Black-Brown Breakthrough as the Election Campaign Heats Up?

February 27, 2025February 25, 2025 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

Remarks on the development of late capitalist democracy in authoritarian Germany.

It is a primitive, obvious scam that anyone who wants to can see through immediately: Every time a person with a migration background, a refugee or a foreigner commits a crime, a new round of fascization of the Federal Republic begins – even if the mentally deranged perpetrator was driven by splinters of right-wing ideology, as in Magdeburg, for example. Even if a new record for right-wing motivated crimes was registered in 2024. The long line of victims of right-wing terror since the 1990s, the activities of the NSU, the right-wing coup preparations and mass murder plans – everything is suppressed just as much as simple historical facts and parallels to the 20th century. It doesn’t matter, if necessary, facts and connections are distorted until they fit. Almost everyone wants to believe that the crisis comes from outside, that refugees and foreigners are “our misfortune.” Otherwise we would have to radically question the crisis-ridden society, in whose middle-class center fascism is maturing.

A totalitarian moment emerges here, as already described by Hannah Arendt in her reflections on 20th century fascism: The distinction between truth and lies has lost relevance. The mercilessly distorted reality now only functions as a quarry to produce ideology and delusion. It is a veritable hysteria that is spreading among the German public as the election campaign heats up – increasingly fanned by the CDU, FDP and AfD (there is hardly any difference anymore). And this scam can theoretically be repeated until fascism is in power. The boundaries between a killing spree and an act of terrorism are becoming increasingly blurred in this manifest crisis. Of the millions of people with migration experience or backgrounds living in Germany, someone will always go berserk, lose themselves in murderous crisis ideology (whether in a nationalist or Islamist form) and break psychologically from the escalating contradictions. Just as people without a migration background do – with little public attention.

It’s so simple, everything literally flies to fascism now that right-wing hegemony has been largely established by personifying the causes of the crisis. In Germany, the victims of the global crisis of capital have been stamped as its causes for a good two decades – now that the crisis is also affecting the German center, it is rehearsed authoritarian reflexes that are being called up almost automatically. All the CDU has to do is continue to agitate and parrot the fascist filth of the AfD in order to form the next government. But that is not enough for the German Mr. Burns, the Dimitroffian real-life satire of a fascism-promoting finance capitalist. Friedrich Merz is really taking a risk as the election campaign heats up, putting a lot on one card in order to win everything. And this kind of “putting everything on the line” is characteristic of German fascism.

Instrumentalizing the knife attack in Aschaffenburg, the CDU has introduced a far-reaching “tightening of laws” as the election campaign has heated up, aimed at further sealing off borders, expanding the powers of the federal police and mass internment of refugees and “illegal” non-Germans.[1] Merz can push through this legislative package – which builds on the preliminary legislative work of the traffic light coalition – before the election, even if the SPD and Greens vote against it, as he can be sure of the votes of the FDP and AfD. And the CDU’s candidate for chancellor also made it clear that this constellation, in which the conservatives together with a largely far-right party push through further “tightening,” will not stop him from doing so.[2]

The path is the goal here, Merz does not want to wait until the CDU is in power, which is already as good as certain, because something else is important to him. What the former Blackrock man wants to achieve before his chancellorship is a joint vote by all parties for a further step towards the fascization of the FRG – together with the AfD, in order to remove before the next legislative period the crumbling taboo of cooperation with the AfD at the federal level. Everyone, not just the CDU, should vote with the AfD in favor of sealing off borders and further disenfranchising refugees, as the AfD has been demanding for years. In this way, the taboo of voting with fascists in favor of fascist policies would be democratically extended to all parties in the Bundestag. This vote at such a crucial time in the election campaign should act as a wrecking ball to tear down the wall to the far right.

Merz wants to use the double homicide committed by a mentally ill refugee in Aschaffenburg to normalize cooperation with the AfD – a largely fascist party. It is actually an unnecessary risk, as the CDU’s election victory seems certain. But Germany’s millionaire candidate for chancellor, who has excellent connections to finance capital and is happy to adopt Wagenknecht’s national socialist rhetoric about the housing and health crisis caused by migrants, wants even more: Merz wants to promote the strategic option of cooperation between the CDU and AfD, and the vote, which he wants to take place before the election, would be the first step in this direction. This approach is risky as it could also backfire, as the cornered SPD and Greens could seek refuge in a camp-style election campaign. What if the SPD and Greens do not give in to this blackmail tactic – then the CDU, FDP and AfD vote for a new “Foreigners Act.” The black-brown united front would then be a reality in the middle of the election campaign.

At the same time, Merz’s push towards fascism can build on the right-wing hegemony that has been established in recent years, particularly on the issue of migration. The public discourse has been shaped accordingly, and it was not least the Social Democratic Federal President Steinmeier who declared “illegal migration” to be the central threat to Germany on the occasion of the Islamist terrorist attack in Solingen – since then, Berlin has increasingly cooperated with Islamists in their actions against refugees. The Nazi slogan “Foreigners out,” initially restricted to refugees, has already become the German raison d’être. As a result, March’s initiative is already being dutifully normalized in public opinion, not only in right-wing newspapers such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine[3] (where AfD leader Gauland has been known to paraphrase Hitler speeches[4]), but also in liberal papers such as Die Zeit[5] (where there is a relaxed debate about letting refugees drown).[6]

When AfD leader Weidel declares the migration issue to be the fate of Germany in her jubilation over the crumbling firewall against the far right, she can build on years of ideological groundwork, especially in the center of German society.[7] There has hardly been a crisis in recent years (from the real estate bubble to Sarrazin, the euro crisis, the refugee crisis, the pandemic and the current export crisis) that has not been projected onto villains outside the German meritocracy. This is now the norm.

However, the authoritarian moment is also decisive in the fascism of the 21st century. Trump’s election, Musk’s crazy promotional tour for European right-wing populists and right-wing extremists, they are blowing all civilizational fuses in Germany. The fascist authoritarian pseudo-revolt is currently craving the favor of the powerful – when a billionaire advertises for the AfD, it has an attractive effect on the authoritarian personality, he sees himself confirmed and encouraged. Trump has an effect, Musk inspires the AfD – precisely because he is the richest man in the world. What’s more, the external pressure to keep fascism in Germany down has now largely disappeared. Why bother? In the U.S., whose search engines suddenly claim to have discovered a “Gulf of America,” migrants are already being arrested en masse.[8] The opposition of once influential capitalist factions to the AfD is consequently waning. In the meantime, it is no longer a scandal when entrepreneurs publicly – for example, in the democratic assault weapon that is the newspaper Spiegel – openly declare their support for fascism.[9]

Trump’s second election is a disaster whose fallout will be truly global. It has always been a naïve, illusory notion, nurtured particularly in the alt-left, that all you have to do to take the wind out of the sails of fascist movements is to unmask the rich and/or powerful profiteers behind them. This approach – which usually goes hand in hand with the borderline obnoxious talk of class and interests that seems ineradicable even in the manifest systemic crisis – simply ignores the fact that fascism is a genuine mass movement that makes a clear socio-political offer to the angst-ridden middle classes: get rid of foreigners, minorities and the useless leaches and we will be better off. This is especially true for Germany with its terrible authoritarian tradition. And America, in particular, is historically responsible for this: by aborting denazification due to the emergence of the Cold War, it tolerated countless Nazis in top positions in the “frontline state” of West Germany, who shaped it accordingly.

This lingering post-fascism laid the foundations for the current pre-fascism. There is no inevitability between the crisis and the drift towards far-right ideology and authoritarianism. The example of Greece, which was led to a real socio-economic collapse by former German finance minister Schäuble, shows just how weak Germany is in this area. In Greece, the fascist party “Golden Dawn” never got above 10%. There is no automatism that leads from systemic crisis to fascism. History and the course of the crisis are open. The AfD can be fought successfully – even in authoritarian Germany.

But this would require the unvarnished truth to be communicated to the people. The simple truth, which is now really out in the open and can only be covered up by means of permanent fascist agitation, is that the crisis in which late capitalist societies find themselves cannot be overcome within the capitalist economy. Closed borders will not keep out floods, storms or droughts. The heat, the fires, the rising sea levels – they will not stop at the panic-stricken borders. The next economic crisis, the next inflationary spurt, the next resource bottleneck will not be conjured away by deportations.

Instead of agitating against the victims of the crisis, we need to initiate a transformative debate to look for ways out of the permanent capitalist crisis. On a planet with finite resources, the compulsion to valorize capital is simply self-destructive. What fascism preaches is in fact the death of civilization.

However, there are no relevant social forces that – building on a radical awareness of the crisis – would lead the fight for a progressive transformation process. This is why the fascist crisis management is gaining momentum and asserting itself – almost inevitably, almost effortlessly. Transformation is inevitable, with no alternative, because capital has reached the end of its possibilities for internal and external development, and is tearing itself apart. And it is fascism that is currently leading this basically open-ended process of transformation in a barbaric direction, almost unchallenged.

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Originally published on konicz.info on 01/28/2025

[1] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/messerattacke-in-aschaffenburg-familie-von-opfer-wehrt-sich-gegen-vereinnahmung-durch-rechte-parteien-13096006.html

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/world/europe/germany-afd-merz-cdu-migration.html

[3] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/bundestagswahl/cdu-vorschlaege-zur-migration-friedrich-merz-ist-nicht-hindenburg-110256240.html

[4] https://www.konicz.info/2018/10/12/tanz-den-adolf-gauland/

[5] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2025-01/migrationspolitik-union-friedrich-merz-verschaerfung-afd

[6] https://www.konicz.info/2018/07/18/absaufen-pro-und-contra/

[7] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/die-brandmauer-ist-gefallen-afd-chefin-weidel-begruesst-merz-ankuendigungen-zur-verschaerfung-der-mi-100.html

[8] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/netzwelt/nach-trump-dekret-golf-von-amerika-kuenftig-in-google-karten,UbABQFW

[9] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/galeria-miteigner-bernd-beetz-haette-wohl-donald-trump-gewaehlt-a-583d56e4-db37-4892-8b14-7a8b5653f19c

A Country for Old Men

February 26, 2025February 25, 2025 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ 2 Comments

America’s Oligarchic Path into the Coming Era of Fascist Crisis Management

Tomasz Konicz

The catastrophe that not only America is now heading for was already looming before Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. “Nothing would fundamentally change” if he were elected, Biden assured wealthy donors at a New York campaign dinner in June 2019, when his socialist rival Bernie Sanders was still spreading fear and terror among the U.S. oligarchy during the pre-election campaign.[1] The basic features of neoliberal politics and the corresponding economic policies, as they had been dominant since the 1980s, were to remain in place. The president largely kept his word – with one major, right-wing exception: Biden adopted the protectionist economic policy of his right-wing predecessor Donald Trump[2] in order to partially halt the impoverishment of the American middle class at the expense of Atlantic competitors[3] without having to tax the increasingly expanding U.S. oligarchy.

And it is precisely this reactionary idea of wanting to hold on to the status quo, even in the face of the continually unfolding capitalist crisis, that is giving a boost to fascism. Biden, as the much-vaunted Washington “dealmaker” who knows how to negotiate compromises, was hardly able to push through any of his already inadequate reform projects, while inflation choked off large sections of the Democratic Party’s base.[4] The Green New Deal and the postulated ecological transformation of the U.S. have remained a bad joke in view of the abyss between ecological necessity and political enforceability.[5] There has been no reduction in the social divide in the U.S. that continues to grow because of the crisis: the private healthcare system remains dysfunctional, homelessness is at an all-time high, the cost of living continues to rise, and the infrastructure remains largely dilapidated.

Biden actually ensured that nothing fundamentally changed. In this respect, his administration performed a final neoliberal St. Vitus dance on a seething volcano of crisis,[6] whereby all deviations from neoliberal orthodoxy – especially with regard to the protectionist deglobalization that has been initiated –only prepared the ground for the great authoritarian turnaround that is now imminent.[7] And yet the reality of the late capitalist crisis is far more glaring than the most exaggerated caricatures or satires of recent years.

What was not expected when Biden took office in 2020 was the Democratic Party’s willingness to gaslight the mental state of its president to the bitter end. Joe Biden was no longer in full possession of his mental and cognitive faculties during the 2020 election campaign. He was mocked as “creepy” or “sleepy Joe” until, thanks to excellent networking in the U.S. political machine, he managed to prevent the old left-wing social democrat Sanders from becoming the presidential candidate in order to beat the impressively unpopular Trump in the 2020 American dementia competition. Any standard toaster could have beaten Trump at that time.[8]

Joe Biden’s presidency can thus be interpreted as a showcase of the late capitalist health industry, whose top products managed to keep the doddering president largely presentable for four long years, while the opinion industry, in its gaslighting, managed with Orwellian thoroughness to make taboo what was blatantly obvious – that there is someone residing in the White House who could hardly get a job as a janitor, since the correct perception of space-time was increasingly too much for him.[9]

The U.S. as the New Soviet Union?

In the four years of his presidency, no successor was built up. Because Joe Biden was comfortable – nothing fundamentally changed, the powerful lobby groups in the Washington political machine could be sure that the Biden administration would not dare to engage in any serious disputes despite the blithely progressing socio-ecological systemic crisis. From the fracking industry to the healthcare sector, Biden – whose “merit” was having prevented Sanders – was a safe political bet.

Above all, Joe Biden’s presidency made it clear that the complex political machines of the late capitalist core states can largely function without a leader. Only in historical situations of upheaval, in the question of war and peace, such as during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, can strong individual leaders actually set the historical course. In this respect, we can consider ourselves lucky that the world has survived the four years of the Biden presidency, including the Ukraine war, without a world war.

Sleepy Joe was, so to speak, the Leonid Brezhnev of the late capitalist world system in the process of open dissolution; a reliable, comfortable veteran of the U.S. political caste, whose infirmity reflects the lethal crisis of capital reaching its inner, historical limits of development.[10] The parallels between the current late capitalist world system and the stagnation of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, as the crisis theorist Robert Kurz clairvoyantly described in his work The Collapse of Modernization back in the 1990s, have long been evident.[11]

But while the old men of the Soviet nomenklatura at least managed to produce a youthful and dynamic-looking head of state and party who failed spectacularly to reform ailing Eastern European-style state capitalism, late capitalism now only produces a fascist terror clown like Donald Trump, who this time was elected truly democratically – with an actual majority of votes. The political borderliner Donald Trump – who can simultaneously deny the climate crisis while laying claim to Greenland, which is resource-rich due to the rapidly melting Arctic – embodies the entire irrationality, the death wish of capital in its agony.[12] Confronted with its own increasingly acute contradictions, the only option for capital and the extreme right as its executor of the crisis is excess, the flight forward. It is the flight into the abyss.

The Democratic Path to Post-Democracy

Trump is the journey to apocalypse personified – but the U.S. functional elites have already been on the path to the catastrophe of a chaotic collapse of value-based socialization since 2020.[13] The bland social democratic appeals of a Bernie Sanders that many things must change in order to prevent the most severe social upheavals had already gone too far. Bernie Sanders had to fail in 2020 to implement a new New Deal, which Roosevelt was still able to realize in the pre-Fordist enforcement crisis of the 1930s. This is not only due to the four decades of neoliberal indoctrination and hegemony that preceded the fateful 2020 Democratic primary.[14] A Green New Deal would simply not have been enough; it would only have been a first step in confronting the socio-ecological crisis of capital. However, the old social democrat Sanders could have initiated a different, transformational dynamic – and this is precisely what scared the U.S. moneyed aristocracy and its political elite.

Ultimately, the 2020 pre-election campaign was about finding a way to transform the system in order to counter the capitalist systemic crisis – the functional elites in the U.S., especially in the Democratic Party, instinctively sensed this. And it was precisely for this reason that Joe Biden was able to close ranks behind him very quickly by simply promising – as mentioned at the beginning – that nothing would change. This is exactly what the most important factions of American capital wanted to hear. And it was precisely this that motivated all the relevant Democratic party wings to make a concerted effort to prevent Sanders – even if a rapidly deteriorating Joe Biden had to be the price.[15] However, the crisis of capital cannot be stopped by intrigues and manipulations in presidential primaries. After the Democrats had prevented a progressive way of dealing with the crisis, the pendulum swung once again in the direction of right-wing populism and naked fascist crisis ideology. Precisely because, well, “Team Biden” didn’t actually want to change anything substantially.[16]

But everything will change because capital, as a fetishistic process of boundless self-valorization, is dying of itself. As I said, the old men in the Kremlin in the 1980s were more advanced in recognizing the need for far-reaching reforms than the political entrepreneurs in Washington who were constantly begging for sponsorship money. However, it was unclear how this transformation process would proceed in the U.S. And the Democratic blockade of a progressive path to further managing the crisis in the United States ensured that the fascist option would now unfold.

