It is becoming increasingly clear that the capitalist catastrophe is looming. The left should fight for an emancipatory outcome.

Tomasz Konicz

Even before all the ideology, megalomania, and opportunism emerged, many left-wing contributions to the debate on Ukraine suffered from a fundamental logical misconception. Much has been written that assumes an easy way out of this catastrophe. Depending on the political or ideological standpoint, a heroic political party or geopolitical constellation is imagined that, by virtue of itself alone, will defuse the conflict and possibly even promote progress. In ever new variations, either the support of Ukraine and NATO is demanded in order to uphold the victory of bourgeois democracy in its struggle against Eurasian despotism, or it is the defeat of Western imperialism that is invoked instead, to be replaced by a multipolar world order. The left – according to a megalomania common throughout – must seize this mantle of history, must rally behind the forces of the pure, good and true, or else lose a titanic and historical struggle that will shape future decades. And in the background still lingering is the Hegelian Weltgeist with its “cunning of reason,” which needs only its correct interpretation.

But what if there is no progressive or even “neutral” way out of this catastrophe that can restore the pre-war status quo? What if the common assumptions sketched out above are wrong? The following contribution to the debate, drawing on the theoretical basis of the critique of value, describes the war over Ukraine as a qualitative tipping and turning point in an irreversible crisis process of the capitalist world system. It does this to then take a position in the debate within the left. The Ukraine conflict will inevitably shape the coming decades. The war will encourage brutalization and barbarization – it doesn’t matter whether Russia or the West emerges victorious from this imperialist slaughter. We will be lucky – and this is an appropriate generalization – for the war to end without a nuclear exchange of blows, without a breakdown of civilization. Although the reified public discourse on crises loves to neatly separate the individual moments of the crisis process from one another, the reality of the crisis dynamics does not adhere to these conventions, and further economic, geopolitical or ecological distortions could each interact with the war in Ukraine, driving it to a global escalation.

Without the development of an adequate concept of crisis, war simply cannot be understood. That is why the pathetic search for the “rational interests” of the imperialists, in which Germany’s “anti-imperialists” of all shades from red to brown so perfectly disgraced themselves, is always doomed to failure from the start. And that is why it was possible for the critique of value to predict the Russian invasion. The fetishized crisis dynamic is the irrational force driving the rulers of the imperialist powers into conflict. This is obvious in the case of Russia, which faced the erosion of its imperial sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space.

The social disruption within this economically isolated region, wherein former nomenklatura clans have established authoritarian oligarchies and kleptocracies, has created social chaos wherever raw materials and fossil fuels cannot be exported in sufficient quantities to keep enough of the population satisfied. These instabilities provide ample opportunities for Western interests in the region. The Russian war of aggression was preceded not only by the war over Nagorno-Karabakh, but above all by the uprisings in Belarus and Kazakhstan. Here Western interests did not have to intervene at scale, because things were fueled by internal social struggles.

It was the fear of further “revolutions” in its imperial backyard that drove the Kremlin, incapable of modernization, to war. Social tensions in the post-Soviet space – where Russia’s hegemony was rapidly eroding before the outbreak of the Ukraine war – gave rise to a dynamic of protest, insurrection, and external intervention that threatened the balance of power. If Moscow was to remain the capital of an empire, then the West had to be pushed back in Ukraine by force of arms. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is thus a sign of its weakness: all its other means of holding down this key component of its sphere of influence have failed. The invasion is sheer crisis imperialism acting from the defensive, seeking to bridge internal tensions through external expansion. Precisely because of its military and economic inferiority, it acts with its particular brutality.

But the same can be said in the case of the West. It was not only the Kremlin that felt compelled to take an enormous gamble in its invasion of Ukraine. The unwillingness of the West, both the US and the EU, to compromise in the run-up to the invasion reflects a similar dynamic of internal crisis and external expansion – in this case expansion into the post-Soviet space. NATO flatly refused to provide neutrality guarantees for Ukraine, which was of course part of Russia’s sphere of influence. Nonetheless, NATO worked all the while on the modernization of Ukraine’s armed forces, complete with its Nazi elements, and provided the Kremlin with at least a casus belli. Would Russia have attacked Ukraine even in the event of binding neutrality guarantees? We will never know. The only question is whether the West grossly miscalculated or deliberately provoked the invasion in order to bleed Russia dry in the Ukrainian war morass.

The EU’s interest in sabotaging geopolitical competition with a German-dominated Europe was what drove the Western intervention in 2014, when the Yanukovych government was toppled. Berlin and Brussels tolerated no alternative to the over-indebted Eurozone. But the NATO expansion strategy in Russia’s “backyard” is motivated above all by Washington’s efforts to halt US imperial disintegration, to preserve its hegemony and the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Without the greenback as the measure of value of all commodities, the United States would degenerate into a gigantic, weapons-grade Greece. Rising inflation suggests that the Fed’s money printing is now reaching its limits. While the EU and FRG wanted to prevent the formation of the “Eurasian Union” propagated by Putin, Washington was additionally concerned with driving a wedge between Berlin and Moscow in order to strengthen the eroding Atlantic alliance system. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has anchored the EU more firmly in the Atlantic Alliance, made a German-Russian rapprochement impossible in the medium term, and led to the expansion of NATO in Scandinavia.

It is not only the internal barrier of the capitalist world system, choking on its hyper-productivity, that makes war and external expansion appear to the over-indebted, socially broken state behemoths as the last way out; the crisis presents the stark reality of monetary devaluation and deflation. The external barrier of capital, which in its drive to valorize deprives humanity of the ecological foundations of life, manifests itself concretely in the food crisis escalating through the war over Ukraine, especially in Africa. Control over food is becoming a geopolitical lever of power in the emerging climate crisis, just as it is with fossil fuels.

Not only is the cause of the war rooted in the escalating contradictions of capitalist crisis, the war is itself a crisis accelerator. War intensifies the already existing processes of capitalist disintegration, shifting the entire world system into a new quality of crisis: deglobalization with political isolation and campist political formations, conflict over resources, shortages and supply chain bottlenecks, militarization and the permanent threat of large-scale war, the reciprocal emergence of authoritarian political actors and simultaneously the ongoing erosions of existing social as well as state structures. This tipping point in the crisis process is irreversible, there is no going back to the time before the war. As such, the current era of crisis imperialism is defined by an intensifying dialectical relation between state actors and capital, where states are striving for dominance and the crisis process of capital is following its own market-mediated, fetishistic momentum fueled its internal and external contradictions. Capital has produced a social formation today that simply does not have this blindly running dynamic under control, and will be  driven by it ever further into social and ecological collapse.

The objective crisis process of capital as a system is enacted through the crisis-imperialist confrontations of the corresponding state subjects. This, the concrete execution of crisis dynamics through economic, geopolitical, intelligence or military power struggles, is the objective core of the crisis-imperialist practice. The Kremlin is waging its war in Ukraine to maintain Russia’s status as an imperial power. The US provoked the war to remain a hegemonic power. Thus, the crisis drives the late capitalist state behemoths into confrontation, with both economic and ecological consequences. Since the systemic socio-ecological crisis cannot be solved within the framework of the capitalist world system, crisis imperialism has its vanishing point in a large-scale war. The possible consequences of which, due to the capacity for destruction accumulated in late capitalism, are unfathomable. Without emancipatory systemic transformation, the collapse of civilization is now threatened both by climate catastrophe and by nuclear war.

In the absence of an adequately radical concept of crisis, a large portion of what saw itself as part of the left in Germany has, since the beginning of the Ukraine war, diminished itself to nothing more than squabbling over sides. The war has only accelerated the collapse of these crisis-blind, politically opportunistic aspects of the German left who claim themselves to be the front lines. On the one hand, there are the Putin apologists around Wagenknecht and the [conspiracy theorist] Querfront media such as Telepolis or Nachdenkseiten, who shamelessly excuse Putin despite paying lip service to anti-imperialism. And on the other hand, there are supporters of NATO and hollow Western values who peddle the stale bourgeois-liberal ideology one last time before the Western states sink into barbarism.

While even Bandera finds praise in the left-liberal environment of the Greens, Germany’s anti-imps of all shades act as alternative imperialists, propagating nothing more than the imperial interest of Russia or China. The whole thing culminates in megalomaniacal appeals, always formulated from a safe distance, for Ukrainians to either bravely hold out as cannon fodder for freedom and democracy, or to surrender to Russian imperialism because the gas prices are skyrocketing in Germany.

The new quality of crisis that emerges with the war supersedes the era of neoliberal globalization. As such, it also marks the domestic limits of leftist practice within capitalism. Progressive, emancipatory “politics” can no longer be expressed without a radical concept of crisis, which makes the struggle for full-blown systemic transformation of capitalism the only option. It is the blindly running crisis process of capital that drives destructive dynamics of conflict on the geopolitical level, opening the door to large-scale war. This process itself must be the central pivot of any leftist praxis, not the opportunist parroting of imperialist propaganda or the imagining of any “objectively progressive” constellations of states each perpetuating their own crisis imperialism.

Ultimately, the German left would have to get comfortable with facing up to the evident and for decades stubbornly ignored fact (which also hardly plays a role in the current debate on Ukraine) that capital is in a systemic crisis. This would at least offer the theoretical chance for it to fight its way out of impotence and insignificance.

