Author: OlIver Blackwell

Russia Is in No Hurry

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ 1 Comment
The chances that the Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul will lead to a quick or even fair peace are slim.

Tomasz Konicz

The fact that peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow were able to take place in Istanbul highlights just how bad the military situation in Ukraine is. On May 10, four European leaders, who had traveled to the Ukrainian capital in a gesture of solidarity, joined their counterpart Zelensky in calling for a 30-day ceasefire as a precondition for any talks. This unconditional, comprehensive ceasefire would give “diplomacy a chance,” Zelensky demanded in the presence of British Prime Minister Starmer, French President Macron, Polish Prime Minister Tusk, and German Vice Chancellor Merz.

The Kremlin remained unmoved by the EU’s threat of sanctions linked the ceasefire that are aimed at taking stronger action against Russia’s shadow fleet – there will be no ceasefire because it is not in the Kremlin’s interest. The Russian-Ukrainian talks, on the other hand, began under fire, as this strengthens Russia’s negotiating position. In addition, as usual, the Europeans were excluded from these negotiations, which were conducted with the participation of the U.S. administration. By excluding the Europeans, Putin obviously wants to further divide the West. Finally, the Kremlin did not agree to Zelensky’s demands to hold direct talks with Putin.

Realities of the War of Attrition

Russia was thus able to dictate almost all of the preconditions for the negotiations in Istanbul. Ukraine, on the other hand, has little choice but to negotiate, as the war of attrition in the east will inevitably be won by Russian imperialism, which has greater resources (material, technology, manpower). Ukraine’s last major offensive, the advance into the Russian region of Kursk, ended in strategic failure. Kiev’s calculation was to dig in and hold the Russian border region in order to have a bargaining chip in any negotiations – now Russia occupies parts of the Ukrainian border region in the Sumy Oblast. Both sides suffered heavy losses in the fighting in Kursk, which also involved North Korean units. However, the Kremlin is better placed than Kiev to compensate for this through successful recruitment campaigns.

Western think tanks sympathetic to Ukraine, after years of whitewashing, are now being forced to acknowledge the realities of the war of attrition on the front lines. In a recent assessment, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assumes that Russia will not only be able to mobilize enough new forces to compensate for losses on the front, but also to “increase the size of army groups in Ukraine.” The Russian army leadership thus has more manpower at its disposal, even though, according to the ISW, Russia has recently suffered “significant losses with limited gains.” The growing imbalance could serve to “put pressure” on Ukraine in negotiations. In addition, Moscow appears to be in a position to build up a considerable “strategic reserve” through successful recruitment, according to the ISW.

The Atlantic Council is already warning of a major Russian summer offensive that threatens to become “the deadliest of the war so far.” Here, too, the admission of impending defeat can be read between the lines. Although the Russian army continues to suffer losses in “costly frontal attacks,” this tactic is constantly evolving, with these attacks being supported by “drone strikes, glide bombs, and artillery,” which is making Ukraine’s defensive measures more difficult. Russia currently holds the initiative on the front and is “advancing on several points” (Sumy, Kharkiv), with the Russian army leadership planning a major offensive in the Donbas – around Pokrovsk – in the coming months, according to the Atlantic Council. Ukrainian offensive plans have therefore long been a waste of time. The only question now is whether the front can be held in the face of Russian attacks and possible offensives. The summer threatens to become a “test of endurance” full of “brutal fighting” for “war-weary Ukraine” – especially in view of dwindling American military aid.

Direct military intervention by the Europeans against the nuclear power Russia – which was at times publicly debated in the EU – is now considered virtually impossible, despite all public expressions of solidarity. In mid-May, Macron stated that despite all its support, France did not intend to start “World War III” over Ukraine. Shortly before that, Polish government officials denied statements by U.S. envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, that Warsaw was prepared to deploy army units to Ukraine. Within Germany’s governing coalition, there is controversy over whether Kiev should be supplied with the advanced Taurus cruise missiles at all. While Deputy Chancellor Merz wants to maintain “strategic ambiguity” on this issue, SPD parliamentary group leader Matthias Miersch has explicitly spoken out against the delivery.

A Caricatured Imperialist Deal

Given this military and geopolitical constellation, which is favorable to Russia, the Kremlin can enter negotiations from a position of strength to push through its core demands, which ultimately aim to legalize its imperialist aggression and claim even more Ukrainian territory than is currently held by Russian troops. The logic behind such a deal is clear: to achieve inevitable military conquest through negotiation. Putin’s minimum territorial demands are likely to include the legalization of the annexation of the entire regions of Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. Russia’s marginal gains in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions are likely to be used as bargaining chips.

Added to this are the restrictions on Ukrainian sovereignty, which the Kremlin is selling under the label of “denazification.” On the one hand, this amounts to preventing Ukraine from becoming part of the Western sphere of influence, which could be achieved through neutrality commitments and arms restrictions for the Ukrainian army, as well as a “regime change” in which new elections would be scheduled in Ukraine. Russia does not want to occupy the entire country, but rather to bring it back into its imperial orbit. In the medium term, the Kremlin hopes to maneuver the “remaining Ukraine” into a state of sham sovereignty, similar to that currently enjoyed by Belarus. Formally independent, the former Soviet republic is in fact already part of the Russian Federation, both economically and militarily.

Russia therefore has no need to rush the negotiations, and one must wonder whether or not they are being held purely for propaganda reasons. Kiev, on the other hand, has few cards left to play in this imperialist poker game, which is why Zelensky had to agree to send his delegation to Istanbul on Putin’s terms—the longer he waits, the worse his position will become. In addition, tensions are rising on Ukraine’s western border, where the Ukrainian secret service has arrested two Hungarian citizens who are alleged to have been spying for the Orbán government in Budapest – they are said to have been gathering information on military installations, the mood among the population, and the defense capabilities of the Transcarpathian region, which is inhabited by a Hungarian minority. Since then, relations between Hungary and Ukraine have been frozen, with both countries expelling diplomats from the other side. The authoritarian head of government Orbán, from whose circle there are repeated calls for the annexation of Transcarpathia, is considered close to Russia.

Kiev’s only chance to retain some leverage seems to be to effectively capitulate to Trump’s extractivism: Kiev has had to sign a humiliating resource agreement with the U.S. in order not to lose its support completely. Kiev’s calculation: this caricature of an imperialist deal, signed at the beginning of May, would only make sense if Ukraine’s resource-rich eastern territories remained under Ukrainian – well – sovereignty. Kiev is hoping that Washington will back up its interest in extracting raw materials with military force. This would effectively tear Ukraine apart between East and West.

At least the Financial Times claims to have noticed a “quiet shift” in favor of Ukraine within the bluntly imperialist U.S. administration as early as mid-May. Speaking at a public meeting in Washington, Vice President JD Vance said that his administration was aware of a number of Russian demands that would make it possible to end the war: “We think they are asking for too much,” Vance said. At the same time, however, the vice president pointed out that despite “widespread criticism” of Putin, it was necessary to understand the Kremlin’s point of view in order to understand the “motivation of the other side.” Vance believed that Russia remained “interested in a solution.”

What might this solution look like? The Kremlin also has the upper hand in Ukraine’s resource poker game: Back in late February, when Kiev was still blocking the sale of its natural resources, Putin offered his American counterpart to jointly exploit the resources of eastern Ukraine and sell them to the U.S. A large part of the natural resources are already under Russian control anyway.

Tomasz Konicz is an author and journalist. His latest book is Climate Killer Capital: How an Economic System is Destroying our Livelihoods. More articles and donation options (Patreon) can be found at konicz.info.

Originally published in analyse & kritik on 05/16/2025.

The Dirt Under the Rug of Freedom

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ 1 Comment
On the inner connection between liberal democracy and the new right-wing extremism

Robert Kurz

Listening to façade democrats is a bit reminiscent of Manichean religion: there is a good and an evil principle in the world. The good principle is democracy and the market economy that goes with it; evil, on the other hand, appears in the form of dictatorship, totalitarianism, fascism, racism, etc. The moods and atrocities of the extreme right have nothing to do with democracy. They must have come from the “outside,” from the pre-civilizational primordial ground of the “human beast,” or possibly from a bad upbringing. This naive democratic thinking ignores the fact that democracy and totalitarianism have not historically had a simple external relationship to one another. The more or less totalitarian modernizing dictatorships of various kinds, from Cromwell to Hitler, were not mere aberrations in relation to the “good” principle of democracy, but rather a kind of larval stage of democracy itself. Western democracy after the Second World War cannot be separated from the history that led to the present state of affairs; and this history is written in blood everywhere.