It could even be argued that Trump’s first presidency already irreversibly damaged the Democratic Party. All progressive political demands, all promises of reform made by Sanders in 2020 had to bow to the maxim of preventing Trump once again. And this meant moving ever closer to the rhetoric of the right. The Democratic Party also failed to mount a significant pre-election campaign to put forward an alternative candidate to the increasingly senile Joe Biden. The panicked Kamala Harris, the hollow shooting star of the united left-liberal stump on both sides of the Atlantic, who emerged from the second tier as the campaign heated up, offered no alternative, as she was to the right of Joe Biden. Her economic policy agenda was largely shaped by Wall Street.[17] That is why the old social democrat Sanders clung to the aged president for so long – Biden was the maximum of what was possible in progressive politics in the late capitalist Washington political machine.[18]

A New Normal for Oligarchs

Trump’s second presidency will not be a mere repeat of the shitshow during his first term. It seems certain that the foundations of American democracy – even in its current, facade-like, quasi-post-democratic state – will continue to erode over the next four years to make way for authoritarian-oligarchic, genuinely fascistic tendencies. Until now, the basis of the political establishment in Washington has been the rule of law. In concrete terms, this means that lobbies – the more financially powerful, the more influential – exert influence on legislation in order to create the corresponding framework of legal conditions that are conducive to specific valorization interests.

The oligarchic principle of power will take the place of the capitalist constitutional state, which must always function as the ideal total capitalist (even if this system-stabilizing moment has increasingly receded into the background in the neoliberal age). This is a wild form of capitalist rule promoted by the dynamics of the crisis, which can also be found in many countries on the semi-periphery of the capitalist world system, such as Russia or Ukraine. The struggle for legislation is being replaced by personal acquaintances, followers, rackets operating in legal gray areas and power blocs fighting for positions of power and access to state or public resources. The state degenerates into the prey of these very rackets, its means of power are directly instrumentalized for particular interests, for example in the struggle for economic sinecures, as was and is common in the post-Soviet region.

Thus, the erosion of the state goes hand in hand with its authoritarian reconfiguration within the fascist crisis dynamic in the 21st century. They are two sides of one and the same process of crisis-induced feralization that emerges as soon as progressive, consciously transformative crisis reactions have been suppressed. And this is precisely what can be observed in the U.S. in all its – sometimes simply ridiculous – clarity. This is not just about the far-right billionaire Elon Musk, who, with his borderline character traits – not unlike Trump – personifies the increasingly open irrationality of the capital relation in its permanent crisis.

Musk is an oligarchic vanguard. Future U.S. election campaigners will hardly be able to do without such sponsors or actors, who no longer intervene via the detour of fundraising campaigns or political action committees (PACs), but “support” their candidates directly – sometimes by simply giving money to voters.[19] Immediately after the election, Musk began supporting populist or extreme right-wing forces from the U.S. and shaping them according to his ideas, for example through interventions in the UK or through campaign support for the AfD. A perfect storm is looming, with Washington using all its power to mutate into a promoter of right-wing populist or even fascist movements in crisis-ridden Europe or – once again – in Latin America.

Musk is just the prominent leader of an “alliance of oligarchs” that has formed around Trump, as the New York Times (NYT) put it in mid-January.[20] Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook), Tim Cook (Apple) and Sundar Pichai (Google/Alphabet) have already paid their respects to Trump with visits to Mar-a-Lago. The billionaires have seen that “the rules have changed” – and they are “signaling their willingness to abide by them,” according to the NYT. The favor of the unstable 78-year-old egomaniac at the head of state is now crucial to avoid being targeted by the state.

The first gestures of submission – intended to win the favor of the Mad King in the White House – were sometimes made even before Trump’s election. Programs to promote minorities at U.S. companies are being discontinued one after the other – and not just at Facebook. Microsoft wisely did this in mid-2024.[21] The billionaires who own the liberal newspapers Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times prevented endorsements for Harris during the heated election campaign. After the election, Tim Cook donated one million dollars to Trump’s election party. The Disney Group donated around 15 million dollars to a Trump foundation and a future Trump presidential museum through its ABC News television station. Zuckerberg had the (already symbolic) fact checks on Facebook removed in order to open up his social networks to mass right-wing hate speech not just during election campaigns, but all year round. And only the IT gods at the top of Google are likely to know what modifications have been made to the sacred algorithms that control the pulse of the web in response to Trump’s election victory. Amazon, on the other hand, is said to have ponied up 40 million dollars for a report by and about Trump’s wife Melania Trump.

Nihil Obstat

Sounds like a fucked-up oligarchy, like something that is common in Russia, Turkmenistan or Turkey? Exactly. The U.S. oligarchs are acting out of a sense of necessity, because there is hardly anything standing in the way of the authoritarian transformation of the U.S. state. It is not even relevant that the Republicans currently hold a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, meaning that the parliamentary checks and balances that characterized the U.S. political system are barely in place. What is decisive is what has happened within the U.S. judiciary in recent years and decades.

In the U.S. judiciary, a veritable judicial war raged over the appointment of influential judges, in which tightly organized, “conservative” groups such as the Federalist Society were able to elevate their sometimes far-right candidates to many key positions in the judiciary.[22] The right-wing majority in the U.S. Supreme Court is therefore only the tip of the iceberg: the mythologized U.S. Constitution – a document written around 250 years ago and amended countless times since – offers the right-wing majority in the Supreme Court a wide scope for interpretation in order to legally flank the fascization of the U.S.

This reactionary politicization of the U.S. judiciary is disastrous precisely because the reactionary and authoritarian domestic policy plans of the Trump administration, which will in fact accelerate the fascization of the U.S., are located in a legal grey area. Much of what Washington intends to push through in the coming years will simply be decided in court – ultimately before the Supreme Court, which has already (and as a precaution?) granted the president almost all-encompassing immunity with regard to his plans to overthrow the government following his election defeat in 2020.[23] Without the Supreme Court, Trump would not have even been able to run in the election.[24]

The main features of the intended fascization of the U.S. during Trump’s second term in office are well known. Project 2025, designed by ultra-right organizations and think tanks, became a scandal during the election campaign, as it effectively aims to abolish the separation of powers, remove the limits of presidential power and purge and subsequently politicize the U.S. state apparatus along Christian nationalist ideological lines, forcing Trump to publicly distance himself from it during the election campaign. However, just a few weeks after the election, the future president praised the reactionary agenda.[25] In the meantime, Trump has brought a number of figures from the right-wing networks surrounding Project 2025 into his administration – while the U.S. media are now avoiding the once hot campaign topic and the scandal, probably out of an instinct for self-preservation.[26]

Trump is already being normalized by parts of the mainstream media. There is currently no broad political opposition movement in the U.S., the Democrats have collapsed, the media are trying to come to terms with the new right-wing power, and the economy can live with Trump rather than Sanders anyway.[27] Nothing stands in the way of the fascization of the U.S., which will first affect migrants, refugees and minorities – as usual. Trump’s threatened mass deportations are likely to be the first major confrontation over the fascization of the U.S. The U.S. right’s fight against minority equality programs will also further inflame racism.

Trump’s second presidency also seems to be fueling racist efforts to restore the dominance of “White America” in the face of the demographic changes of recent decades. Hence the right’s deliberations to change citizenship law, for example to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants born in the U.S., and the moronic talk by Elon Musk of a “demographic crisis” in a world that continues to show population growth (which is probably a legacy of his socialization in South Africa under a Boer racism that fixated on demographics). Musk is referring to the white population of northern metropolitan areas or core states such as Japan.

Racism – especially in the militarized police apparatus of the United States – could also lead to unrest and widespread uprisings during Trump’s second term in office. This time, however, the U.S. right seems prepared to take extra-legal measures against protests. In August 2020, right-wing militiaman Kyle Rittenhouse killed two demonstrators in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during protests against police killings. He was acquitted in court, elevated to a symbolic figure by conservative media and honored with an audience by Donald Trump. During Trump’s second presidency, riots – such as those that shook the U.S. in spring 2020 – are likely to be confronted with much more tightly organized right-wing extremist violence. The erosion of the state – executed by racket battles over the means of power of the authoritarian state – will consequently be accompanied by an increase in the importance of the traditional American militia system.

However, and this is also obvious, it will be the stubbornly ignored crisis of capital that must destabilize Trump’s presidency, especially in its ecological dimension. For one thing, it has now come to this: the worsening capitalist climate crisis is a central factor that is increasingly driving food inflation, from which not only poor and precarious sections of the population are suffering. Trump has just managed to win over large sections of the U.S. middle class, which is at risk of collapsing, with his promises to reduce the soaring prices for food and the cost of living, which cost “Team Biden” many votes. Trump cannot remove this price pressure from the air. In the medium term, in years rather than decades, the climate crisis will threaten the food security of large sections of the population, even in the core of the world system. And right-wing shadow boxing will not help. Only violence will help.

Fascism as the openly terrorist crisis form of capitalist domination is likely to manifest itself in extreme climatic situations in the future. The New Orleans of 2005, devastated by Hurricane Katrina, provided a glimpse of a crisis management in which the collapse of state structures, arbitrary local measures, blatantly obvious rule by racket, and brutal interventions by the central state interacted chaotically. The excess of fascist violence in the 21st century, which sometimes turns against itself and turns into blind self-destruction, is likely to spread in the slipstream of the coming weather extremes, particularly in the rapidly socially eroding U.S., led by an old, deranged white man.

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[1] https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

[2] https://www.konicz.info/2024/06/21/protektionistische-eskalation/

[3] https://www.konicz.info/2023/11/28/transatlantische-entkopplung/

[4] https://www.konicz.info/2021/12/29/der-dealmaker-in-der-sackgasse/

[5] Ibid.

[6] https://telegraph.cc/letzter-neoliberaler-tanz-auf-dem-vulkan/

[7] https://www.konicz.info/2023/11/20/neue-kapitalistische-naehe-2-0/; https://www.konicz.info/2024/01/09/vertikal-gewinnt/

[8] https://www.konicz.info/2020/03/09/amerikas-demenzwahlkampf/

[9] In addition, there was the typical debility of the left-wing swamp, who accused critics of this absurd power-political freak show, which was originally staged to prevent Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidacy, of “ableism.”

[10] During Brezhnev’s demented reign, the Soviet Union entered the stagnation phase of the 1980s, whose inability to reform paved the way for the collapse of the early 1990s.

[11] https://edition-tiamat.de/books/der-kollaps-der-modernisierung

[12] https://www.konicz.info/2016/12/16/donald-trump-und-die-zeit-des-borderliners/

[13] https://www.konicz.info/2020/04/09/us-funktionseliten-auf-dem-apokalypse-trip/

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] https://www.konicz.info/2020/03/09/amerikas-demenzwahlkampf/

[17] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/business/harris-economic-plan-wall-street.html

[18] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4789223-sanders-seeks-influence-harris-campaign/

[19] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crlnjzzk919o

[20] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/12/opinion/ai-climate-change-low-birth-rates.html

[21] https://nypost.com/2024/07/17/business/microsoft-fires-dei-team-becoming-latest-company-to-ditch-woke-policy-report/

[22] https://www.konicz.info/2021/12/25/amerikas-justizkrieg/

[23] https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-immunity-supreme-court-decision-07-01-24/index.html

[24] https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/supreme-court-opinion-trump-ballot-03-04-24

[25] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-praises-project-2025-2000245

[26] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/22/project-2025-trump-picks

[27] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/capital-loves-trump/677317/

Originally published on konicz.info on 01/22/2025

Handing Over the Keys

February 25, 2025 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

How the democratic center of crisis-ridden Germany is paving the way for fascism

Tomasz Konicz

The ease and smoothness with which the fascization of Germany is taking place in the 2025 election campaign is downright dizzying. It is happening in rapid succession, and it is almost impossible to take a breather or pause for reflection. Erich Kästner compared the fascist dynamic before the transfer of power in 1933 to a snowball that grows over time into an avalanche that can hardly be stopped. Germany has now been caught up in such a brown avalanche. Last year’s large-scale anti-fascist demonstrations, which were initiated in response to unconstitutional deportation plans in AfD strongholds, remained ineffective.[1] Banning the AfD via legislation is pretty much inconceivable now – and the AfD has now openly included the mass deportations known as “remigration” in its election manifesto.[2]

A decidedly fascist regime seems quite realistic from the 2029 legislative period after next, as the AfD also envisages in its strategy papers. In the land of the perpetrators, their political heirs are getting ready to “seize power” again. But this is not actually the decisive factor. For it is precisely the forces of the democratic center that enable an effortless, frictionless transition to fascist crisis management. The womb from which this crawled is still fertile – but this time there don’t even seem to be any birth pangs.

On the one hand, there are the democratic right-wing parties such as the conservative CDU and the economically liberal FDP, which have long been in a fascistic competition to outdo the AfD. But the other parties, such as the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party, have also long since capitulated to right-wing hegemony and adapted their rhetoric accordingly. The ridiculous figure of FDP leader Christian Lindner, who writes quasi-right-libertarian love letters to Elon Musk[3] only to see himself ousted from the limelight by the AfD, is just one symptom of the general trend towards fascism in the neoliberal center – which is ultimately devouring it.[4]

The CDU is expanding the fascist demand for mass deportations of people with a migration background to include demands for the revocation of citizenship for dual nationals who have committed criminal offenses.[5] The permanent tightening of the internment regime for refugees, which is being pursued by all parties under pressure from the AfD, has now arrived at the motto “bed, bread, soap.”[6] Criminal responsibility starting at age 12,[7] forced labor for the unemployed, which has already been introduced jointly by the CDU and AfD in Schwerin,[8] public attempts to rehabilitate the SS, etc. – these things are no longer scandalous when civilizational taboos are broken on a daily basis after German society has been fully engulfed by the fascist avalanche.[9]

The AfD was able to achieve its final ideological victory after the Islamist attack in Solingen in the fall of 2024 when Federal President Steinmeier declared not extremism, but the refugee to be public enemy number one.[10] In doing so, the Federal Republic’s supreme greeter was simply following fascist logic, the personification of the causes of the crisis – and this in a year in which right-wing extremist crimes reached a new historic high, far above the level of Islamist crimes (not to mention the fact that Islamism is just a form of fascist crisis ideology specific to the Islamic cultural sphere, which is triggered in times of crisis using similar mechanisms – extremism of the center, identity mania, crisis competition).[11] The slogan “Refugees out!” is now German state doctrine.

All of this has its evil internal capitalist crisis logic. The global crisis process is causing the capitalist valorization machine to increasingly stutter in the core, including in the FRG – and among the ranks of the functional elites, an almost frictionless handover of the keys is being organized, ultimately changing the mode of crisis management. This time, frothing fascism, as a terrorist crisis form of capitalist rule, is accompanied by an opportunistic transformation of the entire political system, which is trying to adapt to it through authoritarianism, resentment production and populism. The fascist “handing over of the keys,” to stay with the metaphor, is also taking place within the democratic parties.

How Democracy Feeds on its Children

It is particularly shocking to the liberal middle classes and democracy-believing constitutional patriots that the transition from democratic to authoritarian-fascist crisis management is so seamless. This applies not only to the FRG, but above all to the U.S. The crisis theorist Robert Kurz already described this development at the turn of the millennium in his essay “Democracy Feeds on its Children.”[12] Capitalist democracy is based on universal market competition, which ultimately perfects the fetishistic process of boundless capital valorization. The whole democratic discourse of “competition between democratic parties,” revolves mainly around the economy, i.e. the optimization of capital valorization. The absurd, Orwellian constitution of capitalist democracy is based precisely on the fact that the occupants of the capitalist treadmill perfect their exploitation and submission to the premises of capital’s valorization process on their own initiative.

However, as soon as the system begins to stutter due to the intensifying internal and external contradictions of the valorization process, as soon as the material gratifications of its subjugation cease to exist for substantial parts of the middle classes, corresponding efforts to drive the logic of valorization to a barbaric extreme begin almost naturally – out of the inner logic of democratic discourse. Increased subjugation to the crisis-induced intensification of the constraints of capital then goes hand in hand with the exclusion, and ultimately the eradication, of competitors or economically superfluous sections of the population – who are ideologized as personifications of the crisis process.

