In terms of lifestyle, it’s called nostalgia: namely, the memory of supposedly better times, for example, of the economic miracle. In pop culture, it’s called “retro”: When producers can’t think of anything else, they rehash old stuff in a slightly different form. And when you watch “Tatort” on TV, you have to make sure you haven’t already seen it a few years ago. Nothing new under the sun, that seems to be the motto. Somehow, the belief has spread that if you want to find a recipe for the present, all you have to do is look to the past. Why else are politicians, the media and economists constantly looking for historical parallels in the crisis developments of recent years? Anyone who opens the newspaper often believes they have been transported to a history lesson.
Breakneck financial speculation, minor and major crises, a host of state bankruptcies, even the odd failed monetary union – the economic historians of modern times have just about everything on offer. And the moral of the story? It’s all been there before, which also means that everything is not so bad, everything can be overcome on the basis of the prevailing facts. Not only is wishful thinking the father of thought here, but also a certain image of capitalism as the eternal return of the same. Sometimes the economy is humming, sometimes it is crashing; there are up-and-comers and down-and-comers of the year or the century. But in principle, so the belief goes, it will always go on like this.
However, this is a mistake. We are not dealing with a static system, but with a dynamic one. Capitalism does not repeat itself, nor does it go round in circles, because it is itself an irreversible historical process. Capital valorization does not always start from scratch, but on a social scale it must exceed its last level if it is to continue. The degree of global economic integration cannot be turned back, and neither can the development of the productive forces. Universal competition ensures that this is the case.
But if globalization and productivity are developing ever higher, why should the character, depth and scope of crises always remain the same? The fondly told story of the tulip bulb speculation on the Amsterdam stock exchange in the 17th century teaches us nothing about the real estate bubble of 2008 and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. To understand that a sovereign bankruptcy in the early 19th century was something quite different from what it would be today, just look at the government’s share of the national product. The current history lesson of the experts and media tea-leaves readers is a witching hour.
Again and again, one hears the claim that politics and management have learned so much from the crises of the past that today there are sufficient instruments and tools available for coping with them. At most, the diagnosticians argue about whether the crisis is now one like 1872 or possibly one like 1929 or merely one like 1973. The learning success seems to be a minor one when governments and central banks prove to us every day that their economic and monetary policy concepts are about as helpful and competent as the toolbox of a steam locomotive for the emergency repair of an high-speed train. Anyone who talks as much about the future as the elites of the present should not rely too much on the system rescues of the past. In the memory of mankind, the old rescue packages and their consequences tend to go down as disasters anyway.
Originally published in Neuen Deutschland on 12/12/2011
In the crisis is almost after the crisis. That has been the message of positive thinking since the Lehman bankruptcy. Why should the biggest financial crash since the 1930s provoke any crisis-theory thinking? Sometimes things just go up and sometimes they go down. Anyway, everything changes all the time; but just to keep things the way they are. The crises come and go, but capitalism remains eternal. Therefore, it is not the crisis as such that is of interest, but what comes next, when it is over again like all the boring crises before. Who are the up-and-comers and who are the down-and-comers of the new era? Is the economic miracle finally upon us in Africa, is the Pacific century coming with China as the new world power, or rather the rebirth of the United States from the spirit of dishwashing? Will we perhaps even see the rise of the reborn lira as the reserve currency? Anything goes. One is allowed to do a bit of courageous trend research when the financial markets, which have become overconfident for their part, emit ash clouds like Mount Etna in its best days.
Who cares about the inner historical context of capitalist development: Happy is he who forgets. The fact that in 1982, with Mexico’s first insolvency, a crisis cycle of a new quality could have begun that continues to this day, eating its way from the periphery into the centers, must not even be thought of. The postmodern structure of perception excludes any insight that would go beyond the horizon of a seasonal trend. What Marx described in the preface to the first volume of “Capital” as a prerequisite of social-theoretical insight, namely the “power of abstraction,” has long been regarded as disreputable essentialism. Like Margret Thatcher, discourse-dominant microeconomics no longer knows society, but only individuals. Where everything is business management, even the relationship to one’s own self, space and time shrink to the horizon of mouse clicks and shopping experiences. The negative whole is not to be spoken of, so that it remains in merciful invisibility. Many a hoodie wearer might ask: What Lehman bankruptcy? Was it before or after the First World War? If one only moves between incoherent event points in the media space without any awareness of the past or the future, one can think the crisis away as long as money is still coming out of the vending machine.
But gradually it smells so dicey that even the entertainment value of trend scouts as soothsayers has diminished. The crisis seems to want to grow old in the new century. One recession and one false all-clear follows the next, while the guardians of the global banking system count their skeletons in the closet and would prefer to throw away the key. Not even German export chauvinism is quite sure whether the FRG is really in a different league from the rest of the euro zone with itself alone. No one knows where the fire will flare up under the roof tomorrow or the day after. But everyone knows that the trouble spots lurk everywhere and seem to be mysteriously connected. The postmodern primordial confidence in capitalism is crumbling, even if its disgrace has not yet become the leading theme.
Even the Foucault left is beginning to realize that it knows about as much about the critique of political economy as Karl Marx knew about riding a motorcycle. That is why the crisis has at least been allowed to steer the discourse onto terrain that was previously condemned as “economistic” and avoided on principle. So what’s wrong with capitalism? Unfortunately, Marx did not leave behind a handy crisis theory in Merve volume format. Because the urge is strong to unite deconstructive loss of reality with the cheapest possible rediscovery of disdainful economics, it is best to look up the somewhat shallower versions of Marxist lore.
According to these, capital from time to time enters a phase of so-called over-accumulation. Too much capital has been accumulated which cannot be sufficiently further valorized because the surplus value produced can no longer be transformed or “realized” into its money form for lack of social purchasing power. The investments in machines and labor were too large for the capacity of the market, overcapacities of production have arisen, unsaleable goods lie around everywhere, money capital flees into the financial markets and drives bubbles there. The surplus capital in all its components (physical capital, labor, commodity capital, money capital) must now be devalued in a crisis. After that, everything can start all over again.
This version is the most palatable for the postmodern un-spirit. For the crisis appears here as an ahistorical event in the eternal return of the same. Such a purge now and then does capitalism good like a sweating cure. The crisis is part of its miraculous functioning, as the detached left has long known. Expansion and contraction alternate in endless succession, without any recognizable coherent and progressive process.
But Marx also has quite different considerations. According to him, the problem in the long run is not the periodically lacking realization of surplus value on the market, but much more fundamentally its lacking production itself. Capital is self-contradictory in that, on the one hand, it has as its sole purpose the incessant accumulation of value or “abstract wealth” (Marx), but on the other hand, competition forces it to make human labor power, as the exclusive source of this value, increasingly superfluous through the development of productive power and to replace it with a scientific-technical apparatus.
The development of productive power, however, is not an eternal return of the same, but an irreversible historical process. As Marx shows in the “Grundrisse”, this process drives towards a situation in which the products are commodities, but as commodities they cannot represent a sufficient amount of past human labor power. They become unsaleable because they no longer represent any abstract value. This is not an adjustment, but an “inner barrier” (Marx) of capital. This aspect of Marx’s theory was already unacceptable to traditional Marxism, which was concerned with the “planning of value” rather than its abolition. For a consciousness that neither knows history nor can formulate a concept of value, but that rushes from event to event and wants to persuade itself of the compulsion to self-valorization as boundless freedom, an objective barrier of this form of existence is all the less conceivable.
What matters to capital is not value per se, but the surplus value that labor power produces above its own cost. The same development of productive power, which makes labor power progressively superfluous, cheapens the costs of the labor power still in use. Thus the relative share of surplus value in the total labor time spent increases. But for the social mass of surplus value it is not only the relative share per labor power that matters, but also the number of applicable labor forces at a given standard of productivity.
Marx formulated this problem in the third volume of Capital as the theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. For each unit of money capital invested, the share of physical capital grows steadily, while the number of workers who can be mobilized with it declines just as steadily. Indirectly, this can be seen in the bourgeois statistics by the fact that the advance costs of a job historically rise inexorably, because an ever larger aggregate of machinery, infrastructure, etc. must be employed in order to be able to apply a labor force. Since only labor power produces new value, the average profit on a social scale per money capital advanced must decrease, even though the relative share of surplus value in the value production of a labor power increases.
In the social result, what matters is the magnitude ratio of the two opposing tendencies. Read together with the theory of a fundamental historical devaluation of value in the “Grundrisse,” however, the argumentation outlined is so inconvenient to the ahistorical understanding of eternally alternately expanding and contracting capital that the latest new Marx reading has taken the precaution of declaring the tendency of the rate of profit to fall to be a mere figment of Marx’s imagination.
In fact, the falling rate of profit can be compensated to some extent by a rising mass of profit, if the capitalist mode of production as such expands and thus additional money capital is productively employed. Externally, this expansion is exhausted by the “valorization” of the entire earthly space. However, there are various concepts of a qualitative internal expansion, all of which go back to the bourgeois economist Joseph A. Schumpeter. The latter described capitalist development as a periodic creation of new products and branches of production. According to this description, expansion is sustained by certain product cycles until they turn into stagnation and innovative entrepreneurs put an end to them with new products for new needs. In the “creative destruction” phase, contraction occurs. Only gradually does the new product cycle become sustainable and renewed expansion on the changed basis can begin.
Schumpeter’s theory has the small flaw that it is in no way related to the connection between the development of productive forces and substantial surplus value production. As in all of economics, the market surface is regarded as the sole object of economic science. Thus, the creation of new branches of production and needs automatically appears as the basis of a capitalist upswing, without the question of the concrete conditions of valorization of labor-substance under a changed standard of productivity being raised at all. This is precisely why the postmodernized left so readily seizes on Schumpeter’s idea and related theorems to add a bit of anti-substantialism to Marx. New branches of production, new opportunities for valorization, because the mass of expended labor energy could not possibly play such an important role, if soon money can be downloaded like everything else. One could then choose whether the central field for the coming boom is created by genetic monster production, friendship networks on the Internet, biofuel instead of bread for the world or saving the polar bears.
In the blanked-out strand of Marxian argumentation, the calculation looks different. No matter what content of production is concocted: For capital, the only thing that matters is the applicable quantity of value-creating labor power. This must increase absolutely if the presupposed end in itself of accumulation is to succeed. The creation of additional branches of production or the incorporation of former luxury products into mass production can, however, compensate for the scientific-technological rationalization of labor power only for a historically limited period of time. Capitalism reaches its climax when the internal expansion is caught up and overtaken by the development of productive power. Then the relative fall of the rate of profit turns into an absolute fall of the social mass of surplus value and thus of profit, and thus the supposedly eternal valorization of value turns into its historical devaluation.
There are some indications that capitalist development has entered this state with the third industrial revolution since the 1980s. The culmination of the internal contradiction is modified and filtered by the historical expansion of the credit system, which is a mirror image of the stagnation and decline of the value-productive labor mass. The permanent relative increase of physical capital drove up the dead up-front costs of production gradually to such an extent that they could be financed to an ever smaller extent from current profits. Credit transformed itself from an auxiliary driving force of surplus-value production into its substitute. Since then, accumulation has been fed less by past real labor substance and more and more by the anticipation of imaginary labor substance of the future. By means of an unprecedented global indebtedness and the financial bubbles that have arisen from it, investments and employment are financed without real foundations. This was also the social condition of possibility for the triumph of virtualist and deconstructionist ideologies. Despite temporary appearances, however, capital is not accumulated in the process, as was shown by the construction industry of many countries after the bursting of the real estate bubbles.
On the surface of the world market, the constantly advanced consumption of future profits and wages took the correspondingly absurd course of a functional division of surplus and deficit countries. The former buy goods with money from future revenues, the production of which was pre-financed by the latter by accessing future revenues. There is an expanding black hole between past real and fictitiously anticipated future value creation. This construct of a global deficit cycle has two focal points: a larger Pacific deficit cycle between China/East Asia and the U.S. and a smaller European deficit cycle between the FRG and the rest of the EU or the euro area. The employment mobilized for this, for example in China, is as unsustainable as the construction activity for the real estate hype. In the one case, Asia has accumulated dollar foreign exchange reserves on an astronomical scale; in the other, the international banking system has financed similarly high deficits within a common currency area. These notorious “imbalances” even make a mockery of the textbooks of economics, which nobody takes seriously anymore anyway.
After a dense chain of financial crises that had shaken individual countries and economic sectors and accompanied deficit booms over the past 30 years, the 2008 financial crash took on global proportions for the first time. The rupture of credit chains put the big devaluation push on the agenda. It was the already highly indebted countries that stopped the avalanche from going down with massive additional loans and the printing presses. They at least suspected that it was not a mere cleansing storm on the way, but that the lights of world capital were threatening to go out. So the bad loans were stashed away like nuclear waste with the help of state guarantees, the industrial overcapacities were maintained by horrendous subsidies, and the economy was artificially fed by state programs. Chinese state capitalism, in particular, forced its banking system, supported by the hoard of foreign currency, to finance investment ruins in the form of ghost cities, ghost airports, ghost factories, etc., pumping up the mother of all real estate bubbles.
All these adventurous measures did not solve anything, but only postponed the devaluation process and shifted the problem from the financial markets to the state. It was foreseeable that the government programs would quickly run out of steam. The euro zone started out as the weakest link, but all other government finances are also teetering and threaten to set off chain reactions. The Chinese dollar mountain, for example, will go up in smoke when the USA has to admit that it is broke. The unserviceable national debts add up to the bad loans of the financial markets; the meltdown of the credit system is approaching. The already spent capitalist future has become the present. Greece exemplifies that people will have to stop living for years to come in order to continue to meet capitalist criteria.
As soon as the central bank no longer merely delays the devaluation of debt securities but directly feeds the economy with insubstantial money, bypassing credit simulation, the money medium will devalue itself. Inflation also has a historical precedent. While it was almost unknown from industrialization until World War I, the war economies could only be financed with the printing press. After the world war epoch, however, the specter of inflation became a constant companion of capitalism, because the expanding credit system also became constitutive for ordinary commodity production. Today, the bailouts have already exceeded the dimensions of the war economy, and the direct money glut of central banks is proving to be the last resort. Even a radical monetary reform, dissolving all assets and credit balances, would not lead to a zero point and a new start. This is because the standard of productivity incorporated in the knowledge aggregate of society, which no longer permits sufficient surplus-value production, is inescapable. The devaluation would only repeat itself in ever shorter intervals.
May there come what will. Despite all this, the media consciousness of experience does not want to be bothered with uncool realities. The end of the world to be expected in 2012 according to the Mayan calendar promises more fun. The main thing is not to have one’s credit card confiscated. In the meantime, even the re-social-democratized postmodern left can imagine a capitalism without a world more easily than a world without capitalism. The ultimate self-deconstruction will certainly be a tingling affair. After all, one doesn’t treat oneself to anything else.
In the 21st century, as has become known, the powers of capital are no longer looking for territorial conquests. What should they do with zones of economically scorched earth and superfluous populations? This does not mean that imperialism has died out. But it is no longer about national empires and zones of influence, but about the controllability of globalization as a crisis. The limits of capital valorization are to be redefined into limits of viability for the losing masses, the collapse of national economies into a controlled coexistence of credit-financed boom towns and abandoned slum regions.
The production of security for the residual businesses under these conditions requires ideological legitimation. It is a good thing that the dismissed and disinherited children of capital are not better people, but rather like to attack their fellow citizens instead of their impossible conditions of existence. Not the external but the internal war along ethnic and religious divisions became the conflict paradigm of a disintegrating world of states. The world police operations on the part of the powers of order of the capitalist center against the barbarians of the periphery could be justified with democratic idealism.
This picture was, of course, only a snapshot in the process of the gradual dissolution of the global order. At the latest, the global economic crisis since 2008 has once again fundamentally changed the situation. Now the limits of creditworthiness are being reached even in the Western centers themselves. Everywhere, debt crises are emerging there of a kind that had previously only flared up in the peripheral zones of the global market. Thus, a qualitatively different crisis management is on the agenda for the metropolises, shifting the emphasis from external to internal distress. In addition to unaccountable populations in the squalid backyards of world capital, their own middle classes must increasingly be targeted. The content-empty democratic formalism, which the God-fascists of various stripes have long since recognized as the shaping principle of their madness, asserts the valorization compulsion of capital as its “natural basis” (Marx) all the more when its inner barriers are erected. The capitalist lifeblood of money must no longer be turned off step by step to solely a marginalized new poor, but to also the majority of the metropolitan “people’s sovereign.”
This, of course, also points to a state of legitimacy emergency. While NATO bombed the Sharia in Libya with reference to democratic values, for the Western core zones of globalization only the practical constraint of the teetering financial system can take over the role of the combat bombers for the time being. The execution of this economic imperative in the name of democracy against the elementary vital interests of a majority of the formal “sovereign” seems to take place first in the EU, because here the monetary construct of the euro has already taken the contradiction to extremes and there is a supranational instance of intervention.
Greece has become a precedent under global crisis conditions qua de facto state bankruptcy. An uncontrolled execution would blow up not only the European financial system and exceed the consequences of the Lehman bankruptcy. Controlled execution, however, would only be possible if almost the entire Greek population were pushed below the subsistence level. Mass unemployment in new dimensions, impoverishment deep into the middle classes, collapse of medical care and public infrastructures will become reality. The Greek elites can no longer justify such a collection of capital logic on their own account. What is needed is crisis-imperialist intervention from the outside, claimed by a troika of the EU Commission, the ECB and the IMF; now no longer against a poorhouse of the former Third World, but for the first time against a Western country.
The Merkel government has become a hardliner, speaking from the heart of the management, political and media class as well as the lowly master race in this country. With the assistance of the deputy sheriff Sarkozy, the systemic crisis is denied in order to appear as the self-appointed bailiff of the “automatic subject” (Marx). The Greeks, who have been dismissed as capitalistically untrustworthy, are not to be hooked up to Berlin Disneyland, but they are to be taken by the purse strings until they spit blood. There was even talk of a German savings commissioner for Greece, even though the EU majority spoke out against this with a residual sense of shame. The false gesture of superiority feeds on the FRG’s provisional position as a crisis winner, because German exports have profited from the expiring global government programs, from the devaluation of the euro precisely because of the debt crisis, and from the implementation of the homegrown low wage since Hartz IV. Suppressed is the fact that the Teutonic economic fairy tale has as its prerequisite not only its own debts but also those of others and must end with the evaporation of purchasing power in the European and global recession. Nevertheless, at least enough is known to make an example of Greece, which, if necessary, must also apply to Germany, in the hope of the historic social masochism of the German “sovereign,” which has always been unable to walk with civic goodness.
Greece also lends itself as an experimental field for the new democratic crisis management, because an isolated youth revolt with no prospects can serve as a sparring partner. It fits in well with the picture that the Greek state budget is being driven to zero socially, while the military budget almost doubled in 2012 compared to the previous year. The associated debts are also perceived favorably by the savings commissioners-to-be, because orders from Athens account for 15 percent of the sales of German arms manufacturers. Besides, in any case, the apparatus of the democratic state of emergency is also flexing its muscles militarily, which is only allowed to be as pseudo-self-reliant in this respect in Greece as it is to become in Afghanistan. If things really heat up, the state of emergency terror under German leadership could already show what it is capable of. The Assad regime may appear to be a wimp as soon as more than a slim Arab social product is at stake.
For the time being, the Greek political class will have to haggle a bit over its surrender terms and feign resistance in order to save its barely recognizable face. The electorate no longer knows what it should want anyway, and the entire party system is also wrapping itself up in exemplary fashion. The post-national crisis administrators approve of the nationalist upsurge, which can serve as an outlet all the more because it only processes the bankruptcy in a manner appropriate to the species, so to speak. The merely anti-German rage of the Greeks does not concern the German export chauvinists, because the pogrom that is due is really directed against Albanian and African refugees or other migrants, as has long been practically demonstrated, and not just in Greece. In this point, too, Germany, with its neo-Nazi serial killers spoiled by the democratic Stasi, certainly has pan-European leadership qualities to offer.
The European and US debt crises are eagerly moving ahead, but this seems to have little impact on the global economy. The German export industry, in particular, believes it is springtime. The car companies are leading the way, reporting ever new record figures. This proves that auto production continues to be a key sector of capitalism. The branch gives an example of where the economic journey is headed. So are the optimistic forecasts that want to see a real economic upswing without end for the coming decade justified?
It is worth taking a closer look at the structure of the auto boom. Sales in Europe continue to decline. On the other hand, exports to the emerging markets, especially China, and the USA have virtually exploded. For this economy to be sustainable in the long term, consumption by the masses would have to fueled with small and mid-range cars, while the expensive premium segment would be reserved for the small number at the top. But the opposite is the case. The driving force behind the supposed car miracle is the ostentatious luxury cars from Daimler, BMW or Audi and the sports cars from Porsche.
In China, as in the USA, the gap between rich and poor is widening. This is a social problem as well as an economic one: If mass car consumption is largely absent among lower incomes, it is a sign of the febrile nature of the luxury economy. It is an illusory boom based on pump-priming and financial bubbles.
The solvent new middle class in China, whose size is dazzling because of the sheer mass of its population, has no solid foundation. It is linked to the speculative run-up of largely vacant apartment and office buildings, sports stadiums and other investment ruins orchestrated by corrupt party cadres at the municipal and regional levels. Credit or irregular income finances their luxury consumption. The situation is very similar in the United States, where the permanent financial injections from the government and the central bank reach only a minority.
It doesn’t take the next financial crash to see that the premium global consumers have overreached themselves – even in the much-praised German wonderland: The big cars are hardly ever sold in cash anymore, instead, they are leased. They can be purchased for a comparatively modest monthly sum. Then the financing air becomes thin, because some people have already reached the limit of their income.
