbage (of the artistic, for example, paying attention to the “residue” of the unusable, and seeking out the hidden little territories of the last no-man’s land, where the prison of identity has not yet been completely closed. Today, however, it is becoming clear that the identitarian process of the “hard nothing” can also negatively cancel itself out, i.e. that it does not at all continue to move endlessly, but rather burns out catastrophically. Since the black hole of total money valorization is not physical but rather social in nature, it must, with the destruction of society and its bio-physical basis, also destroy itself. The other concern is whether the resulting pressure of suffering creates a possibility of escape from the prison of identity, even if its walls are not broken through from the inside in a well-considered way, but burst like in an earthquake.

6.

Especially at the catastrophic end of modernization, the state of social criticism is admittedly a deplorable one. And this is only due to misunderstandings. Insofar as the (left or radical left) critique of society in the form of the various Marxisms, anarchisms, etc. was itself an “identity,” was perceived and presented as such, it was always also its own secret denial. If the reference to something that one wants to abolish or overcome appears as a positive identity, then this is a logical self-contradiction. This means that together with the carefully hated (or rather, love-hated) object, the equally carefully built up, cherished, and cultivated positive identity and one’s own identitarian self-confidence (as a critic, left-wing radical, know-it-all, and troublemaker) would come to an end. Of course, that cannot be allowed to happen, and that is precisely why evil capitalism must live forever, so that one can eternally criticize and fight against it with full self-confidence as a good person, revolutionary, tribune, theoretical expert, elitist cultural critic, etc. (in this respect, not entirely unlike the vampiric relationship between Christian charity and the misery of the world, as already exposed by Nietzsche).

Is this merely dialectical sophistry? Yet there is indeed an intrinsic, objective reason for this self-contradictory, identity-based characterization of social critique, one that cannot be reduced to purely psychological factors. This reason lies in the fact that the previous critique of society was not yet a transformative critique of dynamic money as such, but rather was itself a driving moment of modernization; be it in the form of the internal system development of the West, or in the form of the recuperative modernization of the East and the South. Involuntarily, then, as long as permanent modernization had not yet exhausted itself, social critique was itself part of the whirlwind whose respective destructive force it deplored. Thus, it ultimately belonged to the systemic process of the “hard nothing.” It was involved (under the names of enlightenment, democracy, etc.) in the shaping of the absolute zero-identity, in the totalization of money-subjectivity; and in this respect, at the end of the overall process, its identity also turns out to be a real plastic identity, a synthetic illusory content under the sign of zero and its dynamic meaninglessness. In this sense, the attribution of an “identity” to leftist consciousness is quite fundamentally correct.

And in this respect, the transformation of the plastic identities of the left within the absolute zero-identity in the last ten or fifteen years also becomes understandable, because it points to the end of modernization. The transformation of the old left identity into a trembling post-identity was almost inevitable in this process. To the same extent that the process of modernization began to exhaust itself without the underlying social form being questioned in the slightest, it follows that leftist consciousness also became extinct. Since “creative destruction” has finally lost the attribute assigned to it by Joseph Schumpeter and is now only linearly destructive, there is no longer a “left wing” to occupy within this process in terms of social and development policy. In the great structural crisis at the end of modernity, the left is merely staging a ghostly farewell ball.

The dissolution of leftist consciousness as an identitarian critique of society began with a change of identity in parts of the alternative and ecological movements. Some of its protagonists began to wrap the decaying leftist identity in a bearskin and to want to save the forest only because it was “German.” Far from giving the critique of society a different (reactionary) justification, the critique as such was thus completely withdrawn. Not even a consistent anti-modernism can be attributed to this embarrassing construct. For the “identifying” thinking of modernity even appears particularly transparent in the neo-German identity maniacs as a kind of travesty of the Hegelian concept: it has never occurred to the forest itself to be “German,” any more than it has to dogs and cats; only in the identifying grid of the identity mania is it given such an attribute. For the forest, this does not mean salvation, but rather a death sentence; for its transformation into a component of a synthetic, plastic identity can only mean that the factual-sensual problem of preserving trees, ecological systems, etc. is not at stake at all. The fact that the forest is once again being sung about as “German” at the end of the 20th century is its funeral song from the mouths of maddening money subjects of the absolute zero-identity, who are always already destroying the ecosystem by “making money.”

