The liberal end as an authoritarian beginning: When left-liberal business editors write about the end of capitalism, they mean its descent into authoritarianism. A review of Ulrike Herrmann’s “The End of Capitalism.”

Tomasz Konicz

For just where fails the comprehension,

A word steps promptly in as deputy.

With words ’tis excellent disputing;

Systems to words ’tis easy suiting;

On words ’tis excellent believing;

No word can ever lose a jot from thieving.

Mephisto in Goethe’s Faust, Part 1

At last! After all these long years,[1] in which critics of value, like lonely voices in the wilderness, have addressed the self-destructive tendencies of capital, and warned of the collapse of the process of civilization due to the incompatibility of capitalism and climate protection,[2][3] it now seems that the mainstream of published opinion is also taking up this issue. This is hardly surprising in view of the manifest systemic crisis, in which all attempts to nurse capital back to health are bound to fail.[4] While the opportunistically closed-off “Left Party,” in which national-social and left-liberal rackets fight for hegemony,[5] clings to its dull social demagoguery, Ulrike Herrmann, economics editor of the daily newspaper taz, the left-liberal organ of the ruling Green Party, has written a book on the “end of capitalism,” the subtitle of which at least notes the incompatibility of “growth” and climate protection.[6]

Isn’t that great? Herrmann’s radical crisis theory, for years thoroughly marginalized, not least in the taz, now seems to be becoming “mainstream”! The former Keynesian Herrmann, who still in her 2018 bestseller Kein Kapitalismus ist auch keine Lösung (No Capitalism Is Also No Solution) refused to part ways with her beloved capitalism, thoroughly misinterpreting Karl Marx in the process, now sees no alternative to an alternative system. Unlike many arch-conservative leftists who are still stuck in the 19^th century, Herrmann seems to have undergone an enormous change of heart within a few years, from a healthy worshipper of capitalism to a post-capitalist. Better late than never!

What does it matter if some of the central statements of her new book give the impression of having been simply copied from texts of the critique of value, without a citation or a simple reference to where Herrmann suddenly gets her wisdom, which includes the inevitability of the “demise” of capitalism? Take, for example, when she writes that there is no alternative to “renouncing growth,” because otherwise things would end violently in the long run, having “destroyed the foundations of life.”[7] This is an – admittedly rather hairy – rendition of a central thesis of the critique of value.[8] The same applies to the (former?) Keynes fan’s observation that Keynesian stimulus programs boost the economy in times of crisis, but at the same time literally fuel the climate crisis.[9]

In the late-bourgeois media and political establishment, where competition and copyright are sacred, intellectual theft is considered a serious offense; it is pursued by “plagiarism hunters” and can end the career of a politician or journalist. Without saying so, Herrmann seems to be shamelessly drawing on the resources of value-critical crisis theory, which has been systematically marginalized for years, not least in her newspaper. Measured by the standards of the liberal middle class to which she belongs, this is unacceptable; it comes close to intellectual theft.

But within the left, within progressive, emancipatory forces, different rules apply. Ideally, an open-source approach prevails, so to speak. Here, insights and theoretical findings are common property that can and should be disseminated and, above all, criticized and further developed by all interested parties. Insight is a collective process gained in dialectical discussion, in dispute. And Herrmann’s book – in contrast to most of the intellectual exhalations of the “Left Party,” which is passing into open decay – seems to fulfill a central progressive claim in the manifest systemic crisis: It clearly emphasizes that overcoming capitalism is necessary for survival. Por la causa, for the sake of the cause, it is also important to remember that Herrmann acts as a multiplier. In her media appearances, with the support of the green and liberal media, she can reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, not hundreds or – if all goes well – thousands, as is now common in the left-wing scene.

So, is the struggle for a post-capitalist future finally becoming mainstream in the face of the manifest systemic crisis? Or, to put it another way: Is Herrmann’s book a progressive contribution to the crisis debate? First of all, one might have doubts about this after reading the effusive praise Herrmann heaps on capitalism for its alleged merits (democracy! prosperity! comfort!) before discussing the ecological barriers of its development. Here, of course, the narrow-minded perspective of the German, white middle class comes into play, which confidently ignores the catastrophic conditions in the periphery of the world system and the underclass in the centers.

But here, too, one could argue that the praise of capitalism is intended to soften the necessary rupture that the middle class itself would suffer if it were to part intellectually from its golden capitalist thought-cage. On the other hand, it becomes more difficult to maintain a positive assessment of her argumentation when Herrmann starts to develop quite concrete specifications for an “alternative” way of doing business – which look suspiciously like the old state capitalism of the 1930s – with reference to the slogan “System Change, not Climate Change.”

The economics editor of the taz refers quite specifically to the wartime economy of Great Britain, which is supposed to serve as a model for a post-capitalist alternative (the wartime economy of the Nazis, by the way, differed little in its basic features, with the exception of forced labor in the last years of the war). State planning, rationing and a renunciation of consumption are cited as methods by which the reduction of emissions would have to be achieved quickly. Finally, Herrmann demands that every citizen be assigned the same CO₂ limit of one ton per year, so that the rich would have to cut back far more than the middle class or the poor.

This plea for state capitalism is flanked by ideas from the alternative ecological milieu of the Greens: the degrowth movement, the barter economy, or the public goods economy. The sharing of goods, the reduction of working hours, an unconditional basic income, and vocational reorientation are mentioned in this context as supporting measures of a state-planned “survival economy.”[10] A state capitalism with a green tinge, so to speak. The renunciation of consumption in the face of state-organized rationing of goods and joint yoga courses – this is what Herrmann’s “system alternative” seems to amount to, and it can only be sold as such because the taz journalist takes great care not to elaborate a concept of capital, as even the weekly newspaper Freitag noted in its review of the book.[11] That capital is a process of the unlimited valorization of waged labor in commodity production, a totality that shapes the entire society in its image,[12] Herrmann, in her previous book, at least still suspected in her discussion of Marx.[13] All that remains of this is the regressive and nebulous talk of “growth.”

It is simply not clear what Herrmann means by capitalism, so capitalist institutions, processes or phenomena can be sold as post-capitalist. A renunciation of consumption, as Herrmann demands, implies the continued existence of consumption, which is, after all, only an expression of commodity production. Consumption, as opposed to the satisfaction of needs, is always commodity consumption, that is, a by-product of the pursuit of maximum profit. In a post-capitalist society, however, human needs would have to be freed from the constricting corset of the commodity form. Herrmann thus wants to abolish capitalism while retaining the “elementary form” (Marx) of capital, the commodity as the bearer of value. A necessary liberation of needs from the consumption compulsion of the commodity form in post-capitalism, however, could save resources on a massive scale without being perceived as a “renunciation of consumption.”

Oh yeah, and private ownership of the means of production is also supposed to be a part of the overcoming of capitalism, in the “Democratic Private Planned Economy” (Thus Herrmann on British wartime capitalism). Hermann’s post-capitalist labeling fraud, however, applies above all to the state, which is not a counter-principle to the market and capital, but, in its capacity as the “ideal total capitalist” (Marx/Engels), a necessary pole of capitalist societies, guaranteeing the functioning of the overall system as a corrective agent. Historically, the state was also the midwife of capital, by means of the monetization of feudal levies in the firearms economy (Robert Kurz) of absolutism, and it is dependent on the valorization process of capital through taxes.[14] Without sufficient capital valorization there is no state – and vice versa. That is why, in the crisis episodes of the past decades, many states on the periphery collapsed one after the other and became the notorious “failed states,” because in these places the economic crisis of capital had grown to such an extent that even the state apparatuses had gone wild.

In her middle-class-compatible fetishism of the state, the taz author is thus once again completely Keynesian. At this point, at the latest, the fact that Herrmann only copied the ecological side of the crisis process of capital from the critique of value, without adequately perceiving its economic dimension, takes its revenge.[15] The current systemic crisis is not a mere re-enactment of the crisis of enforcement (Robert Kurz) of the 1930s and 1940s, when Fordism made its breakthrough as a new regime of accumulation with the total mobilization for war.[16] There is no prospect of a new regime of accumulation, which is why the tendencies of state erosion are spreading more and more, even in the centers. In Germany, this takes the form of right-wing networks and rackets, which are acting with increasing self-confidence (the taz reported, for example, on the coup plans of Uniter & Co.) – and to whom Herrmann now wants to entrust control of the reproduction of society as a whole. State capitalism is already a crisis reality in many places: for example in China, in the form of the Russian state oligarchy, or even in Egypt, where the Egyptian military is building a “war economy” without war.[17] State expansion and state erosion often go hand in hand.[18]

Of course, Herrmann would indignantly reject suggestions that she would look to Russia or Egypt as models. But this is – like the state Nazi networks in the FRG – the harsh reality of the crisis, not the Keynesian ideal of the impartial regulating state. The capitalist state, too, is caught up in the socio-ecological crisis of capital. And at the same time, it is a common capitalist crisis reflex, as the above shows, that the role of the state increases in times of crisis. The authoritarian and “brutalizing” state will play a greater role in the further course of the crisis. And that is why Herrmann’s statements must be called ideology, justification. It provides the justification for the coming era of authoritarian state crisis management in the capitalist systemic crisis, which is now not only devastating the periphery, but is also fully taking hold in the centers. The German middle class’s fear of the crisis is likely to provide mass support for this authoritarian flight into the arms of the seemingly strong state – from which the German right is likely to benefit (the AfD is already on the rise).

This justification takes place through the gutting of the concept of capitalism, which degenerates into a mere empty phrase that can be filled with content at will. It is a strategy borrowed from the advertising industry, where it has become a habit to fill words with content at will. Since capitalism has fallen into disrepute due to its permanent economic and ecological crisis, its form of crisis must be given a new label, a new tag: the capitalist crisis management that Herrmann propagates is no longer capitalism, according to the central ideologem of the taz editor. That is why Herrmann does not give a definition of capital, as Freitag criticized; she has to remain vague so that this ideological sleight of hand can succeed.

Actors from the Green Party, the party of the social austerity of Agenda 2010 and the wars of aggression that violated international law, are thus leading the production of ideology in the climate crisis: the chimera of “green capitalism” that has been successfully propagated for years is now giving way to a mere relabeling of the looming authoritarian crisis management as post-capitalism. This is a Mephistophelian trick that takes ideology to a new level: it is a rebranding of capitalism that operates with empty words while capitalism has a very bad reputation due to its permanent crisis.

And that is why it is also legitimate to be outraged by the fact that Herrmann, here completely the bourgeois competitive subject, is basically committing intellectual theft, taking central insights of value critique out of their theoretical context and incorporating them distortedly into her state-capitalist ideology. But this approach is characteristic of this rapidly brutalizing middle-class milieu in its ruthless crisis competition, which we must also judge by its own copyright standards.

Finally, it should be noted that this late Keynesian fetish of the state, even in its idealized and largely unrealistic version, has nothing to do with emancipation, if this is to be understood as the overcoming of capitalist fetishism and its absurd regime of coercion, which is driving towards socio-ecological collapse. Emancipation is not “hollow talk” pursued by “do-gooders,” but the necessary, conscious shaping of the reproduction process in a thoroughly conflictual, egalitarian discourse encompassing all of society. And this liberation of democracy from the fetishistic fetters of capital would ultimately be more efficient than any state economy, which inevitably tends towards authoritarianism, as a look at the history of the GDR or the Soviet Union shows. But the most efficient social reproduction possible, freed from the capitalist irrationality of limitless valorization, would be urgently needed, especially in view of the escalating climate crisis.