Two population groups are caught in the crosshairs of these permanent right-wing smear campaigns: In addition to refugees and people with a migration background, it is primarily the unemployed and marginalized sections of the population who are once again turned into enemy stereotypes – as was the case at the beginning of the 21st century with the application of the infamous Hartz IV labor laws.[13] The tightening and increasing repression that has been practiced on refugees, especially during the smear campaign at the end of 2023, is now also to be used against marginalized “locals.”[14] Potentially, however, all economically “superfluous” groups will be targeted.

The renewed dynamization of fascism in the Federal Republic, the now almost blurred boundaries between the center and the “extremists,” can therefore only be understood in the context of the recent surge of crises in the Federal Republic – fascism is above all a crisis ideology.[15] Germany is in an economic crisis that is being exacerbated by its export-fixated economic model.[16] The crisis surge triggered by the pandemic has shaken the globalization on which Germany’s export world championships were based.

The stubborn inflation that emerged from 2020 onwards meant that central banks had to end their expansionary monetary policy, which had been the basis of the neoliberal financial bubble economy and the corresponding global deficit cycles for decades. The global system entered the crisis era of stagflation.[17] With the supply bottlenecks and the overloading of globalized production chains, tendencies towards protectionism and deglobalization were finally able to assert themselves during the pandemic – with the U.S. at their center, which increasingly relied on vertical integration,[18] nearshoring[19] and reindustrialization. The Ukraine crisis acted as a further disruptive shock to the globalization process.[20]

German Ideology in Crisis

The German economic model, which since the introduction of the euro and the implementation of Hartz IV had been aimed at achieving export surpluses – i.e. exporting debt, unemployment and deindustrialization – has thus run out of steam. The crisis of globalization, to which Germany, Inc. adapted, forms the actual background to the accelerating economic crisis in the Federal Republic. However, with the export industry on the defensive, those forces within the German ruling elite that opposed the rise of the extreme right out of their own economic interests are also on the defensive.[21] Trump’s election victory is particularly devastating in this context, as it largely removes the external pressure to combat fascist tendencies in the Federal Republic.

Until now, the ideology of the AfD has been in conflict with the interests of the export industry, which has always had to ensure a good international reputation for the Made in Germany brand –which was damaged in 2018, for example, by the crystal meth-fueled Nazis in Chemnitz during their pogrom-like riots against migrants.[22] This has largely come to an end since the crisis in the German export industry and the ongoing economic malaise: while neoliberalism preached the blessing of open markets, all relevant players are currently outdoing each other with calls for border closures, isolation and immigration restrictions after the long-standing export boom has collapsed.

It is obvious that this is simply an ideological reflection of the upheaval in the unfolding global crisis, which is giving a boost to German pre-fascism.[23] Seen from a distance, the whole thing looks downright ridiculous. For years, Germany benefited from globalization due to enormous trade surpluses as part of its beggar-thy-neighbor policy of exporting debt and unemployment.[24] The contradictions of the crisis of capital were simply exported, while German economists were outraged by the mountains of debt abroad that German trade surpluses inevitably produce. Now that these export surpluses and global trade imbalances have brought with them the corresponding protectionist fallout, the crisis is also returning to the former export surplus world champion – and a feeling of betrayal is spreading among the crisis-ignorant middle classes, the causes of which are in turn being located outside the German meritocracy and now also outside the national community.

Germany has suffered, tightened its belt, starved itself to death in order to adapt perfectly to the rat race of neoliberal globalization – and now it will suffer particularly badly from the major turnaround towards deglobalization. The right-wing hatred of ideological personifications of the rapidly intensifying crisis dynamics triggered by this paradigm shift focuses, in the tried and true tradition, on refugees, people with a migration background, the unemployed and the socially disadvantaged. In the context of the fascist extremism of the center, which bubbles up in times of crisis, the social Darwinist, nationalist and sometimes simply racist crisis competition now largely coincides with the reality of the late capitalist crisis. While the entire liberal discourse, according to which Germany needs many immigrants, is increasingly disappearing from the public sphere as the economic crisis progresses.

Almost all forces across the political spectrum in Germany have now followed the AfD’s line in order to hallucinate migration and refugees as a fundamental evil of the ailing Germany, Inc. –which means that the capitalist systemic crisis and the role of the Federal Republic in its development can be conveniently ignored. This also applies to the Greens, whose candidate for chancellor openly wants to deport unemployed refugees.[25] And it also applies to the so-called Left Party, which is trying to copy Wagenknecht’s populism – which was the mere ideological accompaniment to the formation of the Querfront – in all opportunistic seriousness in the form of social demagogy.[26] On the refugee issue, the uniformity within the entire political spectrum seems to have taken on a downright totalitarian flavor. There is hardly anything left that could stop the AfD’s path to power now that the civilizing effect of large trade surpluses on German domestic politics is increasingly dwindling.

However, the agitation against the second major enemy after the outbreak of the economic crisis – the unemployed – will no longer be able to contribute to the development of a sustainable economic policy: The provisional and timid abolition of forced labor in the Federal Republic, which was implemented by the so-called traffic light coalition of the SPD, the Greens and the FDP, is to be reversed again under pressure from the right. In fact, the Hartz IV labor laws will be reintroduced in 2025 if the CDU, SPD, FDP, AfD or BSW have their way.

The Subject in Crisis

The crisis reflex, which is being promoted by the right in a number of smear campaigns against the socially marginalized – from the FDP to the CDU to the AfD – consists of a resurgence of the sadistic methods of disciplining and lowering the costs of the commodity of labor power, as implemented at the beginning of the 21st century as part of the Hartz IV program and Agenda 2010.[27] The fascization of the Federal Republic is in fact returning to its place of origin on an even higher level, because the German right instinctively senses that this subjugation program was at the beginning of its political ascent. And it is indeed an authoritarian reflex that is surfacing in broad sections of the population in the face of the economic crisis, as it did around a quarter of a century ago.

The social psychologist Oliver Decker summed up this economization of authoritarian and right-wing ideologies, which was fueled by Agenda 2010, as follows:

“The constant focus on economic goals – or more precisely: the demand for submission to their premises – reinforces an authoritarian cycle. It leads to an identification with the economy, in which the demands for renunciation in its favor lead to the kind of authoritarian aggression that erupts against the weakest.”[28]

The greater the pressure on the authoritarian wage-earner, the greater his need to see weaker people squeezed and exploited in the same way as he himself is. This “authoritarian cycle” also forms the quagmire that, in mediation with the crisis surges of the 21st century, paves the way for German fascism. The causal connection between the impoverishment and disenfranchisement of the unemployed and the worsening of their own working conditions is ignored and gives way to irrational reflexes of hatred and sadism, which prepare the ground for neo-fascist crisis ideologies.

The neoliberal “renunciation policy” at the beginning of the 21st century – submission to the premises of the valorization process – thus promoted the authoritarian aggression against the victims of the crisis, on which right-wing populist and right-wing extremist ideologies are equally based. The neoliberal ideology of subjugation, which often instrumentalized a hollow concept of freedom, formed the breeding ground for right-wing crisis ideologies. The concepts of extremism of the center and conformist rebellion are therefore indispensable for understanding the success of the New Right and neo-nationalism as the heirs of neoliberalism. This is precisely where the right wants to return to in the face of the worsening crisis of 2025. And this program of subjugation will cost them something – the tightening of the “citizen’s income” already decided at the end of 2024 will not lead to savings, but to additional costs in the hundreds of millions.[29] The talk of widespread fraud being committed by the unemployed is just an ideological chimera.

Capitalism as a death cult animated by the fetishism of capital,[30] as a secular religion demanding human sacrifice, comes fully into its own.[31] Through suffering, through the sacrifice – preferably of the weakest, most defenseless members of society – Germany is to regain the favor of capital in its contradiction-driven movement as an automatic subject, which socially and ecologically devastates humanity and the world in its endless compulsion to valorize. Forced labor, starvation, abolition of paid sick leave, labor camps, reduction of wage costs – the whole old program, the same talk that was based on agitation against the lazy unemployed when Hartz IV was implemented, can be heard again.

And it’s not just the right-wing parties, here too we are dealing with an almost totalitarian uniformity. Again, the whole thing has a touch of the ridiculous, for example when SPD politicians use exactly the same phrases to incite hatred against the unemployed as their predecessors did at the beginning of this millennium. “There is no right to be lazy,” this inflammatory phrase, which was spouted by then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder[32] was also repeated by SPD leader Lars Klingbeil in autumn 2024.[33] Of course, the SPD can also imagine supporting the total reduction of citizens’ benefits and the reintroduction of forced labor, as demanded by the CDU.

New German Dysfunction

The internal capitalist problem with this knee-jerk resort to labor sadism is that – from a purely economic perspective – it is now dysfunctional. Hartz IV and Agenda 2010 were successful because they lowered the average price of labor in Germany during the rise of globalization, thereby reducing unit labor costs in the Federal Republic. In the era of globalization, this enabled the veritable explosion of German trade surpluses at the beginning of the 21st century – especially with the introduction of the euro. However, this way out of the crisis, in which economies seek refuge in a beggar-thy-neighbor policy, has been blocked in the face of increasing protectionism and the deglobalization of Germany, Inc.

These measures will only exacerbate the social crisis, without any “return” in the form of an export boom. Neither the non-European sales markets nor the countries of the eurozone, which are suffering under Germany’s top austerity sadist Wolfgang Schäuble, will allow such extreme German trade surpluses again. What this sadistic repetition of the Hartz IV system will certainly bring about, however, is the final establishment of forced labor in the FRG – with which another characteristic of fascist crisis management is likely to find its way into the manifest systemic crisis.

As already explained several times, this fascist dynamic, which is growing into an avalanche, gains its apparent inevitability from the fact that it arises quite naturally from the prevailing late neoliberal ideology[34] and the late capitalist national identity.[35] Ignoring the irreversible social and ecological crisis, which capital cannot address because it is its cause, the ideology and practice of German pre-fascism seems almost inevitable; it also seems to take into account the interests of the wage earners, who can hope that it will affect the others – the marginalized, the foreigners, the refugees, the minorities, the elderly, those unable to work, the gays, the transgender people, etc., etc., who are reviled as “anti-social.”

The monstrous, simply suicidal lies on which this fascist extremism of the center is based only become visible through radical reflection on the crisis process – which must always go hand in hand with an escape from the ideological and identitarian thought prison of late capitalism. Deportations, repression, border closures and authoritarian state formations will not overcome the crisis of capital in either its economic or ecological dimension.[36] The crisis does not come from outside, it is home-made. The global productivity level, the climate crisis – they cannot be locked out or deported at the borders.

Even the calculation on which the European and American isolationist mania is based, according to which the global South will become uninhabitable first in the climate crisis and the North will therefore have to isolate itself now, is illusory in view of the many unknowns of the coming climate catastrophe. A collapse of the Gulf Stream, which could happen within a few years, would hit Europe and North-East America particularly hard – the very regions in which the right has been particularly successful in popularizing its potentially mass-murderous isolationist delusions.[37]

If there were still a left that acted as a progressive force in accordance with its own concept, it would address this simple, obvious truth and make it the basis of an emancipatory transformation practice: Any hope of maintaining the process of civilization can only be sustained if capital, which is in agony, is overcome.[38] This is the Archimedean point that would enable a successful anti-fascist mobilization based on the reality of the crisis. Only through this could the fascist death cult be successfully combated. The only interest that can be rationally formulated in the permanent crisis of late capitalism is the interest in a rapid transformation of the system.

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

[1] https://www.konicz.info/2024/01/31/ein-letztes-mal-antifa/

[2] https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/innenpolitik/id_100571646/afd-parteitag-in-riesa-alice-weidel-laesst-die-maske-fallen.html

[3] https://nachrichten.ag/deutschland/lindner-verteidigt-musk-deutschland-braucht-mut-wie-milei/

[4] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/bundestagswahl/parteien/weidel-musk-100.html

[5] https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/pass-weg-fuer-kriminelle-cdu-legt-nach-laesst-aber-entscheidende-fragen-offen_2de31ee3-ca90-435a-9f8d-ead567469fdc.html

[6] https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/merz-asylpolitik-migration-cdu-csu-wahlprogramm-100.html

[7] https://www.n-tv.de/ticker/CDU-fordert-schaerferes-Jugendstrafrecht-article25055763.html

[8] https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/nach-thueringer-vorbild-schwerin-verhaengt-arbeitspflicht-fuer-buergergeld-empfaenger_id_260607674.html

[9] https://www.morgenpost.de/politik/article242439534/Nach-Krah-Aussagen-AfD-Politiker-normalisiert-SS-Verbrechen.html

[10] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/anschlag-solingen-104.html

[11] https://www.konicz.info/2021/08/17/von-gruenen-und-braunen-faschisten-2/

[12] https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=autoren&index=29&posnr=49

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

[14] https://www.kontextwochenzeitung.de/debatte/667/die-extreme-mitte-9310.html

[15] https://exitinenglish.com/2023/03/08/radicalism-vs-extremism/

[16] https://www.konicz.info/2024/01/25/leerlauf-der-exportdampfwalze/

[17] https://www.konicz.info/2021/11/16/zurueck-zur-stagflation/

[18] https://www.konicz.info/2024/01/09/vertikal-gewinnt/

[19] https://www.konicz.info/2023/11/20/neue-kapitalistische-naehe-2-0/

[20] https://exitinenglish.com/2022/08/12/a-new-quality-of-crisis/

[21] https://www.konicz.info/2023/12/26/konjunktur-fuer-faschismus/

[22] https://www.saechsische.de/kultur/5-jahre-nach-den-ausschreitungen-neonazi-achse-chemnitz-dortmund-ist-eine-einbahnstrasse-YBFWXIHAFEKUJYZXU3RS2674SY.html

[23] https://www.konicz.info/2022/05/24/eine-neue-krisenqualitaet/

[24] https://www.konicz.info/2012/12/21/der-exportuberschussweltmeister/

[25] https://www.msn.com/de-de/nachrichten/politik/robert-habeck-macht-klare-ansage-an-syrer-ohne-arbeit/ar-AA1x1UyM

[26] https://www.konicz.info/2022/11/07/rockin-like-its-1917/

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

[28] https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article10442527/Wirtschafts-Fixierung-schuert-autoritaere-Aggression.html

[29] https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/plus254289756/Buergergeld-351-Millionen-Euro-fuer-Zusatz-Termine-der-heikle-Preis-der-neuen-Haerte.html?utm_source=pocket_reader

[30] https://www.konicz.info/2022/10/02/die-subjektlose-herrschaft-des-kapitals-2/

[31] https://www.konicz.info/2014/01/07/die-prophezeiung/

[32] https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/artikel/a-126811.html

[33] https://web.de/magazine/politik/spd-chef-buergergeld-ansage-recht-faulheit-40110276

[34] https://www.kontextwochenzeitung.de/politik/376/neo-aus-liberal-wird-national-5145.html

[35] https://konicz.substack.com/p/europa-im-identitaetswahn

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

[37] https://www.konicz.info/2024/02/23/von-oekonomischen-und-oekologischen-sachzwaengen/

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

Preprint of passages from the essay “The Crisis Economy of German Fascism. Observations on the Interaction of Economic Crisis Development and the Fascization of Germany in the 21st Century,” which will appear in the upcoming issue of the value-critical theory journal Exit! Crisis and Critique of the Commodity Society in Spring 2025. (see: exit-online.org)

Originally published on konicz.info on 01/28/25 and updated on 02/01/25

The Phantom of The Fine Arts

January 21, 2025January 15, 2025 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

Why society can no longer reflect on itself aesthetically in the modern age

Robert Kurz

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

All attempts by art to break out of its glass ghetto have failed. Sculptures set up in factories and paintings on the walls of offices remained foreign bodies; literary readings in churches or schools never got beyond the character of compulsory events. When the Dadaists resorted to provocation out of desperation and dragged toilet bowls or rusty iron pipes into the sacred halls of art to mock the bourgeoisie, this offer was accepted with animal seriousness as an art object and cataloged like Michelangelo’s sculptures or Picasso’s paintings. The tautological definition is: art is everything that society perceives a priori in a separate space, in a reservation called “art,” and which, therefore, in its impregnated artistic objectivity, can be collected independently of any content, like stamps or insects. It doesn’t matter what the art wants and how it presents this, its effects are always defused and trivialized.

Art is only “allowed” to return to social reality if it gives itself up and capitulates unconditionally: As the design of commodities and as a culture industry for the domestic use of capitalist people, it can no longer be art, because it then ceases to represent an aesthetic reflection of society and the relation between humans and the world. For design and the culture industry are per se as lacking in reflection as business management: the aesthetic form of the commodity no longer relates to the whole of nature and society, but is sufficient unto itself. But if the aesthetics of the individual artistic production no longer contain any reflection “on” the position of the object in a larger overall context, if it is no longer part of an aesthetic “cosmos,” then it can no longer be art. For the essence of the artistic consists precisely in the aesthetic reflection of a cultural “cosmos,” in which the individual object of art always reflects the whole in a particular way.