This would require a politics that could really tell people what’s what, instead of bothering them with anachronistic ideology. How far outdated the anti-imp icon Lenin is, for example, can be seen in the actions of his ever regressing fan club. In the context of the Ukraine debate in Konkret, they were able to spout reactionary rubbish superficially disguised as praise for Wagenknecht and the national minded socialists of the party Die Linke. Ironically, this Querfront darling of the Left, who assiduously advertises for the New Right, is not known to be opportunistic. Only to those whom the concept of an opportunist rebellion is unknown could think in such a way.

Germany’s alternative imperialists – these trivial anti-imps – can spread their anachronistic, reified rubbish, which has long since functioned as apologia for authoritarian capitalist crisis management in countries like Russia or China, in organs more or less open to Querfront tendencies like Telepolis, Nachdenkseiten, Freitag, Berliner Zeitung and Rubikon. It is no coincidence that these media are primarily financed by rich, old, white men from the German upper class, the petit bourgeoisie and the middle classes notoriously receptive to reactionary ideology. The same applies to their newspaper of choice, junge Welt.

Such anachronistic and reactionary ideology is simply not up to the task of confronting the reality of the crisis. People everywhere have long been feeling that the system itself is facing an irreversible crisis, that its transformation has already begun. Leftist political practice can now only be implemented as a partial moment in a wider movement to overcome the systemic capitalist catastrophe that is becoming ever more apparent. The catastrophic threat of large-scale war can only be countered within a struggle for systemic transformation, a struggle which must be formulated offensively. The process of transformation is inevitable, but in the face of the war in Ukraine, emancipatory praxis must aim to ensure that this change is not one that will end in barbarism or world war.

Instead of debating over the imperialist frontlines or parroting bullshit propaganda, leftists would have to anticipate the course of the crisis, name the crucial contradictions, and facilitate a transformation of the collapsing system into something post-capitalist that could salvage as many moments of the historical process of civilization as possible. Struggles against the threat of large-scale war, against crisis driven dictatorships, against chauvinism and reactionary agitation would have to be fought with the aim of creating favorable conditions for an emancipatory course of transformation. These struggles would necessarily unite with others, not least the struggle against climate change. The struggle for systemic transformation would form a common ground on which to bring together seemingly disparate protest movements.

At first, propagating systemic transformation as a necessity for survival might seem to guarantee the marginalization of any movement. But it is precisely the dynamics of the crisis that, with each new episode of crisis, demonstrate so clearly to people everywhere just how urgent it is to overcome capitalism. Clearly, the current Left is useless. But by consistent propagation of a radical and anti-capitalist crisis consciousness in concrete praxis, we could change this very quickly, and indeed preempt the fast approaching waves of oncoming crisis. This praxis would be, of course, an alternative to that of the “anti-imps,” who have withered away to the vanguard of imperialist barbarism, and have left their flank wide open to the far right. In the struggle for transformation, the capitalistically deformed scope of Western bourgeois democracy – so hated in these circles as a mendacious US import – must now be defended against barbarism precisely because it is within this framework that an emancipatory course yet remains open at all.

Originally published in konkret in 09/2022.

Who is to blame for the increasing contradictions and distortions of late capitalist societies – and what can be done about it?

Tomasz Konicz

Who are the rulers in capitalism? Preliminary observations seem to confirm what is, for the most part, the core principle of leftist ideology or theory: it is the capitalist class, the owners of the means of production, who seem to hold the reins of power – and they are therefore the ones responsible for the current state of the capitalist world system.

This conclusion seems justified at first sight, given the absurd level of inequality between rich and poor, between the mass of wage earners and the “happy few” of the billionaire caste, which has only been exacerbated by the neoliberal economic and financial policies of recent decades.

The data on the ever-widening gap between rich and poor seems downright bizarre: the 26 richest billionaires now own assets with a face value equal to that of the poorer half of the world’s population – that’s about 3.8 billion people. In the US, it is the wealthiest 20 people whose assets are equivalent to that of the impoverished half of the population.

In the Federal Republic, on the other hand, this ratio between billionaires and the destitute is 45 to 41 million. 45 mega-rich capitalists own just as much as the lower half of the population, and the income divide in the Federal Republic is now even more pronounced than in the United States.

The inequality of late capitalist societies, together with the emergence of a largely segregated caste of billionaires, goes hand in hand with an intensified, increasingly open assertion of the interests of the capitalist class. The ability of this class to successfully lobby has been reflected not least in the financial and tax policies of recent decades, which have almost exclusively favored the super-rich and large corporations.

US billionaires like the notorious Koch brothers finance a veritable political machine that puts their reactionary interests into law in Washington. As a result, there is a debate about whether the US has degenerated into an oligarchy dominated by a few billionaires.

In the Federal Republic, on the other hand, BMW billionaires from the notorious Quandt clan make donations to the CDU before the federal government once again undermines CO₂ emissions limits, which directly benefits the German car industry. In addition – with the rise of the New Right – there is the direct financing of right-wing extremists and populists by billionaires, as in the case of US President Trump and the German AfD.

The same applies to political inaction in the face of the escalating climate crisis. For decades, both in the US and in Germany, the lobbying groups of the fossil fuel-driven capitalist economy have spent millions of dollars to torpedo any serious measures to combat climate change, and have largely been successful.

Capitalists, Class Struggle and Crisis

In the face of this informal power of the capitalist class, which can effortlessly put its economic interests into legal form through its lobbying machines, the causes of the current crisis seem clear, especially to the left: it is the increasing socio-economic division of society caused precisely by the seemingly behind-the-scenes ruling class of billionaires, the capitalists. The boundless greed or insatiable hunger for power of the capitalist class has led capitalism into crisis.

It seems to be similar with the ecological crisis: the greed of the corporate bosses of the oil and automobile industries, and their influence on politics, seems to be responsible for the fact that climate change, despite all the soapbox speeches, continues raging on, fueled by constantly rising CO₂ emissions.

Economic stagnation and the decades-long social decline of large sections of the population in the centers of the capitalist world system, appear as a consequence of the policies of the super-rich class, which is waging a real class war against the working population, as for example the billionaire and speculator Warren Buffet once said: “There’s class warfare, all right, … but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The beginning of this “class war” is usually traced to the neoliberal turn of the 1980s, which, after the bloody prelude in 1973 in Chile, was first implemented in the US and Great Britain by Ronald Reagan and Margaret (“There is no such thing as society”) Thatcher.

Meanwhile, the bouts of destitution that followed the housing crash in 2008, which devastated the US middle class, for example, have also contributed to the formation of a strong, class-struggle oriented left. In response to the increased animosity towards minorities which the New Right pushed after the crisis surge in 2008, the left in the USA and Great Britain have been calling for a class struggle, in which the class war waged by the super-rich would now be answered consciously by way of the political mobilization of the “bottom,” the wage-earners. This left is also calling for a massive Keynesian investment program, the Green New Deal, to overcome the climate crisis.

A False Approach and A False Premise

Politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thus argue for a redistribution from the top to the bottom, for a strict taxation of large fortunes and for a curtailment of the informal political power of the super-rich, in order to lead out of its ecological and economic crisis through large investment programs. In the face of this renaissance of leftist class struggle, which has now also taken hold of the German left, a progressive counterweight to the reactionary wave of the New Right seems to be forming.

And yet this approach to explaining the crisis, which remains stuck in the dichotomy of proletariat and bourgeoisie, is a distorted consciousness that is ultimately not radical enough to adequately grasp the crisis process. The crisis is more than the result of escalating class struggle. The inherent premise of old, leftist, class struggle thinking, according to which there is a group of people who consciously control social reproduction, is false.

The reality of the unfolding capitalist crisis is far more frightening than any specter of an all-powerful rule of super-rich villains operating behind the scenes of the political establishment – however repulsive and reprehensible the individual egomaniacal actors in these exclusive circles may be.

Fetishism: The Autonomous Movement of Capital

Despite all the conspiracies that actually exist, there is no one behind the curtain who is ultimately pulling the strings, who is somehow “controlling” the course of events of the capitalist system. Humanity under capital is the object of an independent, contradictory dynamic, which it unconsciously produces by way of market mediation. This process of capital’s autonomous movement, called fetishism, is constituted “behind the backs of the producers,” as Karl Marx famously remarked.

Generally speaking, capitalism as a fetishistic social formation is thus characterized by the fact that in capitalism, “the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite,” as Karl Marx wrote in his main work Capital. The fetishistic forms of the valorization of capital, which are independent of the subjects, “appear to the political economists’ bourgeois consciousness” as a “self-evident and nature-imposed necessity.”

This fetishism pervades all the aggregate states that capital passes through in its autonomous movement, its cycle of valorization, in which more money is created from money through the production of commodities and the exploitation of wage labor (M-C-M’): commodity, money, labor.

In the labor process, for example, the wage-dependent market participant (“proletarian”) becomes “variable capital,” the only commodity acquired by capital on the labor market, which through its capacity to work can create more value than it is itself worth. Labor is “external” to the worker, he therefore “only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself,” as Marx put it in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts.

This being at the mercy of an external labor process over whose goal and course the worker has no control, in which his divestment is a moment of the fetishistic valorization movement of capital, leads to the formation of the well-known, omnipresent sense of alienation in capitalism. This “forced” labor under capital no longer serves the direct “satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it,” Marx continues. Its strangeness emerges “clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification.”

The market subjects, isolated from one another by the compulsion of competition, who enter into commodity exchange only through the mediation of the market, appear similarly powerless in the face of commodity fetishism. The social character of their own labor is reflected to the commodity producers in the representational character of the products of their labor, Marx explained in the famous fetish chapter of Capital.