However, the high-horsepower prestige cars are so highly equipped that repairs quickly become necessary. What was still relatively cheap to repair in a pre-electronic small car starts in high-priced cars at 800-1000 euros. It is not only in Germany that leased gems accumulate in car dealerships and repair shops because their proud users cannot pay for the repair (or the next installment). A small hint that the premium-class car boom could be just as phony as the real estate boom.
Originally published in Neuen Deutschland on 06/04/2012
The Centers of The World System Discover Islamofascism As a Repressive Instrument of Crisis Management in The Periphery
Tomasz Konicz
Talk to the Taliban? Mrs. Merkel can’t do that quickly enough. While panicked people clinging to planes taking off plunge to their deaths at Kabul airport, while IS Islamists blow up dozens of fleeing people in suicide attacks, the chancellor declared Taliban rule in Afghanistan to be a new reality that was “bitter,” but one that had to be “dealt with.” This means, above all, holding talks with the stone-age Islamists “in order to be able to preserve something of what has benefited the people of Afghanistan over the past 20 years” (one can only hope that the Chancellor is not referring to the mass-murderous German air strikes, which, for example, provided one Colonel Klein with a career path to General).[1] According to Merkel, the German government is already providing 500 million euros for humanitarian purposes. Through this, the hope is to “continue to protect people” in Afghanistan after the evacuation, which will be completed in “a few days.”[2]
In plain language: Berlin wants to hold talks with the Taliban on how the Afghans can continue to be kept – pardon, “protected” – in Afghanistan despite the Islamist reign of terror. Because that was the central German concern during the collapse of the Afghan state dummy in recent weeks: The fear of new flight movements from the collapsed Afghanistan, which could give the New Right in the FRG additional impetus, manifested itself precisely in the slogan, “2015 must not be repeated.” And anyway: The New York Times knew to report after a first interview that the new Taliban could hardly be compared with the old stone-age Islamists.[3] At least that’s what the Taliban said. Their spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, even stressed that, “in the long term,” women under the Taliban could well “resume their routines.”
After all, it seems that the Taliban’s public relations have indeed been modernized, as Mr Mujahid seemed to know exactly what his Western interviewees wanted to hear. Despite the “tense situation” at the airport, the Taliban hoped to establish good relations with the “international community.” The Taliban spokesman named the fight against terror (Al Qaeda is now being replaced by the Islamic State), the eradication of opium production in Afghanistan, which is one of the Taliban’s most important sources of income, and the “reduction of refugees” who wanted to go to the West as potential areas of cooperation. The Taliban are thus in effect offering themselves to the West as a source of “law and order,” as jailers of a region of socio-economic collapse which, like the post-state region of Libya, is really only called Afghanistan out of habit. The Taliban spokesman was at pains to paint the picture of a rather “tolerant” Islamist movement that had broken with its past, according to the New York Times. For that to happen, the West would still have to tolerate the idiosyncrasies of Taliban extremism, such as the ban on music, which Mr. Mujahid explicitly acknowledged – and the reported burning alive of women by Taliban who didn’t like their food.[4]
The idea of allowing Islamic extremism to play a leading role in the defense against refugees, of allowing the corresponding dictatorships, militias and rackets to play the role of concentration camp wardens on economically scorched earth and turning them into open-air prisons, so to speak, is not entirely new. In Berlin this has been the maxim of policy towards Erdogan’s Turkey since the refugee crisis of 2015, which must not be repeated at all costs. Berlin keeps paying billions to the Erdogan regime so that calm prevails at the EU’s borders. Turkish Islamofascism – already under increased socio-economic pressure due to the crisis – expanded in the collapsing, war-torn areas of northern Syria, where Turkish-funded Islamist militias were able to establish a gang rule marked by permanent clashes. Syrian civil war refugees, who increasingly face pogroms in Turkey, are to be shipped there for some perspective (Al Qaeda in Turkish-controlled Idlib celebrated the Taliban’s victory with a motorcade).[5]
The war of Islamism, which in fact represents a postmodern crisis ideology,[6] is directed first and foremost against progressive counter-models. The aggressions of the Turkish-Islamist soldiery against Rojava, against the self-administration in northern Syria, not only served the ethnic cleansing of this region bordering on Turkey from Kurds; this also attempted to smash a competing, emancipatory counter-model to Turkish-sponsored Islamofascism in the region. Berlin has flanked these Turkish aggressions financially and politically – the repressive suppression of refugee movements with the help of Islamism seems to have become a raison d’état in Berlin, while an emancipatory alternative is being fought by the German state apparatus with passion.
Islamofascism now appears to be on the rise throughout the region. Coinciding with the fall of the Western-funded puppet government in the “failed state” of Afghanistan, Turkey has expanded its attacks on the Kurdish movement in Syria and Iraq. In the slipstream of the disaster in Afghanistan, the emancipatory awakening in Rojava is to be finally put to death.[7] The Islamists in Ankara, at least, are well aware that there is no alternative to their rise in the wake of the globally unfolding crisis process – as the civil war in Syria illustrates.
The collapse of Syria – similar to the even more dramatic situation in Afghanistan – had socio-economic and ecological causes. The civil war broke out due to the advanced impoverishment of a largely economically superfluous population, as well as a prolonged drought in the agrarian northeast of the country. In the course of the civil war, in which the Syrian state, which had degenerated into a self-service shop of the Assad clan, could only be saved from implosion by massive Russian intervention, not only the genocidal Islamic State emerged as a formative force, but also the self-government in northern Syria, which was largely supported by the Kurdish freedom movement.
The Rojava model, which attempts to realize an emancipatory claim, constitutes – as long as it exists – a threat to Islamism in the region, since it shows alternatives to the terror regime of these clerical-fascist crisis ideologies. The Islamism of the Islamic State, the Taliban and Al Qaeda represents, as it were, a fascist extremism of the center,[8] which uses religion, the central religious identity of the Islamic cultural sphere, as a sounding board in order to drive it to the ideological, sometimes genocidal extreme in interaction with crisis shocks – this crisis ideology thus has little to do with the pre-modern agrarian societies of Islam to which the Islamist ideologists refer.
The crisis of the capitalist world system produces economically scorched earth in its periphery, i.e. regions in which hardly any capital valorization takes place and thus economically superfluous population strata emerge, which leads to increasing political instability, which can ultimately lead to state collapse. This is the deeper cause of the rapid collapse of the state in Afghanistan,[9] as well as similar processes in Libya, and the civil wars in Iraq and Syria.
Syria, however, represents an anomaly, since here, with Rojava, there is indeed a progressive, emancipatory alternative to the crisis-induced drift into Islamist barbarism. In Syria, at the latest in the fight against the genocidal militia of the “Islamic State” supported by Turkey, the West had the option of supporting an alternative. It is significant that – after the official victory over the IS – both the US and Russia proceeded to sell off Rojava piecemeal to Erdogan’s Turkey, which managed to play both major powers off against each other. The Islamists in Ankara and Idlib were ultimately more important to Washington and Moscow than the emancipatory awakening in northern Syria, due to Turkey’s greater geopolitical weight.
Turkey’s current airstrikes and artillery strikes in northern Syria[10] and Iraq[11] would also not be possible without the USA’s clearance of the airspace, and without Moscow’s consent in its northern Syrian zone of influence. The West is currently capitulating to Islamofascism, which – historically and socio-economically speaking – it promoted in two ways. On the one hand, it was the many billions of Western and Saudi US dollars that flowed to the Taliban’s predecessors, the Afghan Mujahideen fighting Soviet troops, in the final phase of the Cold War that gave militant Islamism an enormous boost (Osama Bin Laden famously fought in Afghanistan). The Taliban specifically formed in refugee camps and madrasas that sprang up – funded by the Saudis – in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area during the war against the Soviets to indoctrinate children in the emerging Islamist ideology.
At the same time, the world crisis of capital choking on its productivity – which, precisely because of the increasing capital intensiveness of commodity production in the centers, first hit the capital-weak, peripheral regions of the world market in full – creates the socio-economic foundations for the rise of extremist movements in the collapsing periphery. Islamism thus represents – similar to the nationally and racially based European fascism – a terrorist crisis form of capitalist rule, which gains momentum wherever the course of the crisis has progressed far enough and the corresponding cultural foundations are in place.
The twenty-year struggle of U.S. troops and NATO against the Taliban thus resembled a senseless windmill fight in which the West fought against the ghosts of crisis that it itself directly and indirectly produced. The sophisticated late capitalist military machine fought – with barbaric methods – on economically scorched earth against the barbaric end products of the crisis of capital. The U.S. and its NATO allies wanted to finance and literally bomb the superstructure of a capitalist state with billions in subsidies, without realizing that there was no economic basis for it.
For the time being, Afghanistan will probably remain the last futile attempt at “nation building” by Western crisis imperialism. The new aspect of the current escalation in Afghanistan is that not only Berlin, but the West as a whole is coming to accept this religiously based crisis ideology, this Islamic fascism, as a factor of order in the periphery that is supposed to keep the superfluous masses of the global South in check, in order to prevent them from fleeing to the centers – all the more important in view of the full-blown climate crisis. The Taliban are also aware of this, as the interview with the New York Times makes clear. The repressive model of crisis management established by Berlin, in which Islamist regimes or rackets are literally paid to stop emigration, threatens to become a new, dystopian reality in the current crisis imperialism.
The transition from neoliberal, formally democratic capitalism, where rule unfolds without a subject, through the mediating levels of the market and the judicial apparatus, to openly authoritarian crisis management now seems to be taking place. Even the facade of Freedom and Democracy is being dropped, with Biden again merely continuing the policies of his right-wing populist predecessor in office. This authoritarian turn is first taking hold in the periphery – but, as illustrated by the militarization of the US police apparatus, it will soon rebound on the centers as well.
This article draws its inspiration from two motivations. The first is determining the ‘socio-psychological matrix’ of the bourgeois subject based on a reading of Freudian psychoanalysis developed from a value-dissociation-critical perspective. The background of this endeavor is the insight that the objective dynamics of the value-dissociation form sustain capitalist society, but that this does not result in a determinism of social trajectories, due to the dialectical relationship between value and dissociation. This means that the thinking, acting and feeling of people cannot be derived directly from the form of value-dissociation – and yet the capitalist organization is sustained by people who reproduce the abstract categories of value-dissociation in their thinking, acting and feeling every day without being aware of it. So, the question arises as to how these abstract categories are internalized into people’s feelings, thoughts and actions, or, to put it another way, how the subject becomes a subject at all.
Because the form of capitalist socialization does not show itself abstractly, but is mediated with its empirical trajectories, the subject and its socio-psychological mediations are also subject to the dynamic nature of capitalist socialization. This is the second motivation of the text. For in the course of the postmodern crisis processes, a new socio-psychological formation of narcissism has spread. In the experimentation with differences and in the wake of deconstructivism, a narcissistic social type was able to develop. The constant tinkering with one’s own identity became a virtue – indeed, a proof of one’s own flexibility. The constant redesigning of one’s own life was thereby an expression of a narcissistic social type. In the meantime, it has become clear that the spread of the narcissistic social type is by no means as harmless as it might have seemed in the colorful (mascaraed) hustle and bustle of postmodernism since the 1980s/90s. The crisis surges since the late 2000s have shattered the illusion of a never-ending party, and the reality of the crisis is breaking out ever more drastically. This constellation encounters a narcissistic social character whose fragile ego makes him highly susceptible to being offended or threatened. The ability to immediately move from one position to another – especially when one sees themselves threatened – is inherent in the narcissistic social character. With this, however, the narcissistic social type, who is losing more and more opportunities to keep its fragile self alive, is very susceptible to banishing its narcissistic fears of powerlessness into ‘new’ unambiguities. This is precisely the gateway for anti-Semitism, anti-gypsyism, racism, anti-feminism, neo-fascism, etc… Not least for this reason, a critique of the narcissistic social character against the background of a radical critique of the subject is necessary.
Terminal Crisis and Its Displacement
A look at the enforcement and development of capitalist-patriarchal society reveals that the internal history of capitalism is riddled with crises. Capitalist socialization and crises cannot be thought of separately. Since the 1970s, however, a process of crisis has now become apparent that raises the question of an “absolute inner barrier of capital” (Kurz 2007, 280). Karl Marx had already pointed out the possibility of an ‘inner barrier of capital’; the crisis theory of the critique of value-dissociation sees this ‘absolute inner barrier of the socialization of value’ becoming historically topical with the emergence of the crisis processes in the context of the third industrial revolution. Because of the microelectronic revolution, more labor is made superfluous in society as a whole than can be compensated for by the expansion of markets and the like. The critique of value-dissociation has pointed these connections out many times.
The effects of the postmodern crisis tendency are no longer only observed in the so-called ‘periphery,’ but are becoming increasingly evident in the core. Symptoms of the worldwide crisis process in this country are unemployment (or the spread of precarious employment), the erosion of the welfare state, the ‘return of poverty’ associated with these processes (which in any case could only be imagined as overcome in a small part of capitalist history, among a small part of the world’s population), as well as the confrontation with refugee crises and violent rampages on our doorstep. Despite the crisis phenomena that are becoming more than evident worldwide and on various levels, the possibility of a ‘final crisis’ of capitalism seems to be categorically excluded – indeed, this possibility is denied and repressed. Thus, the absurd situation has arisen that, despite the catastrophes and narrowing scope of possibilities everywhere, radical criticism of capitalist society is marginal, at best, and is even exposed to the fiercest hostility.
With regard to the perception of crisis processes and how they are dealt with, there are frightening similarities between the spectrum on the left – from ‘left-wing’ parties to groups/alliances that see themselves as extremely radical, etc. – and ‘mainstream society,’ or even right-wing and neo-fascist voices. You can see how the desire for immediate action aggressively suppresses the question of an analysis of the crisis conditions or an understanding of what is really happening, and pushes any question of content into the background. In other words, there is no questioning of the issue at hand, not to mention an analysis of its connection with the totality of society. At the same time, the fact that immediate action, in combination with the elimination of all content, is not only limited to the perception and handling of the named crisis processes, but also shows itself in all pores of social life, is an expression of the society-wide repression of the realization of the “inner barrier of capital.” It seems to be almost irrelevant what the issue is. If a problem arises, it must be reacted to immediately, without a moment of pause and reflection that could potentially irritate such action. For complex problems, culprits or responsible parties must be identified immediately. Thus, a complex problem becomes manageable. It appears as if the problem can be eliminated by immediate action toward the guilty parties. Instead of the insight that there can be no solutions in the value-dissociation form, attempts are made to banish the resulting powerlessness in an action-fetishistic way. These are the reasons why Pegida, AFD, and other right-wing movements were able to spread so quickly: they offer simple explanations and solutions that also serve as an outlet for racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, etc. attitudes (see text by Daniel Späth in this issue).
This aggressive suppression of questions of content always occurs in combination with an equally aggressive ‘niceness terrorism’ – a term by Daniel Späth. There seems to be an addiction to harmony that threatens to level all ambivalences and contradictions. The general cult of concern seems to further fuel this tendency. Contents can only be perceived and processed with direct reference to one’s own self: if they fit into one’s own ‘self’-conception, immediate identifications occur, if they do not fit, they are destroyed, and, if they are not understood, either blame is put on the mediator (because one’s own gigantic self immediately understands everything, after all), or the content is experienced as an imposition, an insult or even a slight, which all the more throws a correspondingly negative light on the mediator. And since everyone ought to be ‘nice’ to each other, it is not considered ‘nice’ at all to express such a complex thought in the first place, and it is possibly even judged as a personal ‘assault.’ In this process, all questions of content thus become personal matters.
It must now be explained why immediate action, the cult of concern, the addiction to harmony, etc. have become so widespread as a way of reacting to and dealing with living conditions that are becoming ever more complex and hopeless. This question sheds light on why radical social critique that reflects on the inner barrier of value-dissociation socialization has such a hard time; because, as the outlined phenomena have already indicated, there is a ‘limit of mediation’ that lies, so to speak, in the subjects themselves.
The postmodern subject is above all a subject in crisis, undergoing a process in which the foundations of bourgeois subjectivity are constantly being eroded. To put it simply, it is about the working subject who is running out of work. This must be processed. The nature of this processing, despite all individual differences, cannot simply be freely chosen, insofar as this process is decisively structured by the socio-psychological matrix of the capitalist subject.
Postmodern Crisis Processes and the Emergence of a Narcissistic Social Type
Before I take a closer look at the socio-psychological matrix of the bourgeois subject, however, I would first like to outline in key terms the phenomena that are connected with a change, on the level of social character, toward the narcissistic type, or that have helped to drive this change.
Even though the term postmodernism already appears toward the end of the 19th century, this term indicates an epochal rupture within the internal history of capitalism, which has come to a social breakthrough as a result of the neoliberal reforms. Robert Kurz sees postmodernism as the “ensemble of a crisis capitalism that misunderstands itself as postindustrial” (Kurz 1999, 7).
In barely two decades, the Third Industrial Revolution has conjured up the greatest world crisis since 1929: In the capitalist core countries, mass unemployment has returned, and in the periphery, “along with ‘abstract labor,’ the money economy in many countries has already collapsed” – as Robert Kurz wrote back in 1999 (Kurz 2005, first: 1999, 739). This, then, merely describes the beginning of the incipient postmodern crisis developments. The collapse of the monetary economy combined with the collapse of statehood has long since reached European states as well. The trouble spots all over the world can hardly be counted…
The flight of financial capital into the ‘realm of speculation’ – a development that was already a clear sign of crisis at the beginning of the 20th century – is an indication of how unprofitable real investments have become. Capital accumulation is shifting from real to speculative spaces, becoming a simulation. The fragility of this simulated capital accumulation becomes clear again and again when the bubbles begin to pop and very real catastrophes suddenly burst out of the financial sky.
Even the processes of globalization could not compensate for the contradictory dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. Nevertheless, globalization has had an impact on social life: new technologies and, above all, the Internet have created new networking possibilities that are less tied to regional contexts.
In view of the massive increase in unemployment in the 1970s, a process of social cuts began which, among other things, led to the spread of precarious employment and finally culminated in the so-called “Hartz reforms” in Germany.
Parallel to these developments, a social process began in the 1980s that has entered the sociological literature under the term individualization. This process must be seen in the context of changing working conditions and demands. With the spread of unemployment or precarious employment, the basis of the bourgeois ‘normal biography’ collapsed: an education no longer guarantees a permanent employment relationship. The new ‘freedoms’ that have repeatedly been associated with the concept of individualization, e.g., being less dependent on one’s family of origin and fixed biographies, have come at the price of a loss of security and orientation. Individuals are expected to take more and more responsibility for the success of their biographies. This in turn means that it is up to individuals to keep themselves ready, fit and healthy for the labor market. Not being able to keep up is an expression of a poor work-life balance and not a problem of objective constraints. The shift of responsibility to the individual forces an ‘ego-centeredness’ – after all, this is a prerequisite for being able to keep up at all under conditions that are becoming increasingly individualized and flexible.
The bourgeois nuclear family could not remain unaffected by the processes just outlined (insecure, precarious employment, individualization, flexibilization). It is exposed to enormous dissolution processes. High divorce rates, the widespread phenomenon of ‘single mothers’ and so-called ‘patch-work families’ are expressions of these processes. The family has become less important in terms of the socialization of children and young people, but it has not disappeared as an authority. Peer groups, the omnipresence of media, and technical devices such as smartphones and the like, which shape the new form of relating to the environment, have pushed back the role of the nuclear family.
In addition, family structures are also dissolving from within: Entering into fixed relationships and the obligations and responsibilities that go with them seems to be perceived as a threat on a broad level. Thus, people speak of ‘life-interval companions’ to make clear in advance that the connection is only entered into for a limited period. Having children has become a question of complementing one’s own biography: if a child fits into the concept of life, it is brought into the world at a precisely planned time. If children do not meet one’s own narcissistic expectations, the clamor is great, and the child is dragged from the doctor to the therapist to the psychiatrist, to be diagnosed with ‘social behavior disorder’ and/or ‘ADHD’ and sedated with medication.
The almost general inability to enter into obligatory contact with others already points to narcissistic character structures. It can be observed at every turn how people can only perceive and process the world in relation to their own self. This indicates that no clear distinction can be made between inside and outside. Thus, any object (another person or even content, among other things) can become an immediate threat to one’s own easily offended ‘narcissistic self.’
It is not coincidental that the term ‘self’ has been mentioned many times. There is a history to this term: It was the ego and self psychology which made an idealistically constructed self out of Freud’s confrontationally conceived ego, which is then simply positivistically regarded as set. There is no ‘I that develops (confrontationally)’ in ego and self psychology. Rather, the ego or self is always already there, and it is merely a matter of calling up the self-development potentials inherent in the heaven-fallen self from birth. Thus, those who cannot keep up in the working society have simply not yet found a way to activate their powers of self-development.
The postmodern demands to constantly ‘work on oneself’ and to ‘optimize oneself’ hardly leave out any area of life: the postmodern subject is supposed to always be flexible, willing to perform and fit – both on a physical and on a psychological level. As Ulrich Bröckling pointed out in his book ‘The Entrepreneurial Self,’ self-optimization is an incomplete process that has little chance of success (cf. Bröckling 2016).
The expression of this is the ‘career of depression.’ Alain Ehrenberg writes: “Depression began its ascent when the disciplinary model for behaviors, the rules of authority and observance of taboos that gave social classes as well as both sexes a specific destiny, broke against norms that invited us to undertake personal initiative by enjoining us to be ourselves” (Ehrenberg 2010, 4). Depression is thus a “illness of responsibility in which the dominant feeling is that of failure” (ibid. Emphasis in the original).
With the rise of depression, markers have already been set that indicate the direction for a change at the level of social character in the face of postmodern crisis processes. On the pathological level, the shift toward the narcissistic social type is expressed in a shift from neurotic to depressive illness. Thus, Ehrenberg writes: “Depression teaches us about our current experience as an individual because it is the pathology of a society whose norm is no longer based on guilt and discipline but on responsibility and initiative. […] The depressed individual is a person out of gas” (ibid., 9).