Art in the modern age therefore only has the choice of either being appropriated by the culture industry as an ordinary economic object, or leading an “elevated” illusory existence as a dead, unrealized foreign body alongside real life. It is systematically prevented from fulfilling its task of aesthetic reflection of the whole as an integral part of the social life process. And like all its specific problems, modernity has also elevated this dilemma of art to the status of something supra-historical and universal. If there is something fundamentally wrong with the wonderful modern era, then it is never supposed to be a historical problem that can be overcome through critique, but always an irrevocable condition of existence per se that humanity unfortunately has to live with. Modernism also perceives the dilemma of the separateness of art and life through this lens of false ontologization. People pretend that in ancient Greece the artist was just as much a seller of his possibilities as he is today and that even the ancient Egyptians exhibited their images of the gods in galleries and museums or put price tags on them at auctions.

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

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

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

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

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

In a “society as culture,” which knew no separate functional spheres, “art” must have necessarily always been part of everyday life; it was therefore completely unthinkable as the exhibition of a sterilized and dead sphere “behind glass.” But that is precisely why it was not art as art, but a specific moment in an integrated social context. The “artist” could therefore only be an artist and be recognized in the sense of a technical ability, but not as a social representative of “the” art beyond everyday life. By contrast, in modernity, which is culturally disintegrated by an independent economy, dissociated aesthetics takes on an absurd form. Although every manifestation of life itself always has an aesthetic aspect for people, the “economized” world of modernity has negated this elementary fact. “Work” is not aesthetic, the economy is not aesthetic, politics is not aesthetic, life in general is not aesthetic – only aesthetics is aesthetic. The “fine arts” have turned into a phantom. It is as if the aesthetics of things lead an abstracted, ghostly existence of their own alongside things; just as, incidentally, the sociality of products leads a special existence alongside products in the abstract form of money, which has become an end in itself, and abstract formal logic as the “money of the mind” (Marx) takes on a life of its own alongside the concrete logic of real relationships.

The modern artist’s glass prison consists precisely in this structural separation of the aesthetic. Art flounders helplessly back and forth in this prison; it is no longer the artistic form of a social content and thus an aesthetic reflection of the whole, but a dissociated “formality” – form without a common, socially defined content; thus it ultimately becomes an end in itself and, as “art for art’s sake,” an involuntary caricature of the “detached” economy. But once, in its distress, it has fallen hopelessly in love with itself, art begins to suppress its dilemma by “aestheticizing” the spawns of the functionalist split as such. But if the structure of modernity is not critiqued, but its unresolved existence itself is aestheticized, then bodies torn apart by grenades, raped women, starving children and the obscenity of power can also appear as merely aesthetic objects. Such an “aestheticization of politics” without a critique of the system of divisions leads directly to barbarism. This was the secret of fascism, which staged social disintegration as a bloody Neronian Gesamtkunstwerk.

Conversely, the “politicization of aesthetics,” as propagated by the left for a long time, has also proven to be a dead end. When art gives itself over to “agitprop” – even with the best social intentions – it capitulates just as unconditionally as when it is transformed into design and the culture industry. If art does not want to wither away and fall silent for good, it must make its dilemma public; not by adapting to traditional politics, however, but through a radical aesthetic critique of the existing order. If art can no longer reflect the divided whole positively, it must do so negatively by making us aware of the aesthetic intolerability of the “economized” world. To a certain extent, art must become militant with its own means and demand the subordination of the economy to a newly invented (no longer traditionally bound) cultural “cosmos” in which the aesthetics of the whole triumphs over so-called economic efficiency. Only an art that overcomes itself as a critique of social de-aestheticization can return to life.

Originally published in Folha de S. Paulo on 04/04/1999

Fairy Tales for the Crisis

January 17, 2025January 15, 2025 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

Frank Capra’s Autobiography of a Great Court Jester

Robert Kurz

Hollywood is, as everyone knows, kitsch, glamor, technical perfection, sentimentality, fake tears, and fake teeth – and it has been enormously successful for more than 80 years. The grandiose dream machine of capitalism runs like clockwork and produces imaginations for the world on an assembly line; not with the rigid compulsion of propaganda and its lies, but with the tempting power of the offer and its lies. But it cannot be money alone that has made Hollywood great. And it can’t just be the technical tricks that repeatedly melt the minds of viewers. The power of Hollywood does not lie in the fact that we succumb to sophisticated manipulation, but rather that we see through it and let it get to us anyway, while being brilliantly entertained and paying money for it. The power of Hollywood is perhaps the oldest art, the fairy tale, translated into the form of “technical reproducibility” (Walter Benjamin). But even in this modern technological form, there can be no fairy tale without a storyteller.

Many books have been written about Hollywood, but few by its great storytellers themselves. Frank Capra was an exception, and his autobiography is, as John Ford said, “not only the best, but the only book ever written about Hollywood.” This judgment is by no means exaggerated. When Capra, already more than seventy years old, wrote down the almost thousand pages of this magnum opus published in 1971, he not only recounted his own life, but the history of Hollywood itself as one big fairy tale: “Everything we movie people are, have and do comes from the movies, the magic carpet! I was allowed to grab the fringes of this magic carpet, swing myself up and ride towards adventure.” This book contains all the strengths and weaknesses of Capra’s films, and it could also be seen as a “movie” itself, which has to pass the test of credibility.

From beginning to end, Capra unashamedly shows everything that makes up the vices and embarrassments of Hollywood: he talks pompously, postures like a lucky man and superman, and strikes boastful poses like a pubescent ghetto youth. Capra as Napoleon in the wars of the film industry, Capra showered with awards, Capra the greatest! At the same time, he is maudlin to the point of pain (or beyond) and sprays the famous “Capra-corn” by the kilo, pathetic like an itinerant preacher and Roman Catholic to the bone: “Someone should keep reminding the average man,” the unctuous Capra moralizes from his self-made pulpit, “that he is a child of God and an equal heir to God’s rich gifts and that goodness means wealth, kindness means power and freedom means glory.”

If it were only this and nothing else, Capra’s films would have been simply unenjoyable and his mammoth biography would have been unreadable. But in the films, as in the book, the pace is breathtaking, and “the cardinal sin, boredom” doesn’t stand a chance. How is this possible? Perhaps through a single great virtue that the storyteller needs: a stunning naivety! In spite of all his sophistication and bravado, in spite of all his tricks and ruses, Capra, the mischievously grinning little peasant boy from Sicily, always retains bits of Simplicius Simplicissimus. Capra remains naive, which is why he can remain as honest as the innocent boy from the countryside. No sooner has he blown the trumpet of his own fame than he sees himself standing there “with all the composure of a man standing on ice skates for the first time in his life,” and immediately after the triumph always comes the disillusionment: “Reality crashed down on me like a falling sack of sand.” You have to believe his honesty, even if it’s just to make the big slogans come out better.

Capra’s credible naivety would remain one-dimensional if it were not bizarrely offset by the almost opposite virtues of humor and self-irony, the cinematic technique of which he had learned as a gag man in Mack Sennet’s studio, where slapstick was cultivated and the flying cream pie was invented. In his social comedies, Capra has, as he himself says, “merged the heroes and the jokers” from the classic figures of drama “into a single person.” He was well aware that he and his heroes fulfilled a similar function as the “court jesters of the distant past”: “These jesters were usually dwarves or grotesque nobodies who wore jester costumes […] as well as thin marottes (‘slapsticks’) or air-filled bladders as a sign of their special status. The sarcastic talk of the jesters would, the kings hoped, serve as a safety valve and prevent the seething cauldron of the common people’s misery from exploding.” And yet Capra believes in the liberating power of laughter: “In terms of interpersonal relationships, comedy is the complete abandonment of one’s defenses. […] When someone acts superior or when you are afraid of them – you put up your shields. You won’t laugh – neither with him nor at him. […] Dictators can’t laugh. Hitler and Stalin didn’t find themselves funny, nor did the others find them funny.” If anything remains of Capra and his fairy tales, it is the laughter. In Germany, Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), an ingenious work of embarrassment, has become his best-known film thanks to its trademark “black humor.”

Capra’s third great trump card is something that could be described as precision or an eye for detail. Of course, this attention to detail has a technical dimension. Not for nothing was Capra a trained scientist and graduate engineer, a friend of the astronomer Edwin P. Hubble (the discoverer of the red shift of the galaxies and the expansion of the universe), holder of several patents and inventor of various machines; skills that always helped him in his work as a director. Beyond the technical, however, it is Capra’s feeling for the colorfulness of a situation in both the literal and figurative sense that also distinguishes him in his autobiography; for example, when he, as a member of a film delegation to Moscow, describes the giant demonstration in Red Square on May 1, 1937: “We walked between endless rows of Red Army soldiers, between whole canyons of red flags and through roadblocks of controlling, stamping and frisking secret policemen. […] The choleric color was reflected in the eyes and on the faces of the people and made the bayonets flare. The city was red, the mood red. […] Far outside, on the outskirts of the city, the police lines ended abruptly. The sun was setting. In front of us we saw a cloud of dust in an open field. Those marching in front of us stepped out of line and ran towards the cloud. […] And there, under the cover of that gloomy cloud of dust, the biggest mass pissing of all time took place.” A scene from a Capra movie!

Here, the artist’s irony turns against the form of propaganda, against the general and abstract gaze directed at humanity, against the great machinations of social transformation. His gaze is aimed solely at the individual, not only in the sense of the American political ideal, but even more as a method of his own art. For Capra, this is a program: “The mass is a herd concept – unacceptable, insulting, belittling. When I see a crowd, I see a collection of free individuals: each a unique person, each one, in his human dignity, an island unto himself. Let the others make movies about the great storms of history, I would make mine about the guy who gets swept away by the storm. And if this guy is one big bundle of contradictions, […] then I think I can understand his problem.”

Capra takes the side of the individual artistic subject against critical philosophy, of experience against theory: “My films will penetrate the heart not with logic, but with compassion.” If you want, you can recognize an echo of Adorno’s critique of “identity logic” in this, an insistence on the “non-identical” in people that is not absorbed in the determinations of the social structure and its “constraints.” But if this attitude remains one-sided and unreflective, you soon can’t see the forest for the trees. For Capra, there are only the individual trees, and in this he is strictly liberal. Precisely for this reason, however, the social context can only be saved by his heavily applied sentimentality, and the solutions must come abruptly from the miraculous, as if by the “hand of God.” The storyteller feels the ground wobble beneath his feet and the “Capra-style cheesiness” threatens to turn rancid.

What keeps Capra among the greats, however, is his historical position. For even if his fairy tales are sentimentally transfigured, they retain their credibility as films that record reality: as fairy tales of the New Deal and anti-fascism. With his “message of encouragement,” he was able to sing the praises of capitalism and at the same time “the praises of the hard-working people, the cheated, those who were born poor, the beaten-down,” because in the Great Depression there seemed to be a kind of capitalist self-awareness and, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the hope of social renewal. If Capra himself experienced the “American Dream” of rising from poor immigrant child to millionaire and mirrored this in his naive heroes, it was because he wanted to represent the social containment of the capitalist machine rather than the triumph of money and the unfettered market. The New Deal, to which he was committed, ushered in the era of Keynesianism and deficit spending; and only in this political climate was it possible for Capra to lead his provincial Parzival from the deepest despair to the happy ending of a victory over malice and corruption in films such as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1937) or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). The naivety of his social fairy tales was covered by a real social campaign, which even thirty years later led the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas to believe that capitalism was now fundamentally civilized by the welfare state.

Capra’s moment of anti-fascism was also real and authentic. In this respect, he was also able to credibly mobilize the naivety of his critical statements or affirmative critique, because Western capitalism was really fighting a great battle against the worst spawn of its own logic and wanted to prevent its ultimate consequence. Capra turned his back on Hollywood and volunteered to join the U.S. Army to put his skills at the service of the anti-Hitler coalition. After seeing Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, he recognized this “horrifying film” as a propagandistic “stroke of genius” with a message “as naked and brutal as a lead pipe” that heralded the Holocaust. As counter-propaganda, “Colonel Capra” created the film series Why We Fight (1942-45), in which his aim was to use “the enemy’s films” documentary style “to make their enslaving aims clear. Our boys would hear for themselves the Nazis and the Japs shouting their master race nonsense – and our fighters would understand why they were in uniform.”

The fact that Capra’s career only glowed dimly after the war remains incomprehensible to him even decades later. And it is strange how his autobiography becomes weaker in terms of language and thought as soon as he approaches the description of the time when the storyteller’s voice was taken away. Suddenly, the naivety becomes stale and the momentum flagging. Parzival has lost his innocence. Against the youth revolt of the 1960s, he now only barks as a conservative old man and sees “hash-smoking, parasitic parent-haters,” rails against “deviants and masturbators,” uses the denunciatory language of prejudice to attack “homosexuals, lesbians and junkies” and rages against “childish protests with puerile banners” of “spineless hordes.” However, Capra also takes himself to task when he describes the failure of his last film Pocketful of Miracles (1961): “For me, the real cause was a deeply personal one, a deeply moral one: someone who has the incredible power to speak for two hours to hundreds of millions of his fellow human beings, in the dark, must not speak with forked tongue. What he says must come straight from his heart and not from his wallet.”

In reality, the era of capitalist morality was over because the historical resources of Keynesianism were exhausted. Even Kennedy’s myth no longer had a real social equivalent, and Clinton’s show today cannot even be considered a caricature of the New Deal. But it is not the people who have become weaker, but the development of capitalism that has made the personal hero irrelevant. Social critique has disappeared from postmodern art as a whole and the tear of sentiment can now only be shed for animals or extraterrestrials. Conversely, evil can no longer be individualized either: “The villain,” complains old Frank Capra, “began to transform himself from a person into an idea, a state of mind or a condition of life.” Or likewise into an alien. Structuralism has caught up with Capra. But that is no reason to rejoice. He himself suspected it: when the social kitsch of Hollywood’s belief in the personal good in capitalist man has finally degenerated into ridiculousness and become merely boring or a historical genre picture, then “the man-eater masks that children wear on Halloween will reveal reality.” Its last fairy tales must be just as stupid and malicious as unlimited capitalism.

Originally published in Folha S. Paulo on 05/18/1997

Don’t Treat Every “Thing” Alike!

January 15, 2025January 15, 2025 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

Some preliminary remarks on the papers by J. Ulrich, C-P. Ortlieb and Blaha/Wallner.

Roswitha Scholz

1. In my opinion, Comte is the consequence of Kant: he thinks him through to the end by definitively suspending the “thing in itself,” which was still indispensable in Kant. Despite this, Kant himself had conceptions of “underdeveloped peoples” that were arranged in a hierarchy based on stages of development. From Comte’s perspective, Kant is infantilized or at least implicitly feminized, put into women’s clothing as it were, by still being bound to theology in a certain sense and still asking questions about objects and the possibility of knowing and processing them in general. All of a sudden, the old metaphysics of transcendence is feminized.

Such procedures are themselves entirely part of the value-dissociation repertoire with its shifts in meaning; the opponent is forcibly feminized in the competitive struggle. This points to value-dissociation as a principle of social form. Comparable statements can also be found among German Enlightenment thinkers, for example, when they say that the French are more like women (perhaps because they are simply too immediately attached to positivist thinking, unlike the spirit of grand speculation!), or when in National Socialism the intellectual is considered effeminate and feminized in contrast to the male soldier. The basic principle here is value-dissociation, which reveals its relational and flexible character, i.e. such attributions serve to case the opponent as inferior in an otherwise entirely male-dominated event.

2. However, this does not detract from the fact that both in positivism and in the (old) Enlightenment metaphysics and corresponding theories dedicated to the problem of constitution, a “dissociation of the feminine” can be observed in various colors and forms. A “dissociation” of metaphysics in positivism has always taken place on a common basis with metaphysics; and this happens within the overall context of value-dissociation, which represents the principle of social form.

Kant’s problem of constitution is itself entirely androcentric and Eurocentric. He dabbles, so to speak, only on the value side, the subject side. In a different tradition of ideas, this also applies to Marx up to Postone, among others. Unlike the latter, however, whose concepts need to be developed further, Kant’s investigation of the cognitive apparatus provides nothing for the value-dissociation-critical uncovering of the problem of constitution, except in a negative respect as a component of the object to be criticized.