The social property of a commodity as a bearer of value (the quantum of socially necessary labor-time expended in its production process), produced within the framework of the valorization process, appears as a natural property of these things. The individual commodity seems to be endowed with the property of being a bearer of value in the same way as it is endowed with its other physical properties. Since the commodity, as a socially constituted “object of value,” appears only in the exchange of commodities on the market, it appears to the isolated producers as if it were a matter of a “social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers.”

Things thus become “independent” in a market-mediated way from the market subjects, who literally produce them themselves and offer them for sale in commodity form on the market – and this process is animated by the overall social compulsion of capital to valorize. This independence of capital is particularly evident in the financial markets, where fetishism manifests itself in the abstract form of money, and forms the most important driving force for reactionary crisis ideologies, including anti-Semitism.

Especially in times of crisis, when once again a “market quake” or financial crash threaten the stability of the entire economic system – as most recently in 2008 – it becomes clear that even the capitalist class is by no means “in control” of this fetishistic and destructive dynamic of capital, that the crisis-like course of events under capitalism is by no means controlled by a conspiracy.

The fetishistic reality of capitalism is thus actually scarier than the worst conspiracy ideology. The entire real world, human beings as well as nature, are only transitory stages of a blindly unfolding process of the accumulation of abstract wealth, which is ultimately abstract quanta of spent, “dead” human labor. The whole late capitalist horror consists precisely in the fact that there is no one at the wheel of the valorization train that is constantly hurtling towards the abyss.

Society, however, is a necessary appendage of the real-abstract valorization process of capital running amok, since capital can only be valorized through wage labor and the burning of resources in the production of commodities. In the end, only that which is necessary and financially viable within the framework of this blind cycle of capital multiplication has social existence: that is, only that which contributes directly or indirectly to the expansion of capital.

This applies not only to the category of “jobs” in the economy, but also to the state apparatus in its function as an “ideal total capitalist,” (Marx) and even to cultural production, which has to contribute to location optimization within the framework of neoliberal marketing strategies – social existence under capital is always subject to its ability to be “financed.” On the overall social, global level, capital thus acts as an “automatic subject” of boundless, tautological self-aggrandizement.

The concrete world is thus only the “material” of this independent, real-abstract autonomous movement of capital, which in its boundless growth mania deprives humanity of its social and ecological basis of existence. The global surplus value machine of capital thus burns the world to the ground in order to maintain the irrational end in itself of unlimited capital growth for as long as possible. A growing, economically “superfluous” humanity in the periphery and an escalating ecological crisis are the consequences of this autonomous movement of capital.

In a reversal of the old romanticism of progress, the image of a constantly accelerating train hurtling towards the abyss thus suggests itself, a machine out of control, driven by the autonomous movement of capital, which is produced unconsciously by the market participants, mediated by competition and the market. The transformative act that is necessary for survival is to find and apply the emergency brake, as Walter Benjamin already remarked.

Social structures unconsciously produced by human beings that objectify themselves vis-à-vis individuals; social dynamics that become independent vis-à-vis the subjects that produce them – this absurd form of social reproduction that characterizes the “prehistory of humanity” is illuminated by the concept of fetishism.

Thus the people of “enlightened” bourgeois society are nothing more than sinister fetish servants. Domination in capitalism is thus ultimately subjectless, as the crisis theorist Robert Kurz explained in his text Domination Without a Subject; the capital relation rules as a fetishistic abstraction of reality.

The inner essence of the capital relation, according to Kurz, is not captured by the disdainful greed of all the capitalist philanderers who were able to increase their (largely fictitious) wealth to obscene levels during the neoliberal decades:

Their “individual objectives” are not what they seem: in accordance with their form, they are not individual or voluntary objectives, and for this reason their content is also distorted and flows towards self-destruction. The essential point is not that individuals mutually use one another for their individual objectives, but rather, to the extent that they seem to do so, that they themselves execute a totally different, supraindividual and subjectless objective: the autonomous movement (valorization) of capital.

The subjective, “managerial,” exploitative interests of the capitalists thus form the outward appearance that conceals the fetishistic essence of the irrational, subjectless domination of the capital relation at the “macroeconomic” level. In general, capital can only be understood as a social totality; attempts to project the relations of the reproduction of individual capitals (enterprises, corporations) onto the system as a whole ultimately end up as ideology.

The Question of Guilt and Responsibility in Capitalism

As soon as people act as subjects in the valorization circuit of capital, they become character masks (Marx) of their respective position in the accumulation process – whether as assembly line workers, managers, salespeople or service providers is irrelevant in this respect. They are no longer “within themselves,” but act as the personification of their respective economic function (this is the basis of the feelings of alienation mentioned above).

Marx, for example, describes the capitalist in his function as a character mask “as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will,” who functions as the “point of departure and point of return” of the self-purpose of the endless circulation of capital. The “objective content of that circulation – the valorization of value – is his subjective purpose,” according to Marx in Capital.

What emerges here is the absurd position of the market subject within the automatism of capital valorization. On the one hand, capital as an automatic subject turns people into objects of its valorization movement, into things, into commodities that are traded on the labor market – and who have to adapt to this mediated form of subjectless domination as if it were a man-made law of nature, with a subliminal feeling of powerlessness.

At the same time, the only chance to still live out a stale imitation of subjectivity is to cooperate, as the aforementioned economic character mask, in the “subjective” perfection of this automatism of boundless capital valorization – and thus, in turn, to degrade “the others” to objects and “make them equal to things.” Within the all-too-real fetishism that the automatic subject perpetuates, the inmates of the capitalist treadmill are always two things at once: the subject of accumulation as well as its powerless object.

All character masks, as personifications of their respective economic function, therefore function as subject-objects of the autonomous movement of valorization that they themselves perpetuate, whereby the concrete relationship between these two poles depends on their specific hierarchical position in the reproduction process of capital. And it is precisely this hierarchical position of the subjects within the automatism of capital valorization that must also be taken into account in the question of the category of guilt, of personal responsibility. For of course the fetishism of capital does not absolve the actors who carry it out.

While some are obsessed with finding scapegoats, at the other end of the spectrum is a powerless systems theory that exculpates the current actors in business and politics. In this view, it seems as if those responsible can no longer be identified due to systemic constraints and objective structural laws. The concrete perpetrators disappear behind the destructive action of the automatic subject of capital’s collapsing dynamic of valorization.

The fact that the fetishism of capitalist society, in which the market-mediated actions of market subjects confront them as an alien, quasi-objective force, by no means leads to an exculpation of the actions of the perpetrators, was already pointed out by the crisis theorist Robert Kurz at the beginning of the 21st century:

Now, when the common form-context of abstract labor, commodity-form, state-citizenship, etc., moves into the field of vision of critique, where is accountability? Can one make a blind structural connection, can one make the automatic subject responsible for anything, even if it is the greatest crime? And vice versa: if capitalist barbarism is ultimately inherent in the mute compulsions of competition, etc., are not the barbaric acts of the ugly managers, the dirty politicians, the bureaucratic crisis administrators, the bloody butchers of the state of emergency somehow excused, because they are always conditioned and are actually caused by the subjectless structural laws of “second nature”?

Such an argument forgets that the concept of the automatic subject is a paradoxical metaphor for a paradoxical social relation. The automatic subject is not a distinct entity squatting out there somewhere by itself, but it is the social spell under which people subject their own actions to the automatism of capitalized money.

But those who act are always the individuals themselves. Competition, an artificially generated struggle for survival, crises, etc. all increase the potential for barbarism, but practically this barbarism must be carried out by the actions of people, and must pass through their consciousness. And that is why individuals are also subjectively responsible for their actions, the ugly manager and the dirty politician just as much as, on the other hand, the racist unemployed person and the anti-Semitic single mother.

The potential dangers of this society, and the immense anxiety that accompanies them, must be dealt with on a daily basis, and every moment individuals make choices in this process that are never completely without alternatives – neither on a small, daily scale nor on a large, socio-historical scale. No one is simply a puppet, without any agency, but everyone has to deal with the hair-raising contradictions, fears and sufferings of this spell.

Therefore, it is not absurd to direct the necessary critique of society to the level of socially overarching structures, to abstract labor and the automatic subject, but nevertheless to hold the acting individuals responsible for their actions, even if their social character mask leads them to a state of insanity.

Robert Kurz, Marx Lesen

A Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos, as subjects who carry out the contradictory automatism of capital accumulation on a political and economic level, are fully responsible for their actions. This is also true of a Wolfgang Schäuble, who is fully responsible for everything he has done to Greece and Southern Europe during the euro crisis; but it is also true of the little nasty forum troll, who is responsible for all the agitation he spreads on the net – even if these actions only execute the systemic crisis dynamics on a political or ideological level.

Of course, the historical guilt that an egomaniac like Trump or an austerity sadist like Schäuble has brought upon himself weighs far more heavily than the pitiful word-vomit of a single fringe extremist of the New Right in newspaper forums or social networks.

The great question of guilt in relation to the subjectless domination of capital can now also be specified in relation to the dynamics of the crisis and crisis ideology: the crisis as a historical process is a consequence of the increasing internal contradictions of capital, which confront the subjects as ever more severe “factual constraints.”

Specifically, it is the tendency of capital to get rid of its own substance, value-creating wage labor, by automating the production process. This applies not only to the economic crisis, but also to the ecological crisis of capital, which, in its fetishistic compulsion to grow, must burn up the natural foundations of human life at an ever-increasing rate by increasing production.