It may seem strange to see modern dictatorships not as the antithesis of democracy, but as the historical-genetic forms in which democracy itself was implemented. But we must not forget that democracy, by its very name, is also a form of domination, and perhaps one of the most terrible forms: namely the self-domination of man in the name of abstract principles, self-subjugation to the laws of the total market. It was the modernizing dictatorships that (under various ideological names) socially implemented this core of democratic domination: submission to the norms of abstract time, to factory and office discipline, to the necessity of alienated “employment” for money. Nowhere have people followed these impositions voluntarily. Democracy in today’s sense means above all the internalization of these constraints, so that people, who have become abstract monads of work and money, strive for and do to themselves everything they used to have to be forced to do. The totalitarian, the logic of total commodity production, which has become widespread, is no longer an external force, but rather resides in the individuals themselves, and this is essentially the difference between (open) totalitarian dictatorship and (internalized) totalitarian democracy in the modern era.

As Ralf Dahrendorf has noted, National Socialism also possessed many features of a modernizing revolution: not only through the new forms of industrial mass consumption (Volkswagen, Autobahn), which were commercialized after 1945 and were bearers of the “economic miracle,” but also through the melting down of the old social milieus, which were brought into line. The uniformed abstract “Volksgenosse” [comrade] was, as it were, analogous to the Volkswagen, the prototype of today’s highly individualized and thoroughly commercialized individual, as described by Ulrich Beck in his book Risk Society. So there is indeed a complex inner connection between National Socialism and post-war democracy, which has only been suppressed by the façade democrats because they do not want to acknowledge the totalitarian aspects of democracy itself. The Nazi provocations, swastika graffiti and barbaric acts of today’s violent children cynically reveal what has been repressed. In its wayward children, a democracy playing innocent sees only its own reflection, in which the ugly, otherwise hidden scars of its own history of imposition reappear.

However, it is not only the scars of the past that become visible, but also the equally ugly consequences of the democratic present. The freedom of liberal democracy is identical to the core of its domination, because this freedom is only ever the “economic freedom” of buying and selling, the freedom of the solvent. No other freedom is envisiaged. The form in which this freedom is exercised is competition, which by its very nature wants to be total: “Every man for himself and God against all.” And is competition not highly praised in market-economic democracy as a superior principle, the only way to guarantee “efficiency”? Democracy is a pure meritocracy in which no handicap is welcome and which (in principle) tolerates no human emotion that cannot be subjected to the criterion of “profitability.”

In this way, the right-wing extremists are actually only speaking plainly about the innermost principle of democracy itself when they denounce all human solidarity and attack refugees, minorities, the disabled and the homeless, who are only seen as annoying “cost factors.” It is precisely in this respect that democrats should not really be surprised and enraged that the new right-wing extremists see themselves as democrats and want to be recognized as a legitimate part of democracy. This is particularly true of the new forms of right-wing extremism represented by the billionaire Ross Perot or the Republican star Newt Gingrich in the U.S., the Berlusconi group or the “Lega Nord” in Italy and the Haider party (significantly, the “Freedom Party”) in Austria. What we are confronted with here is the foul smell of a thoroughly Western-universalist social Darwinism that preaches an anti-social individualism of the “strong,” wants to get rid of the “unproductive” people in the market economy, and wants to administer poverty exclusively using a police state.

The democratic world, in which people are sorted into winners and losers of the market economy, nurtures this social Darwinism according to its own criteria. The populist demagogues even find support among the losers, who are duped into thinking they belong to the “strong” group and that a fantastic winning position is open to them, from which the even weaker can be kicked in the name of competition. And even the arsonists, bombers and murderers of the right-wing extremist underground: what are they doing other than “continuing the competition by other means”? If democracy has made the ability to assert oneself in a total meritocracy its idol, it need not be surprised at all that this mentality, which it has bred itself, proliferates beyond all limits of the legally codified “rules of the game.”

Ultimately, market-economic democracy doesn’t have its own morality that could emerge from within and wouldn’t have to be imposed from the outside according to artificial criteria that are actually foreign to its mechanism. The much-vaunted welfare state, which is supposed to repair the structural social deficits of market democracy, was only ever a luxury product of a few global OECD winner countries anyway. As long as it was possible to delude oneself that these “social safety nets” were an achievable goal for all countries, the ugly side of democracy was provisionally covered up. But the flood of “evil” had to break loose because the economic “operating system” of democracy, namely the social machine of transforming abstract “labor” into money, is threatening to crash. It is precisely the results of the much-vaunted competition and “efficiency” itself that have brought about structural mass unemployment on an unprecedented scale since the 1980s: according to studies by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, already more than 30% of the world’s workforce.

The rationalization and automation made possible by the microelectronic revolution, the streamlining of organizational lines (“lean production”), and the globalization of financial and commodities markets as well as the international dismantling of production processes are also making a growing mass of people economically “superfluous” in the core countries of Western democracy. State finances are coming up against hard limits, the welfare state is being cut back and becoming unreliable, and the democratic state is even withdrawing from culture. Democracy itself is beginning to abandon the achievements of civilization because it is being suffocated by its own criterion of “financial viability.” Even before any ideological justification of the phenomenon, the mechanism of the objectified system of market democracy automatically begins to exclude more and more people.

The democratic parties, including the Social Democrats and the Greens, and the democratic state bureaucracy are becoming the political sponsors of this exclusion, even if they wash their hands of it and want to “make the atrocities socially acceptable” according to a phrase from the devil’s dictionary. This hypocrisy is so intolerable that it virtually fuels open right-wing extremist social Darwinism; and the rapidly increasing existential insecurity creates such a potential for social anxiety that every poor wretch is desperately trying to swindle their way into the “elite” and the notorious “high earners,” even at the cost of irrational outbreaks of violence against real or supposed social rivals. The nasty suspicion arises that the good democrats secretly find the street terror and bombings of the right not entirely inconvenient, because they can use it as a smokescreen under pious slogans of an “outrage at inhumanity,” get carried away by the popular sentiment of the extreme right and apply, with constitutional legitimacy, measures that they now even declare to be a kind of homeopathic “remedy against the right-wing danger.” This is how the right-wing extremist hand washes the democratic hand. The renewed rise in anti-Semitism is also growing from the same potential for social fear that democracy itself generates. The hatred of weak people who are racialized as inferior corresponds to the hatred of the phantom of a deliriously evil super-intelligence, supposedly lurking as “the Jew” behind the incomprehensible powers of money that have arisen from the very form of the social fetish. The crisis of the market system and its profitability criteria manifests itself not only as a crisis of the labor market, but ultimately also as a crisis of the financial markets: more and more money capital, which could no longer flow into expansion and job investments under the pressure of rationalization, migrated into the derivative speculation sectors. In the 1980s, the financial yuppies were still applauded and the youth of democratic simulation flourished in the atmosphere of casino capitalism. Since the party is over, the cat’s meow looms and the inevitable bursting of the global financial and speculative bubble is heralded by bank failures (Barings), financial scandals and currency crises. Meanwhile, the democratic public itself is looking for scapegoats instead of admitting the limits of the market-based industrial system: “the speculators,” cry the press hypocritically, are destroying “our beautiful market economy.” This zealous hounding of the suddenly economically respectable democrats differs only gradually from the agitation of the anti-Semitic mob, which (itself greedy to the core) suspects the “Jewish world conspiracy” to be behind the financial crash.

It can no longer be denied that it is the social and civilizational decomposition process of market democracy itself that creates, feeds and allows far-right “evil” to grow. It is therefore absurd to want to defend democracy – as it is – against the “right.” If democracy is not capable of radical self-criticism and the self-suspension of its economic machine, there will never again be inner peace. Either the rules of the game will be fundamentally changed, or democracy itself will turn into barbarism, and right-wing extremism will then only be just one component of its own development.

Fundamental social critique has never been as desperately needed as it is today. But the left, which has always seen itself as the bearer of radical, emancipatory critique, has fallen embarrassingly silent. The collapse of Stalinist state socialism, which was never more than a dictatorship of “catch-up modernization” with bureaucratically “planned markets,” was all too cheaply misunderstood as a supposed refutation of any fundamental critique of the market economy. As a result of the global crisis, completely un-emancipatory fundamentalism and right-wing extremism are now surging into the ideological vacuum left behind by the democratically indoctrinated left. The mixture of the radical pseudo-criticism of modernity with the simultaneous brutal extension of modern performance and competition criteria, which has always characterized demagogic right-wing populism, is taking effect unchecked. If we do not succeed in developing forms of social security beyond the market and (national) state through a new emancipatory social critique, taking resources out of the idling market mechanism and radicalizing the socio-ecological transformation instead of retreating more and more from the dictates of the world market, then democracy will become its own gravedigger.

