Reactions to The Attack on October 7

Herbert Böttcher

Initial reactions to the Hamas terror attack were characterized by cautious expressions of empathy with the victims, condemnation of the terror, and solidarity with Hamas. At pro-Palestine demonstrations, however, there was soon hardly any sign of shock at the terror. The focus was on the “liberation” of Palestine and Hamas as part of the struggle for “liberation” from Israel. “Hope for Palestine […] Left-wing resistance groups support offensive against Israel,” cheered Junge Welt.[1] During such offensives, the hatred against Israel is discharged in slogans such as “Zionists are fascists, they murder children and civilians.”[2] Around the stands at the Rosa Luxemburg Conference, tones could be heard with which the official program did not wish to identify, but which nevertheless provided a glimpse into what moves left-wing hearts and minds: Hamas is needed to strengthen “socialist class consciousness,” their attack is “an expected response to decades of oppression.” These statements are not intended to justify the attack, but to help “understand” it.[3]

The “Understanding” of the Left

It is “understood” that Israel is the perpetrator and that the victims are defending themselves against this perpetrator. This shift between victims and perpetrators is one of the anti-Semitic stereotypes present on the left. This view gained momentum with the start of the ground offensive. High casualty figures and images of Palestinian suffering can be used to mobilize media-effective and emotionalized outrage against Israel and delegitimize Israel as a state. Although Israel’s reaction in the face of such a terrorist attack was predictable, perhaps even calculated by Hamas, the denunciation of Israel can be used to score points with a public in which anti-Semitism in the form of hostility towards Israel is resonant. Behind the outrage over the “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip, the barbaric terror of Hamas disappears, along with the anti-Semitism found in its charter, which also strategically pursues the goal of destroying Israel and all Jews.

The memory of the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi era is an obstacle to the fight for the “liberation” of Palestine and to the expression of hatred towards Israel. It blocks uninhibited criticism of Israel and solidarity with the Palestinians. Thus the slogan: “Free Palestine from German guilt.” Academically, it seems to be backed up by genocide researcher A. Dirk Moses’ attack on the German culture of remembrance. According to him, this culture has become a supervised, cultishly celebrated staging and is combined with the devaluation of colonial crimes in particular and a reflexive solidarity with Israel.[4]

Anti-Semitism And Capitalism

Judith Butler situates the Hamas attack within the history of violence in the Middle East. She refers to what she sees as the systematic seizure of land and its protection through arbitrary measures such as controls and arrests.[5] She also says it is wrong to blame the “apartheid regime alone” for Hamas’ terror. That Israel is an “apartheid regime” seems indisputable to her. Categorically, colonialism and racism are the reference variables for Butler’s contextualization of terror. In such postmodern culturalist post-colonialism, any reference to capitalism remains vague and its crisis unnoticed. Thus, anti-Semitism as a projective way of processing capitalist crises cannot come into view. Instead of reflecting on anti-Semitism, racism and colonialism in their references to each other and in their differences, as well as the context of the crisis of global capitalism, Butler denounces violence “on both sides,” pleads “for true equality and justice” and wishes for “a world that resists the normalization of colonial domination and supports the self-determination and freedom of the Palestinians.” The domination of capital becomes colonial domination. What is hallucinated is an “Eden of the innate rights of man”[6] that abstracts from commodity production and ends up in an abstract universalism. Contextually, however, the universal critique of violence and calls to end it are related to Israel as a military and occupying power, which arbitrarily holds the Gaza Strip in check as an “open-air prison” and is now also bombing it. It is no coincidence that Butler also attacks the German culture of remembrance. It no longer allows compassion for anyone other than the Jews. However, the particularity of the conflict constellations can neither be separated from the generality of capitalist forms nor derived from them in terms of identity logic. Accordingly, different levels such as cultural differences and psychological crisis management must be taken into account. Colonialism, racism, anti-Semitism and antiziganism cannot therefore be understood “beyond” capitalist forms. But they can’t be derived from them in the logic of a mechanistic scheme of cause and effect either.

Actionist left-wing movements, on the other hand, may consider reflecting upon these distinct yet interconnected levels too complicated and find that this reflection contributes little to the desired self-efficacy. Without such reflection, however, practice degenerates into dull actionism that feeds on moral indignation. Practice is directed against Israel as a supposedly imperial and colonial actor and is lived out in Israel-related anti-Semitism in an experience-intensive way and with the good gut feeling of being on the right side in the global struggle for liberation. Taking sides sorts people into evil imperialists and good colonized people. Such certainties ignore the fact that the struggle is fought within the framework of the collapsing capitalist forms of market and state, capital and labor, subject as agent in competition, etc. and is without an emancipatory perspective, because liberation is sought as national liberation within the collapsing state form. This ignores the fact that capitalism has reached a limit with the microelectronic revolution. Capitalism can no longer overcome this limit because of the disappearance of labor as a substance for the accumulation of capital, and this limit is expressed in the various processes of disintegration, not least in the disintegration of states. It is precisely these crisis processes that fuel anti-Semitism as a projective crisis reaction that cannot be separated from capitalism and its crises.

The Dual Character of The State of Israel

Against the one-sided classification of Israel as a capitalist state, Robert Kurz has pointed out the dual character of the state of Israel. It is not simply a colonial product, but essentially a rescue project for Jews threatened by persecution and annihilation and, as such, a project against anti-Semitism. As a capitalist state, it is exposed to all the same processes of social and state disintegration as other capitalist states. Like them, it has to deal with these crises, but it is surrounded by an environment that threatens its existence, and above all it is unable to fall back on reserves of anti-Semitism to deal with the crisis. In this context, national-religious and racist processing strategies come into play. Secular and socialist-oriented Zionism is moving closer to nationally and religiously orthodox movements and parties. Identitarian and authoritarian tendencies in Israel are taking on the form of theocratic, national-religious movements that are combined with anti-Arab projections. These tendencies are gaining more and more influence on government policy and are institutionally anchored in the Netanyahu government. Rational security policy strategies to defend the existence of Israel are mixed with irrationalisms of ultra-orthodox promises of salvation. However, authoritarian, identitarian, right-wing mobilizations are not simply “typically Israeli.” They can be seen in all capitalist states as an attempt to cope with global processes of disintegration. With regard to Israel, it is noteworthy that the shift to the right is being met with resolute criticism and a determined struggle, which is primarily directed against the judicial reform aimed at restricting the control of the government by the Supreme Court.

Anti-Semitism Instead of a Radical Critique of Capitalism

Instead of advancing towards a radical critique of capitalism in the face of the global crisis processes, left-wing movements stick to the familiar. They continue to see themselves as national liberation movements without acknowledging that, in view of the failure of recuperative development due to the immanent limitations of capitalism, an autonomous state cannot be a prospect. All dreams of a “two-state solution” fail because the basis of modern statehood breaks away with the barriers to capital accumulation that can no longer be overcome. In this paradoxical situation, traditional forms of state-building are combined with denationalization in the form of warlodization and mafia-like structures. The global crisis processes have long since steamrolled the possibilities of national revolutionary liberation. This means that all strategies that rely on a pole of capitalist immanence – be it class struggle or the state as a regulating authority or even as a haven of liberation – are failing.

In this way, an emancipatory overcoming of capitalism cannot come into view and the core of the crisis as an internal barrier to capital accumulation must remain incomprehensible. As long as the left remains blind to the critique of the capitalist constitution in its fetishistic forms, it remains open to a crisis ideology in which the crisis is processed ideologically by projecting it onto “the Jews” and the “Jewish state.” In anti-Semitism, which feeds on the collective unconscious, Israel is pilloried as “the Jew” of states and becomes the object of projective crisis processing. This can be linked to stereotypes such as the differentiation between rapacious capital and the creative capital that is tied to labor. This expresses the separation of the abstract (money) and the concrete (labor), whereby the abstract can be projected onto “the Jews.” They become masters of money and the mind. They are ascribed a superior power by means of which they are able to conspire and rule the world.

The imagination of a world conspiracy was a core element of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic propaganda. It turned up again in the Hamas charter of 1988 and becomes effective in battles aimed at the annihilation of Israel and all Jews. In the anti-Semitic world view, the militarily defended existence of Israel is worse than any other form of oppression and violence. The delusion that the world would be liberated if it were “free of Jews” is therefore obvious in this view. The abstract domination of capitalism can be concretized in “the Jews” and in the “Jewish state.”  Seen as perpetrators of conspiratorial deeds, they can be identified as the masterminds behind oppression and domination. Liberation from “the Jews” takes the place of liberation from the capitalist socialization constituted in the fetishistic interrelation of value and dissociation, capital and labor, economy and politics. The empty and uncanny irrational capitalist self-purpose of turning money into more money can supposedly be identified and made tangible. Powerlessness becomes an imagined power to act. Capitalism appears to be transformable without one having to touch its fetishistic structure. Money and labor, a state that regulates the market, etc. can be retained and the dissociation of female-connoted reproduction can remain in the kitchen of being considered a secondary contradiction. Transformation can become a return to an “original” capitalism of honest work and good political regulation that also brings crises under control. Normality seems to be saved. “Under the spell of the tenacious irrationality of the whole, the irrationality of people is normal.” It is always “ready in political attitudes to overflow even this instrumental reason.”[7] In times of escalating crises, it is tempting to cling to the normality of the irrational social whole and to defend it by fending off and destroying anything that supposedly threatens it – be it refugees, foreigners, the supposedly “work-shy” or, above all, the Jews.

The anti-Semitism of the left reflects the deficits of left-wing critiques of capitalism. What is decisive is that, despite the failure of commodity production and its promise of immanent emancipation, the left shies away from criticizing the fetishistic social context of the capitalist constitution, which confronts individuals as abstract domination. Instead of making this the object of emancipatory critique – the interrelation of value and dissociation, production and circulation, capital and labor, market and state – the attempt is made to attribute domination to specific actors. This paves the way for personalization, emotionalization, indignation, and conspiracy fantasies – a conglomeration that can be “unleashed” and aggressively discharged at any time in projective anti-Semitism.