The excessive demands that accompanied behavioral norms based on guilt and discipline broke out in neurosis as an expression of an underlying conflict between desire and repression. Depression, on the other hand, is not characterized by a conflict, but is an expression of the narcissistic inability to make contact with the world of objects – psychoanalytically speaking, depression is an expression of an inability to occupy objects libidinously. However, an object can only be libidinously occupied if it can be perceived as an object outside the narcissistic universe.
For Freud, melancholia, which in its symptomatology bears some resemblance to depression, was in a sense a clinical (i.e., pathological) form of mourning. The distinction between mourning and melancholia becomes clear in Freud’s answer to the question of what the ‘work of mourning’ consists in: “Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object” (Freud 1976b, 3042). This process is conscious. Melancholia, however, is about an ‘unknown loss.’ Freud writes: “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (ibid., 3043).
What Freud wrote in 1917 with regard to melancholy is certainly true with regard to depression. Depression is the expression of an emptiness, which is the flip side of the permanent overload of always having to work on and optimize oneself.
The constant manifestations of concern are an expression of the inability to name that which ‘concerns’ – to be able to do so would require not perceiving the world exclusively from one’s own narcissistic universe and recognizing the world of objects as existing outside one’s own ego. With the inability to recognize the world of objects as existing outside of one’s own narcissistic universe, the possibilities of reflection also break away: problems, burdens, confusing experiences etc. can no longer be named, no longer be brought up. Everything remains diffuse, somehow you just don’t feel well, everything is too much, you just don’t feel like doing anything anymore.
Another type of narcissistic processing in its extreme form is running amok. Here a narcissistic megalomania acts out, which carries out its self-constitution via its self-destruction and the destruction of others.
Out of all these processes the narcissistic social character has sprung as a child of postmodernity. The postmodern conditions are above all an expression of the objective crisis dynamics of the value-dissociation socialization. And only by taking this crisis dynamic into account it is possible to understand the triumph of narcissism. For the spread of the narcissistic social type is an expression of the disintegrating bourgeois-capitalist subject, which is incessantly digging its own grave. Narcissism has thus become the last resort for the decomposing subject of the value-dissociation society.
The Critique of Value-Dissociation and Psychoanalysis
The critique of value-dissociation focuses on the analysis and critique of the capitalistically constituted totality. In doing so, it does not serve a universalistic concept of totality. Value-dissociation critique starts from an ‘in itself broken totality’ (cf. Roswitha Scholz, 2009) and thus takes the driving dialectic of value and dissociation into account. Accordingly, different levels of the ‘in itself broken totality’ must be kept apart in the critique, without therefore losing the reference to the level of form.
This understanding of totality results from the insight that the capitalist-patriarchal organization works into all social spheres – and thus also into the drive structure, which is carried, driven and reproduced by a ‘social unconscious.’ In order to clarify the question of why people reproduce the capitalist principles of form in their everyday actions, feelings and thoughts, it is thus necessary to clarify different levels: the level of form, the level of the subject as the agent of the commodity-producing patriarchy, the ideological, the cultural-symbolic and socio-psychological level. All these levels must be interrogated again and again in relation to current phenomena and developments – that is, in relation to the ‘concrete totality,’ which tries to accommodate the individual without losing its relation to the totality.
Psychoanalysis is indispensable for the clarification of the socio-psychological level (and with restrictions, also for the cultural-symbolic level). This is because it focuses on the processes of mediation between society and the individual and poses the question of subject genesis. However, it is not a contradiction-free subject – neither in relation to Freudian psychoanalysis itself nor in relation to its historical reception. It should be noted here that, on the whole, a taming of psychoanalytic thinking has taken place, which can be seen in the displacement of the concept of drive from the inner-psychoanalytic debate: Freud’s conflictual ‘I’ became, in the environment of a corresponding ego or self psychology, a contradiction-free ‘I,’ which no longer knows any drive conflict. The ‘de-libidinization’ of psychoanalysis corresponds to the social developments of a general psychologization and individualization of social contexts and a centering on a conflict-free imagined ‘self’ or ‘I.’
From a value-critical point of view, however, it is precisely the banished libido theory that could be made fruitful. With the help of Freud’s metapsychology, which itself is not free of contradictions and admittedly must also be subjected to critical examination, it is possible to describe the socio-psychological matrix of the subject. According to this reading, ego, id, and superego are the central instances that shape the psychological form of the subject. At the same time, they are expressions of underlying drive dynamics and conflicts.
The Freudian Libido Theory from a Value-Critical Perspective
First of all, the historical situation in which Freud developed psychoanalysis must be clarified. Here it quickly becomes clear that Freud was referring to the bourgeois subject, which had only just established itself and, after a brief period of flourishing, was already in crisis (cf. ‘Civilization and Its Discontents,’ Freud). Now, the bourgeois subject did not simply fall from the sky, but was the result of the brutal history of the enforcement of capitalist-patriarchal society, which extended over centuries, was pushed forward on many different levels, and was finally connected with a restructuring of all areas of life. Here are just a few key points that may have played a role in this history of enforcement:
The emergence of manufacturing because of the absolutist hunger for money due to the costs of warfare, with the development of firearms likely being partially responsible for the spiraling costs.
Inculcating the work ethic in workhouses as a prerequisite for factory work.
The newly emerging mode of production was associated with the dissociation of the spheres of production and reproduction, with women assigned to the area of reproduction. This assignment forms the basis for the emergence of the bourgeois nuclear family.
These developments were accompanied by a ‘domestication of women as natural beings’ (witch hunts), which in turn refers not least to the fact that a completely new relationship to nature emerged (androcentric domination of nature).
The internalization of the ‘work ethic’ and the emergence of corresponding ideologues, which ultimately culminated in Enlightenment philosophy.
In the context of these processes of upheaval, the bourgeois subject has asserted itself with a corresponding socio-psychological matrix. The bourgeois subject and its socio-psychological matrix are centrally based on the dissociation of the feminine, the phantasm of the mastery of nature and the imagination of self-constitution. They are also essentially linked to the internalization of the work ethic. Corresponding to this is a drive dynamic in which, when drives surge, the libido skyrockets in joyful anticipation of the ‘reward for this failure.’ This ‘trick’ of the libido to deal with drive refusals also lays the track for drive sublimation processes. The necessity for drive sublimation arises with the enforcement of the capitalist mode of production and the expenditure of abstract labor demanded by it. Thus, it becomes clear that the capitalist social formation could not remain external to the drive structure. From this it can be concluded: Only with the capitalist patriarchy does a drive structure emerge in which ego, id, and superego interact as separate instances that conflict with each other and thus mediate the psychological dynamics. This form of psychological mediation has thus only emerged in the wake of the historical assertion of capitalism. Freud, of course, did not write it this way; this is part of the interpretation of Freud made here, which is based on reading Freud in the context of the historical situation in which he developed his theory.
Moreover, this reading of Freud’s psychoanalysis is only possible against the background of a radical critique of the Enlightenment and the subject – this also means that Freud’s concept of the subject must be criticized in its affirmation of the Enlightenment. For the Enlightenment must be understood as an “‘enforcement ideology’ of the commodity-producing system” (Kurz 2004, 18). The Enlightenment produced the modern subject and at the same time equated all people living under capitalism with this subject (cf. ibid.). The subject as the “modern actor of abstract labor and its derivative functions” is nothing other than the “social form of individuals’ own activity: form of perception, of thought, of relation, of activity” (Kurz 2016, 184f). The subject is thus not identical with the socially sensible individual, but rather “the conscious (individual as well as institutional) bearer of the subjectless movement of valorization” (Kurz 2004, 57).
For the critique of the socio-psychological form of the subject, this means that here, too, a distinction must be made between subject and individual. For the social-sensual individual is confronted with the socio-psychological matrix of the bourgeois subject, but does not merge into it. The socio-psychological matrix provides, so to speak, the psychological form in which psychological mediation takes place.
However, the socio-psychological level cannot be derived from the subject concept. On the one hand, this is forbidden against the background of a critique of deductive logic. On the other hand, the psychological form is in a certain way also prior to the subject, insofar as it is the precondition for becoming a subject. In view are the processes of subject genesis or reproduction of the subject as ‘agent’ of the capitalist-patriarchal organization. And this is true both at the ‘individual level’ (i.e., in relation to the question of why people repeatedly form the subject position and reproduce it in their thinking, acting, and feeling) and at the level of the emergence of the psychological form itself. The latter, as already indicated above, emerged in the context of the enforcement of modern patriarchy. The socio-psychological matrix of the subject is supported or reproduced not least by a ‘social unconscious,’ which is also the result of the real demanded drive suppression (see above) and reproduces itself in every process of ‘becoming a subject.’
Gender-Differentiated Trajectories of Psychosocial Development.
The constitution of the (male) subject is accompanied by the dissociation of the feminine. In other words, the dissociation of the feminine is the mute precondition of the male-bourgeois subject. This relationship of the (male) subject to the dissociation extends into an ‘androcentric unconscious’ and reproduces itself in the form of the Oedipus complex in individual life histories. This interpretation is based not least on the fact that Freud himself conceptualized the Oedipus complex both at the level of phylogenesis (i.e., the genesis of the subject) – in ‘Totem and Taboo’ patricide is described as a founding act that is passed on from generation to generation as an (unconscious) inheritance or repeated in the Oedipus complex (cf. Freud 1976) – and at the level of ontogenesis (the development of the single individual). However, it is precisely Freud’s concept of phylogenesis that must be critically examined in terms of its ontological moments. In this respect, Freud’s concepts cannot simply be taken up hastily.
Freud, of course, conceived his Oedipus complex in this context without consideration of the value-dissociation structure. Nevertheless, Freud has an eye for the gender-differentiated psychosexual development. Thus, along the Oedipus complex, he describes ‘male’ and ‘female’ libido fates.
Before I discuss the gender-differentiated progression of psychological development, I would like to note that when I speak of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ in the following, it is by no means a matter of ontologizing these terms, but rather of taking into account the socio-psychological matrix of the subject, which is profoundly two-gendered or based on the dissociation of the feminine. Within the socio-psychological matrix, femininity and masculinity are markers that psychosexual development cannot bypass, and thus they must be conceptualized. With the modern two-gender model, women as well as men have been/are forced to form gender identities in the progressive forms of ‘male’ and ‘female,’ with femininity devalued from the outset. Femininity is the absence of the phallus, deficiency par excellence. This ‘void’ that femininity then leaves is well suited to accommodate male projections. The fact that ‘femininity’ has to serve as a projection surface – in the familiar projection directions of mother/wife and whore – is an expression of the value-dissociation structure. These masculine projections are, first of all, an expression of the fact that the dissociation of the feminine precedes the constitution of the (male) subject. However, they also show that the dissociation of the feminine is not an act that is accomplished once, but rather is one that pushes for constant repetition. In this respect, ‘femininity’ is not a ‘dark continent’ by chance, and should/must remain so.
This has consequences for female psychosexual development and its analysis. Thus, ‘femininity’ must correspond to the requirements of the male side and must not be anything ‘on its own’ outside the ‘male’ catchment area. In this sense, it is almost absurd to speak of a ‘female psychological form’ at all, since this form consists mainly in having to be ‘formless.’ This is also reflected in the ‘female’ libido fate as described by Freud: in the male course, the male child, under the threat of castration emanating from the father, gives up the desire it directs toward the mother to bow to the paternal law through identification. In the most favorable case, this development leads to the ‘demise of the Oedipus complex’ (cf. Freud, Oedipus). In contrast, the female child, who does not have to fear castration – because it has already been accomplished – runs into the Oedipus complex ‘as into a haven of refuge’ (Freud 1976e, 4731). The background of this movement is the discovery of the difference between the sexes. The disappointment about ‘one’s own deficiency’ is blamed on the mother, and this makes it possible to turn to the father. From the father, the girl hopes for a (male) child to compensate for penis envy and to restitute herself narcissistically. Thus, the absence of the phallus or this discovery is decisive for the female libido fate. The background of this development is a ‘phallocentric-androcentric unconscious,’ which reproduces itself again and again in the gender-differentiated pathways. Thus, phallocentrism structures the ‘formless’ female psychological form.
Christa Rhode-Dachser rightly criticizes the ‘patriarchal foundation’ of psychoanalysis. She also calls “Freud’s theory of female development” “a theory of non-individuation […] which […] served the adaptation of women to the gender role intended for them at that time” (Rhode-Dachser 2003, 5. Emphasis in original). This statement can be agreed with in part; for, of course, female psychosexual development is attuned to the role intended for women. And it is also true that Freud describes the female libido fate in an affirmative way. Nevertheless, it is not Freud’s theory that is responsible for the female libido fate, but the social conditions of the value-dissociation form. In this respect, it would also be a mistake to simply throw Freud in the garbage can since his theory is androcentric in nature. Rather, it is important to subject Freud to a feminist critique and, against this background, to ask why Freud described the female libido fate as he did.
In addition, Rhode-Dachser’s hypostasis of the feminine is apparent. But it cannot be a matter of searching for a ‘femininity’ beyond phallocentrism. In ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ the value-dissociation structure shows itself. Thus, it would be completely wrong to look for a somehow ‘better,’ even ‘non-identical,’ in ‘femininity’ – Roswitha Scholz has pointed this out again and again. For a critique of capitalist gender relations, this means that ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ must be seen as two poles within the value-dissociation socialization and must be criticized as such – of course, the hierarchical status of the ‘masculine’ and the discrimination of the ‘feminine’ connected to it must not be underestimated. With regard to ‘femininity’ this means that first of all an idea of what is hidden in the ‘dark continent’ would have to be developed. In this sense, the question of a psychoanalytic theory of femininity would have to be posed anew.
Christa Rhode-Dachser is not alone in her attempt to develop a feminist reading of psychoanalysis. Other authors have also dealt with this question. However, the fact that these authors repeatedly hypostatize the “feminine” is certainly not accidental. Here, the fact that feminist-psychoanalytically oriented theory has dealt too little with a critique of the subject takes its revenge. Instead of radically questioning the subject form itself, it tries to develop a theory of femininity beyond phallocentrism that enables women to be ‘subject.’
Crisis Processes and a Narcissistic Social Character
By now it should be clear that the ‘socio-psychological matrix’ of the subject could not withstand the postmodern crisis processes. Gainful employment and family as supporting agencies of socialization break down more and more in the context of general processes of flexibilization and individualization, and thus pillars that were indispensable for the socio-psychological development of the bourgeois subject fall away. But again: the form of psychological processing does not simply dissolve, it still indicates the paths of socio-psychological development – but under postmodern auspices, this path can only lead to narcissism. As I will show, narcissism is already inherent in the constitution of the subject, but it seems to implode, so to speak, under postmodern crisis conditions. The postmodern social character is a profoundly narcissistic one – and this is likely to be true, albeit in different trajectories, for both ‘female’ and ‘male’ characters. What they have in common, so to speak, is the high degree of ‘self’-reference as an expression of their narcissism.
What has changed with regard to the socio-psychological form of the subject in the face of postmodern crisis processes can be illustrated by a quotation from the book ‘The World as Will and Design’ [Die Welt als Wille und Design] (Robert Kurz). Robert Kurz writes:
“The absence of social relationships means nothing other than being a commodity on two legs; ‘expressive individualism’ must also shift to the outfit, because behind the clothes there is only the specter of an individual. Adorno was never more topical than in the postmodern times of the Love Parade, whose followers really do commit a gross impertinence when they say ‘I’” (Kurz 1999, 49).
This quotation can be interpreted against the background of Freud’s concept of the ego. Freud writes in the text ‘On the Introduction of Narcissism’ (1914): “We are bound to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed. (Freud 1976a, 2934). Freud names ‘primary narcissism’ as the decisive driving force of the constitution of the ego. For this – writes Lili Gast as an interpretation of Freud’s train of thought – “initiates a dynamic self-reference in objective self-perception, which ultimately results in the constitution of subjectivity” (Gast 1992, 52). The initial constitution of the ego is a narcissistic one. In Freud’s concept of ego, narcissism is firmly inscribed as the driving engine. However, Freud saw the overcoming of primary narcissism as the central step in ego development. With regard to the socio-psychological matrix of the postmodern subject, we can now assume a dominance of a ‘narcissistic ego’ as the carrier of psychological mediation – an ‘ego,’ in other words, that actually cannot call itself ‘I’ in the sense described above.
Against the background of narcissism, it then also becomes clear why such a delusion of immediacy, as I have described it above, can spread in such a way. Because this goes along with a psychological structure which also pushes for immediacy. Freud describes the ‘subject-object unity’ of primary narcissism as a developmentally specific ‘recognition of reality’ or ‘reinterpretation of reality’ (cf. ibid. 52ff or Freud 1976a, 2931ff). This means that the world of objects can only be directly incorporated by the narcissistic ‘subject-object-unit,’ or must be repelled and destroyed (psychologically) if it threatens the narcissistic integrity.
With regard to the background of origin and the immanent transformations of the socio-psychological matrix of the subject, it can be assumed that different manifestations overlap and coexist. Thus, the ‘authoritarian personality’ did not exist in pure form, and so today the ‘postmodern social character’ does not exist in pure form. Socio-psychological trajectories cannot be thought in a straight line, neither on the level of the description of a social character nor on the individual level. At this point, once again, consideration of the underlying drive dynamics is central: for these are linked to a specific temporal logic in which what is past is not simply past and ‘unconscious’ is not simply ‘unconscious.’ The drive dynamic pushes for the past and unconscious to be flushed up when the present demands or permits it. This means, banally speaking, that ‘old,’ ‘resolved’ conflicts can become virulent again under the impression of a changed reality and now take new paths of processing or repression. Thus, it can be assumed that the narcissistic social character is not only to be observed in the younger generations, but also in older generations, who are not spared from the narcissistic pull. The fact that it is precisely the ‘narcissistic trajectories’ that are taken has to do with a reality that also pushes towards narcissistic positions because of its complexity and hopelessness.
The postmodern narcissistic type in particular cannot be thought of as a rigid figure in view of the general processes of flexibilization and individualization, insofar as the postmodern subject is flexible to the point of self-destruction. This also means that the narcissistic type can pass from one extreme to the next completely abruptly. The ‘narcissistic ego’ and the corresponding mediation of drive processes are extremely ‘flexible’ and adaptable in their immediacy, which may be due not least to the lack of formation of the object libido. This in turn is an expression of an immediate (narcissistic) access to the ‘world of objects.’
Therefore, it is not at all surprising that ego-, self-, and object-relational psychology could prevail against drive theory. The far-reaching purge of psychoanalytic theory from the drive concept corresponds to the real developments of a focus on the narcissistic self. These developments have been affirmatively taken up – or anticipated – by ego-, self-, and object-relational theories, and thus these theories can be interpreted as theories of adaptation to postmodern impositions. This can also be seen, for example, in the fact that these theories – whether intentionally or not – have found their way into the ‘new management literature’ and are thus also part of the intellectual-historical background of the ‘entrepreneurial self’ (cf. Bröckling 2016).
The purification of psychoanalytic theory from the concept of libido in the context of ego-, self-, and object-relational psychology does not mean that with the elimination of the concept the thing itself has disappeared. The ‘drive’ or the dynamic it sets in motion does not disappear; rather, the conditions for a ‘successful’ sublimation in the bourgeois sense break away. This means that the drive dynamic itself had to change qualitatively and the processes of a (in the bourgeois sense) ‘successful’ ‘ego’ development, in which the ego is a stable mediating agency between id (the drive-like moments) and superego (the ‘paternal’ – patriarchal – law) (whereby it should be clear that, in view of the immanent history of crisis, a ‘stable ego’ can never actually be assumed), are blocked. The narcissistic withdrawal or self-reference is an expression of this reality.
Crisis Gender
Against the background of the critique of value dissociation, it is now necessary to question the spread of the narcissistic social character in terms of its gender-specific implications. Here, it must first be stated that in the wake of the postmodern developments described above – also favored by gender and queer theory – there has indeed been an equalization of the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ gender codes. Women as well as men seem to be less fixed to their traditional social roles. This equalization of the ‘codes’ is not least an expression of the fact that, due to the real processes of crisis, the gender roles shaped by the two sexes are increasingly losing their possibilities of realization and are visibly coming into conflict with the demands of the postmodern ‘compulsory flexible individual’ (Roswitha Scholz). The question is how the narcissistic social character mediates this equalization of gender-differentiated codes. Psychoanalytically, the primary narcissistic stage does not yet know gender difference. Thus, the narcissistic social character also does not simply develop along the rigid lines of ‘male’ and ‘female.’
However, it would be fatal to think of the narcissistic social character as gender-neutral or as independent of the two-gender matrix because of the loosening of gender boundaries described above. Even if the boundaries between the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ trajectories are blurred, this does not mean that the differential gender forms and the hierarchy associated with them have simply disappeared. The narcissistic social character is, after all, characterized by the fact that it can pass abruptly from one extreme to the other, since its object ties – to put it euphemistically – are quite loose. Even if the primary narcissistic stage does not know the difference between genders, it knows the ‘phallus’ very well. Both girls and boys in the primary narcissistic stage assume that they possess a ‘phallus.’ This means that phallocentrism has not been overcome even when there has been some equalization of binary codes. And under the domination of the ‘phallus,’ in the context of the value-dissociation society, even the binary codes cannot simply disappear. Rather, the ‘feralization of patriarchy’ (Roswitha Scholz) is also evident here: the codes ‘male’ – ‘female’ do not simply disappear, but go wild – and this happens not least against the background of the codes having lost their ‘meaning’ in real terms, since they no longer coincide with reality. So, it is hardly surprising that the postmodern softie-man can still celebrate the play with the genders at a ‘queer party’ today, and write a ‘Manifesto for the Man’ tomorrow, in which he laments the crisis of masculinity and advocates a flat anti-feminism. The supposed equalization of the different gender codes happens through the different gender forms, so that the apparent equalization can also turn back into gender essentialism at any time. This hard-as-nails changeover from colorful gender hustle and bustle into gender essentialism is an expression of narcissistically shaped crisis gender. With the subject, its gender is also at an end.