Therefore, we can simply conclude that absolutely no one is to blame for the crisis of capital. The crisis was certainly not “orchestrated” by any conspirators. The crisis erupted precisely because market subjects are doing more and more efficiently exactly what the system demands of them: exploiting wage labor for the purpose of unlimited capital accumulation. The more effectively wage labor is exploited, the greater the pressure, the tighter the market-mediated noose around the necks of all market subjects.

The first false question, leading to ideological blindness, which imposes itself on the reified consciousness as a matter of course at the outbreak of the crisis, is the question of guilt. But the shoe is on the other foot: personal guilt must be sought in the “everyday life” of capital valorization, in the “normal execution” of the capitalist treadmill, in the concrete economic exploitation, in political oppression and in the production of ideology that keeps the automatism of the system running.

Thus, while no one is “to blame” for the outbreak of the systemic crisis, the dynamics of which unfold quasi “behind the backs of the producers” (Marx), it is precisely the everyday functioning of the system – the market-mediated oppression, exploitation and ideology production – in which all the individuals who consciously execute the systemic constraints as “character masks” of their capitalist functions, are guilty. Even more: in interaction with the dynamics of the crisis, it is precisely the exploitation, the oppression, the production of lies by the system that is taken to the point of absurdity.

If, as in the neoliberal decades, the exploitation of wage dependent workers continues to increase, this points to a systemic process of crisis that is perpetuated on the backs of those same workers. And this is all the more true when a “normal employment relationship” becomes the exception and, globally speaking, more and more people can actually no longer be exploited by capital because they are superfluous and therefore nothing more than “useless eaters.”

Class Struggle as A Struggle for Distribution

The increase in exploitation, impoverishment and precariousness described above, even in the centers of the capitalist world system, must therefore be understood as a systemic reaction to a deep historical process of crisis. This occurred in the 1980s in response to the end of the post-war boom in the 1970s and the crisis period of stagflation. Consequently, neoliberalism prevailed only because Keynesianism was at its wits’ end. In this sense, neoliberalism was not a kind of “coup” against a supposedly ideal world of the welfare state, as many on the left like to imply.

It is precisely the seemingly absurd split between rich and poor, between the masses of precarious and impoverished wage-dependents, and the fictitious millions in largely fictitious capital that a few billionaires seem to possess that points to the systemic crisis, which also brings with it a lack of profitable investment opportunities in the real commodity economy, and a corresponding shift to speculative activities in the financial sphere (“financialization of capitalism”).

It is precisely these consequences of the crisis that confront all actors as increasing, objectified contradictions or “constraints.” The subjects react to this in a system-immanent way with an intensification of competition: politicians and states that enforce social cuts within the framework of the competition for locations, corporations that find ever more brutal forms of exploitation, in the mass media whose opportunism in the production of ideology seems to know no bounds, and wage-earners who increasingly resort to mobbing.

The market-mediated mute compulsion of the ever “tougher” conditions compels the character masks of their respective social functions to execute this compulsion under penalty of their own downfall. The capitalist who is not able to increase the exploitation of his human material in the context of increasing competition on “tighter” markets will perish. The same applies to the capitalist economies as national “locations,” which are also in a race to the bottom due to the crisis.

The Hartz reforms, with their intended strategy of increasing precariousness and fixating on exports, have thus been “successful” in that they have so far been able to pass on the consequences of the crisis to other countries through the export of debt. The same applies to public opinion: the tendency towards opportunism in politics and the media is increasing, and oppositional thinking is being marginalized, especially on the “left.”

Against the background of what has been written above, a clear assessment of the class struggle now also seems possible. Class struggle is thus a struggle for distribution within the process of capital reduction, the intensity of which is determined by the concrete, historical unfolding of its contradictions. In periods of strong economic expansion, as during the post-war boom until the 1970s, forms of “social partnership” can emerge between the functional elites of capital and the trade unions representing the wage-earners (of “variable capital,” as Marx puts it).

As long as markets are expanding strongly, high profits can be agreed upon with wages that turn wage-dependent workers into consumers. This changes relatively quickly in times of crisis, when the main concern of every capitalist is to perpetuate the irrational end in itself of capital accumulation, if necessary at the expense of his own wage-earners.

The class struggle as a struggle for distribution thus has no inherent objective transformative potential. It is a struggle for shares in the real production of value, which is melting away as a result of the crisis, and it does not question this irrational form of social reproduction as such. The class struggle (and this is also historically true of such struggles) thus moves within the forms of capitalist socialization (value, labor, capital, state) and seeks emancipation and recognition within these categories, rather than their abolition.

The intensifying class struggle is therefore a struggle for distribution. The militancy with which this “class war,” (Warren Buffet) which is escalating because of the crisis, is propagated, conceals its lack of radicalism, since the causes of the crisis and the above-mentioned fetishistic form of social reproduction in capitalism are not reflected upon by this movement.

The present social conditions also seem to resemble the impoverishment of earlier times because the historical “ascendant phase” of the working class in the 18^th and 19^th centuries has social parallels with the present descendant phase of capital and the working class. The current widespread misery within the eroding class of wage-earners in the centers of the world system thus mirrors the misery of its historical formation.

To put it vividly: The foundation on which the class actors operate, the expenditure of wage labor in commodity production, is disintegrating. The one-sided rhetoric of class struggle obscures the fact that the classes themselves are in the process of dissolution as a result of the crisis. The proletariat is disintegrating into precisely that economically “superfluous” layer of people who are desperately fleeing to the core regions of the capitalist world system.

What Do We Do?

To be radical is to grasp a problem at its root in order to find a solution adequate to it. This is precisely what Marxist class struggle thinking does not do. It is not the distribution of commodity wealth that is at the heart of the crisis, but the contradictory form in which wealth is produced for the sake of the irrational self-purpose of unbridled capital accumulation – the commodity form itself. The blatant, ever worsening social division of late capitalist societies is, as explained, precisely the consequence of the escalating internal and external contradictions of capital’s compulsion to grow.

Consequently, the crisis cannot be resolved by social-democratic redistribution. The radical goal should not be to gain “control” (possibly still under the leadership of a dictatorial state and cadre party) over the machinery of capitalist accumulation, but rather to fundamentally transform it in order to finally liberate the production of consumer goods from its commodity form, from the fetishistic end in itself of the valorization of value.

Even the “democratization” of capitalist enterprises, as is currently being discussed in left-liberal circles in the US as direct worker control, would continue to expose these cooperatives to the constraints of the crisis-induced tightening of the markets, and thus change little. The crisis of capital, which is reaching its internal and external limits, can thus only be overcome by overcoming the fetishistic dynamics of the accumulation process – for it is precisely these dynamics of exploitation, unconsciously generated by the market subjects, that are devastating impotent human societies and the global ecosystem.

Ultimately, it is about simplifying social reproduction by organizing it directly, through an all-encompassing process of society-wide communication, rather than – as is currently the case – degrading society to a mere transitory stage of a blind world-burning process run amok. Post-capitalism thus means, at its core, the conscious shaping of the process of social reproduction by the members of society, as opposed to the current state in which people are subjected to a quasi-objective, fetishistic dynamic.

Karl Marx’s seemingly cryptic remark that the overcoming of capitalism would conclude “the prehistory of human society” thus gains clarity. All human history to date has taken place unconsciously, within the framework of fetishistic social systems: from the religious fetishism of early times and the Middle Ages to the secularized religion of capital.

And here is the thing: the crisis is also an irreversible, fetishistic process. It will run its course, and there is no way to stabilize the system in the long run, because the eternal creation of debt will eventually reach its limits, even in the centers. This is not a vision of the future; it is already a reality, especially in the periphery.

The system, choking on its contradictions, is already producing an economically superfluous humanity and collapsing regions known as “failed states,” as the refugee crisis has made clear. The same is true of the climate crisis caused by capitalist growth mania and its monstrous consequences.

Whether the collapsing system will be overcome is therefore not a question of the subjective “will” of the members of society. It is a question of the very survival of human civilization, and ultimately of human existence, how the coming transformation process will proceed: as a chaotic disintegration, in the form of the establishment of a brutal, murderous crisis dictatorship, or in a progressive direction that would open up new emancipatory perspectives for humanity, despite all the climate-related distortions to come.

What is more, this transformation process is already underway – and the increasing political, ideological, and military conflicts are precisely the expression of this upheaval that is unconsciously taking place in humanity, as the sociologist and world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein pointed out at the beginning of the 21st century:

We are living in a transition from our existing world-system, the capitalist world-economy, to another world-system or systems. We do not know whether this will be for the better or for the worse. We shall not know until we get there, which may not be for another fifty years now. We do know that the period of transition will be a very difficult one for all who live in it. […] It will be a period of conflicts and aggravated disorders […]. Not paradoxically, it will also be a period in which the “free will” factor will be at its maximum, meaning that the individual and collective action can have a greater impact on the future structuring of the world than such action can have in more “normal” times, that is, during the ongoing life of an historical system.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics

Civilization or barbarism – these are the extreme poles in this historical “phase of transition,” whereby it is the New Right, with its extremism of the center, which insists on adhering to the forms of society in decay (nation, “creative” capital, state), that is paving the way towards barbarism.