Originally published in EuropaKardioGramm no. 5/6 in 1995

Protectionist Revenants

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ 2 Comments
The lessons that the bourgeoisie learned from the great systemic crisis of the 1930s have long been forgotten in Trump’s Washington.

Tomasz Konicz

Want some more? When it comes to tariffs and trade barriers, the U.S. president is known to be extravagant. In response to the EU’s announcement of retaliatory measures for the U.S. tariffs on aluminum and steel, which include alcoholic beverages, Donald Trump responded by threatening astronomical punitive tariffs of 200% on European wine and sparkling wine. So far, this escalation strategy has worked: when Canada’s Ontario province announced a 25% tax on electricity exports to the United States as part of the North American trade war, Trump immediately threatened to double U.S. tariffs on all Canadian metal imports to 50% – Ontario then withdrew its export tax.

The U.S. actually has a strategic advantage in these trade wars because of its huge trade deficit ($918.4 billion in 2024). This is likely to tend to decrease in the course of the trade wars, while most of America’s trading partners are likely to see shrinking exports. Trump is speculating that he can ride out the short-term turbulence that the major protectionist turnaround will bring in order to achieve the hoped-for long-term return of a re-industrialization of the U.S. before the next election. In fact, the U.S. wants to reindustrialize itself at the expense of those countries and economic areas for whose export industries the U.S. trade deficits have thus far served as a credit-financed economic stimulus program.

In fact, the world economy, which is increasingly running on credit, also functioned like this in the neoliberal era: the U.S. resembled a black hole of the global economy, absorbing surplus industrial production and being able to borrow in the world’s reserve currency, the U.S. dollar, on the rapidly expanding financial markets. In the context of ever-growing deficit cycles, gigantic export surpluses flowed into the U.S. as the center of capitalism’s neoliberal financialization, while a flow of debt instruments and bonds began in the opposite direction, making China, for example, the largest foreign creditor of the U.S. for many years (currently it is Japan). The global total debt, which in the neoliberal era has increased faster than global economic output (from around 110% at the beginning of the 1970s to more than 250% in 2020), was the lubricant of globalization precisely through these deficit cycles.

This neoliberal construction of towers of debt, which gave rise to the illusion of financial-market-driven growth in the United States, spawned a veritable global financial bubble economy that became unstable with the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2008 and unsustainable with the inflationary surge that began in 2020. Trump is thus a product of the crisis, whose protectionism is supposed to provide an answer to the processes of social disintegration that accompanied deindustrialization and the collapse of the financial bubble economy. And it is no coincidence that the whole thing resembles the protectionism of the 1930s, when the world system was hit by the greatest crisis to date.

The internal barrier of capital, which gets rid of its own substance, wage labor, through market-mediated rationalization, is now openly apparent: since new economic sectors that would valorize mass wage labor are nowhere to be found, each economic area must try to protect its remaining industrial capacities, as everyone is trying to support their industries through exports. Trump wants a qualitative break with the credit-fueled crisis delay methods of the neoliberal era – and the contradiction is almost tangible, for example in Trump’s eternal zigzag. The system can only run on credit – and at the same time the consequences of this global deficit boom are no longer socially, economically and, above all, politically sustainable.

But what does Trump want? Ultimately, the White House is currently destroying the system of American hegemony established in the post-war period, since the U.S. can no longer or no longer wants to bear the costs of this hegemony. Instead, Trump is setting about building a U.S. empire that no longer relies on a global network of institutions and rules in the exercise of power, but will presumably assert itself through direct and ultimately military force. And that is not a sign of strength, but of weakness. Trump’s narrow-minded crisis-imperialist calculation, which perceives the deindustrialization of the U.S. as a result of fraud by foreign competitors, will be exposed as such when these competitors no longer see any reason to accept the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The systemic cause of the geopolitical upheavals that are now shaking what is left of the “West” is the openly apparent internal limit of capital.

Originally published on konicz.info on 03/28/25

Into the Crisis One Tariff at a Time

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment
With its protectionist tariff policy, the new U.S. government is ushering in the end of the age of neoliberal globalization.

Tomasz Konicz

Protectionism is likely to become the new normal. The first foreign policy reflex of the new U.S. administration was to instigate trade wars. At the beginning of February, just a few days after taking office, President Donald Trump imposed punitive tariffs on goods from China, Canada and Mexico.

At 25%, the import duties on goods from Mexico and Canada were much higher than for China, whose goods were subject to additional import duties of just 10%. The U.S. is by far the most important trading partner for all three countries, with each of them recording trade surpluses.

However, while the tariffs against China actually came into force, Trump suspended the implementation of protectionist measures against neighboring countries to the north and south of the U.S. for 30 days on February 3rd. At this point, the U.S. government entered into negotiations with Mexico and Canada, during which the threat of punitive tariffs remains in place. In fact, Trump has already been able to secure significant concessions: both Canada and Mexico agreed to tighten controls on their borders with the U.S. Mexico wants to mobilize around 10,000 troops to secure the border so as not to jeopardize the economic position of its northern border region as an extension of the U.S. workbench.

In fact, Trump’s alleged economic protectionism is a geopolitical instrument of power that can be used to extort concessions. In the case of Mexico, which is particularly susceptible to economic pressure from the U.S. because of its increased economic dependency on them as a result of the U.S. nearshoring strategy, the aim is for better defense against migration movements. Canada, on the other hand, is apparently actually being forced to integrate more closely into the U.S. economy – the foreseeable struggle for the resources in and trade routes through the rapidly thawing Arctic make Trump’s bizarre annexation demands regarding Canada and Greenland at least understandable.

China immediately announced retaliatory measures: Tariff increases now introduced there include 15% on energy sources and 10% on agricultural machinery, spare parts for trucks and similar products from the U.S. However, the Chinese government has the short end of the stick in such trade wars. In 2024, the U.S. trade deficit amounted to the gigantic sum of $918.4 billion, of which China alone accounted for $295.4 billion. Even if both sides initially suffer economic disadvantages in a trade war, especially in the current stagflative crisis phase, for example in the form of higher inflation, an escalation would always hit the economy with the export surpluses harder than the deficit country, which can at least hope to substitute imports burdened by tariffs through increased domestic production.

The European Union is in a similar situation, having aligned itself with the export-focused German economic model since the euro crisis and achieving a trade surplus of 235.5 billion euros with the U.S. in 2024. Around 20 percent of all EU exports go to the U.S., its most important sales market. The special tariffs of 25 percent on steel and aluminum, which Trump issued in mid-February, were immediately described by the EU as illegal. It saw “no justification for imposing tariffs on its exports,” according to the EU Commission, which threatened countermeasures to “protect the interests of European companies, workers and consumers from unjustified measures.”

Only Trump’s First Salvo in the Transatlantic Trade War

This was effectively only Trump’s first salvo in the coming transatlantic trade war, as only a few manufacturers in the EU are substantially affected by this. The EU’s trade surplus is primarily generated with cars made in Germany, machinery and pharmaceutical products – on February 18th, Trump consequently threatened punitive tariffs of 25% on cars, semiconductors and pharmaceutical products. Added to this is the EU’s agricultural sector, which is incurring the wrath of the U.S. government due to some EU trade restrictions – for example against the infamous chlorinated chicken. The EU agricultural sector knows exactly what to expect. At the turn of the year, agricultural exports from the EU to the U.S. climbed to their highest level in 15 years. “Mountains of butter, pyramids of cheese and lakes of milk” are currently being laid out for export in anticipation of the coming trade barriers, reported the Austrian newspaper Der Standard.

Trump has already indicated to media representatives that his government is working on a comprehensive protectionist offensive that is likely to hit the EU particularly hard. In principle, the upcoming U.S. tariffs are to be imposed on individual EU countries and not on the entire economic area in order to promote divisive tendencies in the EU, make a joint EU counter-strategy more difficult and reward countries governed by Trump’s ideological allies, such as Hungary, with exemptions. The U.S. Department of Commerce is currently drawing up a list of countries that use “unfair trade practices” in order to impose “reciprocal tariffs” on them.