The incursion of gender and queer theory has not only encouraged the spread of the narcissistic social character, but has also brought feminism – although it has suddenly become prominent – into a situation in which it must once again fight for survival. Mediated via gender theory, the postmodern repression of all content and of a claim to truth was carried into feminism and here wreaked its havoc. Now it is precisely gender theory that cannot explain why, despite the equalization of the binary gender codes, the hierarchical gender relationship has not disappeared, or why it even seems to have been revived. In retrospect, it turns out that gender and queer theory were a vehicle or expression for the spreading crisis gender under narcissistic auspices and now cannot understand the result of their drifting, since their conceptual tools do not reach beyond the cultural-symbolic level. Thus, gender and queer theory must also escape the ‘feralization of patriarchy’ (Roswitha Scholz), or else it cannot explain the individual phenomena that make clear the hierarchical gender relations that still exist.
In view of the worsening gender relations, it would be important for feminist thinking to face up to the “feralization of patriarchy” and to perceive how it acts out. A look at the worldwide crisis shows that, despite the (still) colorful gender hustle and bustle (in this country), a crisis masculinity has long since spread, which finds its expression above all in a brutalization of gender relations. Addiction and violence are everyday phenomena of masculine crisis subjectivity – a combination that may also have played a role in the New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany. It is evident that sublimation possibilities and thus inhibition thresholds for the direct acting out of affects are breaking down. This is an expression of the narcissistic, as I have tried to show. The connection between crisis masculinity and narcissism becomes particularly clear in the case of amok: the last act of the masculine narcissistic self-constitution is the extended suicide, in which ultimately the destruction of the world is imagined.
On the female side, crisis gendering shows itself in the form of the ‘double socialization’ that Roswitha Scholz has repeatedly pointed out in her interpretation of Regina Becker-Schmidt (cf. Scholz 2011, 67ff). In the course of the postmodern crisis processes, women are once again forced into the role of crisis administrators and made equally responsible for family and income, but this under the auspices of a collapsing capitalism, in which it is ultimately a matter of mere survival. (‘Rubble Women’ [Trümmerfrauen] were also crisis administrators, but they were still able to build something). Moreover, women are still exposed to male projections which, under narcissistic auspices, become so immediate that they can be discharged in (even violent) affect at any time. Thus, in addition to the responsibility that women have for family and income, there is the threat of becoming victims of male violence, hostility, and the like. This permanent overload, which is directed at the role of the woman, may not be named – it would not fit the image of an emancipated woman, who actually manages her job and children quite easily. It is in this context that research findings indicating that women in Germany suffer from depression twice as often as men should be explained. Depression is an expression of the narcissistic way of dealing with the aforementioned contradictory, permanent, and excessive demands. Depression is a ‘female’ variant of narcissism, even though depression also increasingly affects men. As far as a ‘female narcissism’ is concerned, some things would still have to be clarified. For example, we should also ask about the female ways of narcissistically acting out aggression. There seems to be a certain ‘feminine’ tendency to be able to get rid of aggressions quite directly, but in a way in which the aggressions are not acted out openly. It is rather something like a ‘narcissistic-passive aggressiveness,’ which from the outset, because it is not open, evades any reaction and confrontation and thus shows itself to be incapable of conflict.
Even if there is much need for clarification on the socio-psychological level with regard to the latest obfuscations of gender relations, it should be more than clear: The spread of narcissistic social character is an expression of crisis gendering, which is visible on both the female and male side, albeit in different ways. All this indicates that people cannot simply step out of the socio-psychological matrix of the subject, even though this matrix is decomposing from within – and it is also being stripped of its substance. The result of this contradictoriness is narcissism as the last hold of the crisis subject: only through it can the disintegrating subject still pretend to be capable of acting, thinking and feeling.
References
Bröckling, Ulrich. 2016. The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject. Translated by Steve Black. London: SAGE.
Ehrenberg, Alain. 2010. The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age. Translated by Enrico Caouette, Jacob Homel, David Homel, and Don Winkler. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1976. “Totem and Taboo (1913).” In The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIII, edited by James Strachey, 2646-2799. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Freud, Sigmund. 1976a. “On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914).” In The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, edited by James Strachey, 2929-2954. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Freud, Sigmund. 1976b. “Mourning and Melancholia (1915).” In The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, edited by James Strachey, 3039-3053. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Freud, Sigmund. 1976c. “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (1924).” In The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX, edited by James Strachey, 4083-4091. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Freud, Sigmund. 1976d. “Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).” In The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI, edited by James Strachey, 4462-4532. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Freud, Sigmund. 1976e. “Lecture XXXIII: Femininity.” In The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII, edited by James Strachey, 4715-4737. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Gast, Lilli. 1992. Libido und Narzissmus: Vom Verlust des Sexuellen im psychoanalytischen Diskurs. Eine Spurensicherung. Tübingen: Gerd Kimmerle.
Kurz, Robert. 1999. Die Welt als Wille und Design: Postmodernism, Postmoderne, Lifestyle-Linke und die Ästhetisierung der Krise. Berlin: Edition TIAMAT.
Kurz, Robert. 2004. Blutige Vernunft: Essays zur emanzipatorischen Kritik der kapitalistischen Moderne und ihrer westlichen Werte. Bad Honnef: Horlemann Verlag.
Kurz, Robert. 2016. The Substance of Capital. London: Chronos Publications.
Kurz, Robert. 2005. Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus: Ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn.
Kurz, Robert. 2007. Marx Lesen! Die wichtigsten Texte von Karl Marx für das 21. Jahrhundert: Herausgegeben und kommentiert von Robert Kurz. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn.
Rhode-Dachser, Christa. 2011. Expedition in den dunklen Kontinen: Weiblichkeit im Diskurs der Psychoanalyse. Gießen: Psychosozial-Verlag.
Scholz, Roswitha. 2009. “Gesellschaftliche Form und konkrete Totalität: Zur Dringlichkeit eines dialektischen Realismus heute” in exit! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, no. 6: 55-100.
Scholz, Roswitha. 2011. Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus: Feministische Theorie und die postmoderne Metamorphose des Patriarchats. Bad Honnef: Horlemann Verlag.
Originally published in Exit! no. 14 on 06/01/2017
“On the struggle for an immigration and post-growth society in Europe” was the motto of the medico Foundation Symposium in 2016.[1] The Austrian journalist and author Robert Misik opposed the fear discourse of both the right and the left. While resentment and the willingness to use violence are promoted by the right, powerlessness is advanced by the left.[2] So what can help against fear and powerlessness?
“The power to act is regained by those who make use of the first virtue of critical thinking: to look for the other world not ‘by looking away from existing evil,’ but by looking in the middle of the ‘real movement,’ ‘which cancels the present state,’” is the answer given at medico, in reference to Karl Marx.[3] And the “real movement” in the 21st century is quickly found. In addition to “explicitly political innovations,” it is the “everyday changes in interpersonal relationships and the ethical and moral attitudes that support them.”[4] Some examples are mentioned: practical solidarity with refugees, self-organized solidarity clinics, and neighborhood networks.[5]
All of this may well make sense. It would only have to be made clear from the self-formulated claim why these activities are not just sensible emergency measures, but would actually abolish “the present state of affairs.” But this state can only be lifted if it is recognized, i.e. if it is clear what is to be lifted. “Real movements,” then, can only be those which are aimed at recognizing the “present state” in order to be able to “abolish” it or – to put it more precisely and less Hegelianly – to overcome it.
Social movements – from the traditional workers’ movements to the new social movements – move a lot ‘in the dark.’ The range extends from the flight into the concrete to the flight into the general – depending on the need. Sometimes it is concrete projects or concrete actors to whom demands are addressed, sometimes it is general ethical-moral appeals or abstract visions that promise an orientation for action. At all costs, however, the question as to what the individual phenomena, from people fleeing their homelands to the permanent deterioration of working and social conditions, which we encounter “in the existing evil,” have to do with the totality of the social conditions to be overcome, is to be avoided. Because this question must not be asked, for fear of paralyzing political impotence, salvation is to be sought in action that jumps back and forth between projects, ‘intercessions’ to economic and political actors, and ethical-moral sermons, between ‘concrete’ and ‘general.’ Such action must remain indeterminate in view of the “condition to be abolished” – as Medico puts it. Its indeterminacy finds expression in empty actionist formulas like: We have to do something. In other words, the main thing is to do something, whatever that may be. Or it leads into moralizing appeals such as: We have to change. Change is everything. It must “become DNA” – as the new NRW Economics Minister Andreas Pinkwart of the FDP inculcates in us.[6]
Two problematic social contexts become clear here: On the one hand, both in labor movement Marxism and in social-liberal reforms, as well as in everyday life, the value-dissociation socialization – that is, the “commodity-producing patriarchy” (Roswitha Scholz)[7] – as a social fetish form has always been presupposed without reflection. Second, with the intensifying crisis of capitalism, a new situation is emerging. The margins of action become narrower because they come up against the limits set by the social form. They cannot be overcome by an effort of the will – according to the motto ‘whoever wants to, can.’ These two problematic social contexts need to be reflected upon.
2. Action as a Struggle for Equality and Political Influence in the Capitalist Form.
Theologian Ton Veerkamp laments how Fukuyama’s talk of the history ending with the free market and democracy leads to a lack of alternatives:
“The new gospel of Fukuyama was also the end of the great narratives of the occidental bourgeoisie, the narrative of true liberté, freedom, true égalité, equality, true solidarity, as we call fraternité today. It was perpetuated in the Great Narrative of the labor movement, the narrative of those who took seriously the narrative of the bourgeoisie, true liberty, true equality, true solidarity, not only in the church, but also in the factory.”[8]
The history of the workers’ movement becomes here the continuation or the completion of bourgeois history. It is completed by extending its promises of freedom, equality and solidarity to all. The promised equality is to become a reality for all those who were excluded from the blessings of bourgeois society, especially the workers. Equality is to apply not only politically but also economically, not only in politics but also in the factory. Equality in bourgeois society was the aim not only of the largest part of the workers’ movement, but also of the largest parts of the slavery abolition and women’s movements.
In the workers’ movement in particular, the struggles were seen in the social context of the contradiction between capital and labor. Capital represented the point of view of domination, and labor, that of liberation. Social power relations were represented by the power of capital over labor and the means of production, and thus over the means that are indispensable for human life.
It should not be denied that these liberation struggles, as struggles for participation and equality, have made people’s lives easier. However, at the latest in view of the failure of socialism, it would have been necessary to reflect self-critically that all attempts at emancipation fall short if they move within the fetishistic social context constituted by capital and labor and at the same time within the framework of the dissociated area of reproduction. In it, value and dissociation are always already presupposed, value insofar as capitalist society is oriented toward the irrational and abstract end in itself of the multiplication of money through the production of commodities, i.e., through the production of value and surplus value, dissociation insofar as reproduction, with its feminine connotations, represents the mute precondition for commodity production.
It is not recognized that, just like capital and labor, politics and the state also constitute the fetishistic social context of the capitalist form of society. They are dependent on the process of valorization and can only shape and steer within the margins made possible by the creation of value. It is within this framework that the state performs its task as an “ideal total capitalist” (Friedrich Engels). In view of the incoherently competing individual enterprises, it is its task to create an overall social framework for production and reproduction. It can do this only as long as the process of value creation provides it with the necessary means to do so.
Embedded in the fetishistic capitalist social context is also the subject who believes himself to be autonomous and free. His autonomous cognition seems to be unconditional, his actions essentially controlled by his will. At the same time, his thinking and acting is always already subjected to the unreflectively presupposed factual constraints of the structuring social context of valorization and the reproductive foundations dissociated from it. What appears to him as free thinking and acting has always already affirmed the fetishistic capitalist social context as a self-evident and unreflected given.
On this basis, the subject becomes the agent of abstract labor. Whereas in pre-modern societies activities characterized by toil were due to the necessity of a ‘metabolism with nature’ at a low level of productivity, in modern capitalist societies with a more highly developed productive power, labor is subjected to the compulsion to serve the abstract and irrational capitalist end-in-itself of producing abstract wealth, which is expressed quantitatively in money and is indifferent to its material content. The concrete is to be had only as a carrier of something abstract, the use-value of the commodity only as a carrier of the exchange-value, the material-content wealth only as a carrier of abstract wealth.
Labor subjected to the capitalist end in itself of the multiplication of abstract wealth belongs to the constitution of an abstract and unconscious domination, independent of the thought and action of the actors. Marx described it with the paradoxical concept of the “automatic subject.”[9] The subject is in the service of an automatism in which money is used as capital to produce value and surplus-value through the expenditure of abstract labor, which is expressed in surplus-money after the exchange of commodities. Automatism needs subjects to set it in motion and keep it going. In this respect, the subject is “the agent of a blind social system that sets the ‘automatic subject’ in motion through its own pre-structured pattern of activity.”[10]
Then, however, the subject is precisely not autonomous, but integrated into “the self-movement of the capitalist real categories.” These were “unconsciously created” by people. They have now “become independent … precisely because the individuals live their lives within these categories not wanting to imagine anything differently and seek their happiness by hook or by crook, and through their satisfying the demands brought forth by this matrix.”[11] Their thinking and acting is determined by this unconsciously created, independent and unreflected fetishistic social context. Therefore, political action is also fetishistic. It moves within the polarities of market and state or economy and politics, praxis and theory, which are set by the fetish form. Thus, depending on the constellation, the welfare state can be invoked against the market, the market can be made neoliberal against the state, praxis can be played off against theory, or theory can be put at the service of praxis.
In social movements, political action becomes above all a question of political will or of the interests that are to be asserted against political-economic power. With a shift of the balance of power within the capitalist form and the polarities set with it, i.e. between capital and labor, market and state, theory and praxis, however, the ‘present state’ cannot be ‘abolished’ or overcome. Capital and labor are always presupposed as a fetishistic social context and are not put up for disposition, just as little as the dissociation of reproduction and the patriarchal gender relations. People as social beings remain subordinated to the movements of the commodities they produce and the social relations of a ‘commodity-producing patriarchy’ constituted by them. Their thought, will, and action are broken by the abstract domination constituted by value and dissociation.
As an agent of abstract labor, bound into the fetishistic structuring social context of labor and capital, the subject cannot be a ‘revolutionary subject.’ Through its integration into the fetishistic social context, its supposedly autonomous thought and action is reduced to the framework set by the social form. In this, the subject turns out to be “a category of capital itself, or a function of the ‘automatic subject’ of abstract labor and value.”[12] Then the category of praxis, or the primacy of praxis over theory, also becomes problematic. The praxis of subjects, before there is any thinking, is always already integrated into the dominant fetish forms that seem plausible to the acting subject:
“Working, earning money, gender relations, etc. are in a certain way similar to the way the wild sow digs for acorns or the way the spider weaves its web. Therefore, the absurdity that individuals do not consciously act socially, but according to blind mechanisms, appears as self-evident and is always already presupposed. The consciousness of individuals, precisely because they are separated from these mechanisms, and the fetish forms and their mechanisms, does not refer to the social character of their actions, but to the given immanent calculation according to the given criteria in these immanent forms.”[13]
Just like the praxis of the subjects, the theory produced under the primacy of such praxis remains integrated into the fetishistic social context presupposed without reflection. Such theory becomes either – e.g. in the form of business administration/economics or systems theory – the justification of the relations presupposed in praxis or the justification of a praxis of modernization of relations, which seeks change within the framework of the presupposed social forms by shifting the power relations within the fetishistic social context of capital and labor, market and state, etc. Such theory enters into the service of practical work on contradiction. It moves in the tracks laid by the struggle for recognition in the forms of law and state and for self-assertion in the forms of abstract labor, value, and dissociation.[14]
3. Action in an “Unreflective Society”
3.1 Limits of Action in the Crisis of Capitalism
As the crisis of capitalism progresses, the scope for acting in the presupposed fetish forms becomes narrower. Accordingly, the actors of individual and political action come up against the limits of their action and experience their individual and political impotence. The crisis of capitalism affects the ability of subjects to act insofar as its basis is the expenditure of labor, the ‘substance of capital.’ Because of the ‘moving contradiction’ (Karl Marx) associated with capital, capital producing in competition is forced to replace labor with technology. With the microelectronic revolution, this logical contradiction also comes up against historical limits that can no longer be compensated for, since now more labor substance has to be disposed of than could be compensated for by expanding and cheapening the products. In this way, however, capitalism undermines not only its own foundations, but also the ability of subjects to act as agents of abstract labor.
The illusion of agency is nevertheless maintained insofar as money, too, is detached from its objective social context and declared to be a sign, true to postmodern logic in which the world consists of a multiplicity of signs. Its validity is detached from the objective social context of commodity production, in which it represents abstract labor and thus value and surplus value. It is now recognized as valid on the basis of social convention. Accordingly, the money supply can be increased according to economic necessities. New possibilities for action seem to be opening up via the control of the money supply even to the point of alternative dreams of being able to both secure stability and free up money for social investment via a transaction tax. Negative reality seems to be able to be leapfrogged and to dissolve into an all-determining intentionality. Against such illusions, Robert Kurz has pointed out that “the meaning of an objective validity (in the sense of the fetish relation being independent and reified)” should not be understood in terms of “‘validity’ as subjective kind of ‘validity’ (in the sense of the bourgeois notions of contract and decree).”[15] The ‘objective validity’ of money results from the fact that it represents the expenditure of ‘abstract labor’ and thus value. Fictitious money can only prolong the crisis as long as the connection with the expenditure of abstract labor and the associated production of value and surplus value does not break.
The extent to which this thread is being put to the test is shown by the increasingly rapid interplay between the capitalist polarities of market and state, economy and politics, in the course of the crisis. In the face of intensifying state financing and economic valorization crises, neoliberalism focused on strengthening the market and the economy through privatization, deregulation and social cuts. Against the supposed omnipotence of the economy and the growing social problems, trade unions and social movements called on the state and its regulatory power. A way out seemed to be found in the miraculous multiplication of capital without going through real commodity production via the buying and selling of financial securities. A simulated accumulation was created which resulted in “money without value” (Robert Kurz), on whose drip the real economy became dependent via global deficit cycles. The ‘natural’ limits of a simulated economy supported by money without value were shown again and again in the bursting of bubbles. The bursting of the real estate bubble in particular called the state back onto the scene to rescue the “systemically important banks” (Angela Merkel). It is becoming clear that not only the state-driven modernization processes in countries of the two-thirds world are coming to an end with the collapse of states that can no longer be financed, but also the ping-pong between market and state or economy and politics in the countries of the global North.
3.2 False Immediacy in an “Unreflective Society”
In view of all the social experiences of crisis and catastrophe, it would seem obvious to critically reflect on the limits of capitalist socialization. Instead, theoretical thinking that seeks to reflect on individual phenomena in the context of social relations is denounced. At the beginning of the new millennium, Robert Kurz had already predicted the path to a “unreflective society”:
“The real social contradiction, which is no longer manageable using the previously employed methods, is simply to be banished from thinking. The dark end of modern development is absurdly celebrated as a transition to an ‘illusionless pragmatism.’ Along with social criticism, reflective thinking ceases altogether.”[16]
The contradiction connected with the inner logical barrier of needing labor for the multiplication of capital, but at the same time having to replace it with technology because of competition, which forces efficiency and cheapening, could be dealt with in capitalist immanence as long as there were sufficient possibilities to compensate for the disappearance of labor. Because this logical barrier now also encounters its historical barriers and thus becomes topical, the perspective would suggest itself to reflect on these barriers and with them on the end of capitalist socialization. Insofar as thinking moves within the unreflected, presupposed social forms, it also encounters the limits of its possible reflection with the logical and historical barriers of capital valorization. Reflection also feels the powerlessness that is established by the objectivity of the relations. There is immanently no more praxis towards which one could think in the interest of change. But instead of making these immanent limits of action and of reflection itself the object of critical reflection, reflection stops its operation.
And yet action is being taken. After all, the crisis ‘must’ be ‘managed’ – among other things, by cutting social benefits and activating companies as well as individuals. The further the crisis progresses, however, the more clearly the limits of its manageability become apparent. Thus it becomes clear: the game is up – both the game of increasing money without value in the casino and the associated illusions of ‘anything goes’ as well as the ping-pong game between market and state that tries to stretch out the crisis. With labor disappearing, both – market and state – are losing their foundation. The latter is most evident in the phenomena of disintegrating states and the looting economies spreading in the voids.[17] But here, too, a ‘need for action’ arises: military intervention is needed to protect the remaining spaces of accumulation from the violence threatening the collapsing regions, as well as from the refugees. The chairman of the German Commission Justitia et Pax and Bishop of Trier, Stefan Ackermann, also does not want to refuse his blessing to such an ‘urgent need for action.’ “Strengthening European cooperation – militarily where expedient – is a prerequisite for the demanded long-term capacity to act.” Against the background of the fight against terrorism, the military participation of the Federal Republic is completely understandable, the episcopal press office of Trier let the bishop announce.[18]
The “illusionless pragmatism” that prides itself on being able to dispense with the burdensome ballast of reflection in the form of theoretical thought and at the same time denounces critical thought as superfluous and detached elitist theory that misses the point of people’s concrete problems amounts to crisis management that is enforced in an increasingly authoritarian manner as the crisis intensifies. In the horizon of easy thoughts and easy language, an easier path is obvious for many: instead of the critical examination of the conditions, which seems too theoretical, the guilty are concretized in “false immediacy” (Theodor W. Adorno) – in ‘the’ foreigners, ‘the’ refugees, ‘the’ politicians, ‘the’ bankers, etc: The unreflective rage of concerned citizens is given an object on which it can act out.