It is precisely the extreme networks and associations of the New Right that are sometimes consciously preparing for the crisis – which they imagine as the result of a conspiracy against Germany – with death lists and coup plans. A dictatorship planned for the next wave of crisis is supposed to serve to finally “cleanse” the left through mass murder. Thus, neo-fascism is a kind of fire accelerator for barbarism in the crisis.

There is a maxim of political practice that left movements, groups or even parties would have to follow in the 21^st century if they still want to function as progressive social forces according to their concept in the current epoch of upheaval and crisis. Capitalism must be consigned to history as quickly as possible, the capital relation as a social totality must be consciously abolished – all practical actions, all tactics, all reform proposals, all broader strategies would have to be oriented towards this categorical imperative.

This is not an expression of leftist “radicalism,” but the formulation of a reasonable bare minimum, that, if not realized, would lead to the end of 21^st century civilization in barbarism. Precisely because capital is collapsing, it must be overcome. Progress can only be realized beyond capital, in the transformative struggle to shape a post-capitalist society.

A progressive movement, based on an understanding of the necessity of systemic transformation, would thus fight to create conditions that could steer this transformative dynamic in an emancipatory direction. The maxim of such a post-politics would be, on the one hand, the effort to maintain and further develop the process of civilization, and, on the other hand, the struggle to overcome the inherent destructive dynamics of capitalism.

The goal of a progressive transformation movement would thus be to consciously shape the process of civilization, which is fetishistically carried out by powerless people, within the framework of a process of communication throughout society. The forms in which a self-conscious transformation movement organizes itself in the context of the crisis-related increase in social conflicts would thus possibly become the germinal forms of a post-capitalist society.

Bourgeois politics, the actions of political subjects, are thus “important” again, they have weight. Not because they can solve the crisis, but because they determine the course of the crisis. An example may illustrate this: whether a Schäuble puts Europe on a neoliberal starvation diet (austerity) after the outbreak of the euro crisis, or whether the crisis process unfolds within the framework of a pan-European economic and social policy, is of great importance for the further unfolding of the crisis, as the rise of nationalist and right-wing extremist movements in austerity-ridden “German” Europe shows.

The increasing social struggles against the dismantling of the welfare state, against the dismantling of democracy and police-state tendencies, and for a genuine climate policy should thus be understood as fields in which the social subjects literally fight for the course of the transformation process that is objectively taking place.

And here the class struggle – insofar as it is aware of its role as a means in a struggle for transformation – also has an important role to play. The class struggle is part of the struggle over the concrete course that the transformation process will take.

Which Society Will Undergo Transformation?

For this to happen, the class struggle must look beyond itself and no longer primarily strive for recognition or social satisfaction in a declining capitalism, as the workers’ movement historically did. The historical expansion of capitalism and the wage-labor regime was the precondition for this, which is no longer the case today because of the crisis.

To put it more concretely, understanding the crisis as a maxim of emancipatory praxis means asking in what form late capitalist society will enter the inevitable process of transformation. Will it be an authoritarian, racist, police-state administered oligarchy with absurd social abysses, or a more egalitarian, bourgeois-democratic polity in which there continues to be space for radical critique and praxis?

Superficially, then, an emancipatory left that wants to be progressive in late capitalism resembles an existentialist figure, comparable to Albert Camus’ Sisyphus, who consciously engages in a seemingly absurd practice. The struggle for social improvements against the dismantling of democracy, for the equality of minorities, for the Green New Deal is waged in full awareness of the internal capitalist futility of this struggle – in the face of the escalating economic and ecological systemic crisis.

But this is where the analogy ends. The consciousness and rhetoric with which this “battle for the tea water” is fought is crucial. It is necessary to tell people clearly what is going on, that the old capitalist world is dying, that the new one has not yet been born – and that this is a struggle against social cuts, for redistribution, against racism, climate destruction and warmongering, a struggle for optimal starting conditions for the inevitable system transformation.

Through this openness, which only makes explicit what has long since been unconsciously embedded in society as a dull crisis agenda, coupled with the search for post-capitalist forms of organization within this movement, it would also be possible to overcome the false immediacy that has often led progressive movements to get bogged down in the false whole of late capitalism.

False immediacy is understood here as the tendency of social movements to unconsciously persist in forms of thinking that correspond to the social conditions and contradictions against which they are directed.

A prime example of this is trade union struggles against job cuts, which have to be fought by the actors concerned for the sake of their social survival – but which, without a corresponding awareness of the crisis, reproduce the existing forms of thought – in this case thinking in terms of “jobs” as the only option for individual reproduction – even in times of crisis among the actors.

It is similar with the protests against inflation, a phenomenon which is often reduced to the greed of the capitalists – and which without radical crisis consciousness must end in impotence. It would be crucial to raise the question of the system offensively in the coming crisis confrontations, precisely because capital is perishing from its own contradictions. The concrete protest must be carried out with open eyes as part of a struggle for the transformation of the system.

Such necessary social struggles would thus have to be coupled with a radical emancipatory critique of the capitalist forms of existence and thought that are in the process of disintegration, as Robert Kurz has already pointed out:

The task, then, is to formulate the emancipatory critique of the objectified, socially overarching forms of existence or thought and to assert it from within the social struggle in order to consciously break through this categorical prison. […] What matters is to develop a will against the dominant form of the will and to make conscious its fetishistic character.

The text is an updated version of an article that was published in the magazine Telepolis in 2019, before it was hijacked by a Querfront racket of the Left Party and converted into a Querfront organ. The text can be taken unabridged by anyone interested, with credit to the author.

I finance my journalistic work mostly through donations. If you like my texts, then you are welcome to contribute via Patreon.

Originally republished on konicz.info on 10/02/2022

A military disaster looms for Russia’s army in northeastern Ukraine

Tomasz Konicz

There is movement in the war in the east – and it is the Ukrainian army that has apparently been able to seize the momentum. While the Western public, to the extent that it still follows the war in Ukraine, which has coagulated into normality, at all, was mainly aware of the offensive around the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, large territorial gains seem to have been recorded in the northeast by combined Ukrainian units in a rapid attack.

Ukrainian units were able to break through the Russian lines southeast of Kharkov on a broad front and gain dozens of kilometers of ground within a few days, between the 4^th and 9^th of September. Even pro-Russian propaganda sources openly admit this.[1] Meanwhile, Ukrainian troops are reported to be on the outskirts of Kupyansk,[2] the main Russian-held city in Kharkov Oblast. Moreover, the most important supply route of the Russian army units in the western Donbass around Izium runs through Kupyansk. Consequently, cutting this supply route would be devastating for the Kremlin’s operations in eastern Ukraine. The attacks by Ukrainian troops in the south thus appear to have contributed primarily to weakening the Russian front in the north – and it is precisely these weak points that Kiev’s army leadership – probably evaluating Western information – was able to correctly identify and exploit.

The Russian defense, thinned out by troop deployments to Kherson, sometimes consisting of conscripted reservists from Lugansk and units of barracked police, is said to have literally collapsed. The Ukrainian army, ironically, has successfully employed the same tactics that the Russian army leadership failed to implement at the outset of the war. No mobile units of combined forces have advanced far into enemy territory after breaking through on the front lines without capturing towns and settlements where significant Russian occupation forces are entrenched. The difference so far, at least, is that the demoralized and encircled Russian troops are not leading attacks on Ukrainian supply routes and supply lines, as Ukrainian soldiers did during the Russian advance at the outbreak of war.

Currently, thousands of Russian soldiers are said to be in these cauldrons west of the Oskol River. It’s a disaster for the Russian army that even Western military experts could scarcely have imagined before the war broke out.[3] In the coming days it will be decided whether the Ukrainian forces can maintain these gains in terrain, or whether Kiev overestimated its forces, overstretched its supply routes – and Ukraine faces similar setbacks in Russian counter-offensives as the Russian invasion forces did at the start of the war.

In response to this disaster, in which terrain that had to be painstakingly conquered over months was lost within a few days, the Russian army is supposed to pull together strong formations in the region in order to quickly reverse any of Ukraine’s territorial gains that are not secured by defensive installations, and to dislodge the encircled Russian troops. But this weakens other sections of the front, as Russia attacked Ukraine with a vastly outnumbered army, and the initial military-technical and equipment superiority of Russian forces is increasingly fading due to Western arms deliveries and war-related attrition.

Further attacks by Ukrainian forces thus seem likely. But this would ultimately mean that the strategic momentum in this war would pass to Ukraine after weeks of de facto stalemate. Russia’s invading army would thus be put on the defensive, while Ukrainian formations exploit weak points to break through thinned Russian fronts and make repeated gains in territory. The coming days will show whether this latest offensive by Kiev southwest of Kharkov indeed marked a strategic turning point in the war. The decisive factor will be the extent to which Kiev’s troops will be able to maintain these gains in the face of Russian counterattacks.

On September 10, the first photos of Ukrainian soldiers from the strategically important city of Kupyansk appeared on the web – as mentioned, the most important Russian supply line to the western Donbass runs through here. Apparently, parts of the city were abandoned by Russia without a fight. It takes Russia months to capture Ukrainian cities. Ukraine appears to be taking them in a hand sweep. Russian troops south of Kupyansk, especially near Izium, are now in a very difficult position. Indeed, it seems that Russia is losing all conquered territory west of the Oskil River. Izium is almost surrounded by Ukrainian army, thousands of Russian troops are threatened with capture or death.