It is almost certain that Germany’s beleaguered car manufacturers will face new burdens, as the EU car import tariffs of 10% are far higher than those in the U.S. (2.5%). The spreading panic was already evident in the public announcement by VW CEO Oliver Blume that he intends to hold direct talks with the U.S. government. The German mechanical engineering industry is also likely to face tariff increases. If the trade conflict with the U.S. escalates, forecasts predict an additional economic slump of up to 1.5% of gross domestic product for Germany in particular.

What Retaliatory Measures Remain for the EU?

Bourbon, jeans, Harley-Davidsons, peanuts – what retaliatory measures are left for the EU? Brussels and Berlin are certainly aware that the EU is at a disadvantage in trade disputes due to its export surplus. So far, leaders have signaled a compromise proposal and a counter-threat to the U.S. government. The EU appears to be prepared to buy larger quantities of liquid gas from the U.S. and to reduce tariffs on U.S. vehicles in order to reduce the U.S. deficit.

Building on the protectionist experience gained during Trump’s first presidency, the EU had already issued a regulation at the end of 2023 that allows for swift retaliatory measures should “economic coercion” be used against the currency area. This time, it is not just about the import of goods, but also services. This could cause difficulties for U.S. IT giants such as Alphabet, Meta and Amazon in particular, who have very quickly come to terms with Trump’s authoritarian efforts.

However, in terms of economic policy, one can hardly speak of an about-face turn in U.S. policy. It is more a further intensification of the previous restrictive trade tendencies, as Joe Biden’s administration also continued the protectionist measures from Trump’s first term in office in a modified form – especially in the form of the economic stimulus programs that benefited domestic producers. And it is precisely in the increasing protectionism that the crisis process becomes evident. The fight for trade surpluses is a concrete expression of the inner barrier of capital choking on its productivity, which has so far been overcome within the framework of neoliberal deficit economies, especially in the U.S.

Trump now appears to be ushering in the final break with the era of neoliberal globalization, which gave rise to gigantic deficit cycles fueled by speculative bubbles. The U.S., with the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, forms the center of this financial bubble economy, in which U.S. trade deficits act as a global economic stimulus program – until the accompanying deindustrialization led to widespread social disruption and political instability in the U.S., which in turn elevated right-wing populist forces to the White House. In their second attempt, they now seem more determined than ever not only to drive forward fascization in domestic policy, but also to stage a revival of the devastating protectionism of the 1930s, which exacerbated the crisis at the time.

Originally published in jungle world on 02/27/2025

The AI Revolution Devours its Children

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ 1 Comment

The Chinese AI company Deepseek is shaking up the business model of the emerging industry.

Tomasz Konicz

The shockwaves that the Chinese AI model DeepSeek sent through the American high-tech industry also produced ironic, downright comical moments. ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, accused the Chinese startup of data theft and espionage. The business model of the American AI pioneer was built on “stealing data from the entire internet” and now they are “crying because DeepSeek may have trained on the outputs from ChatGPT,” as tech critic Ed Zitron said to PC Gamer.[1] The team led by AI guru Sam Altman is now being given a taste of their own medicine, Zitron ranted. OpenAI had designed a “plagiarism machine” and was now complaining that its plagiarisms were being used to generate new plagiarism machines.

Knowledge distillation is what the industry calls this process, in which a lot of money and resources can be saved by using the output of a large language model specifically to train a smaller, cheaper model. It is no coincidence that OpenAI is complaining loudly about the low-cost Chinese competition, which allegedly completed its model for just under six million dollars – ironically, the pioneer of the AI industry, which likes to aggressively propagate its potential to bring about total economic rationalization, simply seems to be losing its business model. The proprietary, closed AI systems were actually intended – due to their gigantic training costs –to be monopolized and sold by the tech giants of Silicon Valley, since machine learning has so far been able to devour billions of dollars. OpenAI would, however, become obsolete in its current form once the innovations of the Chinese language model, which is largely open source, are generalized.

DeepSeek triggered a disruptive shock in which proprietary software is beaten by the open source principle, which enables far faster, global collaboration and innovation (only the latecomer Meta has also pursued an open source approach with its large language model Llama –precisely because Facebook & Co. are not dependent on revenue from the AI business).[2] The dreamed-of software profits of the AI industry giants would thus be largely shattered, because soon every medium-sized company will be delighting its customers with similarly annoying AI tools, as Microsoft has done with its already much-hated Copilot – essentially the Clippy[3] of the AI age – at a cost of billions of dollars.[4]

An analogy from the market for operating systems can illustrate the disruption that is now unfolding: The AI industry wanted to pursue a model like the one Microsoft has practiced with its Windows operating system since the 1990s, in which the software itself is the monopolized product. With DeepSeek, the software becomes free and/or cheaper, while now the services and customizations, the “service” so to speak, must be monetized – similar to what Red Hat does with its Enterprise Linux. This is a realistic business principle, but this potential volume of the AI market is much smaller, even before its widespread realization.

However, the hardware manufacturers whose computing capacities made the AI boom possible also saw their share prices plummet after the DeepSeek shock. The graphics card manufacturer Nvidia not only discovered a goldmine with its computing cards adapted for AI processes, but also largely monopolized it to increase its share price almost tenfold within two years. After the release of DeepSeek, however, its share price slumped by 20 percent. The entire AI boom, which is effectively only keeping the U.S. financial market in a speculative boom (the EU is already largely decoupled), is in danger of running out of steam. What if the hopes for a new accumulation regime, new markets and job-generating economic sectors burst as abruptly as they did during the deflation of the dot-com bubble at the turn of the millennium? One of the most important pillars of the U.S. economy, which is actually only able to maintain its exceptional position thanks to the U.S. dollar, has been clearly cracked by a stock exchange massacre of around one trillion dollars in February.[5]

DeepSeek is not only undermining the U.S. financial market boom, the AI tool also poses a geopolitical and military challenge to Washington’s dominance, which can now only be maintained thanks to the power of the U.S. military machine. This is why the White House – aside from Trump’s empty phrases about the innovation-promoting effect of competition – immediately moved to minimize the app’s reach and simply ban its use in government agencies.

The timing of the publication of DeepSeek was probably also intended to humiliate the terawatt gigantomania of Trump and his techno-oligarchs, who a few days earlier announced Stargate, a 500 billion dollar AI investment program that now looks simply ridiculous.[6] The signal that Chinese state capitalism is sending out is clear: Chinese efficiency beats the American brute force approach. China has also demonstrated the ineffectiveness of American sanctions on high-tech products, which were intended to prevent the development of competitive Chinese AI against the backdrop of the hegemonic struggle between Washington and Beijing – precisely because of the frightening potential of military applications of AI systems.

On the contrary, DeepSeek claims to have made a virtue out of necessity, with several innovations in the training phases of AI leading to the use of Nvidia chips being limited to older 2048 H800 models (DeepSeek has not confirmed the alleged knowledge distillation that scandalizes OpenAI).[7] In the meantime, however, a study by the IT think tank SemiAnalysis has cast massive doubt on precisely these cost advantages of the Chinese competition.[8] According to the study, the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, which financed DeepSeek, has computing farms of around 60,000 Nvidia cards, and the expenses for the highly qualified personnel and the development of the new training methods are not included in the DeepSeek creators’ cost calculation. So the true expenses of the hedge fund High-Flyer in the “People’s Republic” are said to amount to one billion dollars.

Even if large parts of this western cost counter-calculation were to correspond to reality, its implicit logic is wrong. DeepSeek is open source, its development costs play no role in its further use, the process innovations that went into its development are not kept under wraps, they have become common property – and they inevitably lower the price of the AI-based services that America’s IT industry wanted to monopolize. The AI pie is melting away. And these innovations are real, they are not just a cheap copy, as the MIT Technology Review acknowledged – U.S. competitors are now working hard to copy these innovations, which are being promoted by Washington’s sanctions.[9] New compression methods such as multi-head latent attention have reduced memory consumption and minimized bottlenecks resulting from inadequate memory bandwidth.[10]

Another key innovative step that DeepSeek has taken is the extensive automation of the multi-stage training phase of the automation machines. According to the Financial Times (FT), DeepSeek’s “major innovation” is to minimize the use of human labor in the correct “labeling” of data.[11]  This technique, which is used in the final training phase and is known within the industry as “reinforcement learning from human feedback” (RLHF), is expensive and time-consuming, according to the FT, as it requires a “small army of human data labelers.”[12] The day laborers of the AI age, most of whom are paid less than two dollars an hour and recruited in peripheral regions such as Latin America or Africa, spend their working day repeatedly tagging digital data with appropriate labels for the AI – not unlike the captchas of traffic lights, bicycles or dogs that used to be requested when passwords were entered.