In a situation in which the social contradictions can no longer be overcome immanently, leftists have also contributed to a mixture of class struggle thinking, practice fetishism and theoretical hostility so that categorical critique can be disarmed and the supposedly “concrete” can be positioned against the supposedly “abstract.” In contrast to the Nazis, whose anti-Semitism was linked to Fordist accumulation, capitalist accumulation in the current crises comes to nothing and also leaves the subjects “naked” in their lack of prospects. Their ability to compete has been deprived. In such hopelessness, the boundaries between murder and suicide threaten to become blurred. The delusion of projective crisis management could mix with tendencies that lead to the destruction of the self and the world in the capitalist form in an immanently hopeless situation. In the “Middle East,” the disintegration of world capital comes to a head in the unpromising and at the same time dangerous actions of state actors who, in the midst of the disintegration processes, are looking for a “foothold,” not least militarily, and at the same time for strategic advantages within the disintegrating state constellations.

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[1] junge Welt from 09/10/23

[2] Jüdische Allgemeine from 2/9/24

[3] Tagesspiegel from 1/13/24

[4] “Der Katechismus der Deutschen”

[5] Freitag no. 42, 2023.

[6] Marx, Capital Volume 1, New York, 1976, 280.

[7] Adorno, “Opinion, Delusion, Society”

Originally published, in a slightly modified form, in konkret 4/2024

On the Contemporary Relevance of Walter Benjamin

Herbert Böttcher

1. Why Walter Benjamin?

About 100 years ago Walter Benjamin wrote his fragment “Capitalism as Religion” (Benjamin 1921). The anniversary of this piece was an occasion to revisit Benjamin. In the process, the relationship between Benjamin’s dictum “that things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe” (Benjamin 2006, 184), and the crisis of capitalism coming to a head in the so-called polycrisis moved into a constellation. This constellation illuminates the explosive nature of the crisis and the danger of the catastrophes that accompany it.

In the attempt to take up Benjamin, we cannot overlook the fact that Benjamin’s critique of capitalism focuses on the cultural level without including the “hidden abode of production” (Marx 1976, 279), i.e., the level of political economy (cf. Böttcher 2021, 35ff). Moreover, Benjamin’s characterization of “capitalism as religion” remains phenomenologically truncated (cf. Kurz 2012, 389ff), thus requiring corrective further thinking with regard to a Marx-oriented critique of fetishism. In connection with political-economic and fetishism-critical insights, Benjamin’s thinking can provide insights into what he described as the catastrophe and what we describe as the final crisis of capitalism.

2.Can the Story Be Recognized?

With the looming dangers of fascism and war, Benjamin’s thinking in the 1920s and 30s focused on the question of history. His last text, written in the form of theses, “On the Concept of History” (Benjamin 2006, 389-400) was inspired by the Hitler-Stalin Pact – “in a race against Hitler’s extermination apparatus” (Werner 2011, 7). At its core is the question of the relationship between the past and the present. They are connected by a “time-kernel that is planted in both the knower and the known” (Benjamin 1989, 51). This “time-kernel” makes history recognizable.

Benjamin thus distinguishes himself from a bourgeois concept of truth that emphasizes the timelessness of truth. At the same time, he marks a contrast with Heidegger’s connection of “Being and Time” (Heidegger 2008). In Heidegger’s understanding of time, real history does not occur. History becomes historicity, an existential of time. Above all, Benjamin distinguishes himself from historicism. The latter wants to recognize history “the way it really was” (Benjamin 2006, 391). In doing so, historicism starts from the present and tries to explain how the present came to be by “empathizing” with the past. Benjamin criticizes the fact that what was victorious becomes the starting point for the question of history, and the propagated “sympathy” with the past becomes sympathy “with the victor” (ibid.). Only what has survived victoriously comes into view. The failed, the downfalls and catastrophes as well as the victims as the defeated in history disappear. Benjamin, on the other hand, insists on the “time-kernel” that, in the constellation of past and present, makes history recognizable in the “now” in the face of imminent danger.

This has epistemological implications. Benjamin’s talk of the “time-kernel” is not – as Adorno notes – about “truth in history, but rather history in truth” (Adorno 2013, 135). So it cannot be the task of philosophy to grasp its time in thought in the Hegelian sense. For, according to Adorno, philosophy finds itself “in a reality whose order and form suppresses every claim to reason” (Adorno 1977, 120). Therefore, it is denied the possibility of placing itself in a positive relation to reality. If it does so, it “only veils reality and eternalizes its present condition” (ibid.).

Benjamin refers to history from its flip side, emphasizing that the concept of progress must be “grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe.”  (Benjamin 2006, 184). History is not, as in Hegel, the self-revelation of spirit in a progressive process in which relations come to “reason.” They are not directed toward a positive end. In Hegel, this becomes a justification for the fact that the course of progress advancing on the “battlefield” (Hegel 1971, 46) of history involves sacrifices. They are to be accepted as unavoidable collateral damage or to be paid as the price of progress.

In contrast, Benjamin’s insistence that the “status quo” is the catastrophe makes clear that in the “status quo” history rolls over ruins, unfulfilled hopes, unrealized possibilities, in short: over its victims. They are consigned to oblivion, so that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious” (Benjamin 2006, 391). To perceive the catastrophe that is happening now and to think about it allows what is lost and forgotten, not the victors but the defeated, to come into view and into materialist thinking. It becomes possible to “brush history against the grain” (ibid., 392).

3. Benjamin’s Struggle for Time and History as A Struggle Against the Myth of the Return of the Same in Capitalism.

Benjamin characterizes the time in which past and present enter into a constellation as “now-time” (Benjamin 2006, 395). In it, an image of the past flashes. It “holds fast to that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger” (Benjamin 2006, 391). Past and present enter into a constellation that makes them “recognizable.” The “moment of danger” for Benjamin is the spread of fascism and the threat of war. In the face of this danger, Benjamin makes clear in the theses “On the Concept of History” that the struggle against the totality of fascist relations of domination is linked to the struggle for the suppressed past, for all those who have been namelessly defeated in history. Therefore, history as the history of the victors must be interrupted, the “continuum of history,” as a homogeneous and empty flowing time of progress, must be blown up.

The fight against the dangers that flash and can be recognized in the present is a fight for time and history and therefore against myth. It is not determined by the time of history, but by the flowing time of the return of the same. Myth is about the course of nature, about the oneness with nature and its uniform flow of becoming, passing away and becoming again – not bound in temporal-historical constellations, but in the eternity of the cosmos and the constellations of the stars. In the myth time becomes an empty, uniform and homogeneous time.

In connection with political-economic and fetishism-critical insights, Benjamin’s struggle for time and history and against myth takes on clear contours as a struggle against capitalism.

For one thing: In capitalism, history is naturalized through competition. In it, the strong are selected from the weak and, as the crisis deepens, increasingly the useful from the “superfluous.” Those who prove to be strong enough in their ability to adapt have the best chances in the struggle for survival. Companies can only be fit for the future if they respond optimally to new economic situations. Individuals face the challenge of keeping themselves fit as an “entrepreneurial self” (Bröckling 2013) for the competitive struggle for work through permanent self-optimization – always ready to adapt on their own initiative. Those who prove too weak in this process are thrown out of the race. What Darwin thought he had recognized as the law of natural selection becomes law of capitalist-historical selection, the “biologization of world society” (Kurz 2009, 293ff).

Second, as Marx writes in his analysis of the fetish character of the commodity and its mystery, the social character of labor and the representationality of its products appear “as the socio-natural properties of these things” (Marx 1976, 165). The social context of commodity production appears as a natural context, the production of commodities as “natural.” It revolves – advancing in competition on an ever-increasing scale – around the always-same: the end in itself of the multiplication of capital. The always-same, however, is not history, but myth. Modernity cannot be described as rationalization or disenchantment – as Max Weber thought – but is instead characterized by (re)mythification and by magical enchantment. They find their expression in the phenomenon of the enchanting cult of commodities. This cannot be separated from the contexts of commodity production, distribution and consumption, i.e. from the myth represented by commodity production as a whole.

In the myth of commodity production, time becomes a homogeneously flowing and empty time; for the concrete time of labor is subsumed into the abstract time of value (Zamora 2022, 266ff). It is integrated into the qualitatively (i.e. in terms of content) empty flow of the self-valorization of capital as an abstract and empty end in itself. This goes hand in hand with a spiral of acceleration in which there is no rest – as Benjamin had described it on the level of the phenomenon of the permanence of the capitalist cult without interruption by feast days (cf. Benjamin 1921). The driving force behind this restlessness is the tension of raising the level of productivity under the constraints of competition. “[…] [V]alue which insists on itself as value preserves itself through increase; and it preserves itself precisely only by constantly driving beyond its quantitative barrier,” (Marx 1993, 270). In this process, the accumulation of capital moves in self-referential, empty and incomplete circuits that cannot stop at any external limit. Accumulation as an endless process is indispensable for reasons of self-preservation.

“The time of capital is marked by the paradox of a circularity directed towards the future. But this future is nothing other than the future of future circuits of accumulation” (Zamora 2018, 215). Therefore, the emptiness of the process of accumulation in terms of content is trapped in the homogeneous emptiness of time, which flows along as a recurrence of the same – with no goal and no perspective to escape the spell of the same over and over again. The fact that the new always replaces the old, that new products, brands, fashions and trends replace one another, only apparently contradicts this. What is decisive is “that the face of the world never changes precisely in what new, that the new is always the same in all its components” (Benjamin 2015a, 676). Even the new, in its constant change, cannot cover up the emptiness. It does not provide satisfaction and reassurance, but produces the boredom that is an expression of the emptiness that is supposed to be filled by constant newness. For bored customers, there are now offers of relief and deepening in the relevant event, esotericism and spirituality markets. They range from the intensification of experiences of happiness through experiences of spiritual depth to permanent entertainment through events (cf. Böttcher 2023, 81ff). More and more of the same is demanded and offered in the mythological cycle of the “return of the same.”