Ulrike Herrmann, Das Ende des Kapitalismus. Warum Wachstum und Klimaschutz nicht vereinbar sind – und wie wir in Zukunft leben werden, kiwi, 2022

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

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[1] https://www.konicz.info/2008/07/14/mit-vollgas-gegen-die-wand/

[2] https://konkret-magazin.shop/texte/konkret-texte-shop/66/tomasz-konicz-kapitalkollaps

[3] https://www.mandelbaum.at/buecher/tomasz-konicz/klimakiller-kapital/

[4] https://www.konicz.info/2020/04/11/konjunktur-fuer-gesundbeter/

[5] https://www.xn--untergrund-blttle-2qb.ch/politik/deutschland/linkspartei-opportunismus-in-der-krise-7288.html

[6] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/ulrike-herrmann-sieht-kapitalismus-am-ende-100.html

[7] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/ulrike-herrmann-sieht-kapitalismus-am-ende-100.html

[8] https://www.konicz.info/2019/05/27/minimalprogramm/

[9] https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1147322.klimaschutz-die-weltverbrennungsmaschine.html

https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Das-Virus-die-Weltwirtschaft-und-das-Klima-4679329.html

[10] https://taz.de/Kapitalismus-und-Klimaschutz/!5879301/

[11] “Unfortunately, the author does not give us a clear concept of what she wants to call capitalism in essence, although that would actually be necessary if one wants to explain the necessity of the end of capitalism.” Source: https://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/das-ende-des-kapitalismus-ulrike-herrmann-will-geplante-kriegswirtschaft

[12] https://www.untergrund-blättle.ch/politik/theorie/emanzipation-in-der-krise-7306.html

[13] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kein_Kapitalismus_ist_auch_keine_L%C3%B6sung#Karl_Marx

[14] See also: Robert Kurz, The Bang of Modernity. Innovation through Firearms, Expansion through War: A Look Back to the Origins of Abstract Labor. Online at : https://www.exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=transnationales&index=3&posnr=167&backtext1=text1.php

[15] https://www.untergrund-blättle.ch/wirtschaft/schuldenberge-im-klimawandel-7112.html

[16] Robert Kurz, Die Demokratie frisst ihre Kinder, Bemerkungen zum neuen Rechtsradikalismus. https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=autoren&index=37&posnr=49&backtext1=text1.php

[17] https://carnegie-mec.org/2022/01/31/retain-restructure-or-divest-policy-options-for-egypt-s-military-economy-pub-86232

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

Originally published on konicz.info on 12/14/2022

Some reflections on the anti-fascist transformation struggle in the manifest systemic crisis.

Tomasz Konicz

 “It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. […] Only the good has depth that can be radical.” – Hannah Arendt

Where did all the “extremists,” who seek to dominate the current social protests by using social demagogy, suddenly come from?[1] In the German media circus – where ignorance is a competitive advantage – the extremist threat to the democratic “center” of society is always seen as coming from the fringes, or, to put it more precisely, from an imaginary outside. As if extremist aliens were hijacking our good bourgeois democracy. All this rampant delusion[2] couldn’t possibly come from the seemingly rational capitalist mainstream, could it?

The concept of extremism, as it is commonly used in public discourse, is in fact hollow; it refers not only to the political and ideological “distance” between the moderate center and the militant “fringes” of the political spectrum. By listing outward characteristics and extreme methods, it is also an expression of the political majority conditions that prevail at the moment. The center is the political place where the majority of people are, while the “extremes” of the “lunatic fringe”[3] are thought to be the small, lunatic minorities. Thus, the commonly used term extremism refers only to the fringes of the political spectrum. This spectrum, however, is subject to change, and for years it has been marching sharply to the right, in interaction with ever new waves of crisis.

But every actor in the bourgeois political establishment wants to be part of the center. The AfD is no exception.[4] Starting with the Sarrazin debate and continuing with the euro crisis, the refugee crisis, and the AfD’s march through the country, culminating in the Corona mania of the lateral thinkers, the political spectrum has begun to shift. If only because other parties and political forces are reacting to the successes of the right – mostly by trying to copy or adapt parts of the ideological “recipe for success” of the New Right, which is what Ms. Wagenknecht is trying to do.[5] Views of what is considered “normal” and part of the “center” consequently changed during the rise of the New Right. What was once considered agitation and “brown” becomes normal.[6] This calculation is also part of the strategy of the New Right, which seeks to achieve its hegemony of discourse precisely by deliberately breaking taboos and trampling on the most basic norms of civilization.[7]

Ideology and Extremism of The Center

“Extremism” finds supporters in the center of society, thus rendering the bourgeois concept of extremism – which is located in the environment of the ideology of totalitarianism – completely meaningless and therefore “extremely” useless.[8] In the eastern part of the FRG, the AfD has long been the strongest of the parties. So can it really be called “extremist”?[9] And yet, a modified concept of extremism is indispensable for understanding the rise of the New Right in the crisis. But it has to be understood precisely as a crisis-related “extremism of the center,” as an ideological reaction primarily of the middle classes, of the bourgeoisie, to the crisis-related dislocations.

Ideology is not to be understood here as a mere fantasy or figment of the imagination, but rather as a distorted perception of social reality that seeks to justify and legitimize it despite its contradictions and distortions. Ideology, therefore, always refers to the contradictions of the society in which it emerges. Consequently, a critique of ideology is also a critique of society. Ideology is fabricated precisely in the center, in the culture industry and in the media business, and it always carries an ideologically distorted moment of truth; it fabricates half-truths in order to make people resign themselves to a self-destructive mode of economy that is devastating society, climate systems and the environment, a devastation that is becoming more and more obvious.

In response to waves of crisis, right-wing crisis ideology thus pushes the legitimation patterns and narratives prevailing in the “center” to their ideological extreme in a kind of conformist rebellion. The concept of centrist extremism can thus only shed light on the foundations of right-wing crisis ideology – which is rooted precisely in the existing and seemingly “everyday” – if it is taken seriously and not merely used as a purely formal conceptual shell to which forces at the fringes of the political spectrum are assigned in a totalitarian-theoretical manner.

On the one hand, the New Right thus draws on views, values and ideological frameworks that prevail in the mainstream of the societies in which it is successful. This middle-class ideology, whose form has been decisively shaped by the neoliberal hegemony of the last three decades, is being sharpened and taken to an ideological extreme in response to the dynamics of the crisis. It is thus not “external” forces opposed to the bourgeois center that are now questioning many civilizational norms. The center, unsettled by the crisis, is incubating ideologies of human inequality entirely on its own. Thus, it is not the desire to change the world that fuels centrist extremism, but the reactionary reflex to cling to crisis-ridden late capitalist society.

Therefore, it is necessary to show the continuities between the center and the right-wing populist ideology. It is not a matter form, but of concrete ideological content. It is only by examining the concrete content of new-right ideology – as well as its rooting in the mainstream of late-bourgeois societies – that the aforementioned concept of centrist extremism becomes fully comprehensible. And this ideological continuity also explains why the New Right was able to achieve such rapid electoral success. It is precisely because there is no need for an ideological break. It is the same, well-worn ideological path on which the paranoid and fearful citizen drifts to the extreme.

Competitive Pressure and Location Nationalism

Which ideological concepts, then, that have become hegemonic in the “center,” especially in the era of neoliberalism, are being sharpened and taken to extremes by the New Right? First and foremost is the idea of competition, which under neoliberalism has taken hold in almost all areas of society.[10] And of course, right-wing populism and right-wing extremism in all their varieties have always enthusiastically embraced the principle of competition, modifying and sharpening it in many different ways. Right-wing ideologies give this basic principle of the capitalist economy, market competition, a “higher,” timeless meaning by imagining competition as an eternal basic principle of human coexistence: The ideological spectrum here ranges from Social Darwinist ideas to culturalism, racism, economic chauvinism, and the Manichean delusion of German National Socialism, which hallucinated an eternal competition and struggle for survival between Aryans and Jews.

The hatred of “do-gooders” and of moral action is an expression of this crisis-induced barbarization of capitalist competitive pressure, which is characteristic of fascism. The extent to which the hegemony of the New Right has already advanced in this respect is made clear by the right-wing friendly Querfront protagonists of the rapidly eroding left. Christian Baron, for example, denigrated in Freitag (40/2022) as “moral” any criticism of Wagenknecht’s longstanding promotion of the AfD in the financial and refugee crises.[11] This not only confused radical criticism of the activities of the brown fringe of the “Left Party” with morality, but also reproduced the usual resentment of the New Right, which pushes the crisis-induced barbarization of the principle of competition through hatred of the basic principles of civilization.

However, a corresponding drift to the extremism of the center also takes place at the identitary level, in national identity. The era of neo-liberal globalization produced a special form of nationalism and a modification of national identity in the middle class of the “export world champion” Germany, which was very strongly influenced by economic thinking. This locational nationalism, which drew its chauvinism from successful competition on world market, was accompanied by a change in nationalist patterns of exclusion. Culturalism, racism and xenophobia were often economically mediated.

In these economically based resentments, the cultural or racial hierarchization of nations and minorities is derived precisely from their economic position in the world economy or in the national economy concerned. Economic success is said to indicate superior genes or culture, in Germany especially the right attitude towards work, while impoverishment and marginalization are inversely attributed to genetic or cultural deficiencies. These sentiments already found their public breakthrough during the Sarrazin debate,[12] and they became public consensus during the euro crisis, when Schäuble harassed Greece with ever new “austerity packages.”[13]

Moreover, right-wing crisis ideology falsely imagines that the victims of the crisis are its perpetrators. The Hartz IV recipients, according to Sarrazin, are responsible for their misery due to their deficient genetic make-up; the lazy Southern European, according to Schäuble, are to blame for the euro crisis; the refugees, according to Wagenknecht, abuse the “right to hospitality.” This personification of the causes of the crisis in corresponding scapegoats also shows quite concretely that the crisis is a historical process that takes place in stages and promotes the ideological “driving to the extreme” of the existing ideology: The Agenda 2010, which brought about the misery of Hartz IV, which Sarrazin then wanted to attribute to genetic defects, the European debt crisis, the mass migration movements from the periphery, which is collapsing in civil wars, to the centers – these are concrete phases of a crisis process of the capitalist world system that takes place in stages.[14]

National Response to the “Social Question”

The social demagogy of the New Right, which is currently especially successful in the former GDR and which made the AfD the strongest party, is based precisely on giving a national answer to the “social question” in the familiar patterns of thought formed in the brutalization of neoliberalism: “social peace” is to be achieved at the expense of all those who do not belong to the national collective. The right-wing narratives of foreigners who only want our money, of conspiracies to cut off our natural gas, are accompanied by complaints of rising prices and social erosion. This national-socialism that is developing and that has reached the “left”[15] thus seeks to externalize, to project outward, the internal contradictions of capital that are coming to a head as a result of the crisis. These are the same reflexes that appeared, for example, in the euro crisis, when the Greeks, Italians, Spaniards or Portuguese were declared to be the cause of the debt crisis, a crisis that would not have existed without the extreme trade surpluses of the burnt-out republic of Germany.[16]

This process of extremist “brutalization” of the center can thus be traced quite concretely: Since the beginning of the 21^st century at the latest, an ideological “rearmament” has taken hold in the Federal Republic, in which the familiar line of thought is not abandoned but taken to the extreme. In the systemic crisis, the logic of the capitalist system is not questioned by the vast majority of the population, but driven into the barbaric. For right-wing populism, therefore, a public that has been conditioned by neoliberalism for decades is a guarantee of electoral success in times of crisis. All it has to do is to continue to stir existing fears, to fuel existing resentments, and to further push ideological armament by means of “courageous taboo-breaking” (similar centrist extremism brought someone like Donald Trump to the White House in the US).

The maxim of the right-wing populist “extremism of the center” is fully effective. What emerges from the frightened – and the fear is only too justified – center of society in response to the misunderstood crisis is poured into politics: Close the borders! Foreigners out! Forced labor for useless deadbeats! Germany first!

And after all, it’s quite easy to become a Nazi. In almost all European states right-wing populism can triumph precisely because it is so easy to understand – no fundamental break with the dominant ideology is required. And it is easy because, as a conformist rebellion, it does not seek alternatives but remains on the surface of appearances. The well-trodden ideological lines of thought do not have to be abandoned; they lead almost naturally into the barbarism that is emerging.