Parallel to this deep-rooted regression, an initially seemingly contrary dissolution of leftist consciousness into affirmative theorems and attitudes of “postmodernism” developed. Outwardly, the foolish postmodern hustle and bustle was fun, and it continues to this day. With the onset of the secular crisis, many formerly identitarian leftists discovered that not everything was to be taken so seriously, and that capitalism was not so bad after all, but rather fashionable, urban, and fun. Identity was criticized, but in the guise of an identity of social criticism, that is, in an affirmative way. Thus, the postmodern left criticized identitarian thought only in the context of becoming largely uncritical. The pseudo-content of plastic identities was not overcome either, but merely relativized and dumbed down. Identity turned out not to be a skin at all, but merely a costume; and this was not a cause for horror and reflection, but for hooting jokes. Today a little dialectical materialism, tomorrow a little rain dance; today a family man, tomorrow a little gay; today exercises in sensuality, tomorrow a craving for theory again; today a cashmere scarf, tomorrow a traditional jacket and a chamois tuft on the hat: damn, how identity-less we are.

But the more clearly the Medusa head of the absolute zero-identity, i.e. of the mature and aged money subject, appeared in the mirror, the faster and more loudly the permanent costume change had to be carried out. “Masquerade ball” is what this is called in military drill: lining up every five minutes in a different outfit – tracksuit, work suit, evening suit; and most recently, by the way, combat suit. The old ‘68er demand for “strong ego identity,” at that time still meant as a condition for the liberation struggle, but even then rather unreflective in its implications, mutated via “politics in the first person” into the narcissism of the competitive subjects in the party fun of the casino capitalism of the 80s and 90s.

In the 1990s, however, the crisis of the commodity-producing system also reached global proportions. The salon lions of the postmodern costume parties in the Western metropolises must now gradually fear for their own material existence and life in the unresolved fetish form. The fun is over, even if it is still being simulated. Under the impression of crisis and secret existential fear, the identity costume has to be hallucinated again as a veritable skin, as an essential being, even if the functionalism of crude competitive interests peeps out of every buttonhole. From leftist identity to postmodern costume identity to infernal neo-patriotic post-identity: the delirious fetish-consciousness trapped in the nothingness of money finishes its St. Vitus dance. It is as if adults were taking a grim Rütli oath to believe in the Easter Bunny again from now on. And since there are no new plastic identities, pseudo-meanings, and illusory contents to be found, we have to reach for the old ones.

It was certainly suspicious that at the costume party of casino capitalism, the majority of men dressed up as men and the women as women (or even continued to play out the same “identities” within the same gender); under the false impression that these were “just” costumes. Underneath the carnival mask lay the old accrued gender mask. To lift this would have meant to show the bloody facelessness of the money subject; something like how in the movie “Planet of the Apes” the last humans take off their human face masks and show their eerily deformed, eyeless “selves” as they worship the atomic bomb. The unresolved gender masks, as a shell of the absolute zero-identity – which were once again post-identitarily painted over in the revival of the eroticism of the “strong man” and “beautiful woman” (e.g., “Carmen”) – already pointed, however, to the return of the old national uniforms, which were meant to complete the renewed identity mania.

Nevertheless, the errant post-identities do not merge with the old plastic identities. The prefix indicates that once again a historical level of self-evidence and apparent naturalness has broken away; that more subtle and downright ludicrous derivations become necessary in order to be able to play the game once again as mutual deception and self-deception. The empty abstractions of the “difference” discourse are meant to point to identitarian contents that, as plastic identities of past modernization, exist only in faint outlines – like the echo of life in the realm of the dead. But the mad compulsion toward competition and self-assertion in the crumbling civilization of money compels identitarian occupation even in a postmortem sense.