4. Limits for the “Return of The Same” And the Final Emptiness of Capitalism

Nevertheless, the “return of the same” cannot continue indefinitely. It comes up against a logical barrier, which Marx had described as the “moving contradiction” (Marx 1993, 706) of capital. Production conducted within the framework of competition forces labor to be replaced by technology as a source of value and surplus value. In the process, capital destroys its own foundations. With the microelectronic revolution, the disappearance of the substance of labor can no longer be compensated for by expanding production, reducing costs, making commodities cheaper, expanding markets, and so on. Thus the logical barrier also comes up against a historical limit which can no longer be overcome within the framework of capitalism.

Now, Benjamin did not include the “hidden abode of production” (Marx 1976, 279) in his critique of capitalism. Nevertheless, insights can be drawn from his critique, which focuses on phenomena that are important for confronting the crisis of capitalism that we are currently experiencing:

1. Benjamin had in mind the limits of capitalism at the level of guilt. He had characterized the capitalist cult as a “cult that creates guilt, not atonement” (Benjamin 1921), i.e. as a cult without the possibility of salvation. Even God is included in this cycle of guilt (ibid.). God is thus not simply dead, but his “transcendence is at an end” and God is thus “incorporated into human existence” (ibid). He does not stand opposite the conditions, transcending them. Rather, he becomes the expression of their immanent fetishization, the “real metaphysics” (Robert Kurz) of capitalist relations. In this sense, when capitalism becomes religion, it offers “not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. […] It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world” (ibid.). The essence of this religion is to persevere to the end, “to the point where God, too, finally takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope” (ibid.). The end of the world then seems more conceivable than the end of capitalism (as Frederic Jameson has said).

2. According to Benjamin, the God concealed in the capitalist cult becomes recognizable at the zenith of indebtedness (see Benjamin 1921). Here, it becomes clear that today, the pseudo-accumulation of capital in the financial markets can no longer be related to real accumulation, which is why bubbles burst again and again. The flow of a homogeneous and empty time that Benjamin had associated with progress is recognizable in the deepening crisis of capitalist “real metaphysics” as the emptiness associated with the multiplication of capital as an abstract end in itself. It is empty of content in two ways. On the one hand, it is oriented not to qualities, that is, to content, but to quantity, that is, to multiplication in the abstract. The objects of the world are not recognized in their own quality, but only as material for the valorization of capital. Second: With the immanent crisis of valorization, which can no longer be overcome, the abstract and irrational end in itself, to increase capital/money for its own sake, itself runs into the void. Robert Kurz sees its potential for annihilation in the impossibility of resolving the “contradiction between the metaphysical emptiness and the ‘representational compulsion’ of value in the sensuous world” (Kurz 2021, 69). “This gives rise to a double potential of annihilation: an ‘ordinary,’ in a certain sense everyday one, as it has always resulted from the process of reproduction of capital, and a somewhat final one, when the process of divestment reaches absolute limits” (ibid. 70).

3. The naturalization of history, which Benjamin saw in the selection of the strong from the weak, takes on a destructive character as the crisis progresses. It barbarizes itself into a social Darwinist struggle for existence, which can be tamed less and less by political regulations. This finds its expression in the so-called polycrisis of state collapse, wars and civil wars, the destruction of livelihoods, migration and flight, escalating violence in state repression, and barbaric struggles for survival. The fight is to the death. But there is virtually nothing left at stake, because the capitalist struggle for social Darwinist self-assertion is coming to nothing. Catastrophe is inherent in the process of valorization of capital. In the logic of the valorization of capital as an end in itself, there can be no emancipation, but only ruin and destruction.

5. The Present Moment of Danger: World Destruction and Self-Destruction

The current “moment of danger” (Benjamin 2006, 391) is probably the war in Ukraine. In it flashes the world order wars that are waged primarily in regions where states are collapsing. They are an illusory response to the “territorial system of sovereignty that is beginning to disintegrate before the eyes of the democratic-capitalist apparatuses, which unintentionally support this process” (Kurz 2021, 414). In the war in Ukraine, it becomes clear that the so-called great powers, who have nuclear weapons of mass destruction, are also involved in the processes of capitalist disintegration. They are fighting for self-assertion in the processes of disintegration. This struggle also comes to nothing, because there is no prospect of a new regime of accumulation that could serve as the basis for a new hegemonic “world order” (cf. Konicz 2022).

At the same time, isolated and disoriented individuals are driven into a competitive struggle for self-assertion. Under the pressure of a permanent and unattainable process of self-optimization, it is a matter of self-submission to be achieved on one’s own initiative. In this process, the “self-referentiality of the empty metaphysical form” (Kurz 2021, 69) does not remain external to the subjects. Rather, they are forced to deal with the crisis processes to which they are exposed within this form. These struggles, too, come to nothing the more labor as the basis of individual agency and autonomous self-consciousness dissolves.

The universe, “taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope” (Benjamin 1921), interacts with the “condition” in which individuals have to process the crisis dynamics. In this process, the defense against the experiences of powerlessness and humiliation through hallucinations of greatness and power can also occur in self-destruction (cf. Böttcher, Elisabeth 2022). Attempts to ward off the empty self and to defend it in an identitarian way could be means by which the defense of Western freedom and the willingness to accept the price of world annihilation for it in the face of hopelessness gain plausibility. The “greatness” of the Western world is then shown in the willingness give one’s life for it.

The final promise of self-efficacious greatness is the willingness to destroy oneself and the world. It offers itself as the possibility to show greatness and to demonstrate power through acts of destruction. On the social level, too, rampages come within reach. Robert Kurz had hinted at it when he wrote: “The concept of the democratic rampage is […] to be taken quite literally on the level of military action. […] The more untenable and dangerous the world situation becomes, the more the military aspect comes to the fore and the less hesitation there is to use high-tech violence on a large scale without asking questions” (Kurz 2021, 429). The “unmanageable world” and “the incomprehensibility of the problems” can mobilize a “diffuse rage for destruction” (ibid.).

The nation-states that confront each other in blocs in warlike or dangerous constellations are part of the insane capitalist fetish system that has reached the limits of its reproductive capacity and within which there can be no peaceful coexistence. “In the world of consummate capitalism, only open madness is realistic. Under these conditions, so-called pragmatism itself inevitably takes on eschatological features” (Kurz, 2001, 343).

6. The Question of Salvation

6.1 Interruption and Dialectics at a Standstill

In the “moment of danger” that Benjamin recognizes in the threat of fascism and war, the question becomes urgent as to what might save us from the catastrophic flow of empty, homogeneous time in the continuum of capitalist progress. For Benjamin, the possibility of salvation depends on interrupting the empty and homogeneous flow of time and blowing up the “continuum of history” (Benjamin 2006, 396). It goes hand in hand with the refusal to forget and disregard what empty time has rolled over, not least the “name[s] of generations of the downtrodden” (ibid., 394). The constellation that becomes recognizable “at the moment of danger” does not prepare the way for a smooth transition, a gentle transformation into something new, but discharges itself in a “shock” (ibid., 396) that becomes an interruption of the “always the same” in the course of catastrophe.

In a “dialectical image,” the past flashes up “in the now of its recognizability” (Benjamin 2006, 183). In this, the past “bears to the highest degree the stamp of a critical, dangerous element” (Benjamin 2015, 578). That which “has been can become the dialectical envelope, the incursion of awakened consciousness” (ibid., 491). The awakening is an awakening from sleep and mythical reverie, from capitalism, which had come over Europe as a “phenomenon of nature” and brought “a reactivation of mythic forces” (ibid. 494).

The “dialectical image” allows us to awaken from the dream and brings to light “not yet conscious knowledge of what has been.” Awakening is linked to remembering what has perished in history, especially the victims over whose corpses progress has rolled. It aims at “history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful” (Benjamin 1998, 155).

6.2 The Question of Salvation in the Crisis of Capitalism as the Present “Moment of Danger”

In the present “moment of danger” the tendency toward world and self-annihilation becomes recognizable. The potential for the “reform of (capitalist, H.B.) existence” (Benjamin 1921) is exhausted. This hopelessness amounts to “destruction” (ibid.), to the destruction of the coexistence of man and nature as the basis of all life.

In the present constellation, the flashing “dialectical image” would be decipherable as an interruption of the “status quo” within the framework of capitalist fetish relations and their “real metaphysics.” The god or fetish hidden in the course of capitalism becomes recognizable at the zenith of the crisis. We must break with it, i.e. with the categories that constitute capitalism: with value and dissociation at the most abstract level, as well as with their mediation in money as the most abstract expression of the emptiness of the capitalist process of the valorization of capital, with their embedding in the polarities of market and state, economy and politics, with subject and enlightenment… The challenge lies in a consistent critique of capitalist fetish relations, which at the same time implies a demythologization of the capitalist myth. It must resist the temptation to fall back on (vulgar-)materialist immediacies – be it in the form of a recourse to class, interest, identifiable agents, or a praxis that aims at transformation and alternatives in false immediacy (cf. Kurz 2021, 365ff). On closer examination, the latter often turn out to be pseudo-alternatives that do not involve a break with capitalist categories, but remain trapped in the fetishized forms of its constitution (see Meyer 2022).

The “dialectical image” that flashes by in the midst of the deepening crisis of capitalism (Benjamin 1921) flashes what capitalism is rolling over and has rolled over, what has perished in its history and is doomed in the present. It implies an objection to the Social Darwinist character of the history of capitalism, which selects the victors from the vanquished in the struggle for existence, and where, in the escalating crisis, there is “nothing left to lose,” and it amounts to annihilation. It aims at an “arrest” of the “movement of thought” (Benjamin 2006, 396), at “dialectics at a standstill.”It enables “dialecticians of history” to “contemplate” the constellation of dangers, to “follow their development in thought,”and to “avert” them “at any time at the spur of the moment” (Benjamin 2006, 595). This remains impossible without thinking about the downfall of capitalism and without breaking with capitalist fetish relations, including the temptation to seek immanent ways out within the framework of capitalist categories in a seamless continuation of the “status quo.”

Literature

Adorno, Theodor W. 1977. “The Actuality of Philosophy.” In: telos 1977, no. 31: 120-133. Online at: https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/adorno_actualityphilosophy-1.pdf.

Adorno, Theodor W. 2013. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Cambridge: Polity.

Benjamin, Walter. 1921. “Capitalism as Religion.” Online at: https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2018/06/08/capitalism-as-religion-benjamin-1921/.