And these slum jobs, which number in the hundreds of thousands and whose exploitation in the context of the RLHF is bringing the high-tech industry of the 21st century back to life in the 18th century, will soon become obsolete. According to the FT, DeepSeek was able to automate reinforcement learning through digital reward mechanisms that are activated when the AI system gives the right answers. As soon as this process is repeated often enough, the large language model begins to “spontaneously solve problems without human supervision” once a tipping point is passed. An “aha moment” occurred when DeepSeek began to evaluate questions again and adapt its computing time to the different questions, according to the financial journal, echoing reports by Chinese AI researchers. To replicate this, it no longer needs AI day laborers, but only “its very strong, pre-trained model” and a very good infrastructure to carry out “this reinforcement learning process at a large scale.”

AI is also devouring its miserable children. However, the wage earners on the periphery of the late capitalist world system, who are now at risk of losing even their precarious slum jobs, will soon be followed into obsolescence by millions of employees in the core. Although AI will radically transform the societies of the core in a similar way to the internet and the first phase of digitalization, this will not bring about a long-term economic boom in the sense of a new accumulation regime that would valorize masses of labor power in the production process of capital.

The opposite will be the case. The desubstantialization of capital and the displacement of wage labor from the production of goods and the service sector will continue. This is why fears of a slump in demand for AI chips are unfounded; at least Nvidia will continue to enjoy healthy demand. Wherever “experienced people still press the same buttons in a race” (FAZ), the market-mediated rationalization pressure will prevail.[13] The price reductions for training units for large language models will only lead to an accelerated adaptation of this technology in the valorization process of capital, which has already been able to maintain its zombie existence for decades thanks to the production of credit-generated demand and fictitious capital on the world financial markets. The last echo of this global bubble economy of the declining neoliberal era is the AI bubble in the U.S.

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[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/the-brass-balls-on-these-guys-openai-complains-that-deepseek-has-been-using-its-data-you-know-the-copyrighted-data-its-been-scraping-from-everywhere/

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/technology/meta-deepseek-ai-open-source.html?searchResultPosition=6

[3] https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/26/clippy-microsoft-office-mac/

[4] https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/work-life/the-microsoft-365-copilot-launch-was-a-total-disaster/

[5] https://www.dqindia.com/news/deepseek-sparks-1-trillion-tech-stock-meltdown-8662575

[6] https://apnews.com/article/trump-ai-openai-oracle-softbank-son-altman-ellison-be261f8a8ee07a0623d4170397348c41

[7] https://www.dw.com/de/deepseek-ki-aktie-b%C3%B6rse-nvidia-v3/a-71434687

[8] https://winfuture.de/news,148575.html

[9] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/24/1110526/china-deepseek-top-ai-despite-sanctions/

[10] https://towardsai.net/p/artificial-intelligence/a-visual-walkthrough-of-deepseeks-multi-head-latent-attention-mla-%EF%B8%8F

[11] https://www.ft.com/content/ea803121-196f-4c61-ab70-93b38043836e

[12] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/labelers-training-ai-say-theyre-overworked-underpaid-and-exploited-60-minutes-transcript/

[13] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/bullshit-oekonomie-deepseek-und-die-maerchen-der-ki-branche-110266144.html

Originally published on konicz.info on 02/16/2025

The Light of Enlightenment

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

The Symbolism of Modernity and the Expulsion of the Night

Robert Kurz

Even today, after more than 200 years, we are still blinded by the beautiful glow of the bourgeois enlightenment. The history of modernization revels in metaphors of light. The radiant sun of reason is supposed to penetrate the darkness of superstition and make the disorder of the world visible, in order to finally organize society according to rational criteria. Darkness does not appear as the other side of the truth, but as the negative realm of the devil. Even the humanists of the Renaissance polemicized against their enemies by calling them “obscurantists” [Dunkelmänner, which translates literally to dark men]. “More light!” Goethe is said to have shouted on his deathbed in 1832. As a classicist, he had to go out in style.

The Romantics resisted this cold light of reason and turned back to religion in a synthetic way. Instead of abstract rationality, they propagated a no less abstract irrationalism. Thus, instead of metaphors of light, they indulged in metaphors of darkness. Novalis wrote his “Hymn to the Night.” But this mere reversal of Enlightenment symbolism actually missed the point. The Romantics were unable to overcome the suspicious one-sidedness of the Enlightenment; they merely occupied the other pole of modernization and thus truly became “Dunkelmänner” of a reactionary, clerical way of thinking.

But the symbolism of modernization can also be criticized the other way round: as the paradoxical irrationality of capitalist reason itself. Because strangely enough, the Enlightenment metaphors of light reek of overcooked mysticism. The idea of a glistening supernatural source of light, as suggested by the idea of modern reason, is reminiscent of the descriptions of the realms of angels illuminated by the radiance of God, and we are also familiar with the concept of “enlightenment” from the religious systems of the Far East. Although the light of Enlightenment reason is an earthly one, it has nevertheless taken on a strangely transcendental character. The celestial splendor of an ultimately incomprehensible God has merely been secularized into the monstrous banality of the capitalist end in itself, whose cabalism of earthly matter consists in the senseless accumulation of economic value. This is not reason, but higher madness; and what shines there is the brilliance of absurdity that hurts and blinds the eyes.

The irrational reason of the Enlightenment wants to make the light total. However, this light is by no means merely a symbol in the realm of thought, but has a hard socio-economic meaning. It is precisely in this respect that it is fatal that Marxism and the historical labor movement have seen themselves as the true heirs of the Enlightenment and its social metaphor of light. In the “Internationale,” the anthem of Marxism, it says of the wonderful socialist future: “Then the sun will shine without interruption.” A German caricaturist has taken this line literally and shows sweating people in the “Empire of Freedom” who stare up at the glowing sun and moan: “It has been shining for three years now and never sets.”

This is not just a joke. In a way, modernization has indeed “turned night into day.” In England, which is known to have set the pace for industrialization, gas lighting was introduced in the early 19th century and soon spread throughout Europe. At the end of the 19th century, electric light replaced gas lamps. It has long been medically proven that the inversion of day and night caused by the blanket of cold light from artificial suns disturbs the biological rhythm of humans and leads to psychological and physiological damage. So why the widespread planetary illumination, which today reaches the furthest corners of the Earth?

Karl Marx, himself an heir to the Enlightenment, quite rightly stated that the restless activism of the capitalist mode of production is “boundless.” In principle, however, this boundlessness cannot tolerate a time that remains “dark.” For the time of darkness is also the time of rest, of passivity, of contemplation. Capitalism, on the other hand, demands the expansion of its activity to its extreme physical and biological limits. In terms of time, these limits are determined by the rotation of the earth on its axis, i.e. by the full 24 hours of the astronomical day, which has a light side (facing the sun) and a dark side (facing away from the sun). The tendency of capitalism is to make the active sunny side total and to occupy the entire astronomical day. The night side interferes with this urge. The production, circulation and distribution of commodities should therefore run “around the clock,” because “time is money.” The concept of “abstract labor” in modern commodity production therefore includes not only its absolute extension, but also its astronomical abstraction. This process is analogous to the change in spatial measurements. The metric system was introduced by the regime of the French Revolution in 1795 and spread as quickly as gas lighting. In Germany, the transition to this system took place in 1872. The spatial measures based on the human body (feet, cubits, etc.), which were as varied as human cultures, were replaced by the abstract astronomical measure of the meter, which is said to correspond to a forty-millionth part of the earth’s circumference. This abstract standardization of the measure of space corresponded to the mechanistic world view of Newtonian physics, which in turn became the model for the mechanistic economy of the modern market economy, as analyzed and propagated by Adam Smith (1723-1790), the founder of national economics. The image of the universe and nature as a single great machine coincided with the economic world machine of capital, and astronomical measurements became a common form of the physical and economic world machine. This applies not only to space, but also to time. The astronomical meter, the measure of abstract space, corresponds to the astronomical hour, the measure of abstract time; and these are also the measures of capitalist commodity production.