To Be Radical Is to Go to The Root of The Matter

What is needed, however, is not a parroting of the rising resentments that feed on the decaying forms of capitalist ideology, as practiced, for example, by the “Left Party” of a Wagenknecht,[17] but a clear break with the logic of the system in order to initiate a broad social discourse that seeks to initiate a transformative movement.[18] Clinging to categories and concepts such as state, people, nation, market, money, and capital, whose real social equivalents are disintegrating due to the crisis, can only lead to disaster. The radical break with the dominant capitalist discourse of the crisis, which is rapidly running amok, is a bare necessity in the face of the crisis.

To be radical means to tackle a problem fundamentally, to penetrate to the root (radix) of the problem. That is why radicalism is not a preliminary stage of extremism, as is repeatedly suggested in the hollow, late-bourgeois discourse on extremism. Radicalism is the opposite of extremism. While the latter remains on the surface of phenomena, pushing the ideology that prevails in the center to the extreme, radicalism strives for depth, in order to penetrate to the core, to the essence of phenomena. Thus, the struggle against the New Right, if it is to be consistent and ultimately successful, would also have to be accompanied by radical reflection in order to produce an adequate practice.

A radical anti-fascism would therefore have to fight against the re-emergence of fascism not only as an external phenomenon, but also as a terrorist form of capitalist rule during the crisis. The crisis ideology of the New Right, which is rooted in the neoliberal center, is an expression of very concrete contradictions that escalate because of the crisis: the social as well as the ecological crisis of capital, which has reached the limits of its development and threatens to drag humanity into the abyss, into barbarism. The New Right, on the other hand, is the political subject that concretely carries out this objectively threatening crash in the systemic crisis. This is especially true of the climate crisis, to which the New Right responds with trivialization and denial on the one hand, and with a drift toward eco-fascism on the other.[19]

A radical anti-fascism that understands fascism as a potentially mass-murderous crisis form of capitalist rule would thus seek to understand and conduct the struggle against the fascist danger as part of an inevitable transformative struggle for a post-capitalist future.[20] Broad anti-fascist alliance building, as it was already successfully practiced in the 90s, would have to go hand in hand with the open thematization of the systemic crisis and the role of the New Right as the executor of the barbaric and destructive potentials unleashed in the process.[21]

Thus, in the current phase of the unfolding world crisis of capital, the anti-fascist struggle has the central role of keeping open the possibility of an emancipatory course of transformation – in the struggle against the extreme right.[22] Actually, emancipatory forces would have to be the exact opposite of the right-wing friendly social demagogy of Sahra Wagenknecht’s “Left Party.”[23]

The break with capitalism, which is sinking into a permanent crisis – and which carries fascism with it like a storm cloud carries rain – is necessary because it is objectively imminent. Either the transformation of the system will take place in forms of fascist barbarism, or we can fight for an emancipatory transformation. The social reality shaped by the frothing fascist crisis ideology is the yardstick of radical anti-fascist practice, which must go to the root of the very real capitalist systemic crisis. And this would not be mere voluntarism, but insight into the necessity of a transformative anti-fascism.

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

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[1] https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/gesellschaft/wer-protest-ost-deutschland-inflation-100.html

[2] https://www.konicz.info/2020/05/25/die-verbrechen-des-bill-gates/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunatic_fringe

[4] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2016-03/afd-analyse-erfolg-landtagswahlen-partei-waehler

[5] https://www.konicz.info/2021/06/29/schreiben-wie-ein-internettroll/

[6] https://www.kontextwochenzeitung.de/politik/444/neue-braune-normalitaet-6213.html

[7] https://www.konicz.info/2018/01/17/oesterreich-mit-permanenten-tabubruechen-wird-eine-neue-normalitaet-geschaffen/

[8] Cf. Eva Berendsen et al: Extrem unbrauchbar – Über Gleichsetzungen von links und rechts, Berlin 2019.

[9] https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=645182253946598&set=a.122195239578638

[10] https://www.konicz.info/2017/09/22/national-und-neoliberal-2/

[11] There, with an evident misuse of a Droste quote, it literally says: “[…] ‘If the brain has come up short, morals are taken very readily,’ wrote the sadly deceased writer Wiglaf Droste. This can be seen in all the major debates of recent years. During the financial crisis from 2007 onwards, ‘good’ left-liberals interpreted the ‘bad’ protests against big banks as ‘truncated capitalism’ that was ‘structurally anti-Semitic.’ During the ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015, those who pointed out that there was a need not only for a ‘welcoming culture’ for refugees, but also for locals who felt fear of social decline, because otherwise the democratic legitimacy of refugee aid was at risk, saw themselves defamed as ‘racist’ […]” Source: https://www.freitag.de/autoren/cbaron/wagenknecht-putin-afd-querfront-einwurf-in-eine-bezeichnende-debatte

[12] https://www.sopos.org/aufsaetze/4ca59c0843dfe/1.phtml.html

[13] https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Willkommen-in-der-Postdemokratie-3374458.html?seite=all

[14] https://oxiblog.de/die-mythen-der-krise/

[15] https://www.konicz.info/2016/08/11/die-sarrazin-der-linkspartei/

[16] https://www.konicz.info/2010/05/04/krisenmythos-griechenland/

[17] https://exitinenglish.com/2023/01/23/opportunism-in-the-crisis/

[18] https://www.untergrund-blättle.ch/politik/theorie/transformationskampf-statt-klassenkampf-7289.html

[19] https://www.konicz.info/2019/08/30/der-alte-todesdrang-der-neuen-rechten/

[20] https://www.konicz.info/2022/10/05/transformationskampf-statt-klassenkampf/

[21] https://www.konicz.info/2019/08/30/der-alte-todesdrang-der-neuen-rechten/

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

[23] https://exitinenglish.com/2023/01/23/opportunism-in-the-crisis/

Originally published on konicz.info on 10/27/2022

The threat of nuclear war is greater than it has been since the end of the Cold War

Tomasz Konicz

By now it should have dawned on even the last German Putin troll that the Kremlin’s war of aggression in Ukraine is not going according to plan. The best indication of this is Russia’s annexation of the four Ukrainian oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson, which came in response to a dramatic defeat of Russian troops east of Kharkiv in mid-September. By partially mobilizing – for the time being – 300,000 reservists and annexing the four eastern and southern Ukrainian regions, the Kremlin opted for further escalation. This was exacerbated by intense Russian missile attacks on energy infrastructure and civilian targets across Ukraine, including the capital Kiev, following an explosion on the strategically important bridge linking Russia to the peninsula it annexed in 2014.

Adjustment of The Goals of the War

The current annexation of the four territories was motivated by several factors. On the one hand, it represents an adjustment of the goals of the war, which on the one hand are being massively scaled back in order to make them unavailable for any negotiations. These are Putin’s minimum goals, which are no longer to be the subject of negotiations – at the same time, there is less talk of regime change in Ukraine or anything like that. The Kremlin must adapt its imperial ambitions, which only a few months ago saw Ukraine as part of Russia, to military realities in order to simultaneously satisfy the Russian right, the imperialist and nationalist hardliners who are constantly pushing for a further intensification of the war. In the course of the war so far, Putin has been pressured not by liberal forces, but by right-wing forces, which have been calling for total mobilization and unrestricted warfare for months.

With the annexation of large parts of eastern Ukraine –accompanied by offers of negotiations to Kiev – the Kremlin is not only signaling to the West what it intends to take with it as the minimum spoils of its imperial adventure, it is also paving the way for nuclear war, for the final stage of escalation. Since the beginning of October, the Kremlin has considered the annexed Ukrainian regions as part of Russia, and Russian military doctrine provides for the use of nuclear weapons for national defense, even against conventional forces. The danger of nuclear war is now greater than at any time since the end of the Cold War, precisely because the Kremlin, in its imperial megalomania, has overestimated the military capabilities of the Russian army and is still barely able to stabilize the front in eastern and southern Ukraine.

At the latest since the partial mobilization, which is also an admission of the weakness of the Russian armed forces, Vladimir Putin’s political – and ultimately physical – survival is also at stake in the war. Authoritarian regimes encourage apathy, the indifference of the population, in order to secure their rule, which is why Putin has long resisted mobilization because it will inevitably politicize Russia. Without imperial gains, Putin cannot end the war and survive politically, because partial mobilization is already destabilizing the state-oligarchic, kleptocratic ruling structure in Russia. This is currently evident at its borders, where tens of thousands are leaving the country, even before the expected heavy losses among the reservists. Putin thus needs a victory in his imperial war, even though he has no ability to secure it. In view of this power-political impasse, the Kremlin’s flight to a nuclear attack, which is constantly threatened, seems quite possible. The use of weapons of mass destruction by the ailing Russian military machine would even become likely in the event of an advance by Ukrainian units into Crimea or into the eastern regions that had already seceded during the 2014 civil war.

Instrumentalization Of The Systemic Crisis

For Ukraine, Russia’s partial mobilization and annexation means that everything is now riding on a military escalation. Kiev is pressing ahead with the so far successful offensives in the east and south of Ukraine with all its might in order to, despite all the losses, take advantage of the window of opportunity that remains for the Western-equipped and modernized army before the Russian partial mobilization materializes on the front. Putin’s annexation is rendered meaningless by Russia’s inability to hold these “new” territories militarily, which at the same time should help destabilize the “power vertical” around Putin. This is why Kiev responded to Putin’s offers of negotiations with a decree that categorically rules out negotiations as long as Putin is president. This is meant to encourage revolts in the palace.

Meanwhile, not only Kiev but also Washington seems to be banking on the very regime change in Moscow that Putin’s invasion aimed to bring about in Ukraine. The stakes in this crisis-imperialist “Great Game” over Ukraine are getting higher and higher, the warring parties have more and more to lose, which in turn makes de-escalation more and more difficult. The blowing up of the North Sea pipeline, which had been a thorn in the side of the former Central Eastern European transit countries and the US in particular, illustrates the readiness for escalation that exists on all sides. Sometimes crisis tendencies, state erosion and state disintegration are deliberately promoted: the Ukrainian right sees the disintegration of Russia as a strategic goal. There are similar considerations in Western think tanks, where it is currently being debated whether Putin is still needed as a “factor of order.” Russia, for its part, is trying, not entirely unsuccessfully, to bring Western Europe to its knees in the coming winter through its economic war. The capitalist systemic crisis is being instrumentalized to some extent by all the warring parties.

Pre-apocalyptic Conflict Constellation

The West’s political stability is therefore also at stake in the face of increasing economic distortions. This does not only apply to Germany, where the New Right is already smelling the morning air and the Querfront of parts of the Left Party and the AfD is already marching together, for example in Brandenburg an der Havel, for Russian natural gas. Rising inflation, the renewed threat of a global financial crisis, the recession – these are the very concrete internal contradictions of the crisis that are also driving the West into confrontation. The intransigent, escalationist attitude of Washington and Berlin towards the imperialist Putin, which is a sharp contrast with their laissez faire towards the bloody imperial adventures of Western ally Erdoğan, is driven by the same crisis-imperialist logic as in Russia’s crumbling “power vertical.” The internal crisis is to be bridged by external expansion: The dwindling dollar must be defended as the world’s reserve currency at literally any cost, and access to the raw materials and energy sources that Moscow uses as an economic weapon must be restored – even if this requires regime change and state collapse.

For many of the main parties to the conflict, there is little turning back from the spiral of escalation.  In early October, Moscow warned the West of a “direct confrontation” if the recently negotiated resumption of arms deliveries to Kiev went ahead. A distanced view of this crisis-imperialist war reveals a pre-apocalyptic constellation of conflicts. As capital breaks down from its internal and external contradictions, as climate and economic crises escalate, the crisis-ridden late capitalist state behemoths, driven by these contradictions, threaten to attack each other – until the self-destructive urge of capital is unleashed in a nuclear exchange.

Originally published in analyse & kritik on 10/18/2022

Why the state-capitalist People’s Republic will not be able to succeed the USA as a hegemonic power

Tomasz Konicz

Launched in 2013, the New Silk Road, Beijing’s ambitious investment program in developing and emerging countries, was supposed to usher in an era of Chinese hegemony and make the 21st century a Chinese century – after the 20th century went down in history as the period of US hegemony. Beijing has budgeted more than a trillion US dollars for this strategic development program, which evokes memories of the US Marshall Plan in devastated postwar Europe. Just as Washington used Marshall Plan funds to rebuild Europe after 1945, while emerging as the undisputed leading power of the West in the second half of the twentieth century, the huge Chinese loans to many peripheral countries were motivated by a similar strategic calculation.