In the discourse of “difference,” postmodern reflection unites with the earthy stammering of inane bearskin patriots. Adorno’s critical theory is turned into its opposite. It is not what is “different” about things and people themselves from what the “identifying thinking” of the money-born concept stamps them as that becomes the topic, but exactly the opposite: the reciprocal “difference” between their false plastic identities, which “identifying thinking” stamps on them, is once again invoked. Not only in the cultural racism of the New Right, even the identity constructs of the oppressed and offended, which were created in self-defense, are instrumentalized for the prevailing identity mania. The “Black person” is to uphold his false identity “as a Black person,” the gay man his false identity “as a gay man” (possibly even genetically fixed by the new biologism), the “Russian” his false identity “as a Russian,” the woman her false identity “as a feminine being,” and so on. They uphold these pseudo-emancipatory constructs for no other purpose than to allow the “White” and Westerner, the forced heterosexual, the “German,” and the man to once again lead his most false of all false identities onto the battlefield of total competition in a post-identitarian manner.

Post-identities are needed so that people can attack one another. Of course, the “post-metaphysical age,” which has emerged from post-structuralist drivel, no longer permits any substantive or pseudo-substantive objectives of devout self-evidence. Now it’s time to grit one’s teeth and, in all seriousness, march into the “molecular civil war” for the constructivist-revived Easter Bunny. “There is no alternative!” scream the ex-leftists, the identity-obsessed, post-postmodern, defensive late democrats, who in truth no longer want to hear anything about an alternative. But excuse me, who is going to take the global civil war of absolute zero-identity so seriously; after all, it’s all just nothing, even if it is pretty hard.

Originally published in EXIT! no. 15 in 2012.

Artificial Intelligence vs. Artificial Jobs

April 18, 2026 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

What the AI revolution will certainly destroy is the illusion of a working society, one that has been maintained with great difficulty since the IT revolution of the 1980s.

Tomasz Konicz

The widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in late-capitalist working society – apart from a few niches in the IT industry – is still in its infancy, and the consequences of this upheaval are only beginning to emerge. Consequently, this is the era of major, often contradictory studies, which the academic community now publishes on a weekly basis. Whether the labor market is facing an apocalypse or a boom – virtually every opinion seems to be supported by research or expert statements.

In late 2025, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published a study indicating that approximately 11.7% of wage earners in the U.S. could already be replaced by AI systems, which would correspond to an annual payroll of around $1.2 trillion. In early 2024, the institute’s journal, MIT Technology Review, still reached the optimistic conclusion that job losses caused by agent systems and large language models could be offset by new jobs expected to emerge as part of the AI revolution. The startup Anthropic also has something for everyone: In early March, the company published a report that found no evidence that unemployment was rising due to AI, while at the same time, the business magazine Fortune, citing research from the same AI firm, warned of an impending “recession for office workers.”

A report from Stanford University identifies young people in the U.S. as being particularly at risk from these upheavals, as there are already 13% fewer entry-level jobs in AI-prone industries. Anthropic, on the other hand, concludes that older, female, well-educated, and highly paid workers are most likely to be replaced by AI. Other contributions to the discussion pointed to the potential for automation among self-employed individuals who offer online content, ranging from flashy influencers to OnlyFans porn stars. There are also empirical studies, for example from the Brookings Institution think tank, which simply conclude that it is not yet possible to draw clear conclusions about the effects of AI.

So nothing is known for certain. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify some of the contours of the coming upheavals in late-capitalist working life that are evident in virtually all studies. According to these studies, the AI revolution could trigger a surge in automation in the service sector similar to that brought about by the IT revolution of the 1980s and 1990s in industrial production. The advanced economies at the core of the world system are considered service-based societies precisely because the share of industrial workers has fallen sharply in the wake of digitalization. However, the extent of the impending job losses is disputed, as is the question of whether newly created jobs in the AI sector can mitigate them. Within the service sector, office work, customer service, creative jobs in the media industry, legal and financial services, and especially the IT sector are considered particularly at risk. The United Kingdom is already experiencing job losses due to the dominance of the financial industry, as a Morgan Stanley report concluded in early 2026, noting that AI-driven productivity gains of 11.5% had ultimately led to an 8% net loss of jobs.