But the unexpected aspect of the Ukrainian offensive is its total surprise effect. Russian intelligence and intelligence services (satellites, aerial reconnaissance, informants) seem to have been blind. It’s 2022, every major Russian troop movement is known to the West, and sometimes troop redeployments – as most recently towards Kherson – are discussed on the internet. Russia is apparently hardly able to do this, the Russian army actually seems to have been “in the picture” and not to have noticed the significant deployment, the preparations for the Ukrainian offensive – this in the era of satellite-based reconnaissance.

The desolate state of the Russian army, which suffers not only from corruption and mismanagement but also from an archaic command structure, enormous casualties and rapid wear and tear on material (Putin has made gestures to North Korea to procure ammunition), seems to have put the Kremlin in a similar position to that at the start of the war: When the Russian lightning advance on Kiev and Kharkov failed, Moscow had to choose between withdrawal and escalation. Putin opted for an escalation of the cycle.

The Kremlin will soon face a similar decision if the current Ukrainian offensive is successful: Either the admission of defeat, which will certainly cost Putin his head in the medium term, or further escalation. And Russia certainly has the means to continue following the logic of military escalation – which at the same time increases the danger of a major war.

I finance my journalistic work mostly through donations. If you like my texts, then you are welcome to contribute via Patreon.

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[1] https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/09/the-izium-counteroffensive-success-disaster.html#more

[2] https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1568185503962259459

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2QOiMeaYYk

Originally posted on konicz.info on 09/09/2022

Poor, surrounded by enemies, without allies: Armenia finds itself in a desperate geopolitical situation, as Azerbaijan’s renewed attack shows

Tomasz Konicz

The timing of the large-scale attack launched in the evening hours of September 12 was perfect. At the same time that Russia’s army was suffering its biggest defeat since the implosion of the Soviet Union in eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan was launching massive attacks on the territory of Armenia. Localities, infrastructure and military facilities in the southern Armenian border region were attacked with heavy artillery and drones. Within a few hours, Yerevan had to report dozens of dead civilians and army personnel.

The intensity of the attacks reportedly eased somewhat on September 14, following appeals from the West and Russia, but artillery attacks on Armenian towns and villages continued to be reported. At the same time, according to unofficial Azerbaijani sources, Baku’s army has managed to capture a number of strategic positions in the Armenian border area, allowing Azerbaijani artillery to exercise fire control over large parts of southeastern Armenia.

The attacks by Azerbaijan, which has the full support of its close ally Turkey, come barely two years after the invasion of the Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which seceded from Azerbaijan in the 1990s during a bloody war that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the fall of 2020, Baku, which considers Nagorno-Karabakh to be part of Azerbaijan, was able to conquer a large part of this Armenian settlement and expel its population through a successful invasion coordinated with Turkey.

Since that defeat – which rekindled the trauma of the 1915 Turkish genocide of Armenians – Yerevan’s army has been effectively unable to hold its own militarily against the overwhelming Turkish-Azerbaijani alliance. Armenia is poor; it has no mineral resources or energy sources. Azerbaijan, for its part, can not only maintain a military budget larger than Armenia’s entire national budget because of rich natural gas and oil reserves, but can also use the “gas weapon” as diplomatic leverage to isolate Armenia.

This was evident not only in the Azerbaijani-Turkish attack in 2020, when neither the West nor Russia could be persuaded to provide Armenia with substantial support, but also in the present, where a similar geopolitical constellation is emerging. Armenia is a member of the Russian-led post-Soviet military alliance CSTO, which the Kremlin wanted to build into a Eurasian counterpart to NATO. Shortly after Azerbaijan’s initial attacks, which were primarily directed against internationally recognized Armenian territory, Yerevan addressed the alliance, which includes six former Soviet republics, in a video conference requesting assistance. But Moscow, whose archaic military machine is currently reaching its breaking point in eastern Ukraine, responded evasively. Putin only agreed to send a team of CSTO observers.

Abandoned by Putin and the EU

It is not only the military catastrophe of recent days in eastern Ukraine that is forcing Moscow, which has had to reduce its troop presence in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, to exercise military restraint. Azerbaijan, swimming in foreign currency, is one of the Russian arms industry’s most important customers, and Azerbaijani dictator Aliyev maintains great relations with Putin. On the very eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on February 22, both autocratic leaders signed a comprehensive cooperation agreement.

Armenia, on the other hand, experienced a bourgeois “velvet revolution” in 2018, when the corrupt clique loyal to Putin was ousted and liberal, more Western-oriented forces around President Pashinyan came to power, daring a cautious democratization and rapprochement with the West – which Moscow punished with its cold inaction during the 2020 war.

However, Pashinyan’s biggest mistake was probably to have taken the West’s democratic rhetoric seriously, since the EU now wants to develop Azerbaijan into a central gas supplier –especially against the backdrop of the war over Ukraine. In July, the president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was able to agree with the Azerbaijani autocrat Aliyev on the “expansion” of the southern gas corridor leading via Georgia and Turkey, which, at some point in the future, is supposed to transport twice the amount of gas to the EU. On the day of the attack on Armenia, Azerbaijan’s energy minister affirmed that his highly armed country intends to increase gas supplies to the EU by 30 percent this year alone. Azerbaijan is thus engaged in a similar small-scale geopolitical “seesaw policy” between Moscow and the West as Turkey is, in order to gain maximum concessions from both power blocs.

Moreover, for years Baku has simply bribed the Berlin and Brussels political establishment with millions of euros in order to make his point of view prevail. In initial statements EU representatives called on both sides to de-escalate the conflict, thus obscuring Baku’s clear attack.

Brussels and Berlin seem willing to pay for Azerbaijani natural gas with Armenian blood and territory, so that the valorization process in the EU – the material foundation of all airy European values – does not lose its energetic basis. For the current wave of attacks indicates that Baku and Ankara want to use the favorable opportunity to come close to two strategic goals: coercing Armenia to renounce the Armenian settlement areas in Nagorno-Karabakh and conquering a land connection between Turkey and Azerbaijan that would pass through southern Armenian territory.

Originally posted in analyse & kritik on 09/04/2022

Over-indebtedness, inflation, the threat of recession and impotent politicians: the current wave of crises is likely to take full hold even in the western centers of the capitalist world system

Tomasz Konicz

New decade, new crisis? In mid-June, the European currency area, which had already been on the verge of collapse in the course of the euro crisis, once again seemed to switch into panic mode. The European Central Bank (ECB) felt compelled to hold a special meeting on June 15 after European financial markets were hit by rising interest rate differentials, or spreads, between German and southern European government bonds. In particular, the spread between German and Italian government securities is considered a reliable crisis indicator because Italy, the third-largest European economy, has a high level of government debt, at 150 percent of gross domestic product (in 2019, before the outbreak of the pandemic, the country’s debt was 135 percent), which makes the interest burden on Italian government bonds grow particularly quickly in the event of any turmoil. Moreover, Italy has below-average growth rates, so there is little prospect of reducing the debt burden in the foreseeable future. The OECD’s economic forecasts, which are regularly revised downwards anyway, assume growth of 2.5 percent for the country this year and only 1.2 percent next year.

The Italian bond market acts as a kind of early warning bell, which struck hard in mid-June: The yield on Italian government bonds rose to more than four percent, and the spread with the Bund was almost 250 basis points (2.5 percent) at one point. What had happened? The ECB had previously held out the prospect of following the Fed’s lead and countering the eurozone’s runaway inflation of 8.1 percent with a monetary turnaround towards a restrictive monetary policy. The European “currency guardians” thus announced that they would abandon the zero interest rate policy that had effectively been pursued for eleven years, i.e. since the last euro crisis, and raise key interest rates. In addition, a gradual phase-out of the government bond-buying programs, which are used to reduce the interest burden in the South and increase the money supply, was to be initiated. The mere announcement of a departure from the expansionary monetary policy led to an increase in the interest burden in the southern periphery of the eurozone.

At its special meeting, the ECB then decided to continue buying the bonds of “weaker euro countries,” if necessary, in order to keep the gap to German government bonds within tolerable limits, which immediately led to a reduction in the risk premium between Italian and German government securities. One of the ECB’s goals is not to further inflate its balance sheet, which grew to eight trillion euros during the pandemic and was less than five trillion euros before the pandemic began, by buying securities. The revenues generated from maturing government securities are now to be used to buy up new bonds until the end of 2024. With a volume of 1.7 trillion euros, the ECB thus still has plenty of leeway to replace German bonds with Italian ones, for example. But with this the central bank has already partially withdrawn from the expansionary monetary policy that was announced for the purpose of fighting inflation.

With the situation developing in Italy, a member of the Eurozone whose gross domestic product (GDP) is around ten times that of Greece is now threatened with a debt crisis. In the coming year alone, government liabilities south of the Alps amounting to almost 290 billion euros are due for refinancing, while Greece has a GDP of 180 billion euros. For this reason, it is effectively impossible for the Federal Republic, as the dominant power within the Eurozone, to subject Italy to a dictate of austerity, such as that imposed on Greece by former German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU), without endangering the existence of the entire European currency area. Italy is indeed too big to fail. So if Berlin were to try to drive the country into a similar downward deflationary spiral that once ensnared Greece, it would be tantamount to blowing up the eurozone, as was already favored during the euro crisis by the openly reactionary sections of the German functional elites in the FDP and on the right fringe of the CDU (the “values union”).