The turn to a relieving false immediacy, which manifests itself in concretisms, did not just fall from the sky with the increased ‘turn to the right,’ as was evident in the 2017 federal election. The indicators of false immediacy and concretism were already visible before the 2008 financial crisis:
In 2005, Franz Müntefering wanted to revitalize the ossified SPD with a concrete critique of capitalism. He focused attention on the “plague of locusts.” The problem is identified as ‘rapacious finance capital.’ If it were stopped, the problems would be solved. The fact that the distinction between good, creative and evil, ‘rapacious capital’ connoted with Jews serves structural or even direct anti-Semitism is not a problem for such an alleged critique of capitalism, but an advantage: it can be used to reach those who, in view of the crisis of abstract labor, have to circulate on the market as precarious wage workers between changing wage employment situations, pseudo-self-employment and state benefits – i.e., in situations in which they are not able to work. In other words, in conditions in which everyone becomes a “petty bourgeoisie of himself”[19] who, as individualized human capital, is responsive to concretizing right-wing populist slogans.
This corresponds to the individualization of the social crisis, in which everyone is supposed to become an entrepreneur of his or her human capital and is obligated to keep themselves competitive in processes of permanent self-optimization, and is supposed to present themselves in such a way that he or she stands out through eye-catching design. In the process, self-optimization and self-presentation remain empty of content. Self-optimization is about optimizing formal competencies and self-staging is about being eye-catching by doing whatever.
The individual is not only “Me, Inc.,” [Ich-AG] but is also supposed to be “Germany,” as the campaign carried out in 2005 propagated. “While the Germany Inc. is being wound up in real economic terms, in the midst of the hurricane of globalized crisis capitalism, the German people’s community is to rise as an ideological community of need and compulsion.”[20] The “state of patriotic optimism,” as Jürgen Klinsmann put it in view of the summer fairy tale of the World Cup, “in one’s own country,” with German flags everywhere, came just in time.[21]
Behind the false immediacy that is already apparent in the above-mentioned examples is the need to concretize problematic situations and to banish them in a fetishistic way. It is no coincidence that Pegida, AfD, etc. can grow and flourish in this conglomerate of crisis repression, which marginalizes content and reflective thought. They articulate society’s need to concretize guilty parties for complex problems in a false immediacy. They are offered in the form of ‘the’ foreigners, ‘the’ refugees, ‘the’ bankers, ‘the’ politicians. What shows up at the supposed margins of society is not a ‘marginal phenomenon,’ however, but an expression of processes in the ‘center’ of society, which also show up on the so-called ‘left’ : in the structural or direct anti-Semitic concretization of the crisis of capitalism to casino capitalism, in the polarization of German and foreign poor in the party ‘Die Linke.’ Such immediate concretizations open up possibilities for immediate action. When culprits and responsible parties are identified, complex problems seem manageable. They can seemingly be “sorted out by immediate action. Instead of the realization that there can be no solutions in the value-dissociation form, there is an attempt to banish the resulting powerlessness in an action-fetishistic way.”[22]
In the processes that aggressively deny and repress the crisis, in which the false immediacy of action is combined with the elimination of reflection on content, a narcissistic social character finds expression. It arises in the structuring social context of the crisis of capitalism, which has to be dealt with by individuals who are pressed into the subject form. With work and family, the foundations of bourgeois subjectivity collapse. The labor subject runs out of work and the family as a place of reproduction loses its foundation. Thus, the possibilities of sublimation of bourgeois subjectivity associated with work and its promise of success and prosperity break down. In the face of empty promises, drive stimulation makes as little sense as binding commitment to an object. Needs cry out for immediate satisfaction through an ever new mother’s breast, problems for an immediate solution through the concretization of guilty parties and correspondingly immediate strategies of action. The relation to the external world of objects is fundamentally disturbed. Thus the narcissistic social character is under the compulsion to assimilate objects, repel them as threatening or destroy them.[23] In this matrix, questions of content are only significant if they can be “perceived and processed in direct relation to the self”[24] or, as personal questions, trigger consternation and can be handled. Otherwise, they are denied as an offensive, excessive demand or a threat, or are aggressively warded off.
This helps to understand why people react so allergically, either ignoring or aggressively defending themselves, to strenuous, complex analyses that are perceived as disempowering and, moreover, block a way out of the false immediacy of concretism and fetishism of action. They can withstand neither reflective distance nor the lack of an immediate action strategy.
As the crisis progresses, people who become devoid of reflection seem to merge with the world as it is in an authoritarian and aggressive anti-intellectualism. Individuals who are reduced to subjects threaten to become one with their valorization or with their exclusion in the state of their devaluation.
Reflection as the ability to step beside oneself in order to look at oneself and the conditions one occupies ‘from the outside,’ as it were, seems to become more difficult. The realization that, as a supposedly self-aware subject, one is only an appendage or material of a process of valorization and its accompanying moments of dissociation is painful because it is disappointing and disillusioning. Moreover, no alternative that could be immediately realized offers itself up. Theoretical reflection, which remains within the immanence of capitalist socialization, reaches a limit, because it can no longer hope for a new stage within a process of development. It gained its dynamism in the critique of an achieved state as a stage of passage to a better future, a next step on the ladder of development within the framework of a perpetual movement of progress. Such progress, however, was bound to the metaphysics of money, which multiplies endlessly in a supposedly infinite process of the self-valorization of capital.
It seems increasingly difficult to think beyond the immediacy of individual phenomena or experiences. In the face of growing burdens, on an individual level – not least due to the irreducible constraints of self-optimization and the omnipresent danger of failure despite all efforts – immediate, i.e., without any thought, relief is sought and offered. This implies the activation of racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and anti-gypsy attitudes at any time in service of a crisis administration that is under pressure to act but remains bound up in the social form. The crisis administration is also becoming more and more incapable of action – and nothing at all can be done when it comes to the claim of coping with the problems in an emancipatory way. Thus, the inability of crisis administrations to act, which is advancing with the crisis, threatens to turn into authoritarian tendencies and, where the military and police security apparatuses are also deprived of their economic foundations, into the savagery of a struggle for existence, which is fought out in a ‘war of all against all.’
The options for action of social movements, which are linked to capitalist immanence, are also blocked. Instead of critically reflecting on their own powerlessness in the formal social context of capitalist immanence and advancing to a radical critique of capitalism, i.e. one that reaches to the roots, their highest goal seems to be to participate in crisis management or to want to create alternatives without having gone through the purgatory of a radical critique of capitalist society.[25] Thus, individual facets are broken out of the whole of the conditions in the illusion of being able to create an alternative through a niche. Thus it remains with Regiogeld, with exchange rings and free stores, with basic income on the level of misery, with solidarity and common good economy, which do not touch the form of capitalist socialization. In the ecclesiastical field, Caritas and pastoral work take refuge in ‘lifeworld’ orientations, which find their expression in the concept of a so-called ‘socio-spatial approach.’ At least in the ‘small details’ of the immediate life worlds, successes are sought in a praxis that unspokenly admits that it can no longer reach the level of social macrostructures. Praxis becomes the shaping of small life worlds in the immediacy of one’s own social space and is reduced to the framework that the crisis conditions still allow. Playgrounds can then be designed, dilapidated facilities repaired, green spaces tended, and so on. The activated people are given the impression of having influence and of being practically effective. The possibilities of being able to do ‘something’ remain limited to the local area and the framework that the crisis situation allows. Ultimately, behind the often euphorically proclaimed socio-spatial approach is the admission that pastoral praxis and Caritas cannot shape more than the small world of local areas. Thus, it is an expression of adaptation to conditions that are immunized from any critical reflection. Such reflection could, after all, recoil against one’s own praxis and make it recognizable for what it is: as a flight into ‘pseudo-activism’ or into the concretism of false immediacy and as an evasion of the challenge of critical reflection and the necessary overcoming of destructive conditions. The insistence on praxis becomes here – far from being a “forum for appeals against self-satisfied speculation” – a “pretext used by executive authorities to choke, as vain, whatever critical thoughts the practical change would require.”[26] At the same time, the humanitarian significance of solidarity-based crisis management should by no means be underestimated, nor should the improvement of the quality of immediate living conditions against barbarizing savagery in the struggle of all against all. However, without reflection on the structuring context of the social whole, no overall social alternatives to the barbarization inherent in capitalist socialization can emerge from these movements.
4. Religion in a Unreflective Society
Analogous to an unreflective society, an unreflective religion is also developing. As early as the 1990s, Johann Baptist Metz summed up a newly awakened religious enthusiasm with the formula “Religion, yes – God, no.”[27] With this, he described a trend in which religion is very much in demand as a spiritual exaltation and relief from the stress of everyday life, but talk of God is falling into crisis or evaporating. Today René Buchholz speaks of a “false return of religion.”[28] What is false about it is the fundamentalism that is attached to this new interest in religion.
In original religious texts such as the Bible or the Koran, certainties are sought that cannot be shaken by critical reflection on the historical social contexts of the texts. The sacred original texts are just as withdrawn from historical-critical reflection as they are from the question of whether and how their statements can be substantiated. They are valid without time and without justification – then as now.
While religious movements after the 1960s had understood themselves in the horizon of socially critical ‘political theology’ or the ‘liberation theology’ that emerged in Latin America, “today a worldwide religious regression has become the driving force of barbarization. This applies to all religions without exception, from the Catholic fundamentalism of ‘Opus Dei’ to the Protestant sects, Islamism, the messianic-theocratic Jewish ultras, the ultra-right Hindu movement and the racist Buddhists in Sri Lanka, etc.”[29]In the transfiguring retrospection of an ideal situation of origin, they gain their aura and “appear as a way out of the precarious situation and at the same time as a threatened part of one’s own identity, which is regarded as unchangeable.”[30]
In addition, a softer but no less fundamentalist variant of religion is emerging. It is offered as spirituality on esoteric markets, but also by churches that want to remain competitive as entrepreneurial churches in the face of dwindling demand for God. The programs seek success by directly addressing the sensitivities of individuals: the search for an expansion of happiness through intensive and spiritual experiences, for relief for the stressed through wellness, for meaning and closeness for those who have failed in competition or are plagued by fear of social decline. In the immediacy with which individual needs are addressed, the structuring social context is not abolished, but made invisible. The impositions that people have to put up with, as well as the nonsense of a society that has subjected itself to the irrational compulsion of the multiplication of money, is omnipresent, but it should not and will not be grasped.
If spiritual offerings are to be successful on the market, this structuring social context and with it reality must be faded out. They must be experience-intensive and at the same time content-empty and reflection-free. Their fundamentalism lies in the fact that the world as it is, and the merging of individuals with it, is always already presupposed to be without justification, authoritarian, and hostile to reflection. They reflect what Theodor W. Adorno described in his studies on the authoritarian personality as follows: “The superiority of the existing … over the individual and his intentions” is to be “acknowledged” as realism and implies “classifying oneself as an appendage of the social machinery.”[31] With the authoritarian presupposition of the world as it is, any idea that the world could be otherwise remains excluded. It is confined in a closed immanence that is exalted by a contentless spirituality that renounces any thinking that could transcend its object to a level that supersedes it.
5. What To Do?
If the processes of crisis are not to drive further into barbarization, it cannot be a matter of anything less than “abolishing the present condition.” The ‘power to act’ cannot be gained without recognizing and negating what constitutes this condition as a structuring social context of form, namely value and dissociation and the levels of ideology production that are mediated by them, but also connected with a momentum of their own, as well as the cultural-symbolic and the socio-psychological level. In view of this social context, the proclamation of a primacy of praxis is also misleading, since praxis, like the subject as its bearer, always presupposes the ‘condition to be abolished.’
In view of the constraints of immediacy, a reflection is necessary that can gain distance from the condition of a society closed in the form of capitalist socialization. This presupposes an epistemological break with the form and its characteristic thinking in the polarities of capital and labor, market and state, as well as those of subject and object, and theory and praxis. Instead of instrumentalizing theoretical knowledge one-dimensionally from and to praxis, it would be important to understand theoretical reflection as an independent moment of social emancipation. As a mere instrument of praxis, it must remain within the limits set by the form of capitalist relations. In this prison it becomes – just as in the Middle Ages philosophy was once understood as ancilla theologiae (handmaiden of theology) – “the Cinderella of unscientific and pre-scientific premises and forms of life, to which it has to serve as a handmaiden of legitimation.”[32]
“The recovery of theory’s independence lies in the interest of praxis itself,” Adorno says in his “Negative Dialectics.”[33] The background of this statement is the insight that in the demanded unity of theory and praxis, theory succumbed and became “a piece of the politics it was supposed to lead out of; it became the prey of power.”[34]A different praxis is only possible if theoretical reflection can step out of its functional subjection to a praxis already determined by the circumstances and gain its own weight. But then, against the attempts to reconcile the tension between theory and praxis by including critical reflection as ‘theoretical praxis’ under the concept of praxis, the tension between theory and praxis must be endured. It is necessary “to refuse any ‘fusion’ of critical reflection with the given ‘counter-praxis’ of immanent contradiction processing or even an everyday metaphysics.” “In order to be able to shatter this fetishist constitution, both ‘theoretical praxis’ as well as immanent ‘counterpraxis’ must undergo, each in its own respective domain, a process of transformation, until both go beyond themselves and can only merge in the result. Thus, the celebrated ‘unity between theory and praxis’ can no longer be a presupposition, but only an immanent telos of categorical critique; it coincides with real transcendence, or else it will not exist.”[35] Such transcendence is in the interest of social emancipation. It opens up possibilities for recognizing and negating the limits imposed on praxis by capitalist socialization. Without such recognition, “there would be no changing the praxis that constantly calls for change.”[36]
Nor can a royal road to overcoming capitalism be derived from a theory as an independent element of emancipatory praxis and implemented as a model. Theory cannot replace emancipatory praxis. Only in a social movement that negatively reaches beyond the limits set by the capitalist form do paths to overcoming capitalism seem possible. In this sense, it would be important to insist on and fight for demands that cannot be met under capitalism. This includes the struggle for the satisfaction of basic needs as well as the struggle against low wages and precarious working conditions and for ‘public services,’ in short for everything that is possible in view of material wealth and the state of the productive forces, but fails because of the constraint that material wealth in capitalism can only be represented and have meaning as abstract wealth. In this sense a ‘different world would be possible,’ but only in the break with the capitalist form of abstract wealth. This would be the precondition for an orientation towards the life needs of people and the production of the goods that are necessary for this. Corresponding demands would therefore have to know and make clear that they are by no means raised from a situation beyond the form of value and dissociation, but that they lay claim to its overcoming. However, this claim would already be denied if, in the interest of mediation and mobilization, the limits of the capitalist form of society that are to be overcome were no longer allowed to be thematized: For “no theory may play dumb for the sake of agitational simplicity against the objectively achieved state of knowledge. It must reflect it and push it further. The unity of theory and praxis was not meant as a concession to the weakness of thought, which is the spawn of repressive society.”[37]
[1] Cf. Thomas Seibert, Stiftungssymposium: Vom Kampf um eine Einwanderungs- und Postwachstumsgesellschaft, in: meidico international, rundschreiben 2/16, 41-43.
[12] Robert Kurz, Marxsche Theorie, Krise und Überwindung des Kapitalismus. Fragen und Antworten zur historischen Situation radikaler Gesellschaftskritik, in: ders., Der Tod des Kapitalismus. Marxsche Theorie, Krise und Überwindung des Kapitalismus, 19-34, 26.
[13] Robert Kurz, Die antideutsche Ideologie. Vom Antifaschismus zum Krisenimperialismus: Kritik des neuesten linksdeutschen Sektenwesens in seinen theoretischen Propheten, Münster 2003, 233.
[15] Robert Kurz, Geld ohne Wert. Grundrisse zu einer Transformation der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Berlin 2012, 231.
[16] Robert Kurz, Das Ende der Theorie. Auf dem Weg zur reflexionslosen Gesellschaft, in: ders., Weltkrise und Ignoranz, a.a.O., 60-67. 66.
[17] See, among others, the text by Tomasz Konicz in this publication, see: https://www.oekumenisches-netz.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Festschrift-Die-Frage-nach-dem-Ganzen-25-Jahre-Netz-Webversion-full.pdf.
[18] Diocese of Trier – Press Service Koblenz from 11.12.2015.
[19] Cf. Robert Kurz, Die Heuschreckenplage, in: Neues Deutschland, 20.5.2005.
[20] Robert Kurz, Du bist billig, Deutschland, in: Neues Deutschland, 30.9. 2005.
[21] Cf. Robert Kurz, Wirtschafts- und Fussballpatriotismus, in: Neues Deutschland, June 30, 2006.
Originally published in: Ökumenisches Netz Rhein-Mosel-Saar (ed.): Die Frage nach dem Ganzen – Zum gesellschaftskritischen Weg des Ökumenischen Netzes anlässlich seines 25 jährigen Bestehens, Koblenz 2018, 357-380. Slightly shortened and with minor changes for the Exit homepage.
The rise of right-wing populism in recent years demands an explanation. It has been pointed out in various places that the right-wing movements of recent years did not simply fall from the sky, but should rather be seen in the context of neoliberalism and the social distortions it has caused in recent decades. According to Wilhelm Heitmeyer (cf. Heitmeyer 2018), authoritarianism, as expressed and demanded by right-wing populists or right-wing radicals, is already contained in neoliberalism, which is always presented as having no alternative. The erosion of democratic processes, the dismantling of the social safety net, the expansion of the police state, the fundamental social insecurity and the immediate surrender of the individual to the valorization imperatives of capital make the authoritarianism of the neoliberal regime clear (see also Wacquant 2013). Last but not least, the proportion of the population with a racist or otherwise discriminatory worldview has been consistently high over the years. Thus, there has always been a high potential of ‘group-based misanthropy’ and is therefore by no means a novelty of recent years (Heitmeyer 2018).
The strategies of the right aim at ‘pushing the boundaries of what can be said.’ The ‘raw bourgeoisie’ (Heitmeyer) undoubtedly contributed to this, as was evident, for example, in the works of Sloterdijk (cf. Kurz 2005, 387ff., 458ff., as well as Winkel 2010) and Sarrazin (cf. Lux 2012 as well as Konicz 2015a). It is, as Heitmeyer writes, “a fact that hidden beneath a thin layer of civilized, genteel (‘bourgeois’) manners are authoritarian attitudes that are becoming increasingly visible, mostly in the form of rhetoric that is becoming more thuggish” (Heitmeyer 2018, 310). This hiddenness has been broken open continuously in recent years. One occasion (not cause!) was provided by the “foreclosure crisis” (David Goeßmann) in the fall of 2015. The ‘raw bourgeoisie’ thus became apparent in the debate about refugees, in which even so-called opponents of the AfD incorporated right-wing arguments or ‘narratives’ that differed only slightly or not at all from those of the AfD (cf. Goeßmann 2019).[1] Finally, ‘arguments’ of racist agitation were taken up by the mainstream: It is the fine bourgeois center itself that is on the right; it gives birth to the “extremism of the center” (Konicz 2016, 158ff.). As Heitmeyer points out, normality itself is the problem: “It stands to reason that the extreme, with its openly brutal forms of communication and action, is inseparable from the normality of social and political social life, and merely emerges from it. […] the normal [is thus] not to be understood as a guarantee of security, but as potentially dangerous. […] Therefore, the question of how the destructive develops within normality (and not only against it) must be raised” (Heitmeyer 2018, 279, emphasis in original).
Thus, with Heitmeyer, one can speak of the fact that it is bourgeois normality that contains the authoritarian within itself and constantly updates authoritarian attitudes anew. In this context, critical theory and its study of the authoritarian personality gain renewed interest (Ziege 2019, 135ff.). Moreover, in light of the ongoing electoral successes of right-wing populist parties and the strengthening of radical right-wing movements, a publicly delivered lecture by Adorno from 1967 on right-wing radicalism was published in print for the first time. In this lecture, Adorno listed what constitutes modern right-wing radicals and what drives fascist agitation and makes it successful. This little book, “Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism,” made quite a splash: It was discussed in bourgeois feuilletons and on state radio. It was pointed out that Adorno’s remarks were very relevant and sounded as if Adorno was talking about the AfD. The background to the lecture was the electoral successes of the NPD at the time.[2] In the lecture text, Adorno emphasized, among other things, that fascism owed its success primarily to the fact that its causes were still present. Adorno saw a central cause of fascist agitation above all in the concentration of capital and the accompanying or threatening declassification of the petty bourgeoisie and others. A threatening crash of the middle class was also ‘processed’ by calls for national sovereignty. This national sovereignty was demanded all the more because its objective conditions no longer existed. Adorno arrived at this assessment against the background of the bloc confrontation and the EEC (European Economic Community) (cf. Adorno 2020, 9-13). The similarities to the present are obvious: today’s right-wing radicals and right-wing populists also strive to regain national sovereignty,[3] especially in their criticism of the European Union. However, the objective conditions for ‘national sovereignty’ are even less present today than in the 1960s, due to the transnationalization of capital, so these demands are, therefore, completely illusory (cf. Kurz 2005).
Although Adorno’s lecture is praised for its analytical soundness, it is also noted that the differences between now and the 1960s should be acknowledged. Volker Weiß, who wrote an epilogue, remarks: “What value do these analyses have for the present? First, it is important to note the differences. Adorno’s warning against simply linking right-wing radicalism to the cyclical movements of the economy must be taken seriously. The effects of the recession of 1966/67, as the immediate background of the developments described, cannot be compared with the consequences of the world economic crisis of 1929, nor with those of current financial and currency crises. […] Nor are the political front lines readily comparable. Unlike anti-Semitism, the confrontation with global jihadism, a key agitational element of right-wing populism, is not purely a matter of pathic projection. Political Islam is a real actor and must itself be seen as the product of a collective narcissistic injury” (cf. Adorno 2020, 65f.).[4]
Indeed, a theory or a critique must always be examined for its ‘time core,’ which Adorno also emphasized. But what this core should consist of remains quite unclear in the current ‘Adorno debate.’ Thus, the current crisis is perceived only superficially. There is no mention of accumulation or crisis theory in liberal publicists like Volker Weiß. Therefore, the differences between the crises of the 1960s and those of 1929 and 2008 have to be guessed at with Weiß more than they are explicity laid out.