It is undeniable that Kant, in a way, still takes materiality into account (albeit only abstractly), as opposed to just considering empty form. However, a form-content dualism has always been constitutive for modern thought (including metaphysics), and Kant has always moved within this dualism. In this respect, he has at most served as a hinge between old metaphysics/old ideas of constitution and positivist self-assertion, from which materiality, with its specific weight, is then ultimately completely eradicated.

3. If the old (Enlightenment) metaphysics already involved a “dissociation of the feminine” and thus made itself absolute as a problem of constitution and left out everything that did not merge into it, then this continues in a “value-critical” reductionist assumption of exchange/value as a principle of social form, insofar as it is presented as a – somewhat god-like – total omnipotent. In contrast, the theory and critique of value-dissociation aims to demonstrate the limits of such approaches; quite apart from the fact that it is not exchange that is constitutive, but rather the relation of subjection to “abstract labor,” from which the exchange relation is established in the first place, while dissociation is once again a meta-relation.

Otherwise, there is a danger that the critique of society and cognition, insofar as it merely invokes value in its logic of zero/one, reconstitutes it again in the critique. In doing so, value-dissociation cannot be held up against value as an even more universal, indeed now truly universal principle. With any affirmation of the absolute would immediately come its own denial, insofar as value-dissociation finds itself “automatically” constrained by its own concept to encompass even that which does not fit within it; it thus dares to “think against itself” (Adorno) and engages in a new relationship between the general and the particular, the singular, the contingent, etc., without establishing hierarchies or defining one side as the origin of the others. The assertion of the generality of value-dissociation as a principle of social form also implies that the non-identical is suspended in mainstream modern thought. Thus, with an affirmation of the absolute, the critique of dissociation would undercut its own affirmation.

Incidentally, this also means taking into account the constitution of “sensuality” and “nature” and not ontologizing them; even the “sensual,” which was left out in positivist thought in particular and which must be taken into account, is always already socially constituted. Sensuality cannot simply be interpreted as ontologically given, even if in some patriarchal-immanent concepts it is conceived in this way as the counterpart to abstraction (even in value-critical contexts). On the other hand, it is by no means absorbed in this constitution; nevertheless, it is different whether I satisfy my physiological hunger with maggots or Maggi soup (both of which can be equally miserable).

If such a train of thought is not followed, there is a danger that a relationship of derivation or formal attribution will be maintained, i.e. the logic of zero and the logic of one could, even through a critique of them, lead to an attempt at banishing them in a formulaic-magical way. Value, the subject, the zero and/or the one could then stand on the one side and the corporeality, the individual qualities and also the rest of “what” is abstracted from could be on the other. In this case, it would almost be like an equation: there is a “firm” side (value, subject, etc.), so to speak, which always remains, and a putty side, which can be all kinds of things that are not included in the first side, right up to the state and the androcentric metaphysics of the Enlightenment itself. In this way, the One can then remain as a One in the critique, the value-religion and the value-God are recognized as what they want to make us believe about themselves.

As already indicated, a knowledge of the problem of constitution does not necessarily mean the admission of the non-identical; this was not the case with Hegel, who again included it in the identical, nor was it the case with Marx, since he basically affirmed (surplus) value as being the one, and even in Kant the thing itself, although indispensable to self-constitution, was in itself contradictory; in Kant, the essential thing was the form.

4. Now, the fixation on the violent zero/one has two consequences: on the one hand, the forced equalization of other non-identical moments and, on the other, their suspension in the face of a complex mesh of power in the context of (world) society as a whole.

Firstly, value and the modern subject have, in a sense, arrived at a dissociation harem in the critique of the violent zero/one. Before the law, all are equal, and this problematic assumption is thus still tragically repeated in the critique of the violent zero/one. In fact, from the perspective of the natural sciences and the positivist sciences, it is indeed irrelevant that women, “black” people and “savages” are ascribed similar characteristics which are then dissociated in order to arrive at pure science and maintain it as such. However, only from the point of view of the modern subject are all the dissociated cows gray. Now you could say, well, then you just have to distinguish between different types of dissociation. However, if one chooses the aforementioned value-dissociation approach in its formulaic nature, one remains merely on the epistemological level; to take special qualities into account, however, means to become material and to turn to the matter, the (non-generalizable) content; otherwise this approach itself remains tautological and there is a danger that it will simultaneously exhaust itself in an approach that resembles zoological classification. In this context, violence is not only inflicted by the modern white subject on itself and the object per se, but also on (white) women and “other others.”

On the other hand, however, this tautological approach also leaves other (non-) subjectivities and (non-) egos out of a complex power dynamic by basically assuming a simple general model of repression, even if the (male) subject himself has to abstract from his corporeality. The modern white subject thus acquires the apparent role of the lone actor. In contrast, “black” people, for example, are equally inferior “others” as white woman, but what about “black” men who also see their wives as “others”? What is needed here is a more systemic approach (albeit not in the Luhmannian sense), which no longer takes the violent zero/one as a more or less abstract perpetrator subject without renouncing the concept of it and without drowning it in “differences” in an equally bad, abstract way. The tension between concept and differentiation must be endured without in turn hypostatizing this tension.

In the value-dissociation theory, the concept of “dissociation” is clearly delineated.

It manifests itself on the cultural and symbolic level of discourse, it encompasses the material dimension, women’s responsibility for reproductive activities, and it is also evident in the sphere of social psychology (the male child having to separate himself from his mother in order to achieve a masculine identity). Value-dissociation, moreover, is not simply found in specific spheres, but permeates all areas and levels of society, as it can also be understood as a social process. In post-modernity, in which the patriarchy is becoming feral, it has a different face than in the modern era. Since the theory of dissociation cannot assert itself as something absolute (in terms of the theory of knowledge) without denying itself, it is condemned to admit even what does not fit into it. Thus, it asserts itself as a reflection of a fundamental contradiction, which in its momentary formulation collapses into itself again and for this very reason and only for this reason can it represent the conceptuality of a fundamental relationship which is always relativized.

The precise knowledge of a zero/one that causes violence and (in one way or another) is dissociative, is thus only the first step towards a more complex theory of value-dissociation, that – ceterum censeo – wants to show that this one, precisely in its “oneness” that never fails to present de facto results in social reality, is precisely not what it thinks it is. The violent zero/one is and is not at the same time, at least not in its merely negative self-conception.

5. Incidentally, in relativizing itself, the theory of value-dissociation does not believe itself to be in the least bit beyond the commodity-producing patriarchy. In its recourse to the individual, the particular, the different, it by no means represents a “germinal form” of the Other. It is aware of its historicity and limitations and can only hope to “make conditions dance” in its formulation, in the knowledge that it still has a long and rocky road ahead of it out of patriarchal-capitalist conditions, at the end of which it can hopefully become superfluous itself. For this theory, the non-identical is by no means something that goes beyond the given situation, but taking it into account means first and foremost being able to embrace the existence of negative data much better than a reductionism of identity logic.

In this context, I also don’t think that there is a fundamental tendency within capitalism today for “the structurally male enlightenment subject increasingly striving to make its ‘gentle,’ ‘natural’ and therefore ‘feminine’ characteristics fruitful for the valorization process, while the ‘servant society’ (Frank Rentschler) that is currently emerging in the crisis is simultaneously in the process of relegating ‘feminine nature’ to its supposedly sole and ‘natural’ social place.” It is much more complicated: men are being forcibly feminized and turned into housewives in precarious employment situations; they no longer have the role of family breadwinner. Women, on the other hand, have to become competitive subjects, otherwise they will fail, because they are responsible for both life and survival, although at the same time, in fact, for example in management concepts, the “feminine values” and “sympathies” that also exist in men must also be harnessed in the valorization process. Measured against the old, modern notions of the subject, we now have a postmodern “one-gender model”: women are men (competitive subjects), only different (still responsible for reproduction). Today’s capitalism can no longer afford to reduce women to their (ascribed) “natural” role as in the past, even if women today – having come over from classical modernity – are once again given preference over men for servant and care work. This is why we still have a socialization based on value-dissociation, albeit in decay. Both sides of the relation are now in crisis – both value and the dialectically mediated dissociation, without both being “gone” as a result.

6. Nor do I see religion emerging in the crisis today as the “inscrutable feminine” (if I have understood this correctly at all), as the always other side of “instrumental reason, which today leads itself ad absurdum.” It seems more likely to me that it is not chaos that expresses itself (again?) in religion today; instead, religion today appears regressively as an order-maker, but no longer as a unified-universalist one, but as a fragmented-group-pluralist and also individualized one, as corresponds to the “fall of God into the abyss of his concept” in the decline of capitalism.

I think Jörg Ulrich’s assessment in his book Individuality as a Political Religion seems more accurate to me when he writes that Jörg Bopp describes the “[…] ‘mixture of technical dynamism and pseudo-religious faith’ as ‘one of the greatest dangers facing our civilization today’. With this fear, Bopp ties in with Detlef Clausen’s determination, who places modern anti-Semitism at the center of his considerations and states that here, as in all everyday religions, ‘truncated perceptions […] solidify into a reality-distorting system that can be shared not only by fringe groups, but by the majority of society.’ […] In them, traditional religion is overcome, but the fundamentally religious perception of the world remains and combines ‘with conformist elements of consciousness that spare individuals the pain of asociality’ […] Everyday religious subjects compensate for their fear of the consequences of consistent social modernization and its own processes of individualization and disintegration” (p. 134).

The one who turns the corner here first is Carl Schmitt (as Ulrich has just shown with regard to individualized subjects today), is the sovereign who is supposed to judge the state of exception in a decisionist manner, even if this is no longer possible today in the same way as it was in the era of National Socialism. This “state of exception” is constituted at the level of isolated postmodern individuals, but as a “molecular civil war,” a term coined by Enzensberger, which I transfer to the (apparently) private relational war between postmodern individuals (not only with regard to gender issues) that is raging everywhere today. In addition, of course, the same thing happens on the most varied levels of (world) society in the various civil wars; but also when lawless spaces, camps, etc. emerge and the sovereign (such as the USA) abandons constitutional considerations in order to restore “order.” The sovereign, who corresponds to the value-man-god, is invoked here once again in decaying capitalism, although or precisely because it can no longer consolidate itself today as it did in the past.

When capitalism gets out of hand in the course of the “collapse of modernization” and threatens to drift into the fragmentary and barbaric, there is a renewed need to confront this historically new form of chaos in a harsh order-making manner, even if this can no longer succeed like it did in the past. This new form of chaos and this new form of order-making are in fact mutually dependent and constitute each other; they produce each other in a specific form within the framework of a decaying capitalism.

7. It is possible to say for modernity that the value-god, secularized to a certain extent, now turns the genuinely religious god of pre-modernity, from which he actually originates, into a “woman.” Whereas the latter was previously the law, in modernity he is pushed into irrationality and is now considered chaotic and inferior himself. In my opinion, however, what we observe in religion today has less to do with the blazing chaos and more to do with the paradoxical synthetic resurrection of God after the end of the value-man-God, who himself had defined his precursor as inferior, a precursor who is now taken from the tomb as the great order-maker (albeit in fact in a fragmented, pluralistic form) in order to establish (or return to?) unity, order, and meaning because in fact value-dissociation as a fundamental principle and thus the subject-object split has not been overcome. With the crisis of socialization based on value-dissociation, the traditionally understood patriarchal god with a beard and a half bald head, which has been turned into a woman in modernity, is invoked today in all its obsolescence, ironically making this obsolescence even more apparent. And so it’s no wonder that the apostle Paul has recently been rediscovered as a revolutionary and that there has been a “theological turn of postmodern theory” (Doris Akrap).

Neither the postmodern “one-gender model,” in which competition and service are equally inscribed, nor the phenomenon of a potentially barbaric “(everyday) religion” have anything to do with gentle femininity; rather, both should be interpreted as symptoms of a feralization of the modern commodity-producing patriarchy. The question arises as to which inconsistencies can be taken up today, when inconsistency has already become, so to speak, the essential constituent of the current state of society, the commodity-producing patriarchy in decay and feralization. In other words, the paradoxical question arises as to which inconsistencies an already obsolete socialization based on value-dissociation, which nevertheless still exists in all its harshness, could point beyond itself. At the moment, I don’t think that it is possible to make any concrete statements on this.

In my opinion, however, it is possible today to at least analyze this state of affairs, taking into account a necessary differentiation between the concept and the differences existing in said complexity and enduring the corresponding tension without re-hypostatizing this mediatedness; knowing that this is only a transitory stage towards its abolition.

This is what is needed today, not SIMPLE knowledge of the existence of social “inconsistencies.” The question that leads us in this direction can only be asked if it doesn’t lead to a return to the strict concept of violence in the name of order and security. But this also means going beyond the SIMPLE determination of the violent zero/one with its SIMPLE inconsistencies in order not to unintentionally work towards a false and today anyway impossible resurrection of God in the barbaric fragmentation in the form of a value-concept-God.

Originally published on exit-online.org on 05/06/2005

The Biologization of the Social

December 26, 2024December 26, 2024 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

The world undergoes a new kind of “disenchantment”

Robert Kurz

The modern world defines ancient societies’ relationship with nature as irrational. The notion that mountains and rivers, animals and plants have souls seems to modern consciousness as ugly as the idea that someone can be bewitched by magic. Max Weber, as we know, spoke of the “disenchantment of the world” by Enlightenment reason, by the rationality of science and technology.

However, this contrast between modern rationality and pre-modern irrationality in dealing with nature is far too simplistic. Firstly, ancient societies were not at all irrational in their “process of metabolism with nature” (Marx), as they had to provide for themselves. In addition, they created admirable artifacts and bequeathed knowledge that modern people still use. Secondly, modern society is not guided by strict rationality in relation to natural objects. The scale on which the current mode of production destroys its own natural foundations of life leaves us in doubt about Max Weber’s statement.

Rather, we should be referring to a “second disenchantment” of the world by modern society. This disenchantment, in fact, surpasses all the previous ones, because its magical pretension is total and unconsidered. The splitting up of feelings, sensitive experiences and dreams by abstract reason has given rise to a sphere of “irrationalism” divorced from rational ends and ideas – and this both in individuals and in society in general. Autonomized abstract reason itself is only rational in its means, not in its end.

That end is the “economization” of man and nature under the dictates of money, which in turn has no rational origin, only a magical one. Not only are the social relations of modernity permeated by the modern magic of money and its irrational end in itself, but also modern science and technology as well. The instrumental rationality of economized consciousness is therefore in eternal danger of turning into irrational affections.

This modern irrationalism doesn’t just make itself known in the guise of religious movements. Just as often, it can be seen in the rational guise of political ideas and even supposed scientific knowledge. This correlation is expressed most clearly when human society and history are reduced to semi-natural objects. Now, if nature is in itself more than it appears to be to the objectifying gaze of the natural scientist, man is also more than just nature, otherwise he would be incapable of conceiving of it. The reductionism of the natural sciences can only know nature unilaterally; human society, however, is entirely ignored. The apparent objectivity of scientific rationality comes across as wild irrationalism as soon as it tries to dissolve social relations into semi-physical or semi-biological factors.

But it is precisely towards this reductionism that modern science tends. Unable to solve “metaphysical” questions, it has thrown philosophy into the dustbin of the history of ideas. The philosophical and revolutionary 18th century still devised reckless critical thinking in order to give a certain legitimacy to the nascent capitalist society. The 19th century, as the “century of the natural sciences,” sought to trim the claws of social theory and placate its mordacity with pseudo-scientific doctrines. At a time of relentless and widespread misery, it was urgent to lend capitalism the dignity of natural laws in order to make it invulnerable and snatch it out of its historical context. Thus, economics became the “physics” of the total market and its supposedly eternal laws, and sociology began to conceive of itself as the “biology” of social relations, in order to cover up the social contradictions of modernity under the cloak of natural necessities.

The universal competition between individuals, social groups and nations, that existed because of capitalism, was increasingly given a biological interpretation backed up by these “scientific” ideologies. Count de Gobineau, a French diplomat, created the so-called “races” of humanity and elaborated a theory about their “natural” inequalities – evidently a pseudo-scientific legitimization of European colonialism, whose empire over the colored population was to be founded on the alleged biological superiority of the “white race.”

When Darwin discovered the history of biological evolution, his theory of natural selection in the “struggle for existence” was immediately transposed to human society. Darwin himself did not fail to take sides. In some of his letters, he criticized the then incipient trade union movement, since its demands for solidarity hindered the process of natural selection and burdened society with specimens unfit for competition.