Only this abstract time made it possible to push the day of “abstract labor” into the night and eat up the time typically used for rest and relaxation. Abstract time could be detached from concrete things and relationships. Most old timekeepers, e.g. sand or water clocks, did not indicate “what time it is,” but were calibrated to concrete processes in order to show their “measured time.” They could perhaps be compared to an egg timer, which emits a buzzing sound to indicate when an egg is hard or soft boiled. The quantity of time here is not abstract, but is oriented towards a certain quality. The astronomical time of “abstract labor,” on the other hand, is detached from any quality. The difference also becomes clear when we read in medieval documents, for example, that the working hours of servants on large estates were to last “from sunrise to noon.” This means that working hours were not only shorter in absolute terms than today, but also in relative terms, varying according to the season and being shorter in winter than in summer. The abstract astronomical hour, on the other hand, made it possible to set the start of work “at 6 o’clock” regardless of the season and physical rhythms.

That is why the era of capitalism is also the era of the “alarm clock,” the clocks that woke people from their sleep with a shrill signal tone in order to drive them to their artificially lit “workplaces.” And once the start of work had been brought forward into the night, the end of work could also be pushed back into the night. This change also has an aesthetic side. Just as the environment is to a certain extent “dematerialized” by abstract economic rationality, in that matter and its interrelations have to submit to the criteria of profitability, it is also de-dimensioned and de-proportionalized by the same rationality. If old buildings sometimes seem somehow more beautiful and cozy than modern ones, and if we then notice that at the same time they seem somehow irregular in comparison to today’s “functionalist” buildings, then this is due to the fact that their dimensions are adapted to the body and their forms are often adapted to the landscape. Modern architecture, on the other hand, uses astronomical spatial dimensions and “decontextualized” forms, “detached” from the surroundings. But this also applies to time. The modern architecture of time is also de-proportionalized and decontextualized. It is not just space that has become ugly, but time as well.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, both the absolute and relative extension of working hours through the introduction of the abstract astronomical hour were still perceived as torture. For a long time, people desperately resisted the night work associated with industrialization. Working before sunrise and after sunset was considered downright immoral. In the Middle Ages, if craftsmen had to work at night for scheduling reasons, they had to be fed lavishly and paid princely wages. Night work was a rare exception. And it is one of the “great” achievements of capitalism that it succeeded in making torture by time the norm in human activity.

The reduction in absolute working hours since early capitalism has done nothing to change this. On the contrary, so-called shift work has become more and more widespread in the 20th century. Two or even three-shift operation means that machines should run as continuously as possible, interrupted only by short breaks for setup, maintenance and cleaning. The opening hours of stores and department stores should also be pushed as close as possible to the 24-hour limit. In Germany, we had a dispute this year about the statutory closing time for stores, which was previously set at 6:30 p.m. and has been extended to 8 p.m. since November 1, 1996. In many countries, such as the U.S., there is no statutory closing time at all and many stores display the sign: “Open 24 hours a day.” Since microelectronic communication technology has globalized the flow of money, the financial day of one half of the world has seamlessly merged with that of the other. “The financial markets never sleep,” says the advertisement of a Japanese bank.

The light of Enlightenment reason is the illumination of the night shift. To the same extent that competition becomes total, the external, social imperative is also transformed into an inner compulsion of the individual. Sleep becomes as much an enemy as the night, for as long as one sleeps, one misses opportunities and is helplessly exposed to the attacks of others. The sleep of the market-economy man therefore becomes as short and shallow as that of a wild animal, and all the more so the more “successful” this man wants to be. The externally determined work torture of the mechanical night shift appears at the management level as a “voluntary” renunciation of sleep. There are even management seminars where sleep minimization techniques can be practiced. Today, schools of self-management claim in all seriousness: “The ideal businessman never sleeps,” just like the financial markets!

However, the subjugation of people to “abstract labor” and its astronomical measure of time is not possible without equally total control. All-round control, in turn, requires equally all-round observation, and observation is only possible in the light: in much the same way as the police direct a blinding lamp onto the face of the delinquent during interrogation. It is not for nothing that the word “reconnaissance” [Aufklärung, the same word used to refer to the Enlightenment] has a military connotation in German, namely “scouting out the enemy.” And a society in which everyone becomes the enemy of others and of themselves, because everyone has to serve the same secularized god of capital, logically becomes a system of total observation and self-observation.

In a mechanical universe, man must also be a machine and be processed by machines. The light of the Enlightenment has prepared him for this and made him “transparent.” In his book Discipline and Punish (1975), the French philosopher Michel Foucault shows how this total “visibility” has become a historical trap. At the beginning of the 19th century, capitalism still practiced total observation through a “pedagogy of the penitentiary,” as developed by the liberal “utilitarian philosopher” Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) as an elaborate system of organization, punishment and even architecture for prisons, factories, offices, hospitals, schools and reformatories.

The market economy public sphere is not a sphere of free communication, but a sphere of observation and control. This is reminiscent of George Orwell’s negative utopia 1984. Whereas in the totalitarian dictatorships this control was external, exercised by the bureaucratic state and police apparatus, in democracy it has become internalized self-control, supplemented by the commercial media, in which the spotlights of the concentration camps have been transformed into the lights of a monstrous fairground. Here there is no free discussion, but merciless illumination. In commercial democracy, this system has become so refined that individuals obey capitalist imperatives all by themselves and habitually follow the well-worn path like programmed robots.

Contrary to its own social aspirations, Marxism became a protagonist of “abstract labor” by falling prey to the mechanistic thinking of the Enlightenment and its perfidious symbolism of light. Everything that was despotic about Marxism came from Enlightenment liberalism. Conversely, the Romantics, who wanted to give the dark side of truth its due, allied themselves not with social emancipation but with political reaction. Only when night, sleep and dreams are freed from this reactionary captivity can they become slogans of an emancipatory social critique. Resistance to the total market perhaps begins where people ruthlessly take the right to get a good night’s sleep.

Originally published in Folha de São Paulo on 01/12/1997

For a Piece of Land

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ 1 Comment
Trump’s move will probably lead to an end to the war, but how much will Ukraine have to pay?

Tomasz Konicz

Are the imperialists in the Kremlin on the home stretch of their war of aggression in Ukraine? With right-wing populist Donald Trump taking office, Ukraine’s already hopeless military situation appears to have deteriorated abruptly on a geopolitical level. Immediately after taking office, the Trump administration froze all foreign aid – including aid programs for Ukraine. Trump has now entered into direct talks with Vladimir Putin.

He has now also specified what a geopolitical “deal” to end the war could amount to: Russia receives large parts or even all of the claimed territories in Ukraine (he is not particularly interested in which territories Putin gets, Trump said), the U.S. gets access to the mineral resources of the attacked country, the Europeans are to take care of security guarantees, and NATO admission for Ukraine is off the table. The EU states reacted with alarm and demanded to be included in the negotiations. However, the Trump administration does not appear to be willing to grant it a role in the negotiations, nor Ukraine.

Putin’s strategic calculation – which was based on a protracted war of attrition and Trump’s election victory – therefore appears to be working. The last time Russia’s head of state was challenged was back in November, when long-range Western missile systems were deployed against Russia. Putin declared this a “red line” in the fall of 2024, which would effectively drive the Kremlin into a state of war with NATO.

But Putin did not escalate at the end of 2024 because he believes he is on the road to victory in his war of aggression against Ukraine. And this in two respects. On the one hand, the protracted war of attrition means that Russia’s greater resource potential is increasingly coming to bear. It has already become apparent in recent months: Russia’s territorial gains in the east are accelerating, while the Ukrainian army is barely able to mobilize enough manpower for the front. Drones and information technology function as the great equalizer on the battlefield of the 21st century, making offensive warfare more difficult – similar to the machine gun during the First World War.

What remains is the firing of material and people on the largely static front until one of the warring parties collapses. This is why Russia’s gradual successes in the east are so decisive, as the best-developed defense lines in Ukraine have been overcome. Every other Ukrainian front line is weaker. Since the West will in all likelihood not intervene directly in Ukraine, the bloody law of war mathematics dictates that Kiev must lose the war of attrition if it is fought to the last consequences.

Logic of Escalation and a War of Attrition

The only realistic chance of a military victory for Kiev was a shake-up of the Russian power vertical, i.e. the loss of important decision-makers below Putin. This possibility briefly emerged during the revolt of the Wagner group around the mercenary leader Prigozhin. However, he has since been removed by the Kremlin, meaning that the opposition within the Russian elite lacks a military-organizational core that could spark an oligarch uprising against Putin’s disastrous war – which is also a socio-economic and demographic disaster for Russia.

The Kremlin is speculating along similar lines. Russia’s winter terror campaign against the Ukrainian infrastructure, especially against Ukraine’s energy sector, aims to erode the morale and resilience of the Ukrainian “home front” in order to minimize and ultimately destroy the mobilization capacity of the Ukrainian army and society. The increasing desertion in the Ukrainian army shows that this tactic is successful in the context of the war of attrition.