Benjamin, Walter. 1989. “N (Re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]. In Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History. Ed. G. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 1998. Origin of the German Tragic Drama. New York: Verso.

Benjamin, Walter. 2006. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Ed. Michael W. Jennings. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 2015. Das Passagen-Werk. Gesammelte Schriften Band V 1, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.

Benjamin, Walter. 2015a. Das Passagen-Werk. Gesammelte Schriften Band V 2, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.

Böttcher, Elisabeth. 2024. “Selbstvernichtung und Weltvernichtung: Männlichkeit und Gewaltbereitschaft.” Unpublished manuscript, to appear in exit! 2024.

Böttcher, Herbert. 2021. “Kapitalismus – Religion – Kirche – Theologie.” In Kapitalismus: Kult einer tödlichen Verschuldung. Walter Benjamins prophetisches Erbe, edited by Kuno Füssel and Michael Ramminger, 31-81. Münster: Edition ITP-Kompass.

Böttcher, Herbert. 2022. Auf dem Weg zur unternehmerischen Kirche. Würzburg: Echter.

Bröckling, Ulrich. 2016. The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject. Translated by Steven Black. Los Angeles: SAGE.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1971. “Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte.” In Sämtliche Werke, edited by Hermann Glockner. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog.

Heidegger, Martin. 2008. Being and Time. New York: HarperCollins.

Konicz, Tomasz. 2022. “China: Multiple Crises Instead of Hegemony.” Online at: https://exitinenglish.com/2023/03/05/china-multiple-crises-instead-of-hegemony/

Kurz, Robert. 2001. Marx lesen: Die wichtigsten Texte von Karl Marx für das 21. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn.

Kurz, Robert. 2011. Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus. Ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein Taschenbuch.

Kurz, Robert. 2012. Geld ohne Wert, Berlin: Horlemann Verlag.

Kurz, Robert. 2021. Weltordnungskrieg: Das Ende der Souveränität und die Wandlungen des Imperiums im Zeitalter der Globalisierung. Springe: zu Klampen Verlag.

Marx, Karl. 1993. Grundrisse. New York: Penguin.

Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital Volume 1. New York: Penguin.

Meyer, Thomas. 2022. “Kategoriale Kritik und die notwendige Frage nach Alternativen zum Kapitalismus.” Netz-Telegramm – Informationen des Ökumenischen Netzes Rhein Mosel Saar (February): 1- 10.

Werner, Nadine. 2011. Zeit und Person. In Benjamin Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Burkhardt Lindner, 3-8. Stuttgart/Weimar: J.B. Metzler.

Zamora, José Antonio. 2018. “Gedanken zur Gottes- und Zeitfrage.” In Gott in Zeit. Zur Kritik der postpolitischen Theologie,edited by Philipp Geitzhaus and Michael Ramminger. Münster: Edition ITP-Kompass.

Zamora, José Antonio. 2022. “Schuld – Schicksal – Mythos.” In Kapitalismus: Kult einer tödlichen Verschuldung, edited by Kuno Füssel and Michael Ramminger, 255-275. Münster: Edition ITP-Kompass.

Herbert Böttcher

Now liberation theology has also been hit. Roland Rottenfußer, who worked as a journalist for the spiritual magazine connection from 2001 to 2005 and is currently editor-in-chief of Rubikon, has called upon it to serve the Querfront. In his article “Der Schrel der Armen [The Cry of the Poor]”[1] he draws on approaches to the critique of capitalism associated with liberation theology. This serves the purpose of giving a theological impetus to the resistance against Covid policyand the subsequently staged crises around war, inflation and gas shortages, and charging them with a blessed aura.

His points of contact with liberation theology include taking the side of the poor, the exploited and the oppressed, and the associated opposition to the rich and powerful. For him, the biblical basis for this is the Gospel of Luke, which contains a striking number of passages that address the social differences between the rich and the poor. Even before the birth of Jesus, Mary had proclaimed something socially revolutionary: the reversal of the relationship between the poor and the rich, the humble and the powerful (cf. Lk 1:51-53). In this context, the rich are exhorted to see their attachment to material gain as an obstacle to salvation. They should cancel debts, return unjustly appropriated property and, in general, donate a large part of their possessions to the poor. Although this is primarily a spiritual theology, it also contains the fundamental outlines of a social order that, in contrast to the modern economic order, is capable of closing the gap between rich and poor.

The content taken up is certainly covered in the biblical texts. But their immediate appropriation and instrumentalization is problematic. The differences between ancient and modern power relations are consistently ignored. The personalizing biblical talk of the rich and powerful reflects personalized and religiously legitimized power relations. Capitalist domination, as subjugation and the irrational end in itself of the multiplication of money/capital and as the dissociation of the reproductive spheres, represents an abstract domination that cannot be directly represented in the roles of the poor and the powerful or the exploited and the capitalists, the ruling political class and the powerless masses. Moreover, the biblical traditions fail to show that their talk of rich and poor, powerful and powerless, is bound up with the distinction between God and idols (fetishes). On the cultural-symbolic level, idols legitimize a structuring social context of domination, manifested, for example, in the rule of kingdoms and their ties back to the world of the gods. Biblical texts not only criticize the actions of individuals, but also delegitimize the structuring context of domination in which the actions of individuals are situated. Not only the direct criticism of the rich and powerful should be taken up, but also the biblical distinction between God and idols, i.e. the biblical criticism of domination. And here, too, a distinction must be made again between the ancient personalized domination, which was limited in its reach, and the modern abstract domination, which reaches out to the social totality and thus penetrates into the body and psyche of human beings. The latter is the submission to the objective constraints connected with the law of value. It constitutes the form of capitalist society and reaches out to the whole of this society. It cannot be used to immediately ignite anger and indignation and mobilize the masses to vent their frustrations. Before such immediate and confused outbursts, critical, i.e. theoretical, reflection, which seeks to gain knowledge of social conditions, is necessary. Only on this basis can there be a purposeful overcoming of the constitution of capitalist socialization.

Crisscross, But Always Direct: On Positioning in The Present

Those statements of liberation theologians that seem to be compatible with the understanding of social processes and events as the expression of the will of social elites and their targeted control are used for positioning in the present. The elites suppress the will of the people through manipulation of the media and authoritarian measures up to the state of emergency of a Covid dictatorship. A cosmopolitan program of the ruling elites, which is supposed to corrode the sovereignty of the peoples and national identities, is hallucinated. Against this, elements of liberation theology are now being positioned. All this happens in a crisscross manner, but the domination is always direct. Part of this immediacy is the appeal to the movement of the poor, through which liberation theology was set in motion. They interpreted the biblical stories as something that had immediate (sic!) consequences for their daily lives. Without questioning any forms of mediation, the poor are ascribed a higher quality of knowledge, seemingly independent of social fetish relations. Those who speak of the poor with a false immediacy will speak of their counterpart, the rich, in such a way as to make their wealth directly responsible for the poverty of the poor.

The reflection on the capitalist social context of domination developed within the framework of liberation theology, a social context criticized as fetishistic on the basis of the biblical tradition of the distinction between God and idols, is largely ignored. Taking it up, however, would sharpen the view on structuring contexts of social mediation. In this respect, such a critique represents an immanent corrective to a way of thinking that, probably inspired by categories of the class struggle, associates the poor in their struggle against the rich with the revolutionary subjects of the class struggle without reflecting on social contexts. Rottenfußer does not really know what to do with reflections critical of fetishism that aim at the structural social context of domination. He takes up Boff’s critique of neoliberalism, a critique that understands social exclusion as a consequence of the new modes of production, the world market and neoliberalism. But he immediately lands on the financial economy driven by greed for wealth and the rich who profit from interest and financial investments. In addition to Heiner Geißler, with his equally agile and confused tirades against capital interests measured in stock market value and share price, he identifies the theologian Ulrich Duchrow and Pope Francis as benchmarks for his position.

Rottenfußer refers to Duchrow’s speech on poverty-creating wealth and to Pope Francis’ statement that “this economy kills.” With regard to poverty-creating wealth, Duchrow is quoted with reference to mechanisms of enrichment, which are declared as natural necessities and are thus idolized. The mechanisms of enrichment are located on the legal level with the reference to private property. The right to property is thus the reason that one can pursue wealth enrichment according to the laws of the market. Thus, according to Duchrow, the following is made possible: if the interest rate is higher than the growth rate, the owner of monetary assets robs the others involved in the economic process, i.e. mainly the working people, of their fair share of what they have jointly earned. The Pope’s criticism of capitalism is similar. His criticism of the dogma of the neoliberal credo, according to which the market solves all problems, is quoted, as well as his demand to renounce the absolute autonomy of the markets and to address the structural causes of the unequal distribution of income. Last but not least, the pope’s criticism of the tendency toward uniformity in world culture fits into the worldview of the opponents of erased ethnic, national, and/or regional identities. Accordingly, Francis is quoted as saying: “Local conflicts and disinterest in the common good are exploited by the global economy to impose a single cultural model. Such a culture unites the world but divides people and nations.”

Duty to Resist

At the end of the text it finally becomes clear what the discussion about liberation theology is aiming at: the resistance against the Covid narrative, before which the churches had folded in their conformism, even though Jesus had embraced lepers. Their failure in the face of the cultural rupture sparked by Covid forbids them from muddling along any further. The issue of Covid does not exist independently of the discourse on capitalism. After all, the Pope and others, with their insistence on a moral obligation to vaccinate, have helped to swell the coffers of a few pharmaceutical giants. Above all, growing poverty will be the big issue of the next few years. The culprits for worsening poverty are easily identified: de facto occupational bans in the lockdowns, investments in armaments, and inflation wantonly caused by politicians through disastrous energy policies. Against this, a sentence from the Acts of the Apostles is invoked: “We must obey God rather than men.”

A Twisted Way of Thinking

A common thread running through the text is the attempt to identify victims and pinpoint perpetrators. This is also reflected where structural factors linked to capitalism come into play. They are not understood as structures that have become independent as abstract domination, but rather are traced back to the immediate actions of the actors: to those of the rich, who enrich themselves within the framework of these structures and make the poor their victims. Of course, this critique does not imply a simple determinism. Rather, the point is that the form of abstract domination cannot be deliberately bypassed, and the conditions that drive people into poverty cannot be overcome by a change of direction on the part of the elites.