According to this calculation, the infrastructural development boost that the construction of power plants, railways, or roads should trigger in the “developing countries” would go hand in hand with close strategic ties between these countries and China. Beijing would thus buy geopolitical dominance through credit-financed economic development in many regions of Asia, Africa and even Latin America. China, which has long since become the leading trading power in most regions of the global South, would thus become the most important lender and strategic partner that could build up its own alliance system around the People’s Republic – similar to the “West” with the US as the leading power.

A Gigantic Investment Program and Its Spiraling Debt

By the end of 2021, the People’s Republic had invested the equivalent of $838 billion in this ambitious development program, which made China “the world’s largest bilateral lender,” according to the Financial Times (FT).[1] This preeminent position is especially true for the periphery of the world system, as Beijing has lent more to the 74 countries classified by the World Bank as low-income than all other “bilateral creditors combined.” The Belt and Road Initiative, as the “New Silk Road” investment strategy is known in English, was not only the People’s Republic’s largest foreign policy venture since its founding in 1949, but also the “largest transnational infrastructure program” ever undertaken by a single country. Even the Marshall Plan, which today would be equivalent to around 100 billion dollars of investment, pales in comparison to the “New Silk Road.”[2]

And it is precisely this gigantic investment program that is causing China’s first major international debt crisis. More and more of the debtor countries on the “New Silk Road” are being forced to ask China to defer payments or renegotiate loan terms. According to calculations by US think tanks, about $118 billion in Chinese loans are at risk of default, or about 16 percent of the total investment in the “New Silk Road.”[3] Countries in Africa, South Asia and Latin America – the Financial Times (FT) continues – that have been set back economically by the latest wave of crises triggered by the pandemic are affected. According to the report, Beijing had to renegotiate the terms of foreign loans worth $52 billion in the pandemic years 2020 and 2021, compared with only $16 billion in debt in 2018 and 2019.

Negotiations between Beijing and borrowers from the global South revolve around partial write-offs of the loan amount, payment delays, or interest rate cuts. In addition, Beijing is increasingly having to provide emergency loans in order to maintain the solvency of its debtors on the periphery of the global system. As a result, according to the FT, China increasingly finds itself in a “role usually played by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)” in many of the large-scale credit-financed investments under the “New Silk Road.” Ironically, the IMF, whose crisis loans have been tied to draconian austerity measures for decades, called on China and other creditors in mid-July to make concessions to faltering debtor countries as large parts of the global South threaten to collapse in the face of a dramatic debt crisis. According to the IMF, “one-third of emerging market economies and two-thirds of developing countries are in distress because of high debt.”[4]

Meanwhile, Beijing has emerged as a “serious competitor to the IMF” after the People’s Republic had to issue secret “emergency loans” and bailout packages worth tens of billions of dollars to over-indebted states to prevent defaults or debt crises, the FT said, citing studies by US research institutions.[5] According to the report, Beijing’s three biggest debtors alone – Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Argentina – have received bailouts worth $32.8 billion since 2017. The list of countries that have had to be stabilized by Beijing through crisis loans includes Kenya, Venezuela, Angola, Nigeria, Laos, Belarus, Egypt, Turkey and Ukraine. For the most part, these emergency loans have prevented infrastructure projects financed under the New Silk Road from going bankrupt.

In this way, Beijing has often been able to prevent failed major projects from leading to payment crises or sovereign defaults. And China is a more popular creditor than the IMF because, according to the FT, the People’s Republic keeps its debtor states “afloat with ever new emergency loans” without demanding that the debtors “restore economic discipline” or carry out the infamous “structural adjustments” with which the IMF has wreaked economic havoc on much of the periphery of the world system since the debt crises of the 1980s. One Western analyst told the FT that there is a suspicion that countries with debt problems prefer Chinese loans in order to “avoid going to the IMF,” which demands “painful reforms.” But this only delays the inevitable “adjustment” and makes it “even more painful.” In any case, many of China’s Silk Road loans follow a geopolitical logic of creating dependencies with debtor countries in order to “limit the strategic options of the US and the West.”

Geopolitical Dimensions of Investment

The geopolitical component of China’s investment strategy is particularly evident in the high level of lending in the post-Soviet region, where Beijing has invested a good 20 percent of the funds it has earmarked for the “New Silk Road.”[6] At $125 billion, the largest share of Chinese loans has gone to Russia, followed by Belarus with eight billion dollars and Ukraine with seven billion dollars. These gigantic investments by Beijing are now threatened by the war in Ukraine, which Russia currently appears to be losing – and which could lead to a collapse of Russia’s sphere of influence. China’s investment strategy in the region literally depends on the outcome of the war. After all, even in such a case, Beijing can hope to recoup some of its loans through in-kind payments. Under loan agreements, Russia can settle outstanding payments in oil or natural gas, making a total default on loans extended to Russia unlikely.

Another focus of Chinese investment activity is sub-Saharan Africa, where, according to Western estimates, the People’s Republic granted loans worth around 78 billion dollars.[7] Although this represents only a small share (12 percent) of the foreign debt held by this largely economically isolated region of the world, with private Western lenders holding 35 percent of the total debt, China has been able to make up ground here in recent years. Between 2007 and 2020 alone, Beijing lent $23 billion in public-private partnerships in the sub-Saharan region, while the United States, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands and France together invested only $9.1 billion.[8] China is in demand as a lender in the region because Beijing’s lending terms are far more favorable than those of Western institutions. Interest rates on Western loans are said to be twice as high as those offered by the People’s Republic.

And it is not only developmentally nonsensical, corruption-ridden prestige projects, as was the case in Sri Lanka, that are being implemented in Africa. In Ethiopia, for example, Chinese capital financed a railroad that cut travel time between the capital and neighboring Djibouti from three days to 12 hours. In Kenya, a new line was built between Mombasa and Nairobi; a new rail link between Tanzania and Zambia also drastically reduced travel time; dams were built in Uganda; and roads and infrastructure projects for water supply and electrification were pushed forward in Africa or Central Asia. The Chinese strategy of accumulating geopolitical influence through economic development seemed to be working in Africa until the recent crisis.

The Illusion of Recuperative Development

But even projects that make sense in terms of development policy are increasingly reaching their economic limits due to the growing global crisis: The railway line between Nairobi and Mombasa, built in four years by the state-owned Chinese Road and Bridge Corporation, is said to have incurred a loss of some $200 million within three years. Meanwhile, China is said to have accumulated by far the most default-prone loans in sub-Saharan Africa. More than a hundred loan agreements have had to be renegotiated in the region, compared with 21 in Asia and only 12 in Latin America.[9] A prime example of the collapse of this Chinese development and hegemonic strategy in the face of late capitalist crisis realities is provided by the South African country Zambia, which went bust on its foreign debt of $17 billion in 2020. China had previously built a railroad to Tanzania, a hydroelectric power plant, two airports, two sports stadiums, and a hospital in Zambia in investment projects worth six billion dollars.

Outside of Africa and the post-Soviet space, it is not Sri Lanka but Pakistan that has seen the most rapid influx of Chinese investment in recent years. In Sri Lanka, Chinese loans amount to a mere five billion dollars, or just ten percent of the total liabilities of the economically collapsed state, where corruption and mismanagement culminated in absurd investment projects that contributed to the disastrous aggravation of the current crisis.[10] $62 billion flowed from the coffers of the Belt and Road Initiative went to Pakistan, which has always been of high strategic importance to Beijing as a counterweight to China’s geopolitical rival India.

Beijing’s investment activities have ranged from infrastructure projects, with funds flowing into energy generation and transportation, to the strategic expansion of the port of Gwadar, to the establishment of manufacturing facilities in Pakistan to take advantage of the country’s very low labor costs.[11] This development of “extended workbenches” in Pakistan, to which labor-intensive manufacturing activities were outsourced, sometimes took place not only in the economic centers of Pakistan, but also in the unstable periphery, such as the province of Chaibar Pachtunchwa, which was plagued by Islamism and ‘tribal struggles.’

Hopes for capitalist modernization were dashed by 2020 at the latest, as some of China’s investment projects were put on hold after the outbreak of the pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis, while the crisis quickly made Pakistan’s debt burden unsustainable. Work on the Gwadar port project, for example, is said to have largely stopped.[12] In order to avoid bankruptcy as a result of the unfolding downward economic spiral,[13] in which inflation, rising borrowing costs and collapsing government revenues rapidly eroded foreign exchange reserves, Islamabad had to resort to emergency loans from both the IMF and China – by July 2022, Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves were only enough to cover the cost of the country’s imports for two months. Chinese banks had been extending “a number” of loans to the country on an ongoing basis, most recently to the tune of $2.3 billion in mid-2022, to shore up its dwindling “supply of hard currency.” The IMF, meanwhile, has pledged more than seven billion in crisis loans to Islamabad.

At least until early August, the impoverished country, plagued by Islamism and state erosion, appeared to have averted acute national bankruptcy after reaching a new loan agreement with the IMF, accompanied by the usual harsh austerity measures, such as higher taxes and cuts in energy subsidies.[14] But then came the historically unprecedented floods, the frequency of which, like other extreme weather events, is increasing because of the climate crisis.[15] About one-third of Pakistan’s land area was inundated, and more than 33 million people were affected by the floods. The country now faces a hunger crisis and rising extremism,[16] while the economy is on the verge of collapse.[17] Initial estimates by Pakistani government ministers put the cost of the floods at around ten billion dollars.[18]

The increasingly manifest interaction of a debt crisis and the climate crisis,[19] of internal and external limits to capitalism’s ability to develop, devastated entire regions of Pakistan in August that were already suffering from a severe economic crisis, devastation that was largely ignored in the West. This is the global crisis environment of a late capitalist world system that is collapsing because of its contradictions, in which China has launched its grand attempt to build its own system of alliances through an ambitious investment program in order to emerge as the new hegemon. Mounting global debt and the escalating climate crisis are throwing a wrench into Beijing’s imperial calculus, which sought to emulate the rise of the United States after World War II.[20]

Washington’s hegemonic rise after the end of the Second World War, however, took place against the backdrop of the long Fordist boom period of the 1950s and 60s, the “economic miracle,” as it is idealized in Germany. Mass motorization and the total penetration of all areas of post-war societies by the logic of valorization, heralded by the total mobilization of the war economies,[21] made it possible to utilize gigantic masses of labor in the labor-intensive accumulation process for almost two decades. This Fordist regime of accumulation, with the automobile industry as its leading sector, formed the economic basis of US hegemony until it was phased out in the 1970s,[22] only to be replaced under neoliberalism by the financialization of capitalism – in effect, the increasing global accumulation of deficits leading to ever new financial bubbles and debt crises.

In the “Cold War,” the USA was able to emerge as the unchallenged and accepted leading power of the “West,” the hegemon, not least because the prolonged economic boom enabled Washington to grant its allies room for economic development – which Japan and West Germany also made ample use of in the course of the “economic miracle,” soon surpassing US industry in terms of quality. The rapidly rising tide of Fordism lifted all boats. As long as capital was able to expand into new markets (cars, “white goods,” consumer electronics, etc.) that had only emerged during Fordism, the competition between the “economic locations” remained in the background – even in the face of the “clash of systems.”

The Impossibility of a New Hegemonic System in The Crisis of Capitalism

China, on the other hand, has to operate in a crisis-ridden world system in which the extremely high global productivity level of commodity-producing industry has led to a systemic crisis of overproduction, resulting in constantly rising mountains of debt, since the hyper-productive system is effectively running on credit. Moreover, the lack of a new leading sector and regime of accumulation leads to an increasing export fixation of economic policies and corresponding trade wars, in which the core capitalist countries try to support their economies with export surpluses – at the expense of the competition, which often reacts with protectionist measures. The pursuit of export surpluses, perfected above all by the FRG within the framework of this beggar-thy-neighbor policy, with which the systemic crisis of overproduction is to be “exported,” is thus a source of permanent inter-state tensions between the “economic locations” threatened with decline.