Currently, it is Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel that is pushing back against the ECB’s crisis policy, repeating the old German demand that political conditions – mostly austerity programs – be coupled with financial aid for crisis states. In view of high inflation, Nagel spoke of “dangerous waters” into which the ECB was entering if it bought bonds of southern European states as soon as their interest rate differential with German government bonds reached a speculative level. It is not clear at all how a normal market reaction to the high debt burden in the south of the eurozone can be distinguished from a speculative one.

The ECB’s lurching course of action in monetary policy, which consists of cautiously raising key interest rates on the one hand and continuing to print money by buying up government bonds on the other, is an expression of the power-political constellation within the EU. Berlin, where the monetarists call the shots, will get its interest rate hike, while the south of the Eurozone, which favors an expansionary monetary policy, can count on further bond purchases. That’s why the European central bank is much more hesitant about raising key interest rates than the Fed, which has already raised the key rate to 1.75 percent.

So ten years after the euro crisis German Europe is once again at an impasse: the ECB should actually raise interest rates quickly and significantly to curb inflation. And at the same time the “guardians of the currency” would have to keep interest rates low to prevent a new debt crisis in the South and avert the threat of recession. The battle over the course of monetary policy is not a purely European phenomenon; similar disputes between Keynesians and monetarists are also taking place in the US. The connection between the great pandemic-related flood of money and global inflation was most recently discussed, for example, before the US Senate Finance Committee, which the Biden administration’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen had to face at the beginning of June. Berlin’s role was played by the Republican opposition, which claims that inflation and the “overheating” of the economy were fueled by the $1.9 trillion stimulus package.

At the same time, these debates between Keynesian advocates of expansionary monetary policy and neoliberal monetarists point to the increasing internal contradictions and tensions of capitalist crisis policy, which can hardly be bridged in the current crisis surge. And an accumulation model that could lead out of the crisis of late capitalism – the economic forecasts for the USA as well as for the euro area are gloomy – cannot simply be conjured up. Basically, both sides in the monetary conflict, which is fueled by national or class interests, are quite right in their diagnoses at the bedside of capitalism, but their “therapeutic proposals” are wrong. Expansionary monetary policy does indeed cause inflation to rise, specifically in the financial sphere, where the “liquidity injections” of central banks in the 21^st century led to corresponding speculative bubbles, i.e. to inflation in securities or real estate prices. At the same time, monetarism together with the neoliberal austerity regime – as Schäuble brutally executed on Greece – lead to the economic collapses that are well known from Southern Europe.

The late capitalist crisis policy thus finds itself in a dilemma. Deflation or inflation: there are only different crisis paths along which the unalterable devaluation of value can proceed. Either money is devalued in its capacity as a general equivalent (inflation), or the devaluation process takes hold of capital in its form as constant and variable capital – as factories, machines and wage-dependent people who become economically superfluous.

In the course of the 21st century, not only have global mountains of debt grown faster than world economic output, but interest rates have also declined steadily since the breakthrough of neoliberalism and the financialization of capitalism, because after the bursting of each speculative bubble the world financial system had to be saved from collapse with low interest rates and money printing. The current distortions on the financial markets indicate that the transition to a new speculative cycle is hardly possible. Capitalist crisis policy has ridden its horse to death. And inflation, which previously played out predominantly in the financial sphere, is arriving in the so-called real economy.

It was precisely the failure of Keynesianism at the end of the 1970s that paved the way for neoliberalism, which used a period of extremely high interest rates (the Volcker shock) to get a grip on inflation and lay the foundation for the take-off of the financial markets and the financial market-driven bubble economy of neoliberalism that is currently collapsing. At the time, high interest rates acted as a magnet, attracting investment-seeking capital to the US financial sphere. Now the long-forgotten stagflation is returning on a higher ladder. The most important difference between today’s wave of inflation and the historical period of stagflation is the extreme indebtedness of the world system. A period of high interest rates, as initiated by then Fed Chairman Paul Volcker starting in 1979, no longer offers a way out today.

At present, neo-Keynesians in particular are encouraging the creation of myths that suppress the systemic causes of the crisis in favor of external phenomena. According to them, the causes of increasing inflation are solely the consequences of the pandemic and, even more so, of the Russian war of aggression. This is reminiscent of the interpretation of the historical period of stagflation, which is still popular today, that it was due solely to the oil price shock of 1973. The end of the Fordist boom and thus the structural crisis of capitalism are ignored.

However, the current wave of inflation is not merely war-related “Putinflation.” Even a cursory glance at the development of inflationary dynamics clearly shows that it had already begun before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in response to the central banks’ pandemic-related flood of money. In order to absorb the first deflationary shock after the pandemic outbreak, global stimulus measures reached a multiple of what was spent to stabilize the world financial system after the bursting of the real estate bubbles in 2007/08. In this sense, the “external” shocks act at best as crisis accelerators. The flood of money, in interaction with the bursting of the global liquidity bubble – the “everything bubble” – must be understood as the primary cause of the devaluation of value that is now setting in.

The capping or disruption of global trade and production chains during the pandemic and the Ukraine war explains, above all, the recent acceleration of price inflation. But even in the case of the Ukraine war, the interaction with the crisis process is obvious, since Moscow, in classic imperialist fashion, launched the attack on Ukraine in response to the growing dislocation and unrest in the post-Soviet space, which was instrumentalized by the West. In addition, the full-blown climate crisis is driving inflation because it leads to production shortfalls – such as crop failures – and increased demand for energy – Brazil, for example, had to import more natural gas because a prolonged drought limited hydroelectric power generation.

The socio-economic consequences of the recent crisis will in all probability no longer be able to be passed on from the centers to the periphery. Particularly in the Federal Republic of Germany, which has so far been largely spared by the crisis, and where the fear of the crisis alone has given Nazi parties double-digit election results, the coming political upheavals could be dramatic.

Originally published in konkret in 08/2022

The Climate Movement Needs Anti-Capitalist Guardrails for Its Coming Actions

Tomasz Konicz

The climate movement should not be afraid of being accused of radicalism. Given the civilization-threatening dimensions of the climate crisis, solving this monstrous problem is a matter of sheer collective will to survive. It is obvious that global capitalism, in its unbridled compulsion to grow, is incapable of reducing resource consumption and emissions. This has long been empirically proven, since in the 21^st century global emissions of CO₂ could only be reduced in the short term at the cost of world economic crises, only to rise again all the more rapidly as a result of subsequent economic stimulus measures. The entire world is being turned into the mere fuel of this irrational cycle of valorization.

Moreover, since wage labor forms the substance of capital, increases in productivity increase the hunger for resources of the capitalist profit machine, since the value of the individual commodity decreases and more commodities have to be produced in order to successfully complete the cycle of valorization (this results in the tendency towards many products being produced in such a way that they break down faster). The climate crisis is a capitalist climate crisis. Without overcoming capital, there is no hope of averting the impending climate catastrophe.

Being radical means first and foremost saying what’s what. The fight against the capitalist climate crisis must be waged with open sights, given the fact that we are rapidly running out of time. It is necessary to tell people openly that sustainable climate protection, i.e. the alleviation of the climate crisis, is only possible if the capitalist compulsion to grow is overcome. The climate struggle must thus be waged as a struggle for transformation into a post-capitalist society. The absolute minimum is to overcome capital’s valorization compulsion, which is running amok.

With this confrontation, the ideological hex that makes the discussion of alternative systems impossible would finally be broken. Most people already suspect that late capitalism is heading for the abyss; the apocalypse is omnipresent in the culture industry, in films and video games. But the difficulty would be to convince people who are lapsing into resignation that an apocalyptic climate catastrophe is not inevitable. The demand for a transformation of the current system would also put a stop to the opportunism rampant among the left-leaning political parties, who still see even the climate crisis as a vehicle for their career aspirations in crisis management.

What Does Anti-Capitalist Climate Policy Mean?

The vision of a climate-friendly and resource-conserving post-capitalist society, which seems so abstract, results from the concrete necessities of climate protection. The demands of an anti-capitalist climate policy must not be concerned with the irrational coercive logic of eroding and ailing late capitalism; they must be oriented towards the objective, scientific necessities of climate protection, as well as towards the technological possibilities of society. The productive forces that capitalism developed would break the fetters of capitalist production relations.

In concrete terms, this also means countering the current fears of wage earners: The killer argument of job preservation in fossil industries would have to be countered, for example, by saying that the reproduction of people must no longer be linked to the reproduction of capital via their jobs. For this confronts wage-earners in late capitalism with the tragic choice between social survival and the threat of climate collapse. The same applies to the admonitions about the financial viability of climate protection measures, which could be countered by intensifying and extending the debate about socialization and expropriation.

The ideological constraints that capital has erected in the neoliberal era must be countered by the very real constraints of climate protection. Such a transformational climate policy, linking concrete actions with demands that clearly go beyond the logic of capital, would be tantamount to a first breakout from the capitalist thought prison.

But what actually needs to be overcome? Even the most powerful capitalists are helplessly vulnerable to the inherent dynamics of capital, which it generates via market mediation. The uncontrollable self-movement of money functioning as capital in its forms of commodity, money and labor power is called fetishism. This is why capitalists cannot“save the world,” even though the impending social and ecological collapse ultimately threatens their businesses as well. For it is precisely this dynamic of valorization, unconsciously generated by market subjects, that devastates powerless human societies and the global ecosystem.

Marx’s seemingly cryptic remark that the overcoming of capitalism would conclude “the prehistory of human society” thus acquires its clarity. All previous human history took place unconsciously, within the framework of fetishistic social systems: from the religious fetishism of early times and the Middle Ages to the secularized religion of capital.