Such a critique of capitalism also remains truncated in that it is limited to the level of circulation, and there again to the circulation of finance capital. There, the greedy actions of the profiteers can be scandalized particularly drastically. The proximity to (structural) anti-Semitism, with its distinction between rapacious and creative capital, is no problem for lateral thinkers anyway. The fact that Jesus was not the founder of a religion, but a Jew, and that Christianity is rooted in the Jewish tradition, and is therefore not simply a new religion, is consistently overlooked by Rottenfußer.[2] After all, the rootedness in the Jewish tradition is inherent to Christianity: Christians refer to no other God than the God of the Jews.

In the fixation of the critique on (Jewish) rapacious finance capital, the critique of commodity production remains hidden, i.e. the law of value (M-C-M’) and thus the production of capital itself, together with its irrational goal of increasing capital for its own sake and subjugating the globe to this madness. Thus, the crisis of this madness must also remain unrecognized: the logical and historical barrier to the multiplication of capital, which was reached with the replacement of labor by technology and, since the microelectronic revolution, can no longer be compensated for, despite the expansion of commodity production and markets. For a while, the inflow of money from the money multiplication simulated on the financial markets, i.e. money without value (R. Kurz), could serve as compensation. The bursting of the resulting bubbles and, above all, the coincidence of inflation and economic crises signal that the end of this possibility of compensation is rapidly approaching.

This cannot be grasped directly, but only through theoretical reflection that shows how social phenomena are mediated by the social whole. But such insight does not provide an immediate target for the expression of anger and indignation, accompanied by illusions of agency and fantasies of power in the midst of real powerlessness. Lateral thinkers prefer to cling to the cult of immediacy (Günter Frankenberg).[3] It promises to be concrete instead of abstract, practice-oriented instead of concerned with theoretical explanations far removed from practice. This addiction to immediacy is also connected with the recourse to elements of liberation theology and its connections to biblical traditions. Reflection on different historical social contexts, which should be critically related, is ignored. Instead, elements such as the question of the poor are taken up and placed in direct relation to lateral-thinking world views.

Questions for Liberation Theology

It is also not enough to indignantly reject the instrumentalization of elements of liberation theology by lateral thinkers and Querfrontler. Rather, it would be important to reflect critically on where and why such points of contact are offered and how liberation theology needs to be corrected and further developed. This is all the more true since it emerged in social contexts in which it seemed possible to achieve alternatives, up to and including socialist options, through political changes and thus through the state. Liberation seemed conceivable within the horizon of the liberation of labor from capital. In addition, the various variants of liberation theology, which also existed in Africa and Asia, were concerned with liberation from colonial dependence. But this, too, remained largely stuck in the transfer of political power to indigenous elites.

Against this, it would be necessary to recognize that labor, as well as the levels of state and politics, are elementary components of the formal structuring context of capitalist socialization, and that the more the crisis of commodity production progresses, the more the possibilities of regulation collapse. Furthermore, the possibilities of crisis management reach their limits, and state structures collapse and go wild in the interplay and struggles of remnants of the state and gangs.

The tradition of fetish critique in liberation theology could be critically continued. But here, too, it would have to be taken into account that the critique of the market as a fetish remains limited to the level of circulation, that it is not enough to single out individual fetishes such as the market, money and power from the fetishistic social structure of the whole. Rather, it would be important to reflect on the social whole as an in-itself broken totality and to recognize it on the most abstract level in its constitution through commodity production and the dissociation of the femininely connoted and subordinated areas of reproduction, which unfolds in the structuring forms of labor, state, subject, etc. It would be crucial here to recognize this fetishistic social structure as crisis-ridden in its potential for destruction, not discounting the possibility of a destruction of the world. In this framework there can be no emancipatory developments, but only an emancipatory break. Only a consequent negation can open up horizons for emancipatory action.

What this means for theological reflection should also be considered:[4] For the theologically central option for the poor, for speaking of God in the face of suffering and the ever-advancing catastrophe, for connecting with biblical traditions, the Samaritan action and a practice that aims at overcoming the capitalist constitution through negation. Indispensable is the demarcation from identitarian thinking and all temptations to immediacy, and in this sense from all Querfront-like lateral thinking.

Ulrich Duchrow and Pope Francis, who are mentioned in Rottenfußer’s text, must also allow themselves to be questioned. When Ulrich Duchrow speaks of greedy money he does not mean direct personal greed, but a structural social context that is greedy for money, i.e. for the multiplication of capital.[5] Nevertheless, his analysis also focuses more on finance capital than on that of production and circulation and its related crisis. Accordingly, the alternative approaches listed in the book are not adequate attempts to break with capitalism.[6] The same applies to Pope Francis. His critique is courageous because it takes on conservative-reactionary forces, and helpful because it opens doors within the Church for a more radical critique of capitalism. Nevertheless, it is far from the indispensable critique of fetishism.[7] It clings to the ethical regulation of the market, to the illusion that money can serve instead of rule.[8] Furthermore, positions and strategies in the ecclesial sphere that do not or insufficiently include the fetishistic social context of capitalist commodity production and its crisis are worthy of criticism. In this context, the positioning of the Institute for Theology and Politics with regard to Covid policies must be criticized,[9] as well as the insufficient reflections and practical orientations in the environment of Kairos Europa.[10]

In view of the necessity of a consistent demarcation from all lateral thinking, the acceptance and consistent continuation of the critique of fetishism, which can be connected theologically to the biblically central distinction between God and idols, is of decisive importance. It is within this framework that the crisis that is destroying the foundations of life is to be located. The destructive irrationalism of capitalist self-purpose seems to determine more and more the thoughts and actions of people in the struggles for self-assertion in the crisis. Combined with the structural impossibility of rigorous action, this can also explain the confusion in the actions of political-economic actors and the lateral thinking resistance against them. Critical reflection is all the more important if there are to be paths to liberation.

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[1] Cf. https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/der-schrei-der-armen

[2] The impression that Christianity is a new religion is suggested by the history of Christianity, insofar as Christianity separated itself from Judaism in anti-Judaic tirades. This is expressed, among other things, in the (anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic) view that the Church has taken the place of Judaism, which became obsolete with the advent of Christianity. To speak of Christianity as a new religion would confirm this, but it is not immune to the danger of Christian appropriation of Jewish tradition. It is crucial to understand Judaism and Christianity as two variants of the search for liberation, connected in their (fetish-critical) reference to the one God of Israel.

[3] Günter Frankenberg talks about this in his book Autoritarianism, Berlin 2020.

[4] Cf. Herbert Böttcher, “Kapitalismuskritik und Theologie. Versuch eines Gesprächs zwischen wert-abspaltungskritischem und theologischem Denken,” in: Ökumenisches Netz Rhein-Mosel-Saar (ed.). Nein zum Kapitalismus, aber wie? Unterschiedliche Ansätze der Kapitalismuskritik, Koblenz 2013/2015, 117 163, online: https://www.oekumenisches-netz.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Festschrift_Kapitalismus_web.pdf; cf. ders, Der Krisenkapitalismus und seine Katstrophen. Challenge for Theological Reflection, in: Netztelegramm. Information of the Ecumenical Network Rhine-Moselle-Saar, Koblenz 2016, online: https://www.oekumenisches-netz.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/NT16-02.pdf.

[5] Ulrich Duchrow, Gieriges Geld. Auswege aus der Kapitalismusfalle. Befreiungstheologische Perspektiven, Munich 2012.

[6] Cf. Dominic Kloos, “Alternativen zum Kapitalismus. Im Check: Gemeinwohlökonomie,” in: Ökumenisches Netz Rhein-Mosel-Saar (ed.): Die Frage nach dem Ganzen, Koblenz 2018, 299-356, online: https://www.oekumenisches-netz.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/festschrift-final-Druck-innen.pdf; cf. also Thomas Meyer, “Alternativen zum Kapitalismus. In Check: Buen Vivir und das Ende der nachholenden Entwicklung,” in: Ökumenisches Netz Rhein-Mosel-Saar (ed.): Bruch mit der Form, Koblenz 2020, 465-479, online: https://www.oekumenisches-netz.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/08263_%C3%96kuNetz_Festschrift_Bruch_Monitor.pdf.

[7] Cf. Herbert Böttcher, “In der Freude des Evangeliums. Aufstehen gegen Repression und Depression. Der Papst wechselt die Perspektiven, in: Perspektivenwechsel!? Eine Herausforderung für die Kirche angesichts sich verschärfender gesellschaftlicher Krisen. Eine Intervention zur Synode und daruber hinaus,” 14-32, online: https://www.oekumenisches-netz.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Synodenbroschuere.pdf.

[8] Cf. Evangelii gaudium, 57f. For a critique of the Vatican positions on financial markets, see Dominic Kloos, “Die Himmelfahrt des Geldes in den Prinzipienhimmel Zur Finanzialisierung des Kapitalismus und den Grenzen christlicher Sozialethik,” Bielefeld 2022.

[9] Cf. AK Theologische Orientierung, “An Corona und am Kapitalismus vorbei Anmerkungen zu Corona und die Kirchen. Eine Kritik,” Koblenz 2021, online: https://www.oekumenisches-netz.de/2021/03/an-corona-und-am-kapitalismus-vorbei-anmerkungen-zu-corona-und-die-kirchen-eine-kritik/.

[10] Cf. the Zacchaeus Tax Campaign https://zachaeus-kampagne.de/ (cf. critically Kloos, note 8) and the call of casa comun on the occasion of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Karlsruhe in September 2022: https://casa-comun-2022.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Aufruf-Casa-Comun-Deutsch-final.pdf.

Originally published in Net Telegram in October 2022

Who Is the Best at Regressing?