Adorno points out the objective anachronism of nationalism already at that time, but Adorno alone would not make clear why nation-state sovereignty as such is eroding today, why the political regulatory capacity of transnationalized capital is reaching its limits, why democracy is continuously de-democratizing itself (police states, free trade agreements), why state apparatuses are going wild (cf. Kurz 1993 as well as Scholz 2019 and Konicz 2018), or why more and more states are disintegrating (cf. Kurz 2003, Bedszent 2014 and Konicz 2016). In this respect, the celebrated topicality of the lecture is exaggerated, not least because the commentators, like Weiß, are far from being able to formulate a critique on the cutting edge.
Weiß also makes it clear that he criticizes the new right primarily because of its anti-liberalism. Now, this criticism is justified, but right-wing anti-liberalism also feeds on a certain ‘discomfort in modernity.’ Instead of making the discomfort in modernity (the impositions of modernization, bourgeois freedom, and equality) an issue, Weiß commits the mistake of “thinking that the world of the global market would be fine if only the brown-fascist (or currently: green-Islamist) ‘barbarians’ did not exist” (Hanloser 2018, 167). Not only would a right-wing ‘anti-modernism’ (which is itself very modern) thus have to be rejected, but also a bourgeois apologetics of ‘freedom and equality,’ not least against the background of police states and states of emergency, which the bourgeois democracies push on their own initiative (one only has to think of the new laws regarding policing). Adorno’s warning that the continuation of fascism in democracy rather than against it is therefore more dangerous has to be considered further.[5] I.e.: Today’s right-wing extremism would have to be seen as an ideology of crisis, as a continuation of democratic crisis management by other and/or the same means.[6]
Ignorance of the crisis is matched by the unconditional claiming of democracy. This can be linked to a problematic and anachronistic side of Adorno’s lecture. This is how Adorno presents the idea that aims at a genuine democracy yet to be realized: “One very often hears, especially when it comes to such categories as the ‘eternally incorrigible’ and similar consolatory phrases, the claim that there is a residue of incorrigibles or fools, a so-called lunatic fringe, as they term it in America, in every democracy. And then there is a certain quietist bourgeois comfort in reciting that to oneself. I think the only response to this is that, yes, something like this can be observed to a varying degree in every so-called democracy in the world, but only as an expression that, in terms of its content, its socio-economic content, democracy has not yet become truly and fully concrete anywhere but is still formal. In that sense, one might refer to the fascist movements as the wounds, the scars of a democracy that, to this day, has not yet lived up to its own concept.” (Adorno 2020, 14f.).
Today, however, it is quite wrong to claim bourgeois ideals against bourgeois reality, especially if one takes a closer look at what these bourgeois ideals consist of and what is the presupposed framework in which they (should) be realized, even more under conditions of crisis. The danger of being blinded by bourgeois ideals has already been described by Marx.[7] Thus it says in the Grundrisse: “What this reveals, on the other side, is the foolishness of those socialists (namely the French, who want to depict socialism as the realization of the ideals of bourgeois society articulated by the French revolution) who demonstrate that exchange and exchange value etc. are originally (in time) or essentially (in their adequate form) a system of universal freedom and equality, but that they have been perverted by money, capital, etc. […] Exchange value is a system of freedom and equality for all. […] The exchange value or, more precisely, the money system is in fact the system of equality and freedom, and that the disturbances which they encounter in the further development of the system are disturbances inherent in it, are merely the realization of equality and freedom, which prove to be inequality and unfreedom. […] What distinguishes these socialists from the bourgeois apologists is, on the one hand, the feeling of the contradictions of the system, and, on the other hand, the utopianism of not grasping the necessary difference between the real and the ideal form of bourgeois society, and therefore of taking on the superfluous business of wanting to realize again for themselves the ideal expression, the transfigured luminous image reflected from reality itself as such” (Marx 1993, 248f).
If, looking back on earlier times, we may perceive even more democratic conditions in contrast to today, this can be explained by the fact that the political ‘ability to shape’ was still present in earlier times, during the Fordist boom, when reforms indeed still opened up the possibility of social advancement and the scope for political action was still much greater. However, if these shrink, not least against the backdrop of a crisis of public finances, then democracy also loses its ‘ability to shape’ (cf. on this Konicz 2016, 180ff.). Thus, when valorization encounters its limits, democracy also erodes. Despite this, more than a few people today are calling for a ‘real democracy,’[8] without really seeing through democracy’s logic of domination: “The dominant consciousness […] is of course least insightful with regard to the totalitarian character of the sanctified democracy itself” (Kurz 1999, 574). For even the earlier ‘formative capacity’ of democracy was always subject to narrow limits: The subordination of subjects to the valorization imperatives of capital are presupposed in democratic discourse and as such are non-negotiable. All democratic action has to move within this framework. The “democratic thinking of any hue never comes up with the idea of wanting to mobilize and organize resources and social wealth in any other way than in the commodity or money form; and that thus its supposed freedom and humanity always unconsciously sets the systematic laws of the modern commodity form itself as a hard limit” (Kurz 1993, 18). Furthermore, “the abstract freedom of abstract, monadized individuals, who must constantly ‘self-valorize,’ implies the merciless competition of all against all” And: “the real capacity for action as freemen and equals is limited to the ability to pay” (ibid., emphasis in original).
Even when this is only rudimentarily and selectively questioned in practice, the bloodhounds line up and democracy reveals its repressive core. This is the realized democracy and it is therefore not only a formal or formally limited one that has merely not yet realized itself. Its realization consists precisely in formally granting rights, but also in suspending or limiting them again when they prove dysfunctional for crisis management and capital valorization (or devaluation). Therefore, police state terror is not a contradiction to democracy. Since one can realize oneself as a free and equal only when one has proven oneself as a capital-productive subject, realized democracy is also compatible with enormous social inequalities. The opposite of freedom and its contradictions thus belong to this freedom itself, as Marx already pointed out. Surprisingly, this is not denied at all. Friedrich August von Hayek, for example, formulated that freedom includes the freedom “to starve,” and even that “voluntary conformity is a condition for the beneficent effects of freedom.” Consequently, according to Hayek, a “democracy […] can exercise totalitarian violence, and it is conceivable that an authoritarian government will act according to liberal principles” (Hayek 1960, 25, 82, 132). Liberal homages to Pinochet!
When there is a crisis, social protests and any dissent at all can prove to be ‘disruptive.’ It is no coincidence that during the Greek crisis there was talk that Germany’s austerity dictate should not be negotiated democratically (Konicz 2015b). Not coincidentally, Merkel said that democracy must be ‘market-compliant.’ If the ‘market’ no longer allows immanent decision-making possibilities, then all decisions boil down to ‘save and die,’ and democratic freedom then consists of nothing more than helping to shape one’s own execution by decree and parliament.
In a democracy, legal capacity is tied to the ability to valorize. If labor contracts can no longer be entered into, the right itself erodes (cf. Kurz 2003, 324ff.). People who lose the ability to valorize by devaluing their labor power or the like become de facto citizens of lesser rights, as the Hartz IV regime proves (cf. Rentschler 2004). People whose devaluation is more advanced, such as refugees, end up being denied the mere right to live, or having their deaths accepted. This is shown not only by the foreclosure policy of the ‘free and democratic West’ and the ongoing death in the Mediterranean, but also by the more or less ‘final storage’ of people in concentration camp-like facilities, in so-called ‘reception camps.’ The roughest pig work is gladly left to others.[9]
Since democracy as a state form is bound to the form of value and dissociation and thus erodes in the crisis of valorization, it neither makes sense to lament the loss of democracy nor to sue for the realization of an ‘actual’ democracy. In no way, therefore, would it suffice to denounce democracy as merely formal in order to demand that it finally be realized: perhaps through more ‘direct democracy,’ as right-wing populists also demand. It is therefore not enough to criticize insufficient participation or representation or unequally distributed wealth. Rather, the object of critique would have to be the bourgeois subject’s form of interest and will, and thus the capitalist form of wealth and (re)production itself. It would have to be made clear that democracy is not a free discourse, not an “association of free men” (Marx), in which all are required to come to an agreement about the meaningful use of resources. On the contrary: this is just as little a subject of democratic discourse as it is of an authoritarian command economy or of a folkish ethno-regime. The submission to the fetish constitution of the value-dissociation society, to the commodity form and the valorization movement of capital is precisely the basis of every democracy. This repeatedly occurring false juxtaposition of liberal democrats and authoritarian, crude or even fascist bourgeoisie must therefore be rejected.[10] If, as Marx said, the truth of bourgeois society is to be seen in its colonies,[11] the truth of real democracy is to be seen in the crisis and in the state of emergency. A critical theory at the height of the times must take note of this, or it is none.
References
Adorno, Theodor W.: Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism, 1st ed. Wiley 2020
Adorno, Theodor W.: Bemerkungen zu ‘The Authoritarian Personality,’ Berlin 2019.
Bedszent, Gerd: Zusammenbruch der Peripherie – Gescheiterte Staaten als Tummelplatz von Drogenbaronen, Warlords und Weltordnungskriegen, Berlin 2014.
Davis, Mike: Die Geburt der Dritten Welt – Hungerkatastrophen und Massenvernichtung im imperialistischen Zeitalter, Berlin/Hamburg/Göttingen 2011, 3rd ed. first London/New York 2001.
Feit, Margret: Die Neue Rechte in der Bundesrepublik – Organisation, Ideologie, Strategie, Frankfurt/New York 1987.
Goeßmann, David: Die Erfindung der bedrohten Republik – Wie Flüchtlinge und Demokratie entsorgen werden, Berlin 2019.
Hanloser, Gerhard: Die libertäre und die liberale Linke und die Neue Rechte – Bemerkungen zu einer drängenden Frage, in: Ne znam: Zeitschrift für Anarchismusforschung, No.7, Lich 2018, 157-168.
Hayek, Friedrich A. von: Die Verfassung der Freiheit (Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 3), Tübingen 2005.
Heitmeyer, Wilhelm: Autoritäre Versuchungen – Signaturen der Bedrohung I, 3rd edition, Berlin 2018.
Jäger, Margarete; Wamper, Regina (eds.): Von der Willkommenskultur zur Notstandsstimmung – Der Fluchtdiskurs in deutschen Medien 2015 und 2016, Duisburg 2017, online: http://www.diss-duisburg.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/DISS-2017-Von-der-Willkommenskultur-zur-Notstandsstimmung.pdf.
Konicz, Tomasz: Failed State BRD, 2018, online: https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Failed-State-BRD-4232674.html.
Konicz, Tomasz: Generation Sarrazin – Eine kurze Skizze der Genese der neuen deutschen Rechten, 2015a, online: https://www.streifzuege.org/2015/generation-sarrazin/.
Konicz, Tomasz: Kapitalkollaps – Die finale Krise der Weltwirtschaft, Hamburg 2016.
Konicz, Tomasz: Welcome to Postdemocracy, 2015b, online: https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Willkommen-in-der-Postdemokratie-3374458.html.
Kurz, Robert: Das Weltkapital – Globalisierung und innere Schranken des modernen warenproduzierenden Systems, Berlin 2005.
Kurz, Robert: Die Demokratie frisst ihre Kinder – Bemerkungen zum neuen Rechtsradikalismus, in: Rosemaries Babies – Die Demokratie und ihre Rechtsradikalen, Unkel/Bad Honnef 1993, 11-87.
Kurz, Robert: Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus – Ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft, Frankfurt 1999.
Kurz, Robert: Weltordnungskrieg – Das Ende der Souveränität und die Wandlungen des Imperialismus im Zeitalter der Globalisierung, Bad Honnef 2003.
Lenin, V.I.: The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, in: Selected Works Volume III, Berlin 1970, 69-163.
Lux, Vanessa: Verschiebungen in der biologistischen Diskussion: das Beispiel Sarrazin, in: Schulze, Annett; Schäfer, Thorsten: Zur Re-Biologisierung der Gesellschaft – Menschenfeindlichen Konstruktion im Ökologischen und im Sozialen, Aschaffenburg 2012, 129-152.
Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich: MEW Vol. 9, Berlin 1960.
Marx, Karl: Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Penguin 1993.
Rentschler, Frank: Der Zwang zur Selbstunterwerfung – Fordern und Fördern im aktivierenden Staat, in: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, No.1, Bad Honnef 2004, 201-229.
Scholz, Roswitha: ‘Democracy still eats its children’ – today even more so, in: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, No. 16, Springe 2019, 30-60.
Trenkle, Norbert: Der Demokratische Mauerbau – Elendsmigration und westlicher Abgrenzungswahn, in: Rosemaries Babies – Die Demokratie und ihre Rechtsradikalen, Unkel/Bad Honnef 1993, 227-262.
Wacquant, Loic: Bestrafen der Armen – Zur neoliberalen Regierung der sozialen Unsicherheit, Berlin/Toronto 2013, first Paris 2004.
Weiß, Volker: Die autoritäre Revolte – Die Neue Rechte und der Untergang des Abendlandes, Stuttgart 2018.
Winkel, Udo: Der Geist geistloser Zustände – Sloterdijk u. Co.: Zum intellektuellen Abstieg der postkritischen deutschen Elitedenker, in: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, No.7, Bad Honnef 2010, 251-259.
Ziege, Eva-Maria: Nachwort der Herausgeberin, in: Adorno, Theodor W.: Bemerkungen zu ‘The Authoritarian Personality,’ Berlin 2019b, 133-160.
[1] This is shown, for example, by shifts in discourse in the wake of the end of the ‘welcome culture,’ cf. Jäger; Wamper 2017.
[2] The NPD then narrowly missed entering the Bundestag in 1969. The consequence was a ‘change of strategy’ by parts of the right, which ‘modernized’ the right, cf. Weiß 2018, 27ff, and in more detail Feit 1987, 23ff.
[3] It is no coincidence that Jürgen Elsässer’s radical right-wing magazine has the subtitle “Magazine for Sovereignty.”
[4] Volker Weiß emphasizes the similarities between right-wing radicalism and Islamism. For example, the relationship between the two is clear in their hatred of women and their masculinity mania. The neo-fascist masculinity mania is exemplified in the book “Der Weg der Männer” (The Way of Men) by Jack Donovan, published by the radical right-wing Antaios-Verlag, cf. Weiß 2018, 227ff. Jack Donovan could in principle also join the IS, as Weiß noted in an interview: “Tacheles: Volker Weiß über Akteure, Ideologie und Entwicklung der Neuen Rechten”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xtMdgVayOw, 7:50 min.
[5] In Adorno’s lecture from 1959: What does Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit mean, from about 3 min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioj9UPuP374.
[6] The continuity of both becomes particularly clear in racist exclusionary imperialism and democratic wall-building, cf. Kurz 2003 esp. 190ff. and Trenkle 1993.
[7] It is worth mentioning in this context that Lenin, in his polemic against Karl Kautsky, referred to the mendacity of the bourgeois democracies and addressed what today would be called the ‘state of emergency.’ Thus it says: “Take the fundamental laws of modern states, take the methods by which they are governed, take the freedom of assembly or of the press, the ‘equality of citizens before the law’ – and you will see at every turn the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy, well known to every honest and class-conscious worker. There is not a single state, even the most democratic, where there are not in the constitution back-doors or clauses which secure for the bourgeoisie the possibility ‘in case of violations of peace and order’ – in reality, however, when the exploited class ‘violates’ its being a slave and tries to stop behaving like a slave – to use military force against the workers, to impose a state of siege, and so on. Kautsky shamelessly glosses over bourgeois democracy by concealing how, for example, the most democratic and republican bourgeois in America or Switzerland act against striking labor” (Lenin 1970, 87).
[8] Due to the obvious discrepancy between the ‘claim and reality of democracy,’ naturally, fewer and fewer people believe in the Western democratic propaganda. Thus, in various places, there is talk of ‘post-democracy,’ ‘façade democracy,’ ‘(financial) oligarchy,’ etc.; terms which, according to the claim, are supposed to capture democratic reality. These critiques, however, remain phenomenological, do not go beyond a ‘critique of neoliberalism,’ criticize the lack of ‘representation,’ insufficient ‘direct democracy,’ the ‘deep state’ and call for nonsense like a ‘democratic financial system’ and the like.
[10] So as not to be misunderstood: Of course, democracy and fascism are not simply the same thing, and it is by no means irrelevant whether a corrupt social democrat is at the levers of power or a fascist like Bolsonaro. It would therefore be reactionary indeed to accept, for example, a synchronization or dismantling of bourgeois justice with a shrug of the shoulders or to declare it irrelevant.
[11]Thus, Marx’s article The Future Results of British Rule in India, 8/8/1853, states, “The profound hypocrisy of bourgeois civilization and the barbarism inseparable from it lie unveiled before our eyes as soon as we turn our gaze from their homeland, where they appear under respectable forms, to the colonies, where they show themselves in all their nakedness” in: Marx; Engels 1960, 225. How blatant this barbarism was is shown, for example, by Mike Davis (Davis 2011).
Originally published on Exit! homepage on 03/25/2020
The following text is a written elaboration and extension of a lecture given at the conference “General Mathematics: Mathematics and Society. Philosophical, Historical and Didactical Perspectives” in Schloss Rauischholzhausen from June 18 to 20, 2015. The invitation to the lecture was based on older epistemological texts, which therefore reappear – partly in spirit, partly verbatim – as set pieces in the present text.
If I look at the world through rose-colored glasses, it appears to me as rose-colored. And accordingly, who looks at the world through mathematical glasses, sees mathematical structures everywhere.[1] Now obviously the color pink is not a property of the world, but one of the glasses. One could add that the world must have pink components so that one can see anything at all through the pink glasses. But nobody would claim that the world consists only of these components, just because all others are blanked out by the glasses. In contrast, Enlightenment reason has managed to confuse reality with the glasses through which it views it, that is, to declare the approach to the world specific to modern science to be a property of reality itself, and thus to declare it to be essentially mathematical.
As a typical and prominent representative of this view, Max Tegmark, physicist at MIT, was quoted in a Spiegel interview on the occasion of the translation of his book “Our Mathematical Universe” (Tegmark 2015) into German:
Spiegel: Professor, if a fairy godmother promised to answer any question about the nature of our world, what would you ask?
Tegmark: Let me think. Hmm, I would probably ask them: What set of formulas provides an accurate description of our world?
Spiegel: And you are convinced that such world formulas exist?
Tegmark: I suspect so. But if the fairy were to shake her head and say, “Sorry, there are no such formulas,” that would also be very exciting to know.
Spiegel, 4.4.2015, 113
In this essay, to stay in the picture, I would like to take the position of the bad fairy and justify why Tegmark’s question is nonsensical, not to say crazy. In his book, Tegmark argues that the “essence of reality” is mathematical and that the universe is pure mathematics, a mathematical structure in which we humans live but whose physical reality is completely independent of us (cf. Tegmark 2015, 370). At least he can be credited for admitting the possibility that the question of the world formula cannot be answered. There are even tougher dogmatists, people who consider themselves particularly enlightened, dismiss religious ideas as “God delusion” (Dawkins 2007), and for their part adhere to the belief that reality follows mathematical laws. But if one knows that the religious forms have sprung from the human head – I am also of this opinion – it should make one think that this is just as valid for mathematics. To locate it so easily in the world, as a property that is independent of us, could therefore be analogously described as “math delusion.”
Unlike mathematics, mathematical – and thus “exact” – natural science and the access to the world associated with it is an invention of modern times. When thinking about the causes and consequences of the mathematization of modern society, for which there was nothing comparable in pre-modern times, one should therefore pay attention to this hinge between mathematics and society. Beyond its original subject area, the mathematical-scientific method has now gained a foothold as a method of “mathematical modeling” in almost all other branches of science and in many non-scientific disciplines. Apparently, the success of this method in physics, chemistry, and recently biology, as well as in the technical subjects related to these natural sciences, leads to its unreflective adaptation, even in those areas where the use of mathematical methods should at least be met with doubts, because they do not fulfill certain prerequisites of the “exact” sciences.
For example, the preface to a standard textbook of economics states:
Economics combines the strengths of political science and natural science. […] By applying scientific methods to political issues, economics seeks to make progress on the fundamental challenges facing all societies.
Mankiw and Taylor (2012, VIII)
Here it is implicitly assumed that scientific methods can be applied to political questions, even if it cannot be claimed that such attempts are crowned with success (cf. Ortlieb 2004), in which they differ from their “exact” models. But even where the idea of making the use of mathematical methods a badge of “scientificity” is not particularly successful, it does help to increase the importance of mathematics for modern society even further, to a certain extent beyond what is necessary.
The thesis put forward here is therefore that mathematics owes its importance in our society on the one hand to the undeniable success of the mathematical natural sciences, but on the other hand also to a false understanding of this success, as expressed for example in the question of the world formula, the belief that reality follows mathematical laws. I would first like to make clear why this belief is unfounded, then venture to explain where it comes from, and finally suggest what harmful consequences it has.
Mathematics as Positivist Magic
The blindness of mathematical-scientific thinking for its own form jumps almost regularly into the eye whenever scientists start to think publicly about the relation of their own science and its mathematical instruments to the real world:
Real science, on the other hand, remains real magic. It is fascinating to see how many physical phenomena adhere to theories and formulas with uncanny accuracy, which has nothing to do with our desires or creative impulses, but with pure reality. It makes one completely speechless when it turns out that phenomena, which were initially only theoretically justified and calculated with formulas, subsequently turn out to be reality. Why should the reality be like this? It is pure magic!