The Systemic Crisis of Capital Is Irreversible

Overcoming this state of affairs would mean simplifying social reproduction. The organization of society would then be organized directly through an egalitarian process of direct communication by the members of society. This goal would also have to appear in the organizational structure of the transformational movement, which plans its course of action in open discourse – thereby at the same time rehearsing for the post-capitalist future.

And here is the crux of the matter: the systemic crisis of capital is also an irreversible, fetishistic process, as it chokes on its increasing economic and ecological contradictions and passes into transformation. It is not a question of the subjective will of the members of society whether the collapsing system will be overcome. It is a question of the very survival of human civilization, ultimately of human existence, in which way the coming transformation process will proceed: as a chaotic disintegration, in the form of the establishment of a brutal crisis dictatorship, or in a progressive direction that would open up new emancipatory perspectives for humanity in spite of all the coming climate-related disasters. What lies ahead is a struggle over the course of how the system will be transformed.

What’s more, this process of transformation is already underway – and the increasing political, ideological and military conflicts are precisely the expression of this upheaval that is unconsciously taking place over humanity. Civilization or barbarism – these are the extreme poles in this historical “phase of transition.” The struggle for transformation toward a post-capitalist future worth living in should be the common denominator of many seemingly disparate movements and struggles.

As the system is in upheaval and the formerly fixed social structures – from the eroding state, to the political landscape in disintegration, to the constantly crumbling economy – are in a certain sense liquefying, collective actions have a far greater influence on shaping the future than in periods when capitalism seemed more stable. Bourgeois politics, the actions of political subjects, are thus also important again, they carry weight. Not because they solve the crisis, but because they can determine the course of the crisis. Whether Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders sits in the White House is certainly relevant to the course of the crisis process.

Tasks for Radical Movements

The task for radical movements is thus to understand even seemingly reformist decisions as setting the course for transformation and to position themselves accordingly. Here, too, it is important to emphasize the necessity of system transformation in order to finally anchor a discourse on social alternatives in society as a whole. Even protest movements like Fridays for Future and uprisings like the “Arab Spring” are similar in that they can erupt spontaneously when social tipping points are crossed. However, these very different movements, which have erupted in reaction to the same socio-ecological crisis process, are only able to take an emancipatory course if they are supported by an adequate crisis consciousness that is broadly anchored in society.

To understand the crisis as a maxim of emancipatory praxis, then, is to ask in what form late capitalist society will enter the inevitable process of transformation. Should it be an authoritarian, racist, police-state administered oligarchy with absurd social abysses in which the fossil fuel industry buys its parties, or a more egalitarian, bourgeois-democratic polity in which there continues to be space for radical critique and praxis? A progressive movement, borne of an understanding of the necessity of systemic transformation, would thus struggle to establish conditions that could steer this transformational dynamic in an emancipatory direction. The maxim of such a post-politics would consist, on the one hand, in the effort to maintain and further develop the process of civilization, and, on the other hand, in the struggle to overcome the destructive inherent dynamics of capitalism.

There is a maxim of political practice that left movements, groups or even parties must follow in the 21^st century if they want to act as progressive social forces in the current epoch of upheaval and crisis. Capitalism must be transformed into history as quickly as possible, the capital relation as a social totality must be consciously abolished – all practical actions, all tactics, all reform proposals, all broader strategies would have to be oriented towards this categorical imperative.

This is not an expression of leftist “radicalism,” but the formulation of a reasonable bare minimum, which, if not realized, would lead to 21^st century civilization ending in barbarism. It is precisely because capital is collapsing that it must be overcome. Progress can only be realized beyond capital, in the transformational struggle to shape a post-capitalist society.

Originally published in analyse & kritik on 08/12/2022

The cruel lobbying and business practices of the app-based ­transport service ­Uber are in line with its brutal business model. And they are an expression of the processes of barbarism in the ­centers ­caused by the crisis.

Tomasz Konicz

Some 124,000 internal documents comprise the so-called Uber Files, leaked to the press by Mark MacGann, the transport service’s former chief lobbyist for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The corporate correspondence, analyzed by the UK’s Guardian, exposes the cruel, early-capitalist methods used by arguably the best-known company in the internet-based gig economy to pursue its aggressive expansion strategy between 2013 and 2017.

Uber’s core business consists of organizing and exploiting day laborers who are placed on a digital marketplace for passenger transportation. The group collects a commission of 25 percent of the fare on ­all transport provided through its app, although in many countries the providers of this service are pseudo self-employed workers who have to bear all the risk and provide their own vehicles.

In some cases, it was perfectly clear to Uber’s management that the transport service was simply operating beyond the applicable laws and regulations. Senior management correspondence stated, for example, that the group should refrain from making “antagonistic statements” because its business model was “not legal in many countries.” Managers joked in internal emails that they had now “officially become pirates.” The company’s head of communications explained in a 2014 email that the company often gets in trouble simply because its practices are “illegal as fuck.”

In order to secure its own legal position, according to the correspondence analyzed, Uber made efforts to press for corresponding changes in the law as part of an elaborate lobbying campaign. In 2016 alone, the company, which is endowed with lavish venture capital, is said to have budgeted around 90 million US dollars for greasing the political machine. Leading politicians from the US and the EU are said to have been receptive to the demands of the rapidly expanding gig company, which, according to the Guardian, liked to seek “unofficial routes to power” by acting on “friends and intermediaries” of decision-makers and preferred to seek out politicians for intimate talks “without the presence of advisers.” Influential officials were turned into “strategic investors” to ensure their support in countries such as Russia and Italy. In addition, Uber bought academics who ­gave the company a good report on ­its business practices in commissioned reports.

Hundreds of politicians are said to have been worked on by Uber lobbyists. Among the prominent targets of the lobbying campaign is even the current US president ­Joe Biden, who according to the leaks had a meeting with Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2016 when he was vice president. In an email, Kalanick complained that Biden was running late and that he let the vice president know that “every minute he is late will be one less minute with me.” Biden, who supported Uber at the time, gushed after the Davos meeting that Uber gives millions of workers the freedom to “work as many hours as they want, live their own lives as they want.”

Another prominent Uber supporter currently resides in the Élysée Palace. The Uber Files reveal that French President Emmanuel ­Macron met several times with representatives of the transport service during his tenure as Minister of Economics and intervened on its behalf in 2015 in the southern French port city of Marseille, where a ­de facto transport ban was to be imposed on Uber ­following ­disputes and protests by taxi drivers. Macron reportedly agreed to “look into the matter personally” after MacGann intervened. Shortly ­after, the ­Marseille ­police prefect’s order was defused. In an assessment by the group, ­this was chalked up as a success achieved through “massive pressure from Uber.” According to internal correspondence, the meetings between Macron and Uber representatives took place in a “warm, friendly and constructive atmosphere.”

How the notorious revolving door between politics and business works in concrete terms is made clear by company correspondence about former EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who informally lobbied for Uber while still on maternity leave after leaving office – even though the EU Commission ­had forbidden her to do so. According to the group’s email correspondence, Kroes, who is Dutch, allegedly intervened with the Dutch government during a police raid on Uber in Amsterdam to “force the authorities to back down.” However, the ­email went on to say that the ­cooperation with the former EU commissioner was “strictly confidential” and should not be ­mentioned in ­company documents.

Due to legal conflicts with authorities and frequent police raids, ­Uber branches are even reported to have installed “kill switches” in their IT systems, which can be activated to make all sensitive data inaccessible. This software is also said to have been used in searches in several countries, including France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Moreover, the ­company’s management is ­said to have been ­prepared to risk or even provoke violent clashes between Uber drivers and taxi drivers. After riots by taxi drivers in Paris, Kalanick called for counter-protests to be organized. Kalanick downplayed warnings of attacks that could come from “far-right thugs,” saying that “violence would guarantee the success” of the protests.

Uber’s strategy, according to the Guardian, has been to use drivers as “weapons” and to exploit the violence directed against them in order to gain political concessions on rules and regulations. This method was used in Italy, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The “violence narrative should be allowed to run for a few days,” emails about riots in the Netherlands said, “before offering a solution.” Internal correspondence sometimes encouraged management to “embrace the chaos” of a crisis-ridden late-capitalist world in which even legal business practices were becoming increasingly brutal and mafia-like. Uber needs to generate growth even when “fires are breaking out,” Kalanick said in a ­motivational email to managers; that’s “a normal part” of the Uber business: “Embrace the chaos. It means you’re doing something meaningful.”

Although this forced ­expansion did not succeed in all countries and cities, the lobbying investments were successful overall: Uber is now valued at 43 billion US dollars with an annual turnover of 17 billion US dollars and handles 19 million rides in 72 countries every day. Tens of thousands of pseudo self-employed workers, who sometimes have to sleep in their cars because of their wretched wages, eke out a living as day laborers for the internet platform.

Uber’s meteoric rise was hardly slowed down by legal regulations and a political establishment that was always open to lobbying money – only the pandemic, which led to a decline in sales and heavy losses, did that. In addition, the critique of digital day labor, on which the platform economy of Uber & Co. is based, has received new ammunition with the publication of the Uber Files. In Italy, taxi drivers protested against the corporation and the liberalization plans of Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s government in response to the revelations. At the same time, in the Swiss canton of Geneva, trade unions called on the state to intervene, as Uber was effectively continuing to circumvent the labor regulations according to which Uber drivers are employees.

Originally published in jungle world on 07/28/2022