Herbert Böttcher

Conspiracy as The Key to Knowledge

Under the title “Did You Say ‘Health Dictatorship’?” Anselm Jappe had headlined his criticism of repressive health measures, up to and including compulsory vaccination, and defended himself against being labeled a “conspiracy theorist.” This was not enough for Karl Rauschenbach.[1] He wants to go beyond Jappe… Exit!, which he imagines as “at war” with conspiracy fantasies, thus serves as  a negative foil. The group is apparently united by “three dogmas” that also constitute a “moral code”: “Thou shalt not deny Covid and the pandemic! Thou shalt not be a conspiracy theorist! Thou shalt not be a contrarian!”

Now Rauschenbach’s zeal against exit! could be left aside if it did not reveal something about ‘conspiracy theories and lateral thinking.’ The dogmatism attributed to exit! is extremely forced and contrived, as are the statistics that are supposed to support it. The relationship to the Covid pandemic and the political response to it becomes, as it were, a fundamental epistemological category with which to examine social conditions and hallucinate a practice of resistance. The point is not to understand Covid in the context of the social totality, but vice versa: the social totality, including the consequences for practice, is derived from the pandemic – and this quite directly, without ifs or buts.

Even Jappe’s talk of a “health dictatorship” cannot clear such a high bar. He jumps below it conspiracy-theoretically. Rauschenbach discusses this ad nauseam. He refers to “social mechanisms that do not require an actual [sic!] conspiracy” and cites as examples “the sensationalism of the media,” “the conformism of politicians,” “the profit-seeking of individual actors and capitals, such as the pharmaceutical industry or this digital economy.” Later, he mentions the restructuring of capitalism and the possible replacement of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. In any case, the enumeration of such phenomena obviously does not allow us to establish an overall social context, because “given the depth and duration of the state of emergency, such phenomena do not represent its essence.” It is therefore necessary – so far so good – to think about the phenomena together with the essence that is represented in them. That essence is found in the “conspiracy.” This is not a denunciatory attribution, but the author’s plain language: “The structurally conditioned upheavals cannot do without conspiracy in the broader sense.” With the conspiracy, the “actual” has emerged from the thicket of phenomena.

It is precisely this bar of the “actual” that Jappe failed jump over. His decisive jumping error is that of “a dutiful distancing” from the conspiracy theory. After all, he does not want to be considered a conspiracy theorist and thereby lose his reputation. Therefore, “a pliable sentence” flows into his PC: “Of course, there are no secret meetings of the superpowers who pull the wires in all freedom.” Rauschenbach knows how to correct such pliability and refers ‘quite concretely’ to “a little secret meeting of some superpowers” in 2019, at which “the New York financial octopus Bloomberg allied itself with the China Center for International Economic Exchanges (CCIEE)” in agreements on the problem of an aging population with “unaffordable social promises.” In addition, of course, there are “many such nodes of power.”

As one might expect, the whole construction boils down to Covid; for “now two years later, we see how, under the cover of a false pandemic, work has actually begun on settling both the pension question and the question of unaffordable social promises, of which the healthcare system is one.” Thus, “much […] makes more sense if one accepts the hypothesis that the king flu is an operation of the representatives of the ideal and global total capital, and much becomes clearer if one analyzes the machinations of such and similar conspirators of power.”

What is problematic is not simply the references to actors and their meetings, but the epistemological meaning attached to conspiracy. Of course, there is no self-moving fetish of abstract domination here. Nevertheless, the fetishistic structure of capitalist value-dissociation socialization as abstract domination forms the objective social context that even economic and political actors cannot escape. It would be necessary to start from this basic structuring context when trying to understand the crisis relations and the actions of the various actors. The assumptions of conspiracy theories are already contradicted by the fact that uniform action – even in the context of Covid – could not be discerned. The powerful actors in their alliance with the pharmaceutical industry could not even bring about compulsory vaccination. The crisis conditions simply work differently. They are driving a confused and increasingly rapid alteration between the familiar polarities of economy and politics, market and state, and within these between deregulation and re-regulation, freedom and coercion, with a recognizable tendency towards the authoritarian. The latter, however, can be discerned not only among authoritarian politicians, but also in civil society groups and, not least, in the conspiracy theory and lateral thinking scene.

A “Fermented Heap” And New Alliances

The path of lateral thinking leads from the imagined conspiracy of some to the longed-for conspiracy of others. The conspiracy of the powerful is to be opposed by a conspiracy of the powerless. For this, allies are needed. They can be found among the “people who have been labeled Covid deniers.” They are “the only ones who are allowed to somehow name all the horrors.” Among them are more than a few who distinguish themselves by means of their identity from the horrors experienced by others on the seas, in wars, in the destruction of their livelihoods, and who are primarily concerned with their ‘horrors’ under the ‘health dictatorship.’ The goal is to fish consternation and anger out of the darkness of diffuse feelings in order to arrive at a practice of resistance. Such a “fermenting heap” is suddenly imagined as capable of emancipatory fermentation. For despite its ideological fragmentation and a lack of real organization, “the protest against the impositions of the recent years, which is as broad as it is confused, has grown out of it.” In addition, “it must also be said that the explicit structure of lateral thinkers was the most likely to oppose the state of emergency in an organized way and thus at least hinted at a danger for the authoritarian state.”

Such strategic considerations are opposed by those who insist, for substantive reasons, on distinguishing themselves from conspiracy fantasies and lateral thinking. They stand in the way of the longed-for ability to form alliances and take action, to “make a difference” in some vague way. “If one wants to achieve something [sic!] on the street or even in the counter-public that has long been forming, one will have to seek the split with the gatekeepers in one’s own ranks.” There, however, Anselm Jappe got stuck in the middle. True, he made an effort and was also less timid than the other “Halbschwurbler”[2] on the left. But that doesn’t change the fact that he also jumped under the bar. There is only a chance to jump over the bar and to get out of half-hearted criticism and to make “even the bitterly necessary criticism of capitalism more credible again” if there is an offensive commitment to the health dictatorship. So say “health dictatorship!”

In looking at Jappe, Rauschenbach seems to be concerned with the question of who is the best at regressing. Instead of emancipatory insights that aim to break with capitalist relations, the progress of the crisis processes leads to regressions that are an expression of the ties to the relations that should be overcome in an emancipatory way. Classes, identities, interests, identifications of good and bad, newly identified ‘revolutionary’ subjects, and strategies of alliances around a “fermenting heap,” are supposed to save us from the crisis. The less one can do within the framework of fetishistic crisis relations, the greater the pressure seems to be to take sides, to save one’s own skin, or to be on the right side, if not to win, at least to show greatness in resistance.

These times of crisis call for the ‘simple’ and the ‘manageable’: for simple explanations to the point of conspiracy hallucinations, for actionist feasibility, for alliances that bring as many people as possible into the streets. The fact that ‘right-wingers’ and ‘left-wingers’ think and act in contradiction to each other does not bother many people, but is rather seen as an advantage. What is disturbing is content – all the more so when it goes against to the urge for immediacy and is linked to theoretical reflection. What is needed are ‘concrete’ and immediately comprehensible explanations that can also show against whom anger and indignation should be directed and discharged through action. The world becomes manageable, can be sorted into ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ without tedious theoretical efforts that bring with them the unbearable feeling of powerlessness. Actionism, on the other hand, suggests a diffuse power to act. It must remain diffuse as long as it refuses to adequately comprehend the conditions. Compared to the sobriety of an analysis that seeks to understand what people suffer in the context of fetish relations, feelings of immediate self-efficacy are more comforting, especially the affirmative feeling of being able to “make a difference” in a counter-public that is forming – combined with the awareness of being on the right side, on the morally good side of the ‘affected.’ And those who are on the good side, who are even ‘affected’ themselves or at least see themselves as the advocates of the ‘affected,’ may also feel empowered to implement and enforce ‘the good’ in an authoritarian way.

Fabio Vighi shows that in all this ‘squirming’ there are also cross-hybrids.[3] Following Robert Kurz, he analyzes the developments in financial capitalism as attempts to compensate for the crisis of capitalization. To this end, huge masses of “money without value” had to be mobilized. Through a cycle of pseudo-accumulation, money could flow into production and consumption. This cycle is leading to the present situation of intensifying financial crises in the combination of deflationary debt crisis and stagflation, which is “practically impossible” to overcome or stabilize. So far, the analysis is comprehensible and enlightening. At the same time, however, it is precisely here that the regression into conspiracy hallucinations takes place. According to Vighi, the elites have realized the hopelessness of managing the crisis economically. Covid and the war in Ukraine were fueled by the elites and used to once again prolong the crisis of capitalism and to control it by authoritarian means. In Vighi’s work too we encounter an epistemological shift from the question of abstract domination and the actions of actors embedded in it to the immediacy of cognition and the purposeful actions of elites.

A “Cult of Immediacy”

All of this is underpinned by a fixation on an immediacy that is unwilling or unable to grasp individual phenomena in their objective social contexts or, driven by an addiction to the supposedly ‘concrete,’ imagines the objective social context as a conspiracy. This is where the pragmatism that has been ‘cultivated’ for decades, with which the reflection on social contradictions and objective social crisis has been banished from thought, takes its revenge. It finds its expression, among other things, in a – structurally anti-Semitic – hostility to theory and in a hatred of intellectuals who fail to formulate complicated social relations simply, i.e., as a rule, in a personalized and manageable way.

A “cult of immediacy” (Günter Frankenberg) is regressively spreading against the question of understanding the phenomena of the crisis in relation to the social totality of fetish relations, the core of which consists in the fact that society as a whole is subjected to the irrational and contentless end in itself of the multiplication of capital, while at the same time the realms of reproduction are dissociated and marked as inferior. Only the recognition of how these relations mediate what people suffer globally can open up horizons for an emancipatory practice. Specifically, an understanding of the categorical constitution of capitalist relations in value and dissociation, in production and reproduction, in work and money, in economy and politics, as well as in the subject that is certain of itself and its autonomous capacity to act, that is self-sufficient and that in its narcissism loses the reference to objects and thus to content. Everything that is hallucinated in false immediacy is not ‘concrete,’ but pays homage to a pseudo-concretism. Something becomes concrete only when it is understood in its constitutive social context. An emancipatory practice can only be effective where it understands the irrational and abstract relations of domination, whose destructive dynamics become visible in the phenomena of the crisis, and aims toward their negation.