Dewdney (1998, 30)
Why does mathematics, which comes from our own heads, fit so well to nature, which actually has nothing to do with it? Among those who are practically active in positive science, this question, as here with the mathematician Dewdney[2], regularly triggers reverential astonishment, depending upon location either over mathematics, which can accomplish such great things, or over nature, which is so rationally arranged. The only way out of this aporia seems to be to resort to magical notions. However, if even professional science theorists do not get beyond this level, they rightly attract ridicule:
Carnap, one of the most radical positivists, once called it a stroke of luck that the laws of logic and pure mathematics apply to reality. A thinking which has all its pathos in its enlightenment quotes in a central place an irrational – mythical – concept like that of the stroke of luck, only to avoid the insight, which admittedly shakes the positivist position, that the supposed circumstance of luck is none, but product of the nature-dominating … ideal of objectivity. The rationality of reality, registered by Carnap with a sigh of relief, is nothing but the reflection of subjective reason.
Adorno (1969, 30)
Adorno’s criticism covers all the ideas belonging to positivism, that mathematical regularity is a property of external reality, and that science simply consists in grasping the facts and this regularity of things themselves, according to the positivist program of Comte 1844/1994, 17.
In contrast, Adorno insists on the statement – which I will follow here and elaborate on – that mathematics and its laws are not a property of external nature, but part of our instruments of cognition.
An example: Galileo’s laws of falling bodies
The laws of the free fall of heavy bodies are at the beginning of modern physics. They state:
G1 All bodies fall at the same rate.
G2 In a fall from rest, the distances traveled behave like the squares of the times.
With these laws Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) came into contradiction with the Aristotelian science prevailing in his time, whose doctrine said:
Ar Every body has the aspiration to take its rightful place. Light bodies move up, heavy ones fall down. The heavier the body, the faster it falls.
In fact, this is one of the rare cases in which modern physics can be directly confronted with medieval ideas, because it usually deals with questions that people in other or earlier societies did not even ask themselves. It is all the more interesting to see how Galileo’s laws of falling bodies prevailed.
An integral part of the image that modernity in general, and Western science in particular, have of themselves is the idea that they are oriented towards facts, while past cultures followed their myths and other fantasies and have therefore logically and quite rightly passed away. Galileo’s argument with the authority of Aristotelian science and the Catholic Church still serves as a paradigm for this, although mechanics, which goes back to Galileo and Newton, has long since had to give up its claim to general validity. Bertolt Brecht’s play “Life of Galileo,” written around 1945, thrives on the enlightenment pathos of this struggle of the “cold eye of science,” revealing the facts against the “thousand-year-old mother-of-pearl haze of superstition and old words,” through which the reign of “selfish rulers” could continue to be maintained. Brecht’s criticism, which is unavoidable against the background of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, is then also presented exclusively on the moral level, namely that Galileo had allowed himself to be intimidated and had handed over his knowledge to those in power, “to use it, not to use it, to misuse it, just as it served their purposes.” Every well-behaved natural scientist can rightly counter that Galileo’s teachings, despite his retraction, have finally become common knowledge, that truth cannot be stopped, even if this seems to have been of little use to mankind.
Mechanics, associated with the names of Galileo and Newton and today called “classical,” played the role of a leading science from the beginning of modern times until the 19th century. In a certain respect it still is today, even if its results had lost their universal claim by the “modern” physics of the 20th century. For the mathematical-scientific method developed in it and applied with resounding success has gained further importance in the last century and has taken on a model function for Western science of all faculties, at least of their respective mainstreams, so that even the critics of its transfer to the social sciences, for example, still have to deal with it. As correct as their argument is that a method must adapt to its object and that “society” is not the same as “nature,” such discussions often suffer from the fact that positivist empiricism, i.e. the “fact faction,” has won the hegemony of interpretation as to what this method actually does and what kind of results it can achieve. The assertion that these are objective facts, verifiable by everyone, is no longer even questioned.
The Myth of Pisa
An example of this phenomenon is the following story, which the historiography of science had to offer as assured knowledge for almost three centuries. It concerns the free fall of heavy bodies, the first part of the Galilean law of fall, and figured as the “blow from which Aristotelian science never recovered”:
At this point we must refer to the famous experiments on the fall of bodies, which are closely connected with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, one of the most curious architectural monuments in Italy. Almost two thousand years earlier, Aristotle had claimed that in the case of two different weights of the same material falling from the same height, the heavier one would reach the ground before the lighter one, according to the ratio of their respective weights. The experiment is certainly not difficult; nevertheless, no one had thought of carrying out such a proof, which is why this assertion was included among the axioms of the science of motion by virtue of Aristotle’s word of power. Galileo, invoking sense perception, now challenged Aristotle’s authority and claimed that the balls fell in the same time, except for an insignificant difference based on the difference in air resistance. The Aristotelians scoffed at this idea and refused to listen to it. Galileo, however, was not intimidated and decided to force his opponents to face the fact like him. Therefore, one morning, in front of the assembled university – professors and students – he climbed the leaning tower, carrying two balls, one ten-pounder and one one-pounder. He placed them on the edge of the tower and dropped them at the same time. And they fell together and hit the ground together.
J.J. Fahie. Galilei, His Life and Work, London 1903, 24 f., quoted after Koyré (1998, 124).
Almost 300 years after Galileo’s death, Alexandre Koyré[3] has finally put an end to the story of his free fall experiments at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, so that no historian of science who wants to be taken seriously can still tell it today. The only truth in the story is that Galileo held a poorly paid, three-year position as professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa around 1590. The legend first appeared 60 years after the incident described and has been embellished by later historians of science. What strikes one without further historical knowledge is its inconsistency: what could possibly have caused the Aristotelian professors, here reproached for their dogmatism, to run together when one of their most insignificant colleagues staged an insane experiment? The story contradicts all customs at universities of that time and probably still of today’s universities. It was never mentioned by Galileo himself, [4]and finally: the experiments would have gone wrong, respectively they were made (1640, 1645, 1650), with big and small iron balls, with clay balls of the same size, one solid, the other hollow, with balls made of different materials, and they all went wrong (in the sense of the legend).[5]
What is really exciting about this modern fairy tale is that for 300 years it belonged to the general educational heritage, to a certain extent to the secured stock of our scientific knowledge. Like all fairy tales, this one also conveys a message, namely that of modern rationality, which lets the facts speak without bias, while the dark Middle Ages only referred to authorities and passed on textbook knowledge. The late proof that this is a myth, the myth of empiricism, does not change its effectiveness. More than 350 years after Galileo, this worldview has become so self-evident that it no longer needs justification. And as a glance at a standard textbook of experimental physics shows, even the fairy tale associated with it is too good to be omitted simply because it is a fairy tale:
First, let us investigate whether the falling motion depends on the type of falling body, e.g. on its size or weight. We make the following experiments: Two balls of the same size, made of aluminum and lead, which therefore have very different weights, are let fall to the ground simultaneously from the same height. We find that they hit the ground at the same time, as Galileo (1590) already found out by drop experiments at the leaning tower of Pisa. If we take three identical spheres made of the same material, they will naturally arrive at the ground at the same time. If we now connect two of these spheres firmly with each other (for example by a passing pin), and if we let this double sphere fall with the third single sphere at the same time, then also these bodies of different size and different weight hit the ground at the same time. However, the following experiment seems to contradict the conclusion that all bodies, independent of shape, type and weight, fall at the same rate: If we let a coin and a piece of paper of the same size fall, we observe that the coin arrives at the bottom much earlier than the piece of paper falling at the same time from the same height; the latter flutters to the ground in irregular motion and needs a longer time to fall through. The contrast, however, is only apparent. In this last experiment, the resistance of the air becomes disturbingly noticeable. The air flowing past the body during the fall inhibits the falling movement, and more strongly the larger the surface of attack of the air on the body in question. If we clench the piece of paper into a small ball, it falls just as quickly as the coin. The disturbing influence of the air resistance on the free fall can be shown by an experiment given by Newton. A glass tube about 2 m long and several centimeters wide, fused at both ends, contains a lead ball, a piece of cork and a down feather. If the three bodies are at the bottom of the tube and the tube is turned rapidly through 180°, the lead ball, then the piece of cork and finally the downy feather are observed to arrive at the bottom. But if we pump the air out of the tube and repeat the experiment, we see that the three bodies hit the bottom of the tube at the same moment. We may therefore state the law of experience: In a vacuum, all bodies fall at the same rate.
Bergmann-Schaefer (1974, 40)
Why only in a vacuum? After all, it worked in Pisa, too. The conclusion remains as opaque as the reasoning. The reason lies in the fact that statements with completely different methodological status are wildly mixed up here:
The text contains wrong and right assertions about everyday observations, whereby the right ones are just those which contradict the Galilean law of falling. They are simply interpreted away with reference to the “disturbing” air resistance.
A thought experiment is carried out (sphere and double sphere), from which the law of falling is logically compelling, but without recourse to any observational results.
Finally, an experiment is described which requires a high technical effort (pumping the tube empty). Only in the artificial situation thus produced can the claimed law also be observed.
To then call the whole thing an “empirical law” is already strong and indeed presupposes the confusion that first had to be created. Empiricism lives from this confusion.
The text is an example of how little most natural scientists know about the history and method of the science they themselves practice. This was by no means always so, but what can be stated here, rather, has the character of a decay. Galileo himself, at any rate, was quite aware of his approach, unlike most of his epigones – not all of them. It is therefore worth going back to the sources.
What brought the Galilean law of falling into the world, if it could not be the experience, neither the direct observation, because this teaches something else, nor an experiment in the vacuum, which Galilei could not carry out already because he lacked the technical means for it? The simple answer is this: The law of falling bodies results from a logical argument, a mathematical proof or, as one would say today, a thought experiment. The argument had already been published in 1585 by the mathematician Benedetti in Venice and is also contained in the text from the physics textbook quoted above, although there it is completely deprived of its methodical significance.
Proof of the First Law of the Case
Benedetti argued: Two identical bodies fall at the same speed, at least that seems to be undisputed. If they are now connected by a light (ideally massless) rod, their velocity does not change, but it is the same for a body of double mass (cf. Fig. 1). The same can be argued with three, seven or even a hundred thousand bodies, in any case the same velocity results for bodies of arbitrarily different mass.
Fig.1: Benedetti’s argument
Galileo (1638/1995, 57/58) used this as a proof of contradiction: If Aristotle’s law of falling bodies Ar were correct, a heavier body would have to move ahead of a lighter one. If both are now connected with a string, the heavier body would have to pull the lighter one behind it, but the lighter one would have to slow down the heavier one (cf. Fig. 2). The result would be a smaller speed than that of the original heavier body, but for an altogether heavier body, a contradiction.
Fig. 2: Galileo’s argument
Both proofs of the First Law of Fall G1 abstract from the shape of the bodies, and thus refer only to their mass.[6] So it was shown: If the falling speed does not depend on the shape of the bodies, their mass distribution, then all bodies must fall equally fast. This result, however, is in obvious contradiction to empiricism, because the bodies do not fall at the same speed. If now logic and empiricism would be considered equally, then the conclusion would be to be drawn from it that from the shape of the bodies just may not be abstracted. But Galileo does not draw this conclusion, and exactly here lies the revolutionary novelty of his view of nature: He decides in favor of logic and mathematics and against direct empiricism and thus for a view of nature which antiquity or the Middle Ages could only have regarded as crazy.
The Mathematical-Scientific Method
The connection of the natural laws thus obtained to empiricism lies in the experiment, the second great innovation of modern natural science, whose difference from simple observation cannot be emphasized enough. An experiment is the production of a situation in which the condition of the derived law is fulfilled, in this case: one can abstract from the shape of the bodies, e.g. by vacuum, which Galilei was not yet able to do.
In this respect it can be said that mathematical laws of nature are not based on observation, but are produced. To be more precise: They are instructions for the production of situations (in experiments) in which they are valid.[7] Here lies the reference to the nature-controlling technology of modern times.
The mathematical-scientific method constituted in this way is based on the basic assumption that there are universally valid laws of nature, independent of place and time, which can be described mathematically (the concept of measurement would otherwise be meaningless). For this, a linear flowing, continuous time and a homogeneous space, i.e. not subdivided into different spheres, is presupposed.
The objection that the universal form of laws of nature has long been proven by modern natural science misses the point: The lack of form of laws in any area would never be blamed on nature, but would be justified by the fact that science is not yet ready to recognize them.
The procedure then consists first of all in the formulation of ideal conditions, from which conclusions are drawn in the thought experiment in an ultimately mathematical way. The subsequent experiment then consists in the production of these ideal conditions and the verification of the conclusions by measurements. Care must be taken that the measurement procedure, i.e. the physical effort of the experimenter, does not disturb the ideal process. Experiments must be repeatable, and in this respect they also differ from mere observations.[8]
Thus, there can be no question of modern science, in contrast to the Middle Ages, being oriented to “the facts”; rather, the opposite is true. Koyré makes this very clear with the example of the principle of inertia, which as a (mathematical) principle has no direct correspondence in empiricism and nevertheless founded modern physics:
This principle seems to us completely clear, plausible, yes, it is obvious. It seems obvious to us that a body at rest will also remain in it… And once it gets in motion, then it will continue to move in its original direction. And always with the same speed. We don’t really see a reason or cause for why it should happen differently. This appears to us not only as plausible, but also completely natural. Yet it is nothing less than that. The natural, tangible evidence, which these views enjoy, is comparatively recent. We owe it to Galileo and Descartes. In the Greek antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages the same views would have been classified as ‘obviously’ wrong, even absurd.
Koyré (1998, 72)
The question remains to be answered why this misjudgment of the actual mathematical-scientific procedure is so widespread. Koyré explains this by habituation:
We know the basic notions and principles too well, or more correctly, we are too accustomed to them to be able to correctly assess the hurdles that had to be overcome to formulate them. Galileo’s concept of motion (and that of space) seems so ‘natural’ to us that we believe to have derived it ourselves from experience and observation. Although probably none of us has ever encountered a uniformly persisting or moving body – and this simply because such a thing is quite impossible. Equally familiar to us is the application of mathematics to the study of nature, so that we hardly grasp the audacity of the one who claims: ‘The book of nature is written in geometrical symbols.’ We miss Galileo’s audacity in deciding to treat mechanics as a branch of mathematics, that is, to replace the real world of daily experience with a merely imagined reality of geometry and to explain the real from the impossible.
Koyré (1998, 73)
The explanation remains unsatisfactory: The fact that we consider a “manifestly absurd” procedure to be completely “natural” does jump to the eye. Why we do it, however, remains ultimately unexplained here.
Revolution of the Way of Thinking
Immanuel Kant, himself active in the natural sciences for ten years, summarizes the mathematical-scientific method in the preface to the 2nd edition of his Critique of Pure Reason in 1787 in the language peculiar for him:
When Galileo rolled balls of a weight chosen by himself down an inclined plane, or when Torricelli made the air bear a weight which he had previously thought to be equal to that of a known column of water, or when in a later time Stahl changed metals into calx and then changed the latter back into metal by first removing something and then putting it back again, a light then dawned on all natural scientists. They understood that reason has insight only into that which it itself produces according to its design; that it must take the lead with principles for its judgments according to constant laws and compel nature to answer its questions, rather than letting nature guide its movements by keeping reason, as it were, in leading-strings; for otherwise accidental observations, made according to no previously designed plan, can never connect up into a necessary law, which is yet what reason seeks and requires. Reason, in order to be taught by nature, must approach nature with its principles in one hand, according to which alone the agreement among appearances can count as laws, and, in the other hand, the experiments thought out in accordance with these principles – yet in order to be instructed by nature not like a pupil, who has recited to him whatever the teacher wants to say, but like an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them. Thus even physics owes the advantageous revolution in its way of thinking to the inspiration that what reason would not be able to know of itself and has to learn from nature, it has to seek in the latter (though not really ascribe to it) in accordance with what reason itself puts into nature. This is how natural science was first brought into the secure course of a science after groping about for so many centuries.
Kant (1787/1990, B XIII)
On the one hand, it becomes clear here what an important role Kant ascribes to the “principles of reason,” which cannot be derived from empiricism (the Kantian a priori). He thus solves the problem that still troubles modern positivism, namely how objective knowledge is possible.
On the other hand, a typical contradiction of Enlightenment thinking comes through in Kant, which considers “reason” to be a general human quality or ability, but nevertheless claims it exclusively for itself and denies it to other or earlier societies. If this prejudice is brushed aside, it can be said that the mathematical and scientific method did indeed first have to prevail against medieval thinking, and talk of the “revolution of the way of thinking” thus hits the point that this revolution helped a reason to break through which is specific to the bourgeois epoch, against the reason of the Middle Ages, which was completely different, but not therefore unreasonable as such.
The concept of “objective knowledge” thus receives a different meaning than the one that is usual in our linguistic usage, an ahistorical one, independent of the form of society and equally valid for all people, which is why Greiff 1976 also speaks of the “objective form of knowledge.” A representative of another or earlier culture, who does not recognize the basic assumptions of the mathematical-scientific method, the principles of bourgeois reason, would also not be able to be convinced of the truth of scientific knowledge. The only component of natural science which one could demonstrate to him credibly is the experiment: If I carry out this action A, determined to the smallest detail (which probably seems ritualistic or bizarre to the other person), then the effect B regularly occurs. But nothing else follows from this as long as my counterpart does not share my basic assumption of the universal laws of nature that are supposed to be expressed in the experiment.[9]
Fetishism and Gender Dissociation
A fetish is a thing onto which supersensible qualities are projected and which is thus able to exert power over those who fall prey to it. The Enlightenment knows itself to be above such fetishism, as it was attached to West African religions at the beginning of colonialism. Marx, as is well known, saw it differently:
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor… There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
Marx (1867/1984, 86/87)
The analogy to the positivistic idea of mathematical-scientific knowledge jumps to the eye. It is the attempt to apply products of the human head, specifically numbers and other mathematical forms, to reality, and to form it according to their image, or at least perceive it through them. The end of this story consists in the belief that reality or “nature” itself is law-like, and that the success of natural science is definitive proof of this.
But it is not a mere analogy, and not the coincidental parallelism of two independent fetishisms. Since the late publication of Sohn-Rethel’s approach in 1970, there have been repeated attempts to address the question that was blanked out by the Enlightenment and finally tabooed by positivism, i.e. to illuminate the connection between “commodity form and thought form,” “social form and cognitive form,” “money and mind,” for instance by Greiff 1976, Müller 1977, Bolay/Trieb 1988, Ortlieb 1998. The matter is complex and cannot be clarified in a few pages. The most direct way is taken by Bockelmann 2004, which I briefly sketch here. One of the difficulties on which Sohn-Rethel’s first attempt ultimately failed is to clearly distinguish the modern form of knowledge, as well as that of commodity society, in its specificity from its precursors in antiquity. It is not the mere existence of money or the exchange of the surplus products that set the modern form of thought on its way, rather it was necessary for money to become the determining generality and the actual purpose of production,
when, for the first time historically, it can be said that “all things came to be valued with money, and money the value of all things.” Then money begins – in this sense that is concise for us – to be money, in that it still functions as money alone. The fixed existence, which it had until then only in the material thought to be valuable, then passes over into the fixed generality of the reference of all things to the value of money – and thus into its fixed existence taken for itself. When the acts of buying and selling for provision acquire determining generality, there arises the general necessity to continue the market that must have arisen for it, as the web of these buying acts, simply so that the provision that depends on it does not break off in turn. The necessity to dispose generally of money thus translates into the generality with which the money function continues to be necessary; and thus translates into the solidity of this function as an entity existing for itself.
Bockelmann (2004, 225)
The historically new situation consists of a real abstraction. It demands from the market participants a performance of abstraction which they must carry out without doing so as a conscious mental effort; in Marx’s formulation:
Hence, when we bring the products of our labor into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labor. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labor, the different kinds of labor expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.
Marx (1867/1984, 88)
It should be pointed out that Bockelmann does not refer to Marx at any point; the concept of (abstract) labor does not appear anywhere in his work. Regarding the question of what commodity production, i.e. production for the sole purpose of acquiring other commodities, mediated by money, brings about in the people subjected to it, however, both explanations are compatible. The subjects of commodities must develop a reflex for the sake of their survivability, which henceforth, as a compulsion of which they are not aware, determines not only their monetary actions, but their access to the world in general:
This is the form in which no one had to think and therefore no one had been able to think, the synthetic performance conditioned by modern times, which people must perform within it: two units related to contents, but themselves not-content-related, in the pure relation of determined against not-determined. This synthesis, thus conditioned, becomes a necessity and a compulsion for thinking… This synthesis has its genuine area in dealing with money, and it is there that people must apply it to everything, regardless of contents, they have to relate the pure unit ‘value’ to any content… The new, functional performance of determining value using non-content-related units lies above the older and likewise synthetic performance of a material way of thinking, which involved thinking value into things and relating them to each other according to this inherently thought value.
Bockelmann (2004, 229/230)
It is not difficult to see how closely the approach to the world, abstractly described here and enforced by the commodity form, corresponds to that of mathematical natural science, and is still found in the details of its method:
The experiment is the medium for the transformation of nature into function. The modernly changed view on the empirically given is no longer one of observation, but penetrates to find in it what it must presuppose, the lawful behavior.
Bockelmann (2004, 354)
Furthermore, positivistic science’s missing or fetishistic awareness of its method and its object can be easily explained in this way:
World and nature are thought of in a functional way: that is – as long as the genesis of the functional form of thought remains unrecognized – they are thought of as if the functionally conceived form was its real form. After that, the laws of nature must really exist as we think and presuppose them, really in this form of functional non-content.
Bockelmann (2004, 358)
The fact that knowledge of the genesis of its form is necessary for overcoming this consciousness does not mean – and is not claimed by Bockelmann – that it alone will suffice, if it is not accompanied at the same time by the overcoming of the commodity fetish that underlies it.