What both sides – realistically speaking – can aim for is the erosion of the statehood of the opposing warring party. Another form of victory, especially against Russia, is hardly conceivable. The enemy state should become a failed state – this war aim is indeed realistic because it is woven into the crisis-ridden course of events. The crisis of capital causes the brutalization and disintegration of state apparatuses – war only accelerates this tendency. Military conflict, as the ultimate form of geopolitical crisis competition, is the means by which this crisis process will be consummated.

However, the Kremlin has its sights set on victory primarily due to Donald Trump’s new term in office. During the election campaign, Trump repeatedly stated that he would be able to end the Ukraine war quickly through negotiations. For the Kremlin, the prospect of a victorious peace at the negotiating table therefore seemed realistic – especially since the U.S. is now entering into open fascization, complete with a reactionary political climate and an oligarchic power structure, which is also characteristic of Russia under Putin. It is obvious that the crisis of capital in the Western core has now progressed so far that they are approaching the shattered power structures of the post-Soviet semi-periphery. A dirty geopolitical deal on the corpse of Ukraine, concocted by authoritarian leaders of highly corrupt, fascist, oligarchic statesmen, is what the Kremlin is hoping for this year, and it now seems closer than ever to this goal.

Which brings us back to the Kremlin’s aforementioned red lines, which were crossed by the West at the end of 2024 in the form of long-range missile strikes on the Russian hinterland. From Moscow’s perspective, it seemed that these attacks only had to be accepted until January 20, when Trump took office. Why risk a nuclear war when victory seems so close? In the West – in Washington as well as in many EU capitals – the panic of closing the door was spreading. Much of the foreign policy initiated by Washington or the EU after Trump’s election served to make geopolitical processes and developments irreversible. The new faces, who are now allowed to live out their nationalism and imperialism in Washington, should be deprived of as many options as possible. Ukraine was supplied with weapons for the last time and its negotiating position was to be improved through far-reaching military options.

New Cuban Missile Crisis

In fact, however, it is only a matter of damage minimization, as the West’s defeat in the battle for Ukraine has long been openly discussed, even in the West. How much of Ukraine will have to be thrown at Russian imperialism in order to end the war – this is now the logic that is finding its way into Western think tanks. The only question still being discussed is whether it will be possible to give the “rest of Ukraine” any kind of sovereignty.

The crossing of Putin’s last red line, the release of missiles that can reach Russia’s territory, was a clear escalation at the end of 2024 that was sought by the U.S. in the interregnum between Biden and Trump. In practice, it only served to drive up the price that Russia had to pay for its victory in Ukraine. It was a kind of nuclear Russian roulette that both sides played at the end of November 2024. Largely unnoticed by the Western public, the world was on the brink of nuclear escalation for days. The difference between this and the the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, was that in 1962 the world held its breath in shock, while in 2024 Putin’s threats were merely annoying and barely noticed. Putin threatened nothing less than the use of nuclear weapons.

The new volatility in the geopolitical sphere, the increasing tendency towards war as a means of politics, even in the core, and the willingness to take ever greater military risks are an expression of the new crisis phase into which the capitalist world system is entering after the exhaustion of the neoliberal deficit cycles. The crisis era of neoliberalism with its construction of global debt towers, the corresponding speculative bubbles and its world wars in the periphery is finally coming to an end with Trump’s re-election. What now follows is a phase of open authoritarian crisis management, state erosion and military conflicts at all levels – including between the world’s political and economic centers. Putin’s state-oligarchic Russia, authoritarian Belarus – both manifest the future of crisis management in their unstable authoritarianism.

Originally published in analyse & kritik on 02/18/2025

Cancel Culture USA

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ 1 Comment
The purges and deportations threatened by Trump have already begun.

Tomasz Konicz

It seems that what follows neoliberalism is based on the methods that neoliberalism used in previous decades to implement its infamous structural adjustment programs. They are fascistoid decay products of neoliberalism that are now unwinding the neoliberally deformed constitutional state in the U.S. The shocking implementation of controversial neoliberal austerity programs, taking the public by surprise with far-reaching deregulation measures; these tactics find their equivalent in the shock strategy that Trump and Musk are now using to eliminate any potential for opposition in the state apparatus. It’s all happening in quick succession – and these are just the first steps.

Immediately after taking power, in its first week in office, the Trump administration abolished all equality programs (DEI or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and introduced a whistleblower system in the U.S. administration.[1] Not only have all programs that were intended to give minorities greater representation in the state apparatus been abolished without replacement. The White House has also set up an email address where whistleblowers can report incidents that “circumvent” the new regulations, as the New York Times (NYT) put it.

What does this mean in concrete terms? The DEI programs, hated by the racist U.S. right, ultimately amounted to giving preference to candidates from socially disadvantaged or underrepresented minority groups in applications, provided they had the same qualifications as their fellow applicants. If this continues to happen, it could be interpreted as a continuation of the DEI measures, which could prompt losing applicants to report this to the Trump administration. Ultimately, this means that it is safer for decision-makers in the U.S. public administration and state apparatus to hire white men in the future in order to avoid career-damaging accusations of “woke” activities.

It is a thinly disguised racist regulation designed to expand the dominance of white America in its power apparatus. At the same time, it creates an atmosphere of tattle-tailing and suspicion based on racism, which is conducive to the control of large power apparatuses. At the beginning of February, lists of “targets” in the public sector were published online, containing names and photos of mainly black public sector healthcare employees who are accused of “woke” thought crimes, such as using pronouns, supporting Democrats or working on DEI initiatives. It is unclear where these right-wing denunciation sites (“DEI Watch List”) get their information from.[2]

The fight against the “woke” DEI measures functions as a versatile ideological vehicle for the return of racism – and climate change denial. Meanwhile, in response to climate disasters (fire in Los Angeles) and accidents (plane collision in Washington), the White House has even established the narrative of blaming the DEI programs.

Everything Must Go!

On the surface, Trump and Musk want to implement an extreme form of neoliberal austerity policy. The Orwellian construct of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), led by Elon Musk in a legal gray area, wants to cut the U.S. budget, which totaled 6.7 trillion dollars in 2024, by two trillion dollars.[3] To this end, the Trump administration has sent emails to all 2.3 million public sector employees asking them to look for “higher productivity jobs” and to accept a severance package by February 6th that provides for continued pay until September 2025.[4] Shortly before the deadline, only 20,000 employees agreed to this arrangement.[5] In a first step, ten percent of public sector jobs – more than 200,000 jobs – are to be eliminated, which points to tough disputes in the coming months that are likely to provide the Trump administration with further opportunities for the reactionary politicization of the shrinking state apparatus.

The richest man in the world also had his crosshairs on the U.S. aid organization, USAID, which Elon Musk described as a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists.”[6] For decades, USAID not only acted as a humanitarian aid organization, it also flanked U.S. interests globally as part of a standard “soft power” approach. The imperialists in the White House clearly want to do without this in the future. Nearly all 10,000 employees of the U.S. government’s aid agency have been laid off, and most programs in developing countries have been discontinued.[7] The U.S. State Department will now only directly control and manage a few selected aid programs.[8] In addition, around 60 U.S. foreign policy front organizations involved in promoting civil society and democratic structures in authoritarian states such as China, Russia, Iran and Hungary have lost their funding, according to the NYT.[9] Hungarian ruler Viktor Orban in particular – who was granted an audience with Trump in mid-September – has vehemently criticized these projects.

Another priority of the Trump administration is the education sector and the Department of Education, which he wants to deprive of most of its funding – not that it is particularly necessary. According to the report, the Department of Education is not only to be stripped of funding, but all its functions that are “not explicitly stipulated in its statute” are expected to be distributed to other departments, according to reports in the U.S. media.[10] This is expected to happen as early as the end of February. In addition to alleged cost-cutting constraints, the Biden administration’s programs for equality and tolerance in education appear to be the main motivating factors behind this move. Trump seems to be seeking a fundamental, authoritarian-reactionary new beginning here.