And these are precisely the reasons for the almost insurmountable obstacles that stand in the way of the construction of a hegemonic system in the current world crisis of capital. Hegemony, i.e. the leading position accepted or tolerated by the subordinate powers of a power system, is now only conceivable at the price of credit financing, since there is no economic basis for it in the form of a new regime of accumulation. According to the FT, China’s foreign exchange reserves have already shrunk from four trillion dollars to three trillion dollars, partly due to the massive investments in the “New Silk Road,” and Beijing’s lending abroad has also collapsed massively. While the People’s Republic made more than 55 loans worth more than a billion dollars each in 2015, it made less than ten in 2021. But the drying up of Beijing’s generous financial flows, which used to stimulate the economies of Africa and Asia, is exacerbating the current crisis on the periphery of the world system. China can thus lend and gain influence in the short term, over a number of years, but because of the high level of global productivity, it cannot create a new leading sector that would utilize a sufficient mass of waged labor in the production of commodities.

And China itself, as part of the world system, is affected by the world crisis of capital. This is particularly evident in its tendencies towards a beggar-thy-neighbor policy, since the state-capitalist People’s Republic is also striving to achieve the highest possible export surpluses at the expense of its competitors, which counteracts the formation of hegemony. Due to the simmering debt crisis[23] in China’s anemic real estate sector[24] and the pandemic-induced slowdown in the domestic economy, export surpluses are becoming increasingly important in terms of economic policy, even for Beijing. Last June alone, China ran a trade surplus of $98 billion – a new record![25]

It is not only in the US that China’s surpluses are reflected in corresponding deficits. The group of ASEAN countries in China’s immediate Southeast Asian neighborhood ran a $17 billion trade deficit with China in the same period. Instead of building a hegemonic system in which China’s neighbors also benefit economically from the rise of the People’s Republic, a fierce battle for market share is now underway, Reuters noted, as we find ourselves in a world where “absolute demand” is falling and there will be “brutal price wars” for shares of the “shrinking pie.”

China’s Changing Position in The World Economy

The “workshop of the world” thus seems to be returning to the origins of its meteoric rise, which in its initial phase was driven by an extreme export orientation, by the achievement of gigantic export surpluses. Until the global financial crisis of 2007/2008, triggered by the bursting of the transatlantic real estate bubble in the US and the EU, the export industry functioned as China’s main economic engine. The extreme Chinese trade surpluses vis-à-vis the “deficit economies” of the USA and parts of Europe, which were running on credit, not only drove the export industrialization and modernization of the People’s Republic, but also went hand in hand with the export of debt. The Federal Republic of Germany, the multiple “export surplus world champion,” also engaged in the practice of exporting debt until recently.[26]

However, the Chinese accumulation model changed fundamentally with the crisis surge of 2008, the bursting of the housing bubble in the US and Europe, which was countered globally with enormous economic stimulus measures. In fact, the massive government demand stimulus that Beijing unleashed through several economic stimulus packages made the Chinese economy the global economic locomotive in 2009.[27] But the Chinese government’s gigantic support measures in response to the 2008 crisis also provided the initial spark for a transformation of China’s economic dynamics: exports lost weight, and the credit-financed construction industry, infrastructure, and the real estate sector became the central drivers of economic growth – culminating in today’s absurdly high 29 percent share of GDP.[28] China’s export-driven modernization, with its export of debt that at times made the US the People’s Republic’s largest debtor, thus turned into a state-fueled deficit economy – one that has long since escaped state control.

China’s Real Estate Bubble

The Chinese deficit economy, which created a gigantic real estate bubble, experienced its first major crisis in the summer of 2021, when one of China’s largest real estate companies, Evergrande, was on the verge of bankruptcy. The group, which was saved from bankruptcy by the Chinese government in early 2022 through a “restructuring program,”[29] has accumulated $300 billion in debt, $20 billion of which is owed to foreign investors. Domestically, more than 1.5 million real estate buyers are waiting for the completion of homes already planned and paid for at 500 construction sites. Meanwhile, the group’s creditors are fighting over who will bear the inevitable losses.[30]

How big is the real estate and debt bubble created by Chinese state capitalism– and can it stand up to comparison with the housing speculation in the US in 2008? In a study of this speculative dynamic, US economist Kenneth Rogoff concluded that China’s construction and real estate sectors directly and indirectly generate about 29 percent of China’s gross domestic product (GDP).[31] This means that the bubble in the state-capitalist “People’s Republic” need not fear comparison with the West, not only in absolute terms, but also in relation to its economic output. In Spain, at the height of the transatlantic housing bubble in 2006, the real estate sector accounted for about 28 percent of GDP, while in Ireland it was about 22 percent.

The situation is even more dramatic when the price level in the main housing markets of the People’s Republic is compared to the wage level. In Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, more than 40 average annual salaries are needed to buy a property, compared to 22 in London, one of the most expensive cities in the West, and ‘only’ 12 in New York. Rogoff spoke of the “breath-taking” and, for large economies, “unprecedented” extent to which China’s financial market-driven state capitalism drove its housing bubble. This is also evident from the ratio of living space to population, which, according to Rogoff, has long since reached the level of France and Great Britain in the People’s Republic – and even exceeds that of Spain. If the construction fever were really about providing people with housing, China’s real estate market would have been saturated long ago.

Thus, the Evergrande debacle is indeed only the proverbial tip of the iceberg in an authoritarian Chinese state capitalism that shares a fundamental crisis tendency with its Western competitors: it runs on credit. In 2020, all of China’s accumulated liabilities (government, private sector, financial sphere) amounted to about 317 percent of the People’s Republic’s GDP,[32] which was only slightly behind the global average of 356 percent.[33] Despite declarations by the leadership in Beijing and intensified efforts to curb lending, China’s mountain of debt has been growing faster than the GDP of the “workshop of the world” since 2008 – as is the case in many of China’s debtor countries.

But all of Beijing’s official figures should be taken with a grain of salt, as much is simply swept under the rug in China. China’s local governments are also said to be saddled with a gigantic mountain of debt, which Goldman Sachs estimates could be as high as $8.2 trillion – the debt has been outsourced to “financing vehicles,”[34] so as not to show up in the statistics.[35] That would be about 52 percent of the People’s Republic’s GDP. Incidentally, in the course of the real estate boom, the over-indebted municipalities have tapped into an important source of financing: they sell land to real estate companies, which build their speculative properties on it. The officially unrecorded mountain of debt that China’s shadow banks are said to have accumulated is estimated at $13 trillion.[36]

Multiple Crises as An Expression of The Crisis of Global Capitalism

As a result, China’s leaders are facing not only an external but also an internal debt crisis that is not only strikingly similar to the real estate bubble that burst in the West in 2008, but also reminiscent of the distortions in many of the People’s Republic’s debtor states. So far, Beijing has been able to delay the bursting of this bubble through a series of interventions and financial injections, but at some point the devaluation process will inevitably have to take place – especially as the political fallout from China’s internal debt bubble grows: In Zhengzhou, the capital of the central Chinese province of Henan, for example, angry bank customers recently clashed with police as they protested the freezing of their accounts after local banks were embroiled in a scandal and collapsed.[37] The Chinese Communist Party has also had to deal with a mortgage strike by angry home buyers who have stopped paying their mortgages en masse while waiting for their homes to be completed.[38]

Finally, the climate crisis is not stopping at the People’s Republic, which, with its global investment program, is trying to export its own fossil-fuel driven modernization model, which has made China the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, to the periphery and semi-periphery of the capitalist world system, since the new “renewable” industries that are supposed to enable the ecological transformation of capitalism are too capital-intensive and utilize too few workers.[39] Not only Pakistan, which is indebted to China, but also the People’s Republic itself suffered historically unprecedented weather this summer with a combination of prolonged drought and an extreme heat wave[40] that put pressure on energy supplies, economic activity and food security.[41] The sweltering heat literally shut down production, not only diminishing China’s growth prospects, but also threatening to put a strain global supply chains.[42]

The struggle against climate-induced societal collapse that emerged in this year’s summer of horrors, not only in China but also in the EU and the US, is thus likely to make the very idea of global hegemony seem absurd in the years ahead. With the crisis-induced increase in inter-state tensions and struggles, which escalated into a neo-imperialist war in Ukraine, the rotten late-capitalist state behemoths will be more concerned in the coming years with passing on the consequences of the crisis to their competitors in order to delay their own collapse.

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[1] https://www.ft.com/content/ccbe2b80-0c3e-4d58-a182-8728b443df9a

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0077-9

[3] https://www.dw.com/de/g%C3%B6rlach-global-die-vielzahl-der-krisen-wird-f%C3%BCr-china-zum-problem/a-62618116

[4] https://www.diepresse.com/6164054/iwf-draengt-china-zu-steuererleichterungen-fuer-entwicklungslaender

[5] https://www.ft.com/content/f27a543b-7678-4130-9c05-db0492d9c240

[6] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/chinas-overseas-lending-and-war-ukraine

[7] https://www.merkur.de/politik/china-afrika-schulden-investitionen-eu-global-gateway-kenia-wahlkampf-zr-91714454.html

[8] https://www.voanews.com/a/china-s-loans-to-sub-saharan-africa-outweigh-those-of-western-nations-/6436250.html

[9] https://www.ft.com/content/ccbe2b80-0c3e-4d58-a182-8728b443df9a

[10] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/south-asia/sri-lanka-opens-china-funded-white-elephant-tower-to-tourists/articleshow/94245383.cms

[11] https://www.dw.com/en/china-pakistan-investment-ties/a-58734281

[12] https://www.ft.com/content/ccbe2b80-0c3e-4d58-a182-8728b443df9a

[13] https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/08/05/pakistan-sovereign-debt-imf-inflation/

[14] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/10/pakistans-finance-minister-says-country-headed-in-right-direction.html

[15] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/world/asia/pakistan-floods.html

[16] https://www.rescue.org/press-release/pakistan-floods-will-devastate-economy-likely-leading-widespread-hunger-and-violence

[17] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/9/7/after-record-floods-now-pakistan-has-to-worry-about-economy

[18] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62719659

[19] https://www.xn--untergrund-blttle-2qb.ch/wirtschaft/schuldenberge-im-klimawandel-7112.html

[20] https://www.xn--untergrund-blttle-2qb.ch/politik/theorie/krise-krieg-ozeanien-eurasien-7070.html

[21] Robert Kurz, “Freie Fahrt ins Krisenchaos: Aufstieg und Grenzen des automobilen Kapitalismus” in exit! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, no 17, 2020, 23-44.

[22] https://www.untergrund-blättle.ch/wirtschaft/theorie/stagflation-inflationsrate-6794.html

[23] https://www.konicz.info/2021/11/27/einstuerzende-neubauten/

[24] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/finanzen/umfrage-schwache-prognosen-fuer-chinas-immobilienmarkt-18054854.html

[25] https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/chinas-economy-could-beggar-its-neighbours-2022-07-15/

[26] https://www.konicz.info/2022/07/26/schluss-mit-ueberschuss/

[27] https://www.zeit.de/online/2008/46/boerse-tokio-konjunkturprogramm-china

[28] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/09/chinas-property-market-debt-an-issue-for-the-economy-george-magnus.html

[29] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/finanzen/staat-eilt-krisenkonzern-china-evergrande-zu-hilfe-17748055.html

[30] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/finanzen/glaeubiger-von-evergrande-lehnen-vorschlag-fuer-zahlungsaufschub-ab-18164421.html

[31] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/can-chinas-outsized-real-estate-sector-amplify-delta-induced-slowdown

[32] https://www.chinabankingnews.com/2020/05/20/chinas-total-domestic-debt-hits-317-of-gdp-for-record-quarterly-increase-iff/

[33] https://www.axios.com/2021/02/18/global-debt-gdp

[34] LGFV: local government financing vehicles. Financing companies established for the purpose of financing specific infrastructure projects. Their liabilities are traded on the financial markets, but do not appear in the statistics as government debt.