If this were the ‘dogmatism’ of exit!, it would mean a commitment to the content determination of the critique of capitalist fetish relations, which are up for discussion as a whole, connected with the question of an emancipatory practice. These relations are not to be understood statically, but in terms of their movement. Therefore, there can be no critique that stands alone from which everything else is blithely deduced in an identity-logical manner. It has to reflect processes, especially the accelerating crisis processes that are driving towards global destruction, in terms of their mediation with the social totality, taking into account different levels of mediation, from the economic to the socio-psychological, while at the same time thinking against itself. Such a ‘dogmatism’ implies, in terms of content, a demarcation from the various forms of lateral and conspiratorial thinking and their ‘mishmash.’ Exit! will therefore not say “Health Dictatorship!” and will withdraw from the competition to see who is the best at regressing.

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[1] Cf. Karl Rauschenbach: Einige Anmerkungen für halbschwurbelnde Linke, die künftige Gesellschaftskritik betreffend, Aug. 23, 2022, https://magma-magazin.su/2022/08/karl-rauschenbach/einige-anmerkungen-fuer-halbschwurbelnde-linke-die-kuenftige-gesellschaftskritik-betreffend/. All quotations are taken from this text, unless otherwise indicated.

[2] TN: The German word Schwurbler is a derogatory term for someone who rambles on excessively about nothing substantial. It was used at the beginning of the pandemic to refer to conspiracy theorists and people who spread misinformation, but was eventually taken up affirmatively by those who it had referred to.

[3] Cf. Fabio Vighi, Pause for Thought: Money without Value in a Rapidly Disintegrating World, May 30, 2022, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/pause-for-thought-money-without-value-in-a-rapidly-disintegrating-world/.

Originally published on the exit! homepage in 10/2022

Herbert Böttcher

1. The Structuring Social Context of the War

For an assessment of the war against Ukraine, the structuring social context into which the actions of the actors are integrated is crucial: above all, the collapse of the dominant world order[1] and its empires[2] in the crisis of capitalism. This collapse cannot be limited to ‘disintegrating states’ on the periphery. These processes of disintegration also affect the formerly bipolar Eastern and Western empires, which now also have to deal with China as a competitor. Two new blocs seem to be crystallizing: China and Russia on the one hand, and the United States and its allies in Western Europe and the Pacific region on the other.[3] The competition for survival in the crisis of the capitalist world system is being fought out in this geopolitical constellation, as a struggle for access to raw materials, the world’s leading currency and spheres of influence. In this respect, the war over Ukraine is a struggle to determine its membership in newly forming blocs. Unlike the old East-West conflict, which was essentially fought out during the period of Fordist prosperity, the new East-West conflict is about attempts to overcome the crises associated with the disintegrating world system.

In 1989, the capitalist West considered itself the victor over the collapsed East. Nobody realized that it was not a systemic competitor but the ‘twin brother’ of the capitalist West that had met its end: the statist variant of commodity production, which was no longer able to compete with the West and was no longer able to cope with the microelectronic revolution. What was not recognized was that this failure was the harbinger of the deepening crisis of capitalism, in which the internal logical barrier of commodity production marked the limits of development more and more clearly, even in the West. The error to which the West succumbed was not, as is repeatedly claimed, the illusion of an eternal peace, which underestimated Russia’s imperial desire, but the illusion of victory over a supposed systemic competitor, which led the West to rant about the “end of history” (Francis Fukuyama) in its completion in the market and democracy, while ignoring its own processes of crisis and disintegration.

2. Crisis Phenomena in the ‘Victorious’ West

The crisis plays itself out in the familiar phenomena: processes of social division, indebtedness, destruction of the ecological basis of life, disintegration of states, (civil) wars, migration and flight, and violent ideological ‘coping mechanisms.’ The countries in the Western centers were initially able to cushion themselves from these crisis processes by shifting them outwards. The USA did this via deficit cycles in which – mediated by the dollar as world money – its exorbitant indebtedness could be maintained for decades within the framework of a veritable financial bubble economy. Nevertheless, the crisis in the USA could not be ignored. Deindustrialization and high indebtedness also characterized the situation in the USA. As a result, the status of the US dollar as the world reserve currency was no longer an expression of economic strength. The basis for the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the reason for safe investments in the USA was and still is its military strength. With Hartz IV, the ‘model for success,’ and the associated reduction of labor costs in a place with already existing competitive advantages and growing productivity, Germany was able to rise to the position of export (vice) world champion, financing its export surpluses through the indebtedness of the importing countries in the European and global periphery. This ‘success’ was not an expression of successful capital accumulation, but rather the result of better crisis management. At the global level, the crisis manifested itself, among other things, in the failure of attempts to establish political-economic order through military intervention in the processes of disintegration. It was no longer possible for the USA and its NATO allies, as a coalition of the ‘willing,’ to maintain their role as world police and guarantors of the capitalist order. This has become clear at the latest since the crisis in Syria and the failure in Afghanistan.

The internal disintegration processes since the 1970s have been overshadowed by the West’s seemingly victorious superiority over ‘the East.’ Since 1990, NATO’s territory has expanded by about 1,000 kilometers in the direction of the Russian border. Since then, 14 countries have joined NATO[4] – and two more may soon follow. This broke the verbal promises made by the German government in 1989/90 not to expand NATO eastward. The ‘defeated’ Russia became a negligible factor in the power calculation. Security guarantees demanded by Russia were refused, and at the same time, under Presidents Bush and Trump, important arms control agreements were abandoned and the USA’s own arms build-up continued.

3. The Crisis in Ukraine And the Crisis in Russia

The fear now is that Russia wants to assert itself as a great power and secure its spheres of influence, following the lead of the United States and Europe. It is no coincidence that this effort has been spearheaded by the war against Ukraine. Ukraine was set on a pro-Western course with the support of Europe and the United States. The pro-Western orientation is not simply an expression of free self-determination, but is linked to the global crisis. As an eroding state, Ukraine had become a service shop for oligarchs of various stripes. Some of the oligarchs, and with them the so-called democracy movement, saw a way out of the ‘oligarch and disintegration struggle’ in a liaison with the West. This path promised democracy and human rights and subjected Ukraine, as usual, to a structural adjustment regime that further impoverished the destitute population while trying to keep job-seeking Ukrainians out of European labor markets – with the exception of cheap labor in harvesting, care work and prostitution.

As a result of Western economic and political penetration, Ukraine has become a cheap production site and an indebted consumer of Western goods, similar to other Eastern, but also Southern European countries. While the West increasingly restricted Russia’s sphere of influence with the eastward expansion of the EU and NATO, de-industrialized Russia was economically pushed into the role of a supplier of energy and raw materials. With the war against Ukraine, Russia obviously wants to set an – albeit illusory – limit to this dynamic and assert its status as a great power in its historical sphere of influence with military force and ideological megalomania.

4 Russian Autocracy versus Western Democracy?

4.1 Russian Autocracy

Russia’s deindustrialization was, among other things, a result of the neoliberal reforms implemented by Yeltsin with Western support, which, as is well known, impoverished large parts of the population. The flip side of this impoverishment was the increased wealth of the so-called oligarchs, who at the same time gained massive political influence. Putin was a key figure in the authoritarian reorganization of Russian capitalism. Certain economic consolidations could not change the fact that Russia had to increasingly assume the role of a supplier of energy and raw materials. In addition, in neighboring Belarus and Kazakhstan, social protests are occurring as a result of economic erosion. In Kazakhstan, the rise in gas prices and the cost-of-living, as well as the growing impoverishment of the population, have triggered social uprisings. Russia’s dreams of an independent Eurasian bloc between the EU and China were thwarted by processes of social and geopolitical disintegration. Russia hoped to consolidate its status as a central power through the sale of raw materials and energy, as well as through military expansionism, as demonstrated on Russia’s borders (Chechnya, Georgia, Kazakhstan, etc.), but also in Syria, Libya and the Sahel.[5]

It is important to note that the ideological ‘accompaniment’ that legitimized a Great Russian Empire was religiously charged in a fundamentalist way. The conquest of Crimea was justified by the sacral and religious significance of the peninsula for Russia, since it was in Crimea that the Grand Prince of Kiev Vladimir had accepted Christianity in 988. The reactionary philosopher Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954) saw the state as an organic community governed and held together by an understanding and caring monarch. At the height of postmodernity, Aleksander Dugin suggests that truth is a matter of faith and that there is a special Russian truth. Such thinking is close to ethnic notions of identity,[6] which were accompanied by genocide in the world order wars waged in the Balkans in the 1990s.

Within the framework of such ideas, the confrontation with the West becomes culturally and religiously charged in a fundamentalist way. Russia defends its own religious and cultural identity against the religious and moral decline of the West. Here the contours of a “clash of civilizations” (Samuel P. Huntington), for which George Bush also had sympathies, become visible. In any case, traditional family structures, ‘values’ and religion are to be upheld as bulwarks of a stable order – accompanied by the demonization of homosexuality and feminism as well as the exaltation of patriarchy. These are probably the reasons why Patriarch Kirill of Moscow supports Putin’s war as a fight against Western arbitrariness and as a protection of “Ukrainian brothers and sisters against the forces of evil.”[7] Against the background of the struggle against decaying values and orientations, one can also understand the sympathy and support of the lateral-thinking scene and extreme right-wing circles.[8] Putin is fighting the “neo-communism of Brussels – an ‘E-USSR’ with an ‘eco-socialist planned economy,’ political correctness, and the destruction of the traditional values of Christianity and family,” according to Jürgen Elsässer.[9] Ukraine, which by virtue of its identity is considered part of Russia, is to be brought back into the ‘empire’ towhich it ‘originally’ belonged. Countries that could be counted as part of a Greater Russian Empire have a cause for concern. This includes Poland, which has been the victim of (Greater) Russian and German interests several times in its history.