This social Darwinism maintained an obscene link with the “physics” of the market. At the end of the 19th century, they were joined by what was known as eugenics or “racial hygiene,” which advocated the hereditary transmission of social qualities. The lower classes of criminals and disqualified people were labeled as “hereditarily inferior” men who should be prevented from reproducing. On the other side of the coin was the acclaimed “victorious type” of the beautiful, strong man with a “healthy heritage.”

At eugenics exhibitions held in Germany, England and the United States, entire families were paraded like farm animals as specimens of good stock and “pure blood.” Not even the workers’ movement escaped such madness. Karl Kautsky, the social-democratic theoretician, wrote with all candor in favor of “social hygiene,” and the already well-off specialized workers based their repudiation of the “sloppy lumpen-proletariat” on biological and eugenic arguments.

In this pseudo-scientific imbroglio of ideologies that permeated the whole of Western society around the turn of the century, two distinct sociobiological images gradually gained prominence. On the one hand, a social racism developed that labeled people of color, the sick, criminals, the disabled, the ragged, etc. as “inferior men.” The construction of industrial society fell exclusively to strong white workers, and all superfluous “ballast” had to be thrown away. This malevolent irrationalism went hand in hand with the contempt and degradation of women, who were accused of a certain “physiological imbecility.”

On the other hand, a new anti-Semitism began to spread, without any religious basis. “The Jew” was imagined as the “negative superman,” as a kind of prince of darkness and the antipode of the nouveau prince of labor. This Manichean conception reduced the perniciousness and catastrophes of the monetary economy to the biological constitution of “Jewish finance capital,” which the “good” money of venerable white labor had to confront. The anonymous and non-subjective laws of the expanding world market were therefore translated into the folly of the alleged global conjuring of a “foreign race.”

As everyone knows, National Socialism took the dual biological ideology of the “inferior man” and the “negative superman” to the extreme consequence of annihilation on an industrial scale. After the horrors of Auschwitz, no one wanted to commit themselves to such ideas, which then slipped into the historical background. In the period of great prosperity that followed the Second World War, they flickered only as specters of an inauspicious past that was believed to be banished forever. The economic and social sciences, however, were in fact only superficially cleansed of the conceptual dross of biologism and social Darwinism. More than ever, political economy used a type of social science that was averse to “dim lights,” setting itself up as a “rigorous” semi-natural science.

While growth and evolution beckoned with a global perspective of well-being, the lemurs of social biologism remained locked away in the netherworld. From this perspective, the flowering of critical sociology and neo-Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s was illusory, as it merely repeated the emancipatory ideas of the past and found itself unable to survive periods of economic boom. When the economic crisis made its comeback, left-wing social critique disappeared significantly from the big public stages in Western countries. At that time, the theory of post-modern deconstructivism based on Foucault, which suited the casino capitalism speculation of the Reagan and Thatcher era, was all the rage. The world – including the market system – seemed to dissolve into “discourse” that could be played with at will.

But in the refuge of the jovial and neurasthenic “risk society,” as German sociologist Ulrich Beck called it – referring to the development of the 1980s – the turbulence of a new racism erupted. Since then, racist power has spread around the world in a torrent of bloody excesses. In Germany too, immigrants and refugees have been coldly killed by mobs of right-wing radicals in arson attacks. To this day, the public sphere downplays such crimes as the work of a few disaffected youths. In reality, however, the racist power loose in the streets is the harbinger of a turnaround in the world’s atmospheric conditions.

In the factories of ideas themselves, other winds are blowing. The last decade has seen the biologism of a new “natural science” creep wolfishly into academic discourse, which increasingly mirrors the legacy of the playful, “post-sociological” fashion of deconstructivism. At first glance, it seemed that genetic research would be able to debunk racist nonsense with scientific arguments. Researchers such as the Swedish molecular geneticist Svante Pããbo proved that men from the most diverse nations, by virtue of their DNA sequences, can be genetically more “related” to each other than to their closest neighbors. But these findings are now increasingly strained under the weight of a new “biologization” of social conduct, for which, incidentally, the geneticists themselves are ready to provide the ammunition. American neurologist Steven Pinker claims that language is “congenital to man like an elephant’s trunk,” and that there must therefore be a certain “grammar gene.” For Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, from San Diego, free will itself is nothing more than “neurological reactions.” Scientists at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin say they have found a virus that supposedly triggers melancholy and is transmitted by domestic cats. And Dean Hammer, an American molecular biologist, attributes homosexuality to the Xq28 gene, located at the end of the X chromosome.

As is always the case, these are unproven hypotheses that say less about nature than they do about the ideological preferences of scientists. These scholars are often naïve from a social point of view and so perhaps don’t realize how their “purely objective” research is influenced by ideological currents that undermine society. It goes without saying that the reduction of human culture and sociability to the standard of molecular biology provides arguments for the legitimization of a renewed barbarism. The American social scientists Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their study entitled The Bell Curve, had already created a correlation between “race, genes and IQ” that excluded black Americans from the “cognitive elite” in a pseudo-biological way. Soon, the ill-fated scientists will provide us with a “crime gene” or a “poverty gene.”

The discovery of genetic underpinnings to people’s social destiny fits the neoliberal policy of cutting costs like a glove. The new academic discipline of “medical economics” is gradually providing carte blanche for the poor, sick and disabled in Western countries to be given “aid in dying” for cost reasons. Debates on the subject are taking place in broad daylight in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer, whose grandparents died in German concentration camps, now advocates the National Socialist thesis that defective newborns should be immolated for being “unworthy of life.” In China today, a bill is being passed to legalize euthanasia.

This social-Darwinian brutalization on a global scale is matched by a new wave of anti-Semitism in all corners of the globe. Half a century after Auschwitz, synagogues are once again being burnt down in Germany; from the Atlantic to the Urals and even in Japan, the smear campaign against Jewish communities is flourishing; and to top it all off, Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the “Black Muslims” in the United States, is exercising his defamation in anti-Semitic tirades. All social groups, including civil rights movements, are succumbing more and more to biological arguments in the fierce battle of competition, in order to differentiate themselves from humanity. Under the influence of the globalization of capital and based on the academic arguments of geneticists, we may be facing the threat of a “universalist” biologism that considers all people inept at competing within monetary society to be “inferior individuals” and that, at the same time, wants to blame the future catastrophes of the market economy on a “Jewish conspiracy.”

Neoliberalism, with its ideological pseudo-physics of market laws, has loosened the shackles of all the demons of modern barbarism and thus harked back to the irrationality of 19th century “social scientism.” The naturalization of the economy, however, has the logical consequence of bestializing social relations. Neoliberal thought leaders are not only responsible for the advent of fundamentalism, but also for the current return to social Darwinism and anti-Semitism.

Originally published on 07/07/96

Mindfulness: Propaganda and Narcotic

December 21, 2024December 21, 2024 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

Thomas Meyer

1. Submission as Freedom: Happiness in the “Best of All Worlds” (Candide/Voltaire)

In the neoliberal regime, people are forced to see themselves as entrepreneurs of their own labor power so that they can properly satisfy the imperatives of the market, with the ultimate aim of “self-determined” submission to the capitalist valorization process and its constraints. In Western democracies, such self-enslavement is understood as freedom. Here democracy, of course, means nothing other than that everyone is formally subjected to the same coercive freedom. Neoliberalism was only the most recent form taken by the “cage of bondage” (Max Weber) that capitalism has always been (cf. Kurz 1999). In the “commodity-producing patriarchy” (Roswitha Scholz), one’s freedom of personality is about as free as a corset. You are supposed to fit in perfectly to the demands of the market, while of course reserving the freedom to tie your own noose however you would like. Everyone has the freedom to strive for their own happiness, which implies nothing less than the fact that failure and falling behind are also one’s own responsibility. Success and failure, suffering and stress are privatized. Subjectivization in neoliberalism throws the individual back on themselves. Social structures are ignored, while collective thinking and action are denied or suppressed. Collective struggle and solidarity seem impossible. Being flexible and remaining resilient is the type of freedom forced upon every individual (see Graefe 2019). Bad health becomes private guilt. Unhealthy people have allegedly eaten the wrong food and exercised too little. According to neoliberal propaganda, this is also the sole responsibility of the individual and is not due to the stress caused by work or the restriction that having a low income places on one’s “freedom of choice” (cf. Mayr 2021). Diseases are becoming a purely medical problem. The so-called diseases of civilization, such as cardiovascular diseases, have a lot to do with the fact that many people are permanently “in overdrive,” or must be, which physiologically results in higher blood pressure. The long-term consequences of higher blood pressure are damage to the blood vessels, which contributes massively to cardiovascular diseases (see Cechura 2018). Furthermore, mental illnesses also become a privatized ailment. Their causes are supposedly located in one’s own brain, and not in the circumstances of life, so that the cure, according to neuroscientific vulgar materialism, is the consumption of psychotropic drugs (cf. Schleim 2021 & Hasler 2023).

This “musical chairs” that everyone is exposed to in varying degrees in the capitalist regime, which is sold as freedom by the dominant propaganda, does not have to end in a psychiatric hospital or a morgue. However, universal competition leads to more and more people being crushed by it, which has negative socio-psychological and health consequences. Those affected by capitalism, especially those who are lonely and isolated, nevertheless try to “somehow” process what is happening to them. There are plenty of self-help books and paid courses that help individuals cope with themselves and the world: You just have to believe in yourself, think positively, be optimistic, change your diet, accept economic or personal crises as opportunities, discover unrecognized potential in and beside yourself, etc. It is a mixture of adaptation to the market, denial of reality and self-abuse. Those who are “realists” transfigure reality and subordinate themselves to it. Esotericism is also part of this context of individual self-optimization. Esotericism promises many people meaning and direction in their lives, seemingly offering a holistic perspective much different from the “cold rationality” of objective science (or medicine). However, instead of placing life crises in a social context and enabling a collective defenseagainst capitalism’s impositions (e.g. through strikes and sabotage), esotericism serves as an opportunity to constantly reinvent oneself as a neoliberal subject through withdrawal into the private sphere and inwardness, through passivation and gobbledygook, through “wholeness” and health, or it helps one endure the stress (cf. Barth 2012). Esotericism often appears to be harmless promotion of the self, but it has always been and still is linked to reactionary and fascist thinking (cf. Kratz 1994, Speit 2021). Of course, esotericism here has nothing to do with its original meaning from antiquity, namely secret or hard-to-access knowledge that not everyone can or should share. What I mean here is the esotericism that is a billion-dollar business. Naturally, elements or aspects of various religious or philosophical traditions are exploited for this purpose and instrumentalized for neoliberal propaganda and self-indoctrination.

2. Meditation as the “Opium of the Masses” (Marx)

A few years ago, Zen Buddhist and management professor Ronald Purser criticized the neoliberal instrumentalization and exploitation of Buddhist meditation practice in his book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Spirituality of Capitalism[1] (Purser 2021). In Western countries, so-called mindfulness has become a widespread fad. Mindfulness, which can be achieved through a certain form of meditation practice, is primarily intended to reduce stress and strengthen concentration. This meditation practice is called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). A key agitator and preacher of this method is Jon Kabat-Zinn, who Purser repeatedly refers to in the book. This practice says that you should do things like stay in the here and now, not be attached, not judge, have neither negative nor positive feelings, breathe in and out constantly, eat a raisin mindfully, etc. Corresponding courses are used and offered almost everywhere: at schools, at universities, for stressed managers, for stressed employees, for entrepreneurs, at all kinds of conferences, in Davos, and even in the military (so that the soldiers take a deep breath beforehand and don’t fire at random). The mindfulness preachers claim that if everyone just practiced mindfulness, the world could be changed and everything would be fine. Everything is therefore up to the individual. Nothing else needs to be done (such as getting involved in politics, trade unions or, above all, social critique). Just stay mindful in the now. Do Kabat-Zinn & Co really believe their own propaganda? Either way, this idea is based on a bottomless ignorance that doesn’t have or want to have a clue about how the world really works, how other people really live, or the problems marginalized people face. The mindfulness apostles “assume a false unity of human experience” (ibid., 249) and apparently do not even realize from what social filter bubble they are arguing. On the one hand, the mindfulness preachers emphasize that the meditation practice they offer has nothing to do with Buddhism, but is secular (and therefore legal in U.S. public schools), and that its effectiveness is supposedly (neuro)scientifically proven (the evidence, however, as Purser summarizes, is rather thin, statistically insignificant, indistinguishable from placebo or simply non-existent). On the other hand, the same people emphasize, depending on the occasion and situation – which further underlines the instrumental and intellectually dishonest character of the whole thing – that MBSR is supposedly the essence of the Dharma, i.e. fundamentally and essentially related to Buddhism, and that everything else that makes Buddhism Buddhism is more or less superfluous or nonsense. A certain western-white arrogance comes through here. Buddhism is devalued, and there is no serious engagement with it, since this would apparently be detrimental to the commercialization of meditation in the neoliberal regimes of the West. The title of the book was not chosen by chance: McMindfulness.

According to Purser, none of this really has anything to do with Buddhism. It’s not really accurate to say that a Western school of Buddhism is emerging here (just as Chan Buddhism, for example, gave rise to an independent Chinese Buddhism). On the contrary: the mindfulness programs are a product of neoliberal U.S. society; they are therefore situated in a specific context that is not usually made obvious. Mindfulness, on the other hand, as Purser makes clear, is just one aspect of Buddhist practice that cannot be isolated and certainly cannot be seen as a panacea. Purser therefore has no objections in principle to mindfulness and the meditation practices that cultivate it. The decisive factor, as he always emphasizes, is the social context and the objective to be achieved. Meditation is instrumentalized because it is stripped of its context, because the ethical foundations on which it is based and the goal it strives for are excluded (this is what makes its use in the military possible in the first place).[2] Mindfulness is not solely and certainly not primarily about reducing stress and passively breathing in the now; rather, meditation is part of a cultivation of ethics (sila). Right mindfulness as part of the eightfold path has as its goal compassion, a widening of the gaze and not a narrowing of this gaze and fixation on oneself. It is not the individual as an individual who becomes mindful and “compassionate,” but as part of a community (sangha). Mindfulness, stripped of its ethical context and reduced to the sole purpose of coping with stress, ties in perfectly with the neoliberal ideology mentioned above. Buddhism reduced to the consumption of fast food as a means of coping with stress in the neoliberal regime is, as Adorno would probably say in horror, not even “Halbbildung.” Instead of looking for the causes of stress, such as working conditions that we could fight against together, stress is individualized and turned into a private problem. The aim of reducing stress is to remain or become a productive worker and to simply cope better with stress, to simply endure it and to fit in ina good mood and relaxed manner. The purpose of this is to keep the capitalist machinery running smoothly. Lenin is definitely to be agreed with here when he writes that “religion […] is a kind of spiritual fusel in which the slaves of capital drown their humanity and their claims to a halfway decent life” (Lenin 1974, 7). The booze with which reality is drowned here consists of sucking on a raisin for minutes on end and allowing yourself to be persuaded that your problems could be solved or your life improved by focusing on the here and now. The aim of “mindfulness-based stress reduction” is not to criticize stress and its causes, but to adapt to working conditions and life circumstances. Of course, this also has nothing to do with socially committed Buddhism (such as that of Thich Nhat Hanh). And certainly nothing to do with a critique of capitalism. Mindfulness agitators such as Kabat-Zinn are, so to speak, among the priests of neoliberalism.

3. Critique & Solidarity Instead of Self-Anesthetization

Just as one can find content in the Judeo-Christian tradition that supports a critical stance toward capitalism and its ideology, content that makes it possible to spark collective solidarity against the impositions and presumptions of capitalism (see Böttcher 2023 & 2022, Ramminger; Segbers 2018 & King 2022), a properly understood Buddhism has the potential to also contribute to the practical and theoretical critique of capitalism. If mindfulness as a moment of Buddhist practice is not instrumentalized and vulgarized for neoliberal propaganda and used as a wellness narcotic for resilience and the suppression of reality, so that through it “oppressive systems work more gently” (Purser 2021, 237), i.e. if it is not reduced to making the individual more resilient and compliant, a proper mindfulness can broaden our view and help us to stand firm, clear-minded, and of good heart together. In the words of Ronald Purser: “Because liberation is a systemic process, it cannot rely on individual methods. Social mindfulness starts with the widest possible lens, focusing collective attention on the structural causes of suffering. Groups work together to establish shared meanings and common ground, developing a socially engaged motivation before turning inwards. Clearly, this is different to an eight-week program in a boardroom. It goes much deeper and has longer-term objectives, combining resistance with meditative practice. The aim is not to de-stress for more business as usual. It’s to overcome alienation by working with others in a common struggle, using inner resources to seek social justice, resisting unjust power both to liberate oppressors and oppressed” (ibid., 254.).