[35] https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3150556/china-hidden-local-government-debt-rises-over-half-gdp-us82

[36] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/China-s-13tn-shadow-banking-sector-gets-clearer-definition

[37] https://www.fr.de/politik/china-protest-zhengzhou-demonstration-banken-xi-jinping-henan-zr-91663184.html

[38] https://www.handelsblatt.com/finanzen/immobilien/immobilien-wer-hat-mein-geld-immobilienkaeufer-in-china-streiken-die-politik-ist-alarmiert/28533716.html

[39] https://www.konicz.info/2019/07/05/kann-ein-green-new-deal-den-klimawandel-aufhalten/

[40] https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/china/article/3190803/china-drought/index.html

[41] https://www.voanews.com/a/china-s-drought-threatens-nation-s-energy-food-and-economic-security-/6725241.html

[42] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/19/chinas-heatwave-could-have-knock-on-effect-on-its-economy-economist-.html

Originally published on oekumenisches-netz.de in 10/2022

In the unfolding systemic crisis, a renewed plunge into barbarism seems preordained. But this need not be the case.

Tomasz Konicz

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The German Ideology[1]

There is a basic premise of emancipatory practice in the unfolding world crisis of capital that simply cannot be abandoned. It is necessary to tell people what is going on. What most people suspect or only vaguely feel must be clearly stated and become the basis of social movements and struggles: Capitalism is at its end – and in its agony it threatens to drag humanity with it into the abyss by depriving it of the social and ecological foundations of life.[2] The capitalist world system has reached its internal[3] and external[4] limits of development. The economic and climate crises[5] are only two moments of the same crisis process, in which capital’s drive for unlimited growth – the endeavor to make more money out of money by exploiting labor in commodity production – produces an ecologically devastated world and an economically superfluous humanity.

Consequently, it is necessary to consciously seek ways out of crisis and catastrophe capitalism in social struggle and discourse, as the world threatens to sink into barbarism. The overcoming of the capital relation is thus the guiding principle of all leftist practical efforts. Social struggles, protests and movements must therefore be understood and led as partial moments of a transformative struggle for a post-capitalist society. This, the overcoming of capital’s drive to valorize itself, which is running amok worldwide, is the absolute minimum, the sine qua non for any development of civilization in the 21^st century. To tell it like it is, therefore, means to clearly name the overcoming of a collapsing capitalism as a necessity for the survival of civilization. All progressive practice must be oriented to this reality of system transformation. And it is precisely this insistence on the necessity of emancipatory system transformation[6] that distinguishes emancipatory practice from leftist opportunism, the attempt to make a quick career as crisis manager in the crisis by means of demagogy.[7]

The transformation of capital into history is the final capitalist imperative. Any group or party calling itself leftist that preaches incremental change without addressing the systemic crisis and emphasizing the need for systemic transformation is in fact opportunist, if not reactionary.[8] In the escalating systemic crisis, it’s no longer possible for incremental reforms to “succeed” because the distortions caused by the crisis, which are increasing in intensity, simply stand in the way of this endeavor. Progressive practice can only unfold on the basis of efforts to ensure that the inevitable systemic transformation follows a progressive course. This is not left-wing “radicalism,” but a realism born of insight into the nature of the crisis. The crisis runs through society as a fetishistic, uncontrollable process that unfolds through competition and market mediation, regardless of the views and calculations of the occupants of the capitalist treadmill.[9]

Even if the wage-earners do not want to admit it, even if all the relevant strata of the population cling to capitalism, the system will collapse because of its internal contradictions. What is open, however, is what comes after – and that is precisely why the struggle, the transformation struggle, must be waged. The agony of capital can be seen in the global mountains of debt under which many economies are threatening to collapse, as well as in the ever-increasing CO₂ emissions produced by a capitalist world economy caught up in the irrational compulsion to grow.[10] However, an emancipatory movement can only prevent a plunge into barbarism during the now imminent, open-ended transformation process if it reflects on it socially, understands it and consciously shapes it within the framework of the equally inevitable transformation struggle. In order to be able to achieve this, the left, building on radical crisis theory, must tell people what’s what. Otherwise, the fetishistic dynamics of capital will make the world uninhabitable. These introductory theses will be elaborated and justified in the following.

Unconquered Nature

The contradictory capitalist mode of production is thus not only the driving force[11] behind the mounting debt and economic crises,[12] it is also the cause of the unfolding climate catastrophe. And it goes without saying that “man-made” climate change is in large part the result of the social system – the way society is organized and reproduced – in which people are forced to live. This fact is openly obvious. The climate crisis is a capitalist climate crisis, it is “capital-made climate change.” That it nevertheless seems blasphemous to speak this simple, uncomfortable truth is a result of the enormous ideological pressure that weighs on social discourse, and is also an expression of the increasing density and crisis-proneness of capitalist socialization, which seeks to stifle all oppositional thought and action through opportunism or repression.[13][14]

Since the Enlightenment, the core of capitalist ideology has consisted in ideologizing capitalism as a “natural” mode of production, without contradictions in itself and appropriate to human nature, as a social formation that is simply an expression of human nature and – at the latest since the rise of Social Darwinism – unfolds economically according to the same laws as “natural,” ecological systems. Consequently, this synthetic “capitalist nature” of the subjectless domination of capital,[15] with its mediating levels of market, politics, law, culture industry, etc. is always only the basis and never the object of the published discourse of late capitalist societies. And this is precisely why scapegoating, which quickly turns into fascism, gains such popularity in times of crisis,[16] because the “natural” market economy is literally thought of as natural, and free of almost any contradiction. Thus, capitalism appears to the “enlightened” person in bourgeois society as “natural” as feudalism appeared to the medieval person as God-given.

And yet the common ideology of the “natural essence of capitalism” contains a distorted grain of truth. There is a parallel between the processes of ecological and economic crisis that promotes their perception as “natural”: The element of “untamed nature” in society that promotes the illusion of a capitalist state of nature is the uncontrollable valorization process of capital, i.e., the social fetishism mentioned above. Capital’s destructive valorization dynamic, produced unconsciously by market subjects – “behind their backs,” since it is market-mediated – appears as a natural phenomenon running through society. This fetishism comes to the fore especially in episodes of crisis, when the “economy” suddenly runs amok and “waves of crisis” or “market quakes” wreak socio-economic havoc on entire regions – like extreme weather events. The feeling of being at the mercy of quasi-natural, anonymous and overpowering forces then becomes evident.

This irrational momentum of capital, unconsciously generated by market subjects in their seemingly rational pursuit of the greatest possible profit, thus represents the moment of unmastered pseudo-nature, which, due to its increasing internal contradictions, is destroying civilization and its ecological foundations. As long as capital blindly runs through society according to the formula M-C-M’ with ever increasing frictions, neither the climate crisis nor the social crisis can be overcome.

It is therefore necessary to overcome this fetishism, this capitalist pseudo-nature, in order to preserve the natural foundations of human society. In the end, the process of human civilization must be brought to a conclusion, so to speak. The unconscious reproduction of society by means of blindly running processes of valorization must be replaced, in a tremendous process of transformation, by the conscious discussion and organization of social reproduction, which no longer subordinates itself to the boundless, irrational accumulation of ever greater quanta of spent abstract labor in the form of capital, but has as its rational goal the direct satisfaction of needs beyond the commodity form.

What is Capital? What Must Be Overcome?

From these remarks on the social fetishism that seems “natural,” it also becomes clear what we mean by capital, which must be transformed into history. Capital is not just a thing, it is not just money, or the factory and the machinery. Nor is it simply a person, like the capitalist, the manager, or the speculator. This truncated view leads to the reification or personification of capital, which in turn is the basis of all ideology in capitalism.

Capital is a social relation that runs through society only as a transitory stage of its boundless surplus-making in commodity production. It is only within this valorizing movement – the burning of resources by means of labor for the purpose of maximizing profit – that people or things must become capital. The worker and the manager no longer function as capital after work. The same is true of the tools in their hobby cellars, which are simply commodities, whereas in the factory they function as (constant) capital. The capital relation is thus to be understood as this dynamic of valorization, calibrated for permanent growth and encompassing the whole of society. Capital, in all its social and ecological contradictions, is thus a real abstraction that in every cycle of valorization undergoes a change of form from money, to commodity, and finally to more money: concrete things and people are set in motion by it in the most efficient way possible, in order to accumulate ever greater quanta of abstract labor (the source and substance of capital) in an irrational end in itself.

This real-abstract growth compulsion of capital is thus in a sense totalitarian; the capital relation becomes a social totality. In its flight from its internal and external contradictions, it occupies all social spheres and niches – with the exception of the dissociated (femininely connoted) sphere of domestic reproduction – and leads them to valorization.[17] The state apparatus, the legal and political institutions, the political, economic, juridical and ideological levels of mediation of domination – they have all been produced and shaped by the capital relation in a blindly running historical process. Precisely in its agony, capital has thus subjugated the whole of society, as far as this was possible, right down to its subcultural impulses. The subjectless domination of capital is totalized at the historical moment when it suffocates under its own contradictions. And it is precisely all these institutions and levels of mediation produced or shaped by capital that are now collapsing along with the dynamics of capital.

What must be overcome is capital’s blindly running valorization process, which devastates human society and ecosystems. This destructive fetishism must be replaced by a conscious understanding by the members of society of the reproduction process of society, without the division of activities according to gender or the like. This is necessary for survival, precisely because this process of valorization, on whose drip all capitalist societies hang in the form of taxes and wages, is collapsing under the weight of its contradictions. With it, however, the institutions and social structures that capital has historically produced also perish. The post-capitalist reproduction of society cannot therefore take place in the form of “nationalization,” as imagined, for example, by orthodox leftists, since the state in its capacity as the “ideal total capitalist” is a historically developed, necessary institution of capitalism that must be financed by capital through taxes. This is why many over-indebted peripheral states collapsed into “failed states” as early as the 1990s, once the crisis process had exceeded a certain degree of maturity. The state is not the solution, it is part of the problem.

In a historical process that began with the debt crises of the “Third World” in the 1980s, the crisis is gradually moving from the periphery of the world system to the centers. Therefore, the future of the crisis can be predicted from the course of the crisis in the periphery. Without a conscious, emancipatory overcoming of the collapsing capital relation, it will fall into barbaric forms of anomie or crisis dictatorship, as in Somalia, Congo or Eritrea[18] – unless the process of civilization is brought to an end by a catastrophic nuclear war. Mad Max or 1984 – this is the system-immanent alternative that capitalism leaves open in its agony.

Motivation: There Is No Alternative to Transformation

The character of the crisis described here as a fetishistic process of increasing internal development of the contradictions of the capital relation thus leads to the necessity of the struggle for its emancipatory overcoming. As mentioned at the beginning, it is simply a question of the will to survive. Consequently, it is necessary to address people’s survival instinct, which is unconsciously activated in the crisis and contributes to the intensification of crisis competition. And this survival instinct, in its unreflective, quasi-reflexive form, has long been at work on a mass scale. Unconsciously, most of the inhabitants of late capitalism have long since reacted to the increasing crisis-related dislocations with a quasi-instinctive intensification of competition. The survival instinct unconsciously comes to fruition in the intensification of competition in that one’s own survival is to be ensured through the downfall of competitors at all levels (from mobbing to cutthroat competition to location competition to crisis imperialism).  And it is precisely this crisis competition fueled by the naked survival instinct that causally contributes to the barbarization of capitalism and the rise of the New Right – which cloaks this crisis competition in racism, nationalism, anti-Semitism, religious fanaticism, and so on.