It should have become clear that any explanation of the connection between the form of society and the form of knowledge must take into account the subject of knowledge, which is always at the same time a citizen of the state and a monad of money, shaped by the society in which knowledge takes place. Even if the aim is only to better understand the phenomenon characterized here as math delusion, independent studies on the constitution of the subject form can certainly be helpful, cf. for example Ulrich 2002, Kurz 2004. One fundamental moment that has not been touched upon so far should be highlighted here, namely the split nature of the modern subject and the (related) gendered connotation of value-shaped socialization, as well as that of the mathematical-scientific form of knowledge.
Objective knowledge, as it takes place for example in the physical experiment, can be described as a process of dissociation, namely the dissociation of those aspects of reality which would disturb the law-like process. One of the “disturbing factors” to be eliminated is the experimenter himself. His physicality and his sensations could disturb the “ideal” course of events and are therefore to be eliminated as far as possible without endangering his observer status, which Greiff (1976) elaborates on the basis of the common, imperatively formulated regulations in textbooks of experimental physics on the execution of experiments. The active intervention in nature carried out in the experiment is thus first and foremost an action of the experimenter on himself, namely his splitting into a mind and a body being. This form of knowledge presupposes a subject that can be split in this way.
Such subjects are by no means to be found in all forms of society, but are rather a specific feature of only one, namely bourgeois society, in which the division into feeling and mind, body and spirit, private and public, together with the corresponding gender connotations, is constitutive. In the public sphere, which is oriented towards abstract calculations, only the “male” parts are in demand, while the “female” parts are to be dissociated. The latter, since they are nevertheless necessary for individual survival and for social reproduction, have not disappeared, but have been delegated to women (“value dissociation,” cf. Scholz 2000, 13 ff. and 107 ff.). Where else, one could object, but these parts become “female” – and the others “male” – only through the corresponding attribution, they are not so by nature. It should also be noted that we are dealing here with a schema that is often broken in individuals; after all, we are not talking about biological determinants, but about social conditions. Thus, not every man is equally “male,” not every woman equally “female,” but the compulsion is great to conform to the gender attributes codified by commodity society, so that still, statistically speaking, the positive correlation between social and biological gender is high.
In this sense, the experimenter, the subject and the bearer of objective knowledge aiming at mathematical laws of nature is “male,” not only structurally but also empirically, and the higher his rank in the scientific hierarchy, the more pronounced this is. It is therefore no coincidence that criticism of the seemingly unassailable mathematical sciences has come almost exclusively from the feminist side in recent decades. Representative of many such critiques are Scheich 1993 and Keller 1995, cf. and also Bareuther 2014. The profound dimension of the problem can, of course, hardly be reached without reference to value dissociation as an equally comprehensive as “in itself broken formal principle of social totality” (Scholz 2004, 19). Those who only consider the institutionalized acquisition of knowledge and its mechanisms for themselves can at best scratch its surface.
Models
If the fetishistic way of thinking about mathematical regularity as a property of things were not so deeply anchored in the social unconscious of modernity, it should have become obsolete at the latest with the emergence of the concept of a model at the end of the 19th century (cf. Ortlieb 2008). Because this term contains – in contrast to Galileo’s idea of the book of nature written in geometric symbols – an ambiguity: Mathematical models do not emerge clearly from the matter, but their development is always subject to arbitrary aspects of expediency (cf.Hertz 1894/1996). The same object of investigation allows different mathematical models that can exist side by side, even if they contradict each other because they cover different aspects. This forbids combining model and reality into one.
That “certain correspondences (must) exist between nature and our mind,” what Hertz (1894/1996, 67) also speaks of, is guaranteed in physics by the fact that nature is adapted to our mind, i.e. to the mathematical ideal conditions, in the experiment and the said correspondence is produced with it first. If, on the other hand, the ideal conditions assumed in the model cannot be produced or can be produced only insufficiently, the laws of nature to be observed remain mathematical fictions in the end, as everybody who has “fitted” models and data at least once knows well. The regularity is only in the mathematical function of the model, while the deviations of the observed data from it are explained by “external disturbances,” which escape the modeling. Fig. 3 gives an arbitrary example for this.
Fig. 3: Observational data and “regularity,” here using the example of the mean annual variation of a phytoplankton density, Helgoland Reede data 1976-1991.
Under the assumption that reality follows mathematical laws, we try to find out the mathematical structure and regularity which best fits the controlled observations. Obviously, this works in many areas, but this is not due to the correctness of the underlying assumption. Conversely, it becomes conclusive that:
By choosing a certain set of instruments – that of the exact sciences – we focus and limit ourselves to the knowledge of those aspects of reality that can be grasped with this set of instruments. And there is nothing to suggest that this is or could become our reality.
This does not define the limits of mathematical knowledge of nature, but at least names them. The unity of nature and mathematics, as Newton and Galileo postulated it, is finally gone, and not least because of the historical development of mathematics and the natural sciences themselves.
As an ideological self-image, however, it is still stuck in many people’s heads. There is no other way to understand why terms such as “artificial intelligence” or “world formula” are used not only for self-promotion and the acquisition of research funds, but also in an emphatic sense, as if they were to be understood literally, as if mathematical machines could really be intelligent and thus possess consciousness, or as if we could have the world “under control” if only we had a formula for it.[10] The mathematical-scientific method is thought to be boundless: there is no question which we would not eventually be able to answer with it, no problem which would be inaccessible to it.
Not being able to see the limits of one’s own instruments – in this case those of the exact sciences, of mathematical modeling – is a sure sign of the unconsciousness with which they are used. In view of the obvious impossibility of being able to solve the great problems of mankind with scientific means alone, a certain modesty would be quite appropriate, as it can only arise – in the sense of the Socratic phrase, “that what I do not know, I do not think I know” (Plato 1994, 18) – from a self-reflective awareness of one’s own thinking and doing.
References
Adorno, Theodor W.: Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie. Introduction, Neuwied 1969
Bareuther, Johannes: Zum Androzentrismus der naturbeherrschenden Vernunft, in: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, No. 12, Berlin 2014, 18-52.
Bergmann-Schaefer: Lehrbuch der Experimentalphysik, Band I, Mechanik, Akustik, Wärme, 9th improved edition, Berlin 1974.
Bockelmann, Eske: Im Takte des Geldes. Zur Genese des modernen Denkens, Springe 2004.
Comte, Auguste: Rede über den Geist des Positivismus, 1844, new edition of the German language edition, Hamburg 1994.
Dawkins, Richard: Der Gotteswahn, 9th edition, Berlin 2007.
Dewdney, Alexander K.: Alles fauler Zauber? Basel 1998.
Fölsing, A.: Galileo Galilei. Process without End. Eine Biographie, Reinbek 1996.
Galilei, Galileo: Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche, intorno a due nove scienze, 1638, Übersetzung von A. v. Oettingen 1890, Nachdruck, Frankfurt/Main 1995.
Greiff, Bodo von: Gesellschaftsform und Erkenntnisform. Zum Zusammenhang von wissenschaftlicher Erfahrung und gesellschaftlicher Entwicklung, Frankfurt/Main 1976.
Hertz, Heinrich: Die Prinzipien der Mechanik in neuem Zusammenhange dargestellt. Introduction, Leipzig 1894, reprint, Frankfurt/Main 1996.
Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, 2nd edition 1787, reprint, Hamburg 1990.
Keller, Evelyn Fox: Geschlecht und Wissenschaft: Eine Standortbestimmung, in: Orland, Barbara / Scheich, Elvira (eds.): Das Geschlecht der Natur, Frankfurt/Main 1995, 64-91.
Koyré, Alexandre: Leonardo, Galilei, Pascal. Die Anfänge der neuzeitlichen Naturwissenschaft, Frankfurt/Main 1998.
Kurz, Robert: Bloody Reason. Essays on the Emancipatory Critique of Capitalist Modernity and its Western Values, Bad Honnef 2004.
Mankiw, N. Gregory / Taylor, Mark P.: Grundzüge der Volkswirtschaftslehre, 5th ed.
Marx, Karl: Das Kapital. Erster Band, 1867, MEW 23, Berlin 1984.
Mehrtens, Herbert: Moderne – Sprache – Mathematik, Frankfurt/Main 1995.
Müller, Rudolf-Wolfgang: Geld und Geist. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte von Identitätsbewußtsein und Rationalität seit der Antike, Frankfurt/Main 1977.
Ortlieb, Claus Peter: Methodische Probleme und methodische Fehler der mathematischen Modellierung in der Volkswirtschaftslehre, in: Mitteilungen der Mathematischen Gesellschaft in Hamburg 23, 2004, 1-24.
Ortlieb, Claus Peter: Die Zahlen als Medium und Fetisch, in: J. Schröter / G. Schwering / U. Stäheli (eds.): media marx. Ein Handbuch, Bielefeld 2006, 151-165.
Ortlieb, Claus Peter: Heinrich Hertz und das Konzept des Mathematischen Modells, in: G. Wolfschmidt (ed.): Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894) and the Development of Communication, Norderstedt bei Hamburg 2008, 53-71.
Ortlieb, Claus Peter / Ulrich, Jörg: Die metaphysischen Abgründe der modernen Naturwissenschaft. Ein Dialog, in: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft No. 4, Bad Honnef 2007, 145-176.
Plato: Sämtliche Werke, Übersetzt von Friedrich Schleiermacher, Vol. 1, Hamburg 1994.
Scheich, Elvira: Naturbeherrschung und Weiblichkeit, Pfaffenweiler 1993.
Scholz, Roswitha: The Gender of Capitalism. Feminist Theories and the Postmodern Metamorphosis of Patriarchy, Bad Honnef 2000.
Scholz, Roswitha: Neue Gesellschaftskritik und das Dilemma der Differenzen, in: exit – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, Nr. 1, Bad Honnef 2004, 15-43.
Sohn-Rethel, Alfred : Geistige und körperliche Arbeit. Zur Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Synthesis, Frankfurt/Main 1970.
Tegmark, Max: Unser mathematisches Universum – Auf der Suche nach dem Wesen der Wirklichkeit, Berlin 2015.
Ulrich, Jörg: Individuality as Political Religion. Theologische Mucken und metaphysische Abgründe (post-)moderner Individualität, Albeck bei Ulm 2002.
[1] For example, David Hilbert, inventor of the “axiomatic method,” in a lecture of 1918 (quoted after Mehrtens 1990, 133): “Indeed, whatever occurrences or phenomena we encounter in nature or in practical life, everywhere the mathematically minded and attuned person will find a mathematical kernel.”
[2] Alexander K. Dewdney is a Canadian mathematician and was responsible for the “Mathematical Recreations” column in Scientific American from 1984 to 1991.
[3] Galileo and the experience of Pisa: About a legend, Annals of the University of Paris 1937, Koyré (1998, 123-134.
[4] In a tract of Galileo from the same year 1590 there is even the opposite hint: If balls of wood and lead are dropped from a high tower, the lead moves far ahead, cf. Fölsing (1996, 85).
[6] Another implicit assumption is that the massless connection of the respective two bodies does not change the velocities.
[7] This is not to say that an experiment can not also show completely unexpected results, namely if the mathematical derivation is based on wrong presuppositions. In the case of Galileo’s law of falling bodies, this would have been the case if the inertial mass was not equal to the heavy mass, i.e. if the doubling of the one would not lead to the doubling of the other. In this respect, an experiment tests whether the assumptions underlying the mathematical considerations are correct.
[8] The law of falling bodies G2, which is not presented here in more detail, is also introduced in the Discorsi according to this scheme: It is proved as a mathematical theorem (Galilei 1638/1995,159), which states that a uniformly accelerated body satisfies the law G2. Galilei comes to the uniform acceleration because of its simplicity, there is no other argument. Only then the experiments follow (Galilei 1638/1995,162). Whether Galileo actually carried them out or only described them is disputed (cf. Koyré 1998,129).
[9] Intentionally manipulated and therefore technically usable effects already existed in antiquity. In contrast, the idea of universal – always and everywhere valid – mathematical laws of nature is modern.
[10] This criticism is not directed against the goal of unifying scientific theories, which is sometimes also subsumed under the term “world formula.”
From the Classic Petty Bourgeoisie to Universal Human Capital
Since the mid-1980s, postmodern discourse has dominated global theoretical discussion for almost two decades, especially on the left. The critique of political economy was replaced by the critique of language, and the analysis of objective material relationships by the arbitrariness of subjective interpretation; Traditional left economism was replaced by an equally abbreviated left culturalism, and social conflict was replaced by media simulation. In the meantime, however, the situation has changed radically. The economic crisis is now also affecting large social classes in the West that had previously been spared. That is why the social question returns to the intellectual discourse.
But the interpretations remain strangely pale and seem downright anachronistic. The polarization between rich and poor, which is inexorably increasing, has not yet found a new term. If the traditional Marxist concept of “class” suddenly has a boom, it is more a sign of helplessness. In the traditional understanding, the “working class,” which produces surplus value, was exploited by the “capitalist class” through “private ownership of the means of production.” Not a single one of these terms can accurately represent today’s problems.
The new poverty does not arise through exploitation in production, but through exclusion from production. Anyone who is still employed in regular capitalist production is one of the relatively privileged. The problematic and “dangerous” mass of society is no longer defined by its “position in the production process”, but by its position in secondary, derived areas of circulation and distribution. They are permanently unemployed, recipients of welfare payments or cheap service providers in the areas of outsourcing, right up to wretched entrepreneurs, street vendors and waste collectors. These forms of reproduction are increasingly irregular, unsecured and often illegal by legal standards; employment is irregular; incomes are at the limit of the subsistence level or even fall below it.
Conversely, a “capitalist class” can no longer be defined in the old sense according to the standards of the classic “private ownership of the means of production.” In the form of the state apparatus and infrastructures as well as in the form of the large (today transnational) stock corporations, capital appears in a certain way as socialized and anonymized; it has turned out to be an abstract form of society as a whole that can no longer be personalized. “Capital” is not a group of legal owners, but the common principle by which the life and actions of all members of society are determined not only externally, but also in their own subjectivity.
In the crisis and through the crisis, a structural change in capitalist society takes place once again, which dissolves the old, apparently clear social situations. The core of the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the new productive forces of microelectronics are melting down labor and with it the substance of capital itself. With the increasing reduction of the industrial working class, less and less real surplus value is being created. Money capital is fleeing into the speculative financial markets because investments in new factories have become unprofitable. While growing sections of society outside of production become impoverished or even go into poverty, there is only a simulative accumulation of capital through financial bubbles.
Logically, this is nothing new, because this development has shaped global capitalism for two decades. What is new, however, is that the middle class in western countries is now also being hit by the wheels. The American essayist Barbara Ehrenreich had already published a book in 1989 on “The Fear of the Middle Class before the Fall”. The problem then shifted for a full decade because the speculative financial bubble boom of the 1990s, along with the upswing in information technology and the commercialization of the Internet, once again sparked new blossoming dreams. The collapse of the New Economy and the bursting of the financial bubbles in Asia and Europe, partly also in the USA, have now, since 2000, brutally started to bring about the previously feared collapse of the middle class.
But who is this middle class and what role does it play in society? In the 19th century the world of social classes was still simple and transparent. The class of the so-called petty bourgeoisie stood between the class of capitalists, that is, the private owners of the social means of production, and the class of wage workers, who have nothing but their labor power. This old middle class was characterized by having its own small means of production (workshops, shops, etc.), in which they mainly had to use their own labor and that of their families in order to sell their products on the market themselves. The expectation of the orthodox Marxists was that these “petty bourgeoisie” would gradually disappear through the competition of the big capitalist enterprises and sink into the class of industrial wage workers, until society was completely polarized into the two main classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat.
But already at the beginning of the 20th century there was the famous debate between Bernstein and Kautsky about the “new middle class” in German social democracy. This meant certain technical, economic and intellectual functions as they emerged from the process of capitalist socialization. With the increasing scientification of production and the corresponding expansion of infrastructures (administration, engineering, education and training, health care, communication and media public, institutions of research, etc.) a new social category arose, which according to the old scheme was “neither fish nor meat.” They were not capitalists because they did not represent great money capital; just as little were they classic petty bourgeoisie, because they did not have their own means of production and were largely wage-dependent or only formally independent; but they were not proletarians, because they were not employed as “direct producers,” but as functionaries of the capitalist development of the productive forces in all areas of life.
As early as the 19th century there were teachers and other state officials as well as those business functionaries whom Marx described as “officers and sergeants of capital.” But these social categories were numerically so negligible that they could not be called a “class” in their own right. Only with the new demands of capitalism in the 20th century did the corresponding functions become so massive that they constituted a new middle class. While in the Marxist debate at the beginning of this development Kautsky tried to press the new middle classes into the old scheme and somehow to classify them into the proletariat, Bernstein wanted to see in this social phenomenon a stabilization of capitalism that would make a moderate reform policy possible.
At first, Bernstein seemed to be right for a long time. The new middle class increasingly emerged as a social category distinct from the traditional working class; not only in terms of the content and location of the activity, but also in economic terms. Barbara Ehrenreich mentions as a criterion that for these people their “social status is based more on education than on ownership of capital or other assets”. The higher qualifications, the training of which takes a long time up to the age of 30 or beyond and devours large resources, increased the value of the labor far beyond the other average fluctuations.
In this context, a momentous term emerged, namely that of “human capital.” White-collar workers, engineers, marketing specialists or human resource planners, self-employed doctors, therapists or lawyers, and teachers, scientists and social workers paid by the state ‘are’ capital in two ways under certain circumstances: On the one hand, because of their own qualifications, they behave strategically, in a guiding or organizing manner in relation to the labor of other people in the sense of capital utilization; on the other hand, they partly relate (especially as self-employed or managerial employees) to their own qualifications and thus to themselves as ‘human capital,” like a capitalist, in the sense of ‘self-exploitation.’ The new middle class does not represent capital on the level of the external material means of production or money, but on the level of the organizational qualification for the process of exploitation with a high level of use of science and technology.
Numerous new functions of this type emerged in the course of the 20th century, and the new middle class continued to increase in number. Especially the development after the Second World War, together with the new forms of Fordist production and the leisure industries, brought an additional push in this direction; This can be seen from the fact that in most countries the proportion of students rose from generation to generation. The worldwide student movement of 1968 showed the growing importance of this social sector; but it was also a first signal of the crisis. If up to then the emergence of the new middle class had actually stabilized capitalism in Bernstein’s sense and was connected with advancing reforms, a process of destabilization now began.
It is true that the new structural mass unemployment in the wake of the third industrial revolution and the globalization of capital primarily affected the immediate industrial producers. But it was already becoming apparent that the new middle class would not be spared either. The rise of this class had in many respects been accompanied by the expansion of state infrastructures, education, and the bureaucracy of the welfare state. The crisis of real industrial exploitation, however, led ever deeper into the state’s financial crisis. Suddenly, many areas that had previously been considered proud achievements appeared as unnecessary luxuries and ballast.
The catchphrase of the “lean state” made the rounds; funds for education and culture, health care and numerous other public institutions have been cut; the dismantling of the welfare state began. In large companies too, entire sectors of skilled activity fell victim to rationalization. The crash of the New Economy even devalued the qualifications of many high-tech specialists. Today it can no longer be overlooked that the rise of the new middle class had no independent capitalist basis, but was dependent on the social redistribution of surplus value from the industrial sectors. To the same extent as the real social production of surplus value gets into a structural crisis as a result of the 3rd Industrial Revolution, the secondary areas of the new middle class are gradually being deprived of their breeding ground.
The result is not just growing unemployment among academics. Through privatization and outsourcing, the “human capital” of qualifications is devalued and degraded in status even within employment. Intellectual day laborers, cheap workers and wretched entrepreneurs as “freelancers” in the media, private universities, law firms or private clinics are no longer the exception, but the rule. Nevertheless, in the end, Kautsky is not right either. The new middle class is falling, but not into the classic industrial proletariat of the immediate producers, who have become a slowly disappearing minority. Paradoxically, the “proletarianization” of the qualified classes is connected with a “deproletarianization” of production.
The devaluation of qualifications goes hand in hand with an objective expansion of the concept of “human capital”. Contrary to the decline of the new middle class, a new kind of general “downsizing” of society takes place, the more the industrial and infrastructural resources appear as anonymous mega-structures. The “independent means of production” shrinks down to the skin of the individual: everyone becomes their own “human capital,” even if this is only the naked body. A direct relationship arises between the atomized people and the economy of value, which can only be reproduced in a simulative manner through deficits and financial bubbles.
The greater the income differences between rich and poor in the context of this financial bubble economy, the more the structural differences between the classes in the structure of capitalist reproduction disappear. It is therefore pointless for some ideologues of the formerly falling new middle class to want to claim for themselves the earlier “class struggle of the proletariat,” which no longer exists. Social emancipation today requires overcoming the social form common to all. Within the commodity-producing system there is only the quantitative difference of abstract wealth, which is existential up to the question of survival, but remains emancipatorily sterile. A Bill Gates is as petty-bourgeois as a wretched entrepreneur, both have the same attitude towards the world and use the same phrases. With these phrases of the universal market and of “self-realization” on their lips, they cross the gate to barbarism together.
Post Comment: This text has sparked debate among Brazilian intellectuals. Dieter Heidemann (São Paulo) writes about a letter to the editor in the Folha de São Paulo that uses the expression “Boias-frilas”: “The expression ‘Boias-frilas’ makes a joke to equate temporary sugar cane cutters and the perspectives of academics. The sugar cane migrants are called ‘boias frias.’ Boia is the ‘lunchbox’ and fria is cold. The expression refers to the cold lunch they take to the sugarcane field when they are carted to work at 4 a.m. by ‘sub-contractors’ (called ‘gatos’ = cats!). ‘Boia fria’ became a general metaphor in Brazil for the most precarious working conditions. The letter to the editor calls the jobbing academics ‘boias frilas’ = boias freelancers…”
Published in the Folha de São Paulo in September 2004
EXIT! in English 