However, a critique of neoliberalism will hardly suffice to adequately grasp and criticize capitalism as a “concrete totality” (Scholz 2009) with its fetishistic valorizing movement M-C-M’ and the gender-specific bourgeois subject form as well as the manifold manifestations of crisis (cf. e.g. Jappe 2023, Kurz 1999 & Scholz 1992). Nevertheless, Purser’s contribution to a critique of neoliberal ideology in the form of “mindfulness” is no minor matter, as the size of the esoteric and self-optimization scene shows. As is well known, the Christian churches also have esoteric self-management in their “pastoral offerings” (cf. Böttcher 2022, 73ff.). Naturally, the church does not want to miss out on any potential market share, which is why it is chumming up to the prevailing zeitgeist. Without a collective solidarity that liberates the individual from their lethargy and isolation and their futile attempts to cope using all kinds of psycho-techniques and medication, any attempt to defend themselves against the anti-social impositions and the terror of the economy is doomed to failure. Religious or pseudo-religious practices that confirm the individual in his isolation and do not even dream of having the “whole” in view are not an alternative to the “cold rationality” of capitalism, but its realization.

Literature

Barth, Claudia. 2012. Esoterik – Die Suche nach dem Selbst: Sozialpsychologische Studien zu einer Form moderner Religiosität. Bielefeld: transcript.

Böttcher, Herbert. 2022. “Auf dem Weg zu einer ‚unternehmerischen Kirche’ in Anschluss an die abstürzende Postmoderne.” Available online at: https://www.oekumenisches-netz.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Druck_Unternehmerische-Kirche.pdf.

Böttcher, Herbert. 2023. “Weltvernichtung als Selbstvernichtung: Was im Anschluss an Walter Benjamin ‚zu denken’ gib.” In: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft 20: 159-207.

Cechura, Suitbert. 2018. Unsere Gesellschaft macht krank: Das Leiden der Zivilisation und das Geschäft mit der Gesundheit. Baden-Baden: Tectum Wissenschaftsverlag.

Graefe, Stefanie. 2019. Resilienz im Krisenkapitalismus: Wider das Lob der Anpassungsfähigkeit. Bielefeld: transcript.

Hasler, Felix. 2023. Neue Psychiatrie – Den Biologismus überwinden und tun, was wirklich hilft. Bielefeld: transcript.

Jappe, Anselm. 2023. The Adventures of the Commodity: For a Critique of Value. London: Bloomsbury.

Kratz, Peter. 1994. Die Götter des New Age: Im Schnittpunkt von “Neuem Denken,” Faschismus und Romantik. Berlin: Elefanten.

King Jr., Martin Luther. 2022. I have a dream. San Francisco: HarperOne.

Kurz, Robert. 1999. Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus. Frankfurt: Eichborn.

Lenin. 1974. On Religion. Moscow: Progress Publishers

Mayr, Anna. 2020. Die Elenden: Warum unsere Gesellschaft Arbeitslose verachtet und sie dennoch braucht. Berlin: Hanser.

Purser, Ronald E. 2019. McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Spirituality of Capitalism. London: Repeater.

Ramminger, Michael and Franz Segbers. 2018. “Alle Verhältnisse umwerfen… …und die Mächtigen vom Thron stürzen” – Das gemeinsame Erbe von Christen und Marx. Hamburg.

Schleim, Stephan. 2021. Gehirn, Psyche und Gesellschaft – Schlaglichter aus den Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Berlin: Springer.

Scholz, Roswitha. 1992. “Der Wert ist der Mann – Thesen zur Wertvergesellschaftung und Geschlechterverhältnis.” In: Krisis – Beiträge zur Kritik der Warengesellschaft 12:19-52.

Scholz, Roswitha. 2009. “Gesellschaftliche Form und konkrete Totalität – Zur Dringlichkeit eines dialektischen Realismus heute.” In: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft 6: 55-100.

Speit, Andreas. 2021. Verqueres Denken – Gefährliche Weltbilder in alternativen Milieus. Berlin: Ch. Links.

[1] For reasons of space, page references and citations are largely omitted in the following.

[2] This also applies to the neoliberal use of ancient philosophy, such as the Stoa or Plato.

Originally published on Ökumenisches Netz in 10/2024.

Crisis Imperialism

November 25, 2024November 25, 2024 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

6 Theses on the Character of the New World Order Wars

Robert Kurz

1

Capitalism is not a Buddhist event; it cannot be understood in an ahistorical way. The logic of the principle of valorization, which remains consistent, does not bring about the eternal return of the same, but rather an irreversible historical process with qualitatively different relations. The respective world constellation can only be explained with reference to the development of world capital. When a certain stage of valorization has been exhausted, the associated political institutions, concepts and ideologies also become obsolete. This is all the more true when the world system has reached the level of maturity that it did at the end of the 20th century.

Since the 1980s, the third industrial revolution of microelectronics has begun to set an internal historical limit to the valorization of living labor. Capital is becoming “incapable of valorization” in the sense that at the level of the irreversible productivity and profitability standards it has itself produced, no further real-economic expanded reproduction (an expansion of valorization) is possible. This “structural over-accumulation” of world capital leads to structural mass unemployment in the metropolitan areas through the application of microelectronics, to global overcapacity and a flight of money capital into the financial superstructure (financial bubbles). In the periphery, the lack of capital power prevents microelectronic rearmament; but precisely because of this, entire national economies and world regions collapse all the faster, because they fall so far below the standards of capital-logic that their social reproduction is declared “invalid” by the world market.

The result is a cost-cutting and shutdown race. Globalization is nothing other than transnational rationalization and, in this respect, is actually something qualitatively new. The traditional export of capital in the form of expansive investments abroad according to modular design is being replaced by the outsourcing of business functions in order to exploit global cost differentials. This, on the one hand, creates transnational value chains, while at the same time growing parts of social reproduction dry up and die off. This process is shaped and controlled by equally globalized financial bubble capital.

However, the old gap between metropolises and the periphery remains even under the crisis conditions of globalization; now no longer as a gap in the degree of capitalist development, but as a gap in the degree of social decay. Transnational value creation is becoming more concentrated in the areas of the “triad” (U.S./North America, EU, Japan/South East Asia), while it is becoming ever thinner in the rest of the world. The dynamics of economic globalization in the context of transnational financial markets are breaking up national economic regulatory spaces.

The state in the metropolises is not disappearing, but it is ceasing to be an “ideal total capitalist” in the classical sense. Because, unlike the business economy, it cannot disperse transnationally, it loses one regulatory function after another and mutates into purely repressive crisis management. However, this is not merely a matter of the social degradation of growing sections of society; capital is also involuntarily destroying a whole series of its own structural conditions of existence. This is reflected not least in a contradiction of a new quality between the transnational valorization of capital and the national form of money (currency).

In the periphery, the state apparatuses are dissolving to a far greater extent – along with the majority of capitalist reproduction. Public services are almost completely disappearing, the administration is capitulating, and the repressive apparatuses are running wild. All that remains are small islands of productivity and profitability in an ocean of disorganization and impoverishment. All national economic development comes to a standstill; the globally active corporations snatch up these insular sectors as components of their transnational business economy. At the same time, an economy of plunder emerges in which the physical substance of the collapsed national economy is exploited, and population groups attack each other according to ethnic or religious criteria in a continuation of competition by other means. Marauding groups take the place of social institutions. A large part of the elite is transformed into the leadership of ethnic or religious bandits and clan militias, into warlords and princes of terror.

These conditions are only a transitional stage of the world crisis at the historical limit of the valorization process. For the time being, the economy of plunder can still dock onto the world market and make the exploitation of economic ruins appear to be a continuing process of valorization, just as, on the other hand, it does through the constant inflation of financial bubbles in the core. But both phenomena are approaching complete exhaustion.

2

Against this background, classical imperialism has come to an end. Just as the business economy can no longer be formed and regulated on a national basis, the subjugation and incorporation of capitalistically superfluous population masses no longer makes sense. The territorial form of domination and expansion has become obsolete. The “hands,” which make up the majority of the world’s population, are no longer useful, but are unable to break free from the capitalist logic which, as a negative world-socialization, is maintained at all costs.

In the post-war period, the competition between the old (mainly European) national expansionist powers had already been replaced by the bipolar competition between two superpowers: the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Here, what was decisive was no longer the struggle for national zones of influence, but the question of the regulating principles and modalities of capitalist reproduction. It was about the competition between the historical latecomers on the world market, the societies of “recuperative modernization” in the reference area of the Pax Sovietica, and the societies of the developed capitalist core in the reference area of the Pax Americana. The U.S. had already matured into the sole leading power of the West on the basis of continental resources and the largest domestic market in the world; it had pulled away unassailably thanks to the dynamics of its military-industrial complex after the Second World War.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of “recuperative modernization” in the crisis of the third industrial revolution, there is no going back to the old intra-imperialist conflicts of national expansionist powers. Instead, we are faced with the planetary unification of the Pax Americana, but this in the context of a precarious minority capitalism based on financial bubbles and an economy of plunder. It is ridiculous to talk of a new intra-imperial competition between the U.S. and the FRG or EU. The U.S. military apparatus built up in the decades of the post-war boom is unrivaled; year after year, the U.S. armaments budget is more than twenty times that of Germany. There are neither military nor political and economic conditions for a new rival power.

Despite a certain relevant rhetoric and individual moments of interest, the U.S. is not acting in the name of national territorial expansion, but as a kind of global protective power of the valorization imperative and its laws under conditions of crisis in the world system. Everyone operates in a context of transnational processes of valorization, while simultaneously feeling the pressure of a growing mass of “superfluous” people. Therefore, the role of the U.S. as the last monocentric superpower is not only to be explained externally by its military weight, but also by the deterritorialized conditions of globalization itself. The entirety of transnational capital, the financial markets, and what remains of the state apparatuses in the core are dependent on the ability of the U.S. to police the world.

What has thus emerged is an “ideal total imperialism” under the sole leadership of the U.S., extended via NATO and other world-capitalist institutions. The image of the enemy is clearly not one of internal imperialist national interests, but one of a democratic, total imperialism against the crisis ghosts of the unified world system. The state capitalist empire of failed “recuperative modernization” has been replaced by a diffuse complex of disruptive potentials, ethno- and religious terrorism, anomic conditions, etc. as a new “realm of evil.”

“Ideal total imperialism” essentially acts as a security and exclusion imperialism of the democratic capitalist core against the crisis conditions created by capital itself, without ever being able to overcome them. Security is to be established in order to guarantee the smooth flow of capitalist transactions, even in the precarious islands of valorization on the periphery. This includes, first and foremost, guaranteeing the supply of fuel for the capitalist world machine. Here too, however, it is not a question of specifically national oil interests, but of the process of transnational valorization. The core’s common interest in excluding the mass global migration movement emanating from the collapsing zones of the periphery lies even farther beyond national territorial claims to power.

3

The contradictions within the framework of democratic imperialism as a whole (such as the current dispute between the FRG, France, Belgium etc. on the one hand and the leading power, the U.S., on the other) are of merely secondary importance. To deduce from this the logic of a new major intra-imperial conflict along the lines of the World War II era would be about as intelligent as trying to declare the differences between, say, Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain (which, as we know, stayed out of the Second World War) to be the “real” conflict of that time.

It is not old-style national competition that determines the current intra-imperial conflicts, but some subaltern governments’ fears of consequences that may no longer be controllable. NATO and the rest of the world are dividing themselves into submissive and hesitant vassals, without the latter being able or even willing to openly rebel against the U.S. The procrastination stems more from the fear of those who do not have their own finger on the trigger, while the compliant are more likely to be those who have nothing more to lose, but also nothing to say anyway.

While up to now, including the Afghanistan intervention, there has been no opposition to the world wars under the aegis of the U.S. and the Red-Green government has sent its Germanic auxiliary troops into the field with oorah-democratic ideology, the announced pre-emptive strike against Iraq is now raising concerns because international law, the UN and sovereignty – the guarantees of the much-invoked capitalist community of states and “peoples” – are being openly disregarded. The FRG, France and the rest of the world are afraid that they will soon be treated in a similar way and that the existing legitimizing construct could give up the ghost.

The fact that the U.S. is so rudely trampling on the rules of the game of the capitalist world of states that it itself installed after 1945 is a formal consequence of the internal contradiction between the national constitution of the last world power on the one hand and its transnational “mission” as a protective power of the globalized valorization process on the other. The deeper substantive reason, however, is that the principle of sovereignty itself, which consists precisely in uniting populations territorially as a “total labor force,” has become obsolete. Even the core states, including the U.S. itself, are relinquishing more and more internal functions of sovereignty through “privatization,” including the apparatus of force. By declaring the sovereignty of “rogue states” null and void in foreign relations as well, the U.S. is only executing the world crisis on the political-legal level, which heralds the end of all civil contractual relationships (and ultimately the end of the sovereignty of the U.S. itself). The conservative resistance to this dynamic on the part of some European states is doomed to failure. Old anti-American resentments may also play a role here, but no longer a decisive one.

4

The problem faced by the all-imperial world police force is that it can only act on the level of sovereignty, which it must, on the other hand, destroy with its own hands. This also applies to the high-tech weapons systems that are geared towards classic territorial conflicts. The ghosts of crises, potential troublemakers, terrorist gangs, etc. cannot be reached in this way because they themselves operate in the folds of globalization. Al Qaeda is structured exactly like a transnational corporation. Military superiority is becoming useless, the “war on terror” is becoming a big swing and a miss. At the same time, the end of the financial bubble economy threatens a severe crisis for the capitalist core, especially for its heart, the U.S. economy itself, and consequently a severe world depression. This would also call into question the continued ability to finance the high-tech apparatus of the last world power.

This is why the U.S. administration has switched back from the “war on terror” to the paradigm of “rogue states.” The pre-emptive strike against Iraq signals a double flight forward. On the one hand, the ruin of Iraqi sovereignty with its exhausted army is to be “defeated” as an easy opponent of a classic state-territorial character in order to show the world who is master of the house. On the other hand, the impending economic collapse is to be cushioned by immediate access to the Iraqi (perhaps also the Saudi) oil fields and the dismantling of OPEC. This is less about the material flow of oil, which would be guaranteed even without military intervention, and more about saving the financial markets in the short term. The dwindling recycling from the financial bubbles must be renewed, and this is not possible without a “future option” for a new secular prosperity. After the “Pacific century” option proved to be just as much a flop in this respect with the collapse of the Japanese and South-East Asian models as the new economy of internet and telecoms capitalism, the “oil at pre-OPEC prices” option is now to bring it under direct U.S. control.

However, this could backfire. The Iraqi army is not a serious opponent, but a possible urban battle for Baghdad and other centers with high casualty figures, major destruction and millions of refugees would morally discredit the U.S. around the world. Above all, however, it would certainly not be possible to install a stable regime; Milosevic and Saddam are in any case obsolete models of sovereignty. However, a U.S. military administration of Iraq and the entire oil region in constant confrontation with guerrillas and terror would be neither affordable nor politically and militarily sustainable and, moreover, anything but a signal of euphoria for the financial markets. The “victory” over Iraq will inevitably be a Pyrrhic victory that can only exacerbate the overall crisis of the world system.

5

However, it is not just about the pseudo-rationality of certain “interests,” which are always subordinated to the irrational end in itself of the principle of valorization. The vulgar materialism of interests fails to recognize the real metaphysics of capital as a secularized religion whose irrationality overwhelms the internal rational interests at the boundaries of the system. The valorization imperative, which is indifferent to all sensual content, ultimately demands the dissolution of the physical world into the empty form abstraction of value, i.e. its annihilation. In this respect, we can speak of an almost gnostic death drive of capital, which expresses itself in the logic of destruction in business management as well as in the potential for violence in competition. Because the contradictions can no longer be resolved in a new model of accumulation, this death drive is now manifesting itself directly and globally.

The self-preservation of the system at all costs turns into the self-destruction of its actors. Mass shooters, suicide cults, and suicide bombers are executing the objective madness to an unprecedented extent as a reaction to the crisis devoid of any prospects. Closely linked to this is the anti-Semitic syndrome as the last crisis-ideological resort of the capitalist subject form, which breaks out again and no longer concentrates on a specific national-imperial constitutional history (such as the German-Austrian one in the past), but floods the world in diffuse post-modern and post-national amalgamations, especially of religious provenance.