This unconsciously practiced survival instinct, caught up in the escalating everyday competition of late capitalism, would have to be “sublimated” within the framework of emancipatory practice. This is to be understood as the conscious, analytical reflection of the unconscious causes of social action, in this case the interaction of competitive behavior and the systemic crisis process, in which the fatal “barbarizing” effect of the individual competitive struggle would be illuminated. Just as the individual, “blind” survival instinct only accelerates the crisis dynamics and opens the door to barbarism, a reflective collective survival instinct, convinced that overcoming capital in society as a whole is necessary for survival, could be a powerful motivating factor for emancipatory forces in the struggle to transform late capitalism. And this is not a question that concerns only leftist “radicals.” Such a consciously established connection between – collective – survival and the necessity of overcoming the system can also very well become the concern of the philistine who wants to leave his children a future worth living.

And that is precisely why it is important to tell people what is going on. It is important to transform the broad masses’ “sense of crisis” into a reflective crisis consciousness – precisely because there is no “revolutionary subject,” the formation of a radical crisis consciousness with mass appeal is indispensable for an emancipatory course of the crisis. And this would not even be the central difficulty in spreading an emancipatory consciousness in the manifest crisis. It would be instilling belief in a viable systemic alternative to collapsing capitalism. The crisis-induced ideological shift, in which blind faith in capital as the natural precondition of human civilization suddenly mutates into fatalistic cultural pessimism, actually represents the standard ideological reaction in manifest crisis situations.

This late capitalist production of panic must therefore be contrasted with the insight, gained through radical theoretical reflection, into the necessity of system transformation, motivated by a sublimated survival instinct that has become aware of its own social and ecological preconditions. The right-wing “prepper” will not save himself; this can only be achieved collectively at the level of society as a whole. Averting the impending ecological and social catastrophe by means of system transformation thus amounts to “influencing” a crisis process that is driven by its fetishistic dynamics and ultimately represents only the crisis-like dialectical reversal of the contradictions inherent in capital. To be more precise: capital is in the process of dissolution; what matters is to steer this process of transformation, which is taking place blindly, in a progressive, emancipatory direction within the framework of a transformation struggle, in order to finally overcome fetishism and move on to the conscious shaping of social reproduction. This, this overcoming of the fetishistic prehistory of humanity, is, as I said, simply a question of survival. Once again: there is no alternative to the struggle for an emancipatory course of the inevitable systemic transformation.

Emancipation and Extremism in The Systemic Crisis

This also opens up the concept of emancipation – it is an emancipation from social fetishism, i.e. from the “alien determination” of the subjects by social dynamics that these subjects themselves unconsciously produce and that are mediated by the market. This can only be achieved by a movement that is aware of its own situation, that is aware of the crisis described above. Only in a conscious struggle for a post-capitalist future, resulting from an understanding of necessity, could moments of emancipation possibly emerge. Consequently, there is a maxim of political practice that emancipatory movements, groups or parties in the 21^st century would have to follow if they still want to function as progressive social forces in the current epoch of upheaval and crisis. Capitalism must be transformed into history as quickly as possible, and the capital relation must be abolished. All leftist actions, all tactics, all reform proposals, all strategies should be oriented to this categorical imperative.

And the struggle for a livable post-capitalist future is not “radicalism.” It is precisely the opposite: clinging to the disintegrating forms of capitalist socialization, to the market and the state, leads to barbarism, to extremism of the center. The successes of the New Right in the crisis result precisely from its ability to push the ideology that is effective in the neoliberal center of late capitalist society further toward brutalization. Enriched with fantasies of envy against scapegoats, neoliberal competitive thinking has been taken to a racist-nationalist extreme by the right. The competition of market subjects and economic locations is ideologically exaggerated into a clash of nations, cultures, “races” or religions.

What is decisive here is that in this “racially,” religiously or nationally legitimized competition there is no break with neoliberalism and its implicitly nationalist thinking about location. In these ideological lines of continuity lies the open secret of the success of the conformist rebellion of the New Right. It does not break out of the capitalist thought-prison and its so-called constraints. Instead, the authoritarian characters remain in the well-worn ideological track that leads from the neoliberal center to the barbaric extreme. That’s why it’s mainly the right that benefits from the current crisis. It’s very easy to become a Nazi.

What is crucial, therefore, is precisely the aforementioned mental escape from the capitalist thought-prison, which must go hand in hand with emancipatory practice in order to prevent the drift into an extremism of the center. That’s why it’s important to tell people what’s what. In the face of the deadly crisis of capital, the struggle for a systemic alternative worth living for is the only reasonable, moderate thing to do. Progress can only be realized beyond capital. Once again: this is not necessary because of the will of the subjects or the moods and sensitivities of the population, but because capital as a global fetishistic totality is collapsing.

False Immediacy

And that is precisely why it is important to prevent this objectively ongoing transformation process from drifting into ideological delusion and fascist barbarism, as far as possible, by spreading an adequate crisis consciousness. Perhaps the consciousness of a viable alternative to the collapse of capitalism and the climate could only develop broadly in a struggling movement. There is no shortage of confrontations, uprisings and struggles in the accelerating systemic crisis. In Europe, apart from climate protests, it is often anti-fascist or labor and socio-political defensive struggles that serve as focal points of oppositional mass mobilization – but most of these don’t develop a transformative perspective.

These movements often get stuck in the false immediacy of their direct demands; for example, they want a better redistribution of abstract capitalist wealth, rather than its abolition. Increasing impoverishment leads to demands for a larger welfare state, while inflation is met with demands for its containment through subsidies and price caps. These immediately “plausible” demands are forcefully discredited by the reality of the crisis. Similarly, the discussion of measures to combat the climate crisis – such as carbon taxes, boycotts of airplanes, renunciation of meat or electric cars – is discouragingly inadequate in light of the dramatic acceleration of climate change and the steps that are actually necessary.

This contradiction between system-immanent social struggles and the social consequences of the systemic crisis was already pointed out by the crisis theorist Robert Kurz at the beginning of the 21st century:

“The critique of value is not simply opposed to social struggles that are immanent to capitalism. They are necessary starting points. Nevertheless, the question is to know what direction these struggles are taking. In this respect, their basis plays an important role. The trade unions are accustomed to presenting their demands not as derived from the needs of their members, but as so many contributions to improving the functioning of the system. Thus, they will say that higher wages are needed to strengthen the economy, and that they are possible because capital has high profits. Now, however, that capital valorization has obviously stagnated, this attitude is voluntarily transformed into a willingness to engage in the co-management of the crisis, to serve the “higher interest” of the entrepreneurial economy, of the laws of the market, of the nation, etc. This false consciousness exists not only among the trade union officials, but also among the so-called rank and file. If the wage workers identify with their own function in capitalism and demand what they need only in the name of this function, they transform themselves into “character masks” (Marx) of a particular component of capital, namely, labor power. Thus, they recognize that they only have the right to live if they can produce surplus-value. This gives rise to an embittered competition among the various categories of wage workers and a social-Darwinist ideology of exclusion. This is particularly evident in the defensive struggle for the preservation of jobs, which has no other perspective than the mere preservation of jobs. In this case there is often mutual competition for survival even between the employees of different branches of the same company. It is therefore essentially a good idea, and also much more realistic, besides, for the French workers to threaten to blow up the factories in order to force their employers to give them a reasonable severance package. These new forms of struggle are neither defensive nor positive, but can be combined with other demands, such as, for example, higher unemployment insurance payments. To the extent that such social demands give rise to a social movement, the latter will also be confronted by the experience of its practical limits, if it will confront the questions of a new “categorical critique” of the fetishistic end-in-itself of capital and its social forms. The crystallization of this advanced perspective is the task of our theoretical elaboration, which does not exist in some abstract Beyond, but is understood as a moment of social debate.”[19]

Given the advanced dynamics of the crisis, it seems counterproductive to launch a fundamental critique aimed at building a “new” transformative and emancipatory movement. Emancipatory movements would have to work with what still exists, because time is of the essence, and windows of opportunity are closing. Retreating into the ivory tower of “pure doctrine” in order to work towards a gradual “diffusion” of adequate crisis consciousness within the left is not a viable strategy. Instead, the only option is to use the crisis to try to bring an adequate crisis consciousness directly into the current struggles. As I said, building on crisis theory, people need to tell frightened people what is going on, so that the protest movements can develop in an emancipatory direction.

The chances of this happening are actually not bad, since even ideologically blinded left-wing associations –from the green, left-liberal or traditional Marxist spectrum, for example – can hardly overlook the consequences of the crisis.[20] The crisis is both the enemy and the friend of the progressive movement: it narrows the spaces of social discourse more and more, it causes panic to rise and right-wing extremist delusions to swell. But at the same time it compels all social forces that still have their wits about them to face up to the undeniable necessity of fundamentally overcoming the collapsing mode of socialization based on capital.

The attempt to bring into the current social confrontations and conflicts a crisis consciousness that corresponds to the objective crisis process ultimately amounts to a struggle against the false immediacy that characterizes these confrontations. False immediacy is understood as the tendency of social movements to unconsciously persist in forms of thinking that correspond to the social conditions and contradictions against which they are directed.

The people caught up in the growing crisis-related confrontations are not seized by a “revolutionary automatism” that would give them an anti-capitalist crisis consciousness. On the contrary. The fixation on concrete, seemingly achievable goals within the existing system reinforces its logic even in oppositional struggles. The struggle for the closure of lignite mines, against inflation and against social erosion, for a higher wage or against wage cuts, the windmill struggle of the helpless, social-democratized left against the blithely advancing dismantling of democracy and social welfare, all these solidify the corresponding capitalist social structures and forms of socialization in which and for whose will the struggle takes place. Work, bourgeois democracy, the capitalistically neutered notion of “civil rights,”[21] and the state as the “welfare state” thus become quasi-natural preconditions of human society, even within the movement caught up in social struggles.

The immediate goals pursued within the system are thus “wrong,” they lead to the formation of the aforementioned false immediacy, because firstly, they do not break with the crisis-ridden logic of the system, but further cement it, and secondly since their realization is completely illusory in a collapsing capitalist society. After the inevitable failure of the major social struggles in a wave of crisis – for example in Southern Europe after the outbreak of the euro crisis – resignation and apathy are widespread, since these movements lack the more far-reaching transformative perspective that can only emerge from a crisis consciousness adequate to the crisis process. The forces involved in the crisis-related increase in social protests for the most part want nothing more than what they postulate: Fighting against lignite mining, for jobs, for higher wages, against social cuts, against the destruction of jobs, against the constant erosion of “civil rights,” and so on.

It seems absurd: in the crisis, the left is fighting to maintain the capitalist forms of socialization, which are eroding as a result of the crisis. And at the same time, there is no realistic alternative to these very struggles, since they are mostly more or less open forms of the naked struggle for existence. Under capitalism, the reproduction of one’s own labor power is only possible by means of waged labor. The establishment of starvation wages, which are below the subsistence level, is also progressing in the centers. The loss of a job is increasingly accompanied by a fall into life-threatening poverty. The struggle against the dismantling of democracy and the omnipresent fascization of Europe is necessary in order to keep open as much room for maneuver as possible for emancipatory politics. As long as the capital relation continues to exist as the described social totality, oppositional forces are also chained to its forms of socialization.

This does not mean, however, that these forces have make the demands of the socio-ecological struggle only in these forms, let alone perceive it only in these forms. Thus, the consciousness with which the current protests and struggles are led is indeed decisive, even if their concrete course does not initially differ that much from the system-immanent, reformist struggles. The confrontation with crisis ideology, a truncated critique of capitalism and false immediacy ultimately aims at raising the transformation process into the “political consciousness” of the social movements, in order to understand the unconsciously led transformation struggle as such in the first place and to consciously shape it accordingly.

The focus, the goal of such a consciously led, apparently system-immanent confrontation (climate struggles, wage struggles, Antifa protests, demos against the dismantling of democracy, defensive struggles against social cuts) changes as soon as it is permeated by a transformative consciousness; that is, when it is understood and propagated as an early phase of the transformative struggle that is already raging in the periphery with all its mass-murderous brutality. To stay with the example of social protests: Instead of simply postulating that the rich should pay their fair share, it would instead be necessary to demand that the rich pay for this transformation – as long as money still has value and it makes any sense to make this demand at all. The path becomes the goal: the self-organization of the people in the opposition movements would thus already have to be supported by the effort to form moments of a post-capitalist socialization.