U.S. universities, which often have a liberal reputation, are also already in the Trump administration’s crosshairs. Hundreds of millions in state funds are on the hit list, so university leaders are avoiding public criticism of the previous revision of equality programs. Professors and university leaders prefer “not to provoke the president,” according to the NYT, as the financial screws are already being tightened.[11]

Hand on the Money Lever

Elon Musk’s biggest coup to date came in his capacity as a “special government employee” (the White House’s official term for the oligarch) in his attack on the Treasury Department’s payment system, which handles a large proportion of U.S. payments.[12] The so-called Bureau of the Fiscal Service is a mere executive body run by civil servants who are not political appointees. It handles nearly 90 percent of all federal government payments, such as social programs and tax refunds. It stores data on more than 100 million U.S. citizens and most government employees, which previously only a “handful of top non-political officials” had access to, according to the Independent.[13]

But now Musk has managed to access the data stream using his DOGE construct, and he has the support of Trump’s Treasury Department. The oligarch seems to be less concerned with the efficient processing of payments than with controlling them and possibly blocking any payments. This would simply mean that Congress, which provides the legislative basis for the payment office, would be undermined by the Trump administration. Musk has wanted to gain access to the payment system since December, but was refused by the now resigned head, with his team exploring the possibilities of payment stops in particular. In disputes with recalcitrant parts of the state apparatus, in repression against “ideological enemies,” as Rolling Stone put it, the Trump administration and its oligarch are now in the driver’s seat.[14] Anyone who doesn’t do their part is – without an ounce of bureaucracy – cut off.

If Musk’s actions are reminiscent of oligarchies such as Ukraine or Russia, where it is common to abuse state power to enforce particular interests, then this is because late capitalism in the United States is entering its oligarchic stage as part of crisis-induced brutalization.[15] In the meantime, a number of lawsuits have been filed against these actions by – let’s say – the Trump administration,[16] but these proceedings will be carried out in a judicial system that has been deliberately infiltrated by Republicans and right-wing groups for many years by means of political appointment campaigns.[17] The staunchly right-wing Supreme Court, which has already granted Trump general immunity for his second term in office as a precaution, is only the tip of the reactionary iceberg in the judicial system.[18] And it is precisely here that many of the Trump administration’s plans will be decided, as they operate in a legal gray area. For this reason, the Biden administration tried to fill as many judgeships as possible by the end of 2024 in order to counter the right-wing offensive in the coming judicial war.[19]

Fight For the “Deep State”

The fight against the so-called “deep state,” against informal networks in the ministries of power, which Trump has taken up the cause of,[20] is a classic right-wing projection.[21] The U.S. right wants to seize the “deep state” as part of its fascist impulse and,  if necessary, build it from scratch so that it never has to leave power again. The Trump administration’s attacks on the FBI and CIA serve this very purpose. It is not about destroying or weakening these state agencies, such as the Department of Education or USAID. Trump wants to turn them into his personal instruments of power – another characteristic of oligarchic, authoritarian systems.

The capitalist rule of law is practically on the brink of collapse. The subjectless form of capitalist domination mediated by the state and judicial apparatus, as implemented by the FBI and CIA at home and abroad, is thus degenerating into potential prey for particular interests. Which oligarch will win the next “elections” by spending billions to push through his interests via the FBI and CIA? This is the future that threatens the U.S. if Trump succeeds in his grab for the “deep state.” The suppression of any opposition movements by the United States’ highly trained and militarized repressive apparatus would be possible almost without interruption, regardless of the rule of law.

Trump is planning a comprehensive purge of the FBI, in which FBI officials who have investigated Trump and his supporters are on the hit list. This right-wing “cancel culture” targets all those who appear to be disloyal. Here, too, there is formal talk of “cuts”[22] to which six FBI leaders have already fallen victim.[23] The purges could affect “hundreds, if not thousands” of agents, according to U.S. media.[24] Every FBI investigator involved in the investigation following Trump’s attempted coup d’état in January 2021 is effectively at risk. In the meantime, FBI agents have even gone to court to obtain an emergency court order to deny the Trump administration access to their identities.[25]

At the CIA, however, which has a tense relationship with Trump due to his preference for despots, the usual threatening emails with severance offers were sent out – this applied to all CIA people without exception.[26] A spokesperson for the notorious intelligence agency explained that this approach was intended to bring the CIA into line with the goals of the new administration. As early as November 2024, CIA insiders warned that Trump wanted to politicize the intelligence service and transform it into a personal “weapon” to be used unlawfully against political opponents, for example.[27] Musk’s empire is already closely intertwined with the U.S. state apparatus, for example with space programs and intelligence services.[28]

Guantanamo For Migrants

This Trump crusade, in which the separation of powers and all checks and balances of the U.S. political system are to be undermined in the fascist tradition, is taking place against the backdrop of extensive deportations of migrants by the new administration. The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was instructed at the end of January to achieve a daily arrest rate of 1200 to 1500 “illegal” migrants.[29] Countries such as Colombia, which refused to grant landing permits to deportation flights from the United States, were threatened with tariffs by Washington and brought into line. The same applies to Mexico, which is deploying around 10,000 soldiers to the border to secure it following comprehensive U.S. tariffs, which have been suspended by Trump for a month. The Trump administration is also deploying Army and Marine units to the southern border.[30]

The ICE migrant hunt, which is supported by large sections of the U.S. population,[31] is now proving too successful:[32] At the beginning of February, interned migrants sometimes had to be released because the detention centers were overcrowded.[33] But the Trump administration seems to have found a solution for this too. The infamous military base at Guantanamo, which served as a detention and torture center for Islamist terrorists during the “war on terror,” is to become a – well – concentration camp for all the migrants detained by ICE who cannot simply be deported. The capacity of this camp is said to be up to 30,000 people.[34]

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.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us/politics/trump-immigration-climate-dei-policies.html

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/federal-health-workers-terrified-dei-website-publishes-list-targets-rcna190711

[3] The White House stated that Musk was a “special government employee.” https://www.golem.de/news/doge-weisses-haus-aeussert-sich-zu-elon-musk-2502-193042.html

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/us/politics/federal-workers-opm.html

[5] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/04/trump-buyout-offer-federal-workers-deadline/78208851007/

[6] https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/02/04/usaid-marxists-once-again-elon-musk-again-displays-his-invincible-ignorance/

[7] https://time.com/7212938/trump-administration-pulling-almost-all-usaid-workers-off-job-worldwide/

[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/us/politics/usaid-trump-musk.html

[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/us/politics/democracy-human-rights-fired.html

[10] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-administration-to-take-steps-to-defund-education-department/ar-AA1ylYd4

[11] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/us/trump-executive-orders-universities.html

[12] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/elon-musk-us-aid-social-security-data-heist-trump.html

[13] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-doge-treasury-payments-b2691375.html

[14] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/elon-musks-attempt-to-control-the-treasury-payment-system-is-incredibly-dangerous/ar-AA1yka77

[15] https://www.konicz.info/2014/12/05/oligarchie-und-staatszerfall/

[16] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/03/unions-sue-block-musk-treasury-payment-00202243

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

[18] https://exitinenglish.com/2025/02/26/a-country-for-old-men/

[19] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/senate-confirms-bidens-235th-judge-beating-trumps-record-rcna182832

[20] https://www.uspresidentialelectionnews.com/2024/11/donald-trumps-10-point-plan-to-dismantle-the-deep-state-revisited/

[21] https://www.konicz.info/2019/02/11/ich-will-wo-es-ist/

[22] https://www.yahoo.com/news/fbi-launches-wide-ranging-round-202334950.html

[23] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/30/politics/senior-fbi-leaders-demoted-wray/index.html

[24] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/01/trump-fbi-revenge-firings/681538/

[25] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/us/politics/fbi-names-trump-jan-6-lawsuit.html

[26] https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstories/cia-offers-buyouts-to-entire-workforce-to-align-with-trump-priorities-sources-say/ar-AA1ytjkq

[27] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/former-cia-officials-worry-trump-politicize-weaponize-intelligence-age-rcna179024

[28] https://www.yahoo.com/news/retired-general-no-idea-got-222433140.html

[29] https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/02/04/everything-to-know-about-trumps-mass-deportation-plans-first-flights-to-guantnamo-bay-underway-white-house-says/

[30] https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-marines-southern-border/

[31] https://abcnews.go.com/538/americans-support-trumps-mass-deportations/story?id=118194123

[32] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/fear-spreads-in-immigrant-communities-as-raids-and-deportations-escalate

[33] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-releases-some-migrant-detainees-detention-facilities-reach-109-percent-capacity/

[34] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-wants-to-hold-up-to-30000-detained-migrants-at-guantanamo-bay-heres-what-to-know

Originally published on konicz.info on 02/06/2025

Black-Brown Breakthrough as the Election Campaign Heats Up?

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ Leave a comment

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

Tomasz Konicz

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.

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

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

~ OlIver Blackwell ~ 4 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