Because the capitalist internal rationality of the bourgeois subject of enlightenment cannot represent itself in a new model of accumulation, it no longer forms an immanent potency against the systemic death drive, but itself immediately turns into a moment of this irrationality. Enlightenment and counter-enlightenment, reason and delusion, democracy and dictatorship fall into one. Democratic imperialism as a whole is unable to pacify its own world of crises, but instead becomes the “ideal total mass shooter,” right up to the use of nuclear weapons against the zones of insecurity, the intangible specters of crisis and the masses of the “superfluous,” as the U.S. administration has already openly threatened.

6

There is no longer an immanent alternative. But because the left knows nothing other than to occupy immanent alternatives on the ground of capitalist ontology and developmental history, it largely flees into the past and engages in an absurd argument about whether we are writing 1914 or 1941. Both factions are intellectually stuck in the era of a capital based on national economies and national-imperial powers of expansion, both are illiterate in terms of crisis theory and, more generally, with respect to the critique of political economy, and both cling to the capitalist internal rationality of the bourgeois enlightenment subject.

The nostalgics of 1914 and followers of Lenin’s mummy conjure up the phantasm of an “anti-imperialist” alliance of left-wing pacifists in the metropolises with the “sovereignists” and “peoples” of the Third World, who are supposed to defend their bourgeois independence against Western imperialism. The nostalgics of 1941, on the other hand, are delirious with the idea of an “anti-Hitler” coalition led by the “good” Western powers against “Islamic fascism” and its German accomplices to protect Israel and “civilization.”

But Saddam’s regime is neither a world-threatening Nazi empire nor a hopeful force for national development, and bin Laden is neither a Hitler nor a Che Guevara. The Palestinian state is disintegrating even before it can be founded, because statehood is no longer an emancipatory option at all; conversely, the barbarism of intifada and suicide attacks cannot be equated with the factory extermination of Jews at Auschwitz. The false friends of the Third World subsume Israel under imperialism and ignore its essential quality as a result of global anti-Semitism; the false friends of Israel glorify the reactionary-ultra-religious forces responsible for the murder of Rabin and themselves fall into primitive racist agitation. Some negate Israel as a place of refuge, others ignore the fact that its existence is more endangered by its own internal crisis barbarism than by external military threats.

The zombies of 1914 accept the völkisch-anti-Semitic, culturalist-anti-American neglect of “class struggle” and “anti-imperialism.” The zombies of 1941 abandon any critique of the imperial war for world order, unrestrainedly denouncing both the beleaguered Israeli as well as the U.S. left-wing opposition and distorting the necessary criticism of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism to legitimize democratic bombing terror. What is needed instead is a radical opposition to war that confronts the real world situation and develops a categorical critique of capitalist modernity beyond the false immanence of pseudo-alternatives, which only represent different forms of the same cosmopolitan crisis barbarism.

Originally published on exit-online.org on 03/01/2003.

Crisis Management in Times of Change

October 11, 2024October 11, 2024 ~ OlIver Blackwell ~ 1 Comment

The end of neoliberal globalization is giving a boost to neo-fascist crisis management – especially in the former “export world champion”

Tomasz Konicz

It would be wrong, and reminiscent of the bad Marxist tradition, to postulate a one-sided causal inevitability between the development of the economic base and the political-ideological superstructure. Economic development, the unfolding of the internal contradictions of capital, does not unilaterally determine the political system. There are clearly interactions between the two, and the capitalist functional elites have various options open to them when reacting to the consequences of the crisis. Here – and this is crucial – the further course of the crisis can actually be influenced by politics, even if it is, of course, not in a position to overcome the systemic crisis from within capitalism. Many of the emergency measures discussed by politicians in response to crisis episodes can be implemented by governments or regimes of various political orientations. This is particularly evident in the severe crisis phase of the 1930s, when protectionism, labor programs and statism were pursued by states as diverse as Roosevelt’s U.S. and Nazi Germany.

Nevertheless, the latest phase of the crisis, which began at the latest with the pandemic and the surge in inflation, makes a fascist option at least viable, especially in countries with corresponding “traditions.” The fundamental upheaval in the process of crisis and its handling of contradictions was initiated by the pandemic-induced crisis surge. The war in Ukraine is in fact a reaction to this new crisis phase, which is putting an end to neoliberal globalization. This phase is characterized by stagflation, deglobalization, protectionism, active industrial policy, nearshoring and vertical integration.

The four decades of neoliberalism – from the 1980s to around 2020 – were in fact a reaction to the crisis, and they prolonged the unfolding of the internal contradiction of capital. This fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production unfolds as follows: Productive wage labor forms the substance of capital, but at the same time the process of capital valorization strives to displace wage labor from the production process through competitive rationalization measures.

Marx introduced the ingenious term “moving contradiction” for this auto-destructive process. This contradiction of capitalist commodity production, in which capital minimizes its own substance, wage labor, through competition-mediated thrusts of rationalization, can only be maintained by “moving,” by the continuous expansion and further development of new fields of exploitation in commodity production. The same scientific and technological progress that leads to the melting away of the mass of expended wage labor in established branches of industry also gives rise to new branches of industry or production methods.

The result of this is precisely the kinds of change to the overall industrial structure – the ability of capital to constantly “reinvent itself” – that the bourgeois apologists of capitalism are so proud. Since the beginning of industrialization in the 18th century, the capitalist economy has been characterized by a structural change in which the textile industry, heavy industry, the chemical industry, the electrical industry and, most recently, Fordist vehicle manufacturing served as leading sectors that exploited wage labor on a massive scale. With the advent of automation and the IT revolution, the process of changing the structure of industry began to fail in the 1970s and 1980s. These new technologies created far fewer jobs than were rationalized away by their application to the economy as a whole. The productive forces thus burst “the fetters of the relations of production” (Marx) and capital came up against an “inner barrier” (Robert Kurz) to its ability to develop.

How Neoliberalism “Rescued” Capitalism

That capital as a moving contradiction had reached its inner limit was demonstrated very concretely in the crisis period of stagflation that followed the post-war boom, as no new leading industrial sector with mass valorization of wage labor could be developed. The late 1970s and early 1980s were characterized by anemic economic growth, frequent recessions, rapidly rising mass unemployment and an inflation rate that sometimes reached double digits. From a historical perspective, the stagflation of the 1970s – a portmanteau formed from the words stagnation and inflation – was precisely the period of crisis that paved the way for neoliberalism, as Keynesian crisis coping strategies has failed.

In addition to destroying or disempowering the labor movement (Great Britain, U.S.), which led to a long-term stagnation of wage levels in the U.S., neoliberalism reacted to the crisis by removing the “safety nets” from capitalism, with a flight forward in which the markets – especially the financial sector – were deregulated. In order to avoid collapsing due to its internal contradictions, capitalism effectively left the ground of labor exploitation during the neoliberal turn of the 1980s in order to take to the lofty heights of an economic structure dominated by financial markets. The system reacted to the failure of a change to the industrial structure by establishing the financial system as the “lead sector.”

Capital valorization was thus increasingly simulated on the financial markets under neoliberalism. Since no real capital valorization can be carried out within the financial sphere in the long term, growth in the four neoliberal decades was ultimately fueled by a historically unique boom in the most important commodity that the financial sector has to offer: credit. The capitalist world system thus runs on credit, on the anticipation of future utilization, which is pushed further and further into the future through lending. Credit generates the demand that sustains capitalist commodity production, which is choking on its productivity. This can be seen in concrete terms in global debt, which has risen much faster than global economic output in the neoliberal era: from around 120% in the 1970s to 238% in 2022.[1]

The central mechanism that transformed the increasing financial market-generated debt into real economic growth was the speculative bubble. Since the 1980s, the system has thus been increasingly based on the “hot” air of various speculative bubbles that are constantly forming anew: from the dot-com bubble at the turn of the millennium, when the emergence of the Internet led to wild speculation in high-tech stocks that crashed in 2000, to the real estate bubble in Europe and the U.S., to the large liquidity bubble maintained by central banks, which was only brought to an end by inflation in 2020. When a bubble would burst, there would be a threat of a more widespread crash, which would then be prevented by the emergence of a new speculative bonanza. One could speak here of a veritable transfer of bubbles, in which all the fiscal and monetary policy measures used to combat the consequences of a burst speculative dynamic contribute to laying the foundations for the formation of a new bubble. Ultimately, capitalist financial policy can only put out the speculative fire with gasoline.

The End of Neoliberalism

However, this was not a linear process, but a dynamic one. The costs of stabilizing the global financial system increased more and more as each bubble burst until, in the inflationary phase of monetary policy, outside of the U.S. with its world reserve currency, there was no alternative but to stop the expansionary monetary policy that had been at the root of the boom in the financial markets. Capitalist crisis policy has ridden its financial market-driven, neoliberal horse to death after using this horse to flee from the inner barrier of capital for over four decades. The neoliberal postponement seems to be coming to an end, and the stagflation that has been forgotten for decades is returning on a much higher level. The most important difference between today’s wave of inflation and the historical phase of stagflation is that a phase of high interest rates, such as that initiated by Fed Chairman Volcker from 1979, no longer offers a way out in view of the unstable financial sphere.

With the end of the global deficit economy, the global deficit cycles, which in fact formed the base of neoliberal globalization, were also damaged. Not all economies became equally indebted in the neoliberal era; export-oriented locations were able to export their production surpluses to deficit countries as part of these cycles. The largest, namely the Pacific deficit cycle between the U.S. and China, was characterized by the fact that the People’s Republic, which was rising to become the workshop of the world, exported gigantic quantities of goods across the Pacific to the de-industrializing U.S., thus creating enormous trade surpluses, while a financial market flow of U.S. debt securities flowed in the opposite direction, so that for a time China became Washington’s largest foreign creditor. A similar, smaller deficit cycle developed between Germany and the southern periphery of the eurozone in the period from the introduction of the euro to the euro crisis.

Globalization was thus not only characterized by the establishment of global supply chains, it also consisted of a corresponding globalization of debt dynamics in the form of deficit cycles, which, as mentioned, grew faster than global economic output – and consequently acted as an important economic engine by generating credit-financed demand. The globalization that brought about these gigantic global imbalances was a systemic reaction, a flight forward from the increasing internal contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, which is choking on its own productivity.

The Return of Protectionism

The euro crisis is, to some extent, a good case study for what is now unfolding globally: As long as the mountains of debt are growing and the financial market bubbles are on the rise, all of the countries involved seem to benefit from this credit-based growth. However, as soon as the bubbles burst, the battle over who should bear the costs of the crisis begins. In Europe, as we know, Berlin has used the crisis to pass on the costs of the crisis to southern Europe in the form of Schäuble’s infamous austerity dictates. Now, on a global level, the collapse of the much larger debt-financed deficit economy, which has recently been kept alive primarily by the expansive monetary policy of the central banks, is imminent. Rising nationalism and neo-fascism, the acute threat of world war: they are an expression of this very crisis process. An analogy can therefore be drawn with the pre-fascism of the 1930s, when the fallout from the global economic crisis that broke out in 1929 was exacerbated by a rapid rise in protectionism.

Which brings us to Germany’s misery. With the erosion of globalization, the long-term economic strategy of strict export orientation pursued since the introduction of the euro by the Federal Republic, whose economic “business model” was based on achieving the highest possible trade surpluses within the framework of the aforementioned deficit cycles, is also failing. With this so-called beggar-thy-neighbor policy, debt, deindustrialization and unemployment are exported to the target countries of the export surpluses. After Berlin had ruined the European crisis states through draconian austerity policies, this export strategy was directed at non-European countries – such as the U.S.[2]

However, this export-focused strategy is increasingly coming into conflict with the protectionist tendencies in Washington, where the Biden administration is effectively continuing Trump’s economic nationalism aimed at reindustrialization. Washington is no longer prepared – precisely because of increasing domestic political instability – to continue accepting the high trade deficits that stabilized the hyper-productive world system during neoliberal globalization. These deficits were, of course, only made possible by the dollar serving as the world’s reserve currency. As early as mid-2023, the Financial Times described this change in Washington’s economic policy strategy, which was initiated by the Trump administration and further promoted by Biden. At its core, it is a protectionist rejection of globalization. By means of a “foreign policy for the middle class,” the White House wanted to counteract the “hollowing out of the industrial base,” the emergence of “geopolitical rivals” and the increasing “inequality” that threatens democracy.[3]

A visible expression of the full onset of deglobalization is nearshoring, in which the U.S. is seeking to replace its economic dependence on the Chinese export industry by building up industrial capacities in Mexico. In addition, German automotive suppliers continue to face the threat of exclusion from U.S. production chains due to provisions of the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act. A substantial concession from Washington is also unlikely, as protectionism appears to be working. German companies in particular are increasingly investing in the U.S. in order to benefit from Washington’s subsidies. In effect, there is an economic decoupling between the U.S. and the EU, with Washington pulling away economically while the Europeans in particular have to bear the consequences of the crisis.

The Danger of “Authoritarian Revolt”

Berlin thus spent the 21st century orienting the Federal Republic – and from 2010, in the wake of the euro crisis, the eurozone – towards an export-fixated economic model aimed at achieving trade surpluses in the globalized world economy of the neoliberal era. With the onset of deglobalization, the former export surplus world champion has found itself in an economic policy impasse, which in the medium term not only calls into question the political stability of the Federal Republic of Germany, but also the continued political existence of the eurozone. And it is precisely this return of protectionism that is giving the New Right an additional boost. The properly functioning export economy acted as a kind of civilizational safety mechanism in Germany, with its terrible authoritarian-fascist tradition, as it provided a solid economic argument against nationalism. After all, Germany was a “winner” during the process of globalization.

However, it is the German export industry that is currently experiencing a downturn, which is actually just the beginning of the end of the export-focused German economic model. The sharp decline in exports in 2023 has contributed significantly to the poor economic development in Germany, with little improvement expected in the coming years. This also means, however, that the prosperous years made possible by export surpluses will inevitably come to an end for the Federal Republic. The power-political weight of the German export industry will therefore diminish at a time when, for the first time in a long time, Germany will also enter a long-lasting crisis phase, from which the New Right once again threatens to benefit.

Yet it was precisely the functionaries of the large-scale export industry who repeatedly took a stand against the New Right. The AfD and the dull Nazis were seen as an image problem that was damaging the “Made in Germany” brand in its quest for global success. The BDI (Federation of German Industries) and top managers such as Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser were able to cite real economic interests in their arguments against the right. The capital faction that is most resolutely opposed to AfD participation in government is therefore the German large-scale export industry, which is currently losing influence due to the crisis. The reactionary avant-garde within the functional elite, which made pacts with the AfD and the Querfront very early on, consists of small business owners and SMEs, as can be seen from the links between the association of “family entrepreneurs” and the AfD. Capitalists focused on the domestic market (“Müller Milch”) also appear to be more inclined to consider far-right options.

The AfD is already the second strongest force at federal level. The fact that the rise of the AfD took place during a phase of relative economic prosperity shows just how thin the civilizational ice has become in Germany; it was fueled by German fear of crisis, not by an actual outbreak of crisis, such as the one southern Europe had to endure during the euro crisis. Since the refugee crisis, the entire bourgeois-liberal anti-fascism, which was largely in line with the arguments of the export industry, has emphasized the economic “usefulness” of globalization, open borders for the movement of goods and immigration: refugees are economically useful due to the ageing of the Federal Republic, the export country must remain attractive for skilled workers, at least according to the common arguments. However, these narratives cultivated in the liberal mainstream will disappear as soon as stagnation and recession become entrenched in Germany, while exports will continue to decline in order to give further impetus to the “German fear” that so readily turns into hatred of the socially disadvantaged.

The crux of the matter is that this authoritarian revolt will never come to power unless a substantial part of the ruling elite opts for this fascist option. And there are signs of an open split within the German ruling elite regarding the participation in government of a party that is drifting towards the extreme right. This is the decisive breach in the dam: will entire factions follow the previous AfD sympathizers such as Mr Müller von der Müllermilch or the Mövenpick billionaire Baron August von Finck? In the middle class? Among family entrepreneurs?

Fascist movements only come to power in times of crisis when the shocks and upheavals have reached such an extent that functional elites perceive these movements as the “lesser evil.” To put it vividly: only when capital managers are so deeply mired in the crisis that they are up to their necks in water do they hold their noses and reach out to the extreme right. And then there is no stopping them, as the fascist authoritarian revolt, which always craves the approval of the authorities, is further fanned by this (which, incidentally, also defeats the left-wing intention of shaking up their supporters by unmasking the powerful fascist backers. Authoritarian characters are not deterred but attracted by the cronyism of AfD functionaries and billionaires).

[1] https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/09/13/global-debt-is-returning-to-its-rising-trend

[2] https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c0003.html

[3] https://www.ft.com/content/77faa249-0f88-4700-95d2-ecd7e9e745f9