The profession of programmer, in particular, appears to be at risk of job losses, as AI systems are already driving enormous short-term productivity gains in this field (even if this could lead to code instability in the long run). Estimated project hours in the industry are already shrinking from days to hours. Industry critics like Ed Zitron like to point out – and rightly so – that essential services for business customers, in particular, cannot be fully automated, but they don’t need to be. The labor market, as the arbiter of general competition, will likely ensure that rising productivity manifests itself in declining employment and compensation for IT workers, since AI tools simultaneously reduce the demands placed on the workforce.

In fact, the IT industry – which has enjoyed decades of success and remains one of the few remaining bastions of middle-class employment – is being hit by massive waves of layoffs: Oracle, Amazon, Meta, Epic – the mass layoffs, often numbering in the tens of thousands, are frequently justified this year by citing investments in AI. According to the Swedish industry publication Tech Insider, the number of layoffs in the IT sector worldwide has skyrocketed from approximately 150,000 in 2024 to around 245,000 last year, with around 264,000 projected for 2026. The justification of layoffs with investments in AI has risen sharply: from 5% in 2024 to 8% in 2025 and to around 20% in the first quarter of 2026. Tech Insider estimates that this share could rise to as much as 30% in 2026.

However, caution is warranted when looking at such figures. Oracle, for example, plans to cut 30,000 jobs, but this is not being justified by AI-driven productivity gains, but rather by cost-cutting measures aimed at raising sufficient capital for the costly construction of AI data centers. The Harvard Business Review, citing a broad survey of managers conducted in December 2025, reported that most AI-driven waves of layoffs were motivated not by actual productivity gains, but by the “anticipation of the impact of AI.”

In other words: Capital’s leadership groups are speculating on productivity gains before they can be realized. This doesn’t always work: A corporate survey conducted in late 2025 by the market research firm Forrester Research reached the sobering conclusion that 55% of decision-makers regret their AI-related layoffs. Respondents assume that either the productivity gains failed to materialize or that well-paid workers are being replaced by low-wage workers. Another study by MIT found that the use of generative AI in business applications proved unprofitable in 95% of all cases.

If AI is ever to achieve a widespread breakthrough in the economy, it will likely only happen during the socioeconomic upheavals resulting from the expected bursting of the AI bubble. Only those market participants who utilize this technology most efficiently are likely to survive the cutthroat competition of the crisis. But the question arises as to whether a new stable regime of accumulation can even be established, since AI merely drives the already well-advanced crisis process to extremes, a process fueled precisely by the internal contradiction of capital. In a sense, the elimination of artificial jobs by artificial intelligence is currently looming.

Labor is the substance of capital; in this respect, capitalism is indeed a “labor society,” and the internal contradiction of capital lies in the fact that it seeks to rid itself of this very substance through competition-driven rationalization. The first major IT revolution already made this internal contradiction acute through the decline of the industrial workforce, yet its full-scale societal impact was delayed by the financialization of capitalism in the neoliberal era of globalization, as debt – which was rising faster than economic output on a global scale – was transformed into credit-financed growth through speculative bubbles. The service sector, which now faces AI-driven upheavals, is thus artificial insofar as it could only develop within the framework of the neoliberal deficit economy. AI technology merely destroys the illusion of a working society that the neoliberal deficit economy laboriously attempted to maintain amid ever-increasing frictions in response to the IT revolution.

Without a broad employment base in industrial production, there can be no stable labor society. But there is no going back to an industrial society; the wheel of time cannot be turned back. Instead of succumbing to the general fetishization of labor – which is already recognizable in its fascistic traits, particularly in Germany – the remaining emancipatory forces must move toward a radical critique of labor that consciously and openly seeks to overcome capitalist society, which is in a state of open decay.

Originally published in Jungle World 15 in 04/2026, and then expanded and posted on konicz.info on 04/17/2026.

Nationalist Shadow Boxing

March 24, 2026 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ 1 Comment

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

March 24, 2026March 20, 2026 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

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!

March 20, 2026March 24, 2026 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

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

March 19, 2026 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ 1 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.

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[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?

March 19, 2026March 20, 2026 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ 3 Comments

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.

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