But questions beyond redistribution and expropriation will also be raised: How can health care, food, housing, etc. be organized without adequate funding or profitable jobs? At the latest when inflation devalues money and everything threatens to be closed down or thinned out for lack of profitability, the organization of social reproduction according to criteria other than capitalist ones is on the agenda. Not ‘How can pensions be financed?’ but ‘How can material and social wealth be organized so that old people can live with dignity?’ Not ‘How can jobs be created?’ but ‘How would people and resources have to be mobilized and what would have to be done so that people have access to food, housing, health care etc.?’ (and not just at the level of Hartz IV, a slum or a gulag). Either the left gets involved at this level, or it has to participate in the implementation of system-immanent solutions, which will amount to nothing more than shipping old people off to cheap care gulags or euthanizing them in a ‘socially acceptable’ manner.

The demands and forms of organization in resistance against the impending climate catastrophe, against the impositions of crisis management, must therefore already contain germinal forms of post-capitalist forms of socialization. Central to this should be the effort to shape the system-immanent opposition movements into open spaces for discourse and discussion. Discourse on the crisis, which is no longer possible at the level of society as a whole (and which is sabotaged by the Left Party for opportunistic reasons),[22] must at least be conducted in opposition. Moreover, the desired post-capitalist process of an understanding of the reproduction of society as a whole already emerges from an understanding of strategies for and forms of protest. The spaces of discourse must therefore be kept open as long as possible, even in the face of increasing repression. The open process of discussion, the organization and coordination of transformative resistance, could function as a prefiguration of the global, conscious self-understanding of world society with regard to its reproduction.

By the way, this is why the democratic struggle is so important for maintaining the remaining bourgeois-democratic freedoms as long as possible, in order to be able to influence the transformation process in forms of non-military conflicts for as long as possible. Moreover, the necessity of the transition between democratic struggle and militant-military confrontation is difficult to assess; it depends on the degree of fascization and the tendencies towards disintegration of the state in question and its society. However, such an armed struggle, which can be imposed on emancipatory forces in the course of a crisis, also represents a defeat. The open structure of discourse, the beginnings of self-management, which could form the germ of future societies, threaten to give way to the necessities of military organization. Then, in fact, the Leninist prescriptions of practice become inescapable – and, consequently, there is the danger of an authoritarian “sovietization” of the post-capitalist alternatives.

“The Real Movement Which Abolishes the Present State”

Ultimately, it is necessary to understand the various struggles and social movements as partial moments of one globally raging transformation struggle. The world has been undergoing a systemic transformation for a long time, but the crisis-blind left does not perceive it as such. As already explained several times: This blindly running transformation process is in principle open, it is not predestined, which is why the outcome of this system transformation (should it be completed without a nuclear holocaust) is also totally open. Moreover, because the system is in a state of upheaval, because the once concrete social fabric is in motion, because the formerly fixed social structures are in a sense becoming fluid, collective action has a far greater influence on shaping the future than in periods when capitalism seemed stable. However, these greater possibilities for intervention offered to emancipatory forces in the current systemic crisis have narrow windows of opportunity that may close irreversibly.

This is obvious in the case of climate change with its tipping points. But the unfolding of social crises is also not linear – it is not a gradual development. Within the transformation process there are decisive moments or situations of upheaval that determine the further course of the crisis. As soon as such a culmination point of the inner unfolding of contradictions has been passed without entailing catastrophic consequences (nuclear war, ecological collapse of entire regions, etc.), the further the crisis process proceeds along the lines laid down at this decisive moment – it seems hardly possible to change such a development by subsequent intervention.

“They don’t know it, but they do it.” This famous quote by Karl Marx, which sums up the fetishistic process of total social reproduction under capitalism, also aptly characterizes the process of dissolution of the capitalist world system that is now in full swing. The world system is already in a phase of chaotic upheaval, although the direction and outcome of this process cannot be predicted – simply because it is being shaped (unconsciously for the time being) by the actions of the subjects in the unfolding transformative struggle. Since there is no such thing as a “revolutionary subject,” the decisive factor is precisely whether the character of the crisis is reflected upon in the population on a sufficient scale to allow the corresponding tipping points to be passed here as well.

Emancipation and barbarism thus appear simultaneously in the full-blown global transformation struggle: On the one hand, the brutal late capitalist crisis competition is merging into a post-capitalist transformation struggle, partly overlapping with it, both moments of crisis sometimes interacting, with the late capitalist crisis ideology, which is subject to constant metamorphoses, trying to rationalize this process of dissolution. At the same time, uprisings and mass protests against late capitalism’s lack of prospects are breaking out more and more frequently, sometimes completely unexpectedly, a global environmental and climate movement is forming, spontaneous uprisings are breaking out in countries such as Iran, and so on. When social tipping points are crossed, uprisings can erupt as if out of the blue. As the intensity of the crisis increases, these contradictions and conflicts will intensify and the myriad struggles will turn into a global confrontation that may well lead to nuclear war.

This applies to the crisis imperialism of the eroding late capitalist state behemoths,[23] as well as to the various conflicts in crisis-ridden societies that are intensifying. However, it is important to avoid “ranking” the struggles in such a way that the class struggle becomes primary and all other struggles secondary. The class-struggle conflicts, exemplified by the demands for increased wages, can only serve, on an equal footing with the other social struggles (antifa, climate struggle, antimilitarism, feminism, defense of democracy, sexual self-determination, etc.) of a transformative movement, to overcome their false immediacy in the way indicated above. This would thereby transform the social struggles, protests or struggles for redistribution into moments of a transformative struggle by introducing a radical crisis consciousness.

As soon as the different movements are understood as partial moments of a struggle for an emancipatory transformation of the system, the emerging, destructive “movement competition” – for example between the climate movement and the social justice movement – which is being pushed by the reactionary parts of the Left Party in particular, could also be minimized.[24] Incidentally, with its “social campaign,” the Left Party is pursuing exactly the opposite of an emancipatory transformation movement: social movements are to be hijacked with social demagogy in order to prevent the emergence of a radical crisis consciousness through repressive movement and crisis management.[25] This opportunistic and right-wing friendly social demagogy, which despite the escalating systemic crisis wallows in a cartoonishly obvious false immediacy, must be confronted in all practice with the collective survival necessity of an emancipatory system transformation.

As it is, it does not remain. This insight from Brecht’s praise of the dialectic[26] could become the maxim for action of an emancipatory transformation movement, which would first have to learn how to influence the transformation process. The question always arises as to which political structures, which social configurations of power should prevail in the next wave of crises. After all, the crisis process that unfolds behind the backs of the subjects can encounter very differently structured late capitalist societies. They can be oligarchic, pre-fascist or bourgeois-democratic, more egalitarian or corporative, nationalist or cosmopolitan, secular or religious-fascist.

It is therefore ultimately a matter of thinking in processes, in developments, of perceiving the existing social structures as being in a state of decay, of locating the decisive contradictions and, in anticipation of the enormous shocks of the future, of creating the best social conditions, the optimal starting position for an emancipatory transformation, which can only happen through large-scale cooperation. The difficulty of such a policy of alliances now consists in locating the appropriate forces that would steer the further transformation process in an emancipatory direction, as well as in bringing the radical crisis consciousness described above into these movements.

In reality, it is only the fetishistic, blind movement of the automatic subject of unlimited capital valorization, that, when it breaks through its inner barrier, turns into the threat of ecological self-destruction and escalating social struggles – possibly even nuclear and world civil war. The late capitalist value society is disintegrating, but social fetishism – the powerless surrender of the subjects to the social dynamics they unconsciously produce – remains strong. The actors, especially on the German left, stagger unconcernedly into the impending world civil war as the vanishing point of the transformational conflicts.

So it really does exist, the “real movement which abolishes the present state of things,” that the young Marx, together with Engels, identified in his early work “The German Ideology” and imagined as a progressive movement.[27] Only it is not an automatism of civilization that leads humanity to communism. Marx, through whose entire work is characterized by the split between an outdated belief in progress and an important categorical critique, expresses here the fetishism of capital while at the same time succumbing to a belief in eternal progress, in the Hegelian world spirit. The real movement that shakes late capitalism to its foundations is that of capital’s valorization process blindly running over society, which is killing itself. It is the fetishism that Marx already suspected at that time.

Therefore, despite all the evidence, it is necessary to fight to form this inevitable transformation movement, which will certainly abolish the present state of things and which is still open in its course and outcome, into a consciously acting movement in the transformation struggle. The transformation of the system is inevitable; what matters is to steer it in a progressive, emancipatory direction – in the struggle against the forces of barbarism that capital is sweating out again in its crisis.

If there is one field of struggle that should be prioritized in the current phase of crisis, then it is an anti-fascism that seeks to build the broadest possible alliance, since fascism is already clearly emerging as the openly terrorist crisis form of capitalist rule. The Querfront, which has long been spreading on the German left,[28] the New Right, which is deeply intertwined with the German state apparatus,[29] and pre-fascism, which is on the rise,[30] are already sharpening their hooves in order to answer the crisis of capital with a renewed plunge into barbarism.

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[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/

[2] https://konkret-magazin.shop/texte/konkret-texte-shop/66/tomasz-konicz-kapitalkollaps

[3] https://www.xn--untergrund-blttle-2qb.ch/wirtschaft/theorie/stagflation-inflationsrate-6794.html

[4] https://www.akweb.de/ausgaben/642/kapitalismus-und-klimakatastrophe-zu-effizient-fuer-diese-welt/

[5] https://www.mandelbaum.at/buecher/tomasz-konicz/klimakiller-kapital/

[6] https://www.akweb.de/bewegung/die-klimabewegung-braucht-antikapitalistische-leitplanken-fuer-ihre-kommenden-aktionen/

[7] https://exitinenglish.com/2023/01/23/opportunism-in-the-crisis/

[8] https://exitinenglish.com/2023/01/23/opportunism-in-the-crisis/

[9] https://exitinenglish.com/2023/01/23/the-subjectless-rule-of-capital/

[10] https://www.konicz.info/2022/06/25/schuldenberge-im-klimawandel/

[11] https://exitinenglish.com/2022/08/12/mountains-of-debt-on-the-move/

[12] https://exitinenglish.com/2023/01/03/the-walking-debt/

[13] https://exitinenglish.com/2023/01/23/opportunism-in-the-crisis/

[14] https://www.konicz.info/2021/09/20/telepolis-eine-rotbraune-inside-story/

[15] https://www.konicz.info/2019/04/27/die-subjektlose-herrschaft-des-kapitals/

[16] https://www.konicz.info/2019/08/30/der-alte-todesdrang-der-neuen-rechten/

[17] See on this: Roswitha Scholz, Der Wert ist der Mann, https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=autoren&index=38&posnr=25&backtext1=text1.php

[18] https://www.rnd.de/politik/eritrea-das-nordkorea-afrikas-diktator-mischt-in-tigray-konflikt-mit-UFEFDYU3TZHRJNBTV776QRFO3I.html

[19] https://libcom.org/article/marxs-theory-crisis-and-abolition-capitalism-robert-kurz

[20] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/ulrike-herrmann-sieht-kapitalismus-am-ende-100.html

[21] Civil rights essentially recognize the human being as a subject capable of capital valorization, whereby recognition ceases if the ability to valorize is absent – as can be seen clearly in the case of refugees. See: https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=autoren&index=20&posnr=554&backtext1=text1.php

[22] https://exitinenglish.com/2023/01/23/opportunism-in-the-crisis/

[23] https://www.konicz.info/2022/06/23/was-ist-krisenimperialismus/

[24] https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=5047254132045984&set=a.1916895028415259

[25] https://exitinenglish.com/2023/01/23/opportunism-in-the-crisis/

[26] https://www.deutschelyrik.de/lob-der-dialektik-1934.html

[27] “Communism is for us not a state of affairs to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a4

[28] https://www.konicz.info/category/querfront/

[29] https://www.konicz.info/2019/04/01/braun-von-ksk-bis-usk/

[30] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/niedersachsen-afd-101.html

Originally published on konicz.info on 10/12/2022