4.2 Western Values and Democracy

The Western “narratives” of freedom, democracy and human rights are by no means rational in comparison to such Great Russian fantasies. They’re also identitarian in character. They are inseparable from capitalist relations of domination in their liberal form. These mark the conditions of their validity. The more the crisis progresses, the more capitalist liberalism also relies on authoritarian and repressive structures and ideologies, analogous to the ones deployed throughout the history of the enforcement of capitalism. It’s almost as if it were a film of the same history running backwards, only faster. The commodity-producing system, which has reached its inner logical and outer ecological limits, and to which the supposed socialist alternatives also belonged, is getting more and more out of control. This can be seen in the way it treats those who, as superfluous human material, can no longer be used and are treated as waste and rubbish, and in the way it deals with the climate catastrophe. The political sphere is losing its room for maneuver. State institutions are reaching their functional limits in the face of dwindling possibilities for funding. Anomie is spreading in hard-to-fathom conglomerates of state, oligarchic and mafia connections, up to and including the warlordization that is also evident in the war against Ukraine in the deployment of brutal mercenary armies and gangs on both sides.[10] Ultimately, the processes of disintegration cannot be overcome even by authoritarian-repressive restrictions, because they also lose their foundations in these processes.

Authoritarianism is thus not the opposite of liberalism, but its indispensable flip side.[11] Similar to the post-1989 hallucinations of the West’s victory over communism, the defense of Ukraine against an out-of-control dictator and of the free and democratic West against a Russian-dominated authoritarian East is now one of the West’s ‘life lies’ [Lebenslügen].

The East and the West meet in a twisted way in their respective assessments of Augusto Pinochet. Putin is regarded as an admirer of Pinochet. The Western democracies had no objection to his coup against an elected government, nor to his extermination of people, because it was a matter of defending the market economy against socialism and communism in the implementation of the first neoliberal project with the help of the “economists” of the Chicago School around Milton Friedman. With the dictum “A welfare state enslaves, a police state liberates” Franz Hinkelammert had summed up his critique of this project. In 1993, as the Second Mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin told German businessmen that he considered a Chilean-style military dictatorship a desirable solution to Russia’s current problems. In keeping with the logic of the neoliberal self-image used to justify Pinochet’s dictatorship, he distinguished between “criminal” and “necessary” violence. “Criminal violence” aimed at eliminating the conditions of the market-economy, while “necessary violence” protected private capital investments. He therefore explicitly welcomed possible preparations by Yeltsin and the military for a Pinochet-style dictatorship. The minutes record the  applause of the representatives of German companies present, as well that of the deputy German consul general.[12] Liberal and authoritarian variants of commodity production converge in their willingness to use violent repression that operates ‘over dead bodies.’ The authoritarian-repressive is inherent in the liberal variant of commodity production.

5. Dynamics of Escalation and Madness

It is true that Chancellor Scholz – cheered on by the coalition and the CDU – had proclaimed the ‘historical turning point’ [Zeitenwende] and had subsequently launched a gigantic armament program, which was already an expression of the militarization of politics. However, he was reluctant to increase arms deliveries, especially of so-called heavy weapons, and justified this reluctance with warnings of an escalation to the use of nuclear weapons. However, the initially reluctant Chancellor came under increasing pressure – first through a debate fueled by circles within the Greens and the FDP, and finally through pressure from the USA and the other NATO countries, as became clear at the meeting in Ramstein arranged by the US Secretary of Defense.

5.1 Escalations in A Confused and Insane Debate

The debate over the German Chancellor’s brief reluctance to supply arms shows that restraint is apparently out of the question. The only options seem to be ‘more’ or ‘even more,’ despite the fact that this could lead to a further escalation of the war. The impression is created that only increased arms deliveries can help Ukraine. They are stylized as a moral standard for assuming responsibility and charged as an expression of solidarity with Ukraine. The dangers of escalation to nuclear war are ignored and the use of nuclear weapons is trivialized. Strack-Zimmermann of the FDP does not want to be “constantly influenced by military scenarios.” Anton Hofreiter of the Greens stated with certainty that whoever did not immediately deliver heavy weapons would even risk a “de facto third world war.” Michael Theurer (FDP) ranted on Deutschlandfunk radio,[13] giving the impression that a nuclear war could be waged because it could be controlled. That sounds like a “special operation,” noted Katharina Körting.[14]

The question of when Germany could be considered to be participating in the war became the focal point of the debate on arms deliveries. The liberal Federal Minister of Justice, Mr. Buschmann, who had consulted the handbook of international law, knows how to answer this question. According to him, arms deliveries do not constitute participation in war. This is only the case if the recipients are trained to use them. “Only if, in addition to the delivery of weapons, the instruction of the conflict party or training in the use of such weapons were to take place, would one leave the safe area of non-warfare,” according to an expert opinion of the scientific service of the Bundestag.[15] In other words: ‘Free passage for heavy weapons from Germany.’ Meanwhile, we are already one step further: since mid-May, soldiers from Ukraine have been trained in the use of these weapons at Idar-Oberstein in Rhineland-Palatinate. But even that is not enough. But even that is not enough. Marie-Luise Beck, a member of the Greens, is even calling for a no-fly zone. There is obviously no stopping them. Putin is rightly accused of breaking international law, but on the other hand it is pretended that he will adhere the definitions of international law when it comes to the question of a further entry into the war. Putin is denounced as evil, unpredictable and crazy, while at the same time the agitators of the debate trust him to calculate rationally and not start a ‘nuclear confrontation.’ And if he does, there are options for further escalation.

At the time of the disarmament debates, the peace movement was accused of having an ‘ethics of mind.’ Not without reason, if this meant that moral demands were simply derived from general principles without further ado. Now it is the other way round. The bellicists derive the moral demand for the supply of heavy weapons directly from the suffering of the Ukrainians. There is no limit to what can be gained. In such an upsurge of emotions, the agitated gut feeling driven by anger and indignation ultimately reigns supreme. In this dynamic, the question of the supply of heavy weapons becomes a question of commitment. The current ‘Gretchen question’ is: How do you feel about heavy weapons? At the same time, it functions as a test of loyalty and humanity.

A storm of moral indignation erupted when a letter to Scholz signed by a group of publicists and artists was published. In it, they had warned of an escalation of the war and the suffering it would bring to the people of Ukraine. The writers had failed the loyalty test. They now had to put up with being called “intellectuals with a penchant for paternalism” and (Putin’s, I suppose?) “homeland combatants.” Habermas’ complaint about the “impetuous moralizing urge of the Ukrainian leadership, which is determined to win,” as well as calls for a “compromise,” are seen as an “embarrassment of freedom and humanity” on the part of German intellectuals who “do not strike a good pose in dealing with Russia’s war of aggression.”[16] The expected verdict of the world court was expressed by Jan Böhmermann: “The open letter to Olaf Scholz sends a reassuring signal: If Putin attacks Germany with nuclear weapons, the intellectual damage will at any rate be limited.”[17]

5.2 ‘America Locuta, Causa Finita’?

The debate and the Chancellor’s hesitation probably ended in the run-up to the meeting of the US Secretary of Defense with his counterparts from the other NATO countries and 14 non-NATO countries in Ramstein. Now there is more at stake than just the delivery of “German-made” heavy weapons. It was decided to train Ukrainian soldiers in Germany, together with the Netherlands and the USA, regardless of the definitions of international law. At the same time, it became clear at the meeting that the US strategy is not simply about Ukraine’s right to defend itself. As Secretary of Defense Austin made clear during his joint visit to Ukraine with Secretary of State Blinken, it is also about “weakening Russia to the point where it can’t do what it did when it invaded Ukraine. It’s already lost a lot of military capability and, frankly, a lot of its troops. And we don’t want them to be able to restore those capabilities very quickly.”[18] The New York Times said in late April that America’s goals are shifting “from a battle over control of Ukraine to one that pits Washington more directly against Moscow.”[19] This amounts to permanently weakening Russia so that it is eliminated as a competitor in the struggle over the formation of new geopolitical constellations.

So it’s not just about Ukraine’s right to self-determination, but about defending Western liberal normality by weakening Russia, or about a struggle for new geopolitical constellations in which NATO’s borders are pushed as far east as possible. In the process, Ukraine is becoming a battlefield. The war being waged in Ukraine is claiming more and more lives, destroying towns and villages, destroying livelihoods. Those who are supposedly being defended are being sacrificed to Western normality. Those who fuel the war from a (still safe) distance and venerate its protagonists and victims as heroes turn out to be “homeland combatants” who let others fight the war on their behalf. At the same time, they reveal what Western freedom and humanity entail: people become strategic material when they are needed for war. Refugees are welcome if this serves the war and its legitimation – as long as they have the “right” skin color.[20] If they are superfluous because they cannot be used, they can drown in the Mediterranean, bleed to death in barbed wire at the NATO borders, be put in camps or be deported into the hands of any one of the many ‘Putins.’ This logic also includes the fact that the defenders of Western humanitarianism and the moral apostles of war are unaware of their effects in worsening famines, climate disasters, etc. The threat of catastrophic famine only becomes an issue in connection with the Russian blockade of Ukrainian ports, because without reference to the Russian aggressor, the suffering of the ‘merely’ starving remains too remote to stir, let alone outrage, the humane heart and ethical disposition of a ‘homeland combatant,’ and certainly does not provide their brains with ‘food for thought.’ An impending gas embargo, however, does give pause for thought. That’s where the morality based on gut feelings and indignation begins to crack. Arndt Kirchhoff, Vice President of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations, warns of the economic consequences of an abrupt halt to gas imports from Russia, because according to him: “We must not only show moral strength, but must also be economically stronger than the dictatorships of this world.”[21]

6. Socio-Psychological Considerations

The socio-psychological constitution of the subjects of capitalism is also affected by its crisis.[22] The foundations of their psychic constitution are the internalization of labor and the family as a space for social development. Both instances of socialization, which are interdependent due to their relationship of dissociation, are increasingly collapsing in the crisis of capitalism. As a result, people are being thrown back on themselves. In the face of eroding employment opportunities and social interconnectedness, they are expected to take personal responsibility for not only their happiness, but also for their failures. Self-realization is demanded as a self-adaptation to crisis phenomena such as precarious employment, the imminent danger of falling out of the middle class, or even becoming superfluous and standing alone. Self-responsible self-realization becomes an adaptation to the constraints of being subjected as an “entrepreneurial self” to the permanent stress  of an unattainable self-optimization in order to survive in the competition and, in case of failure, to take ‘personal responsibility’ for it and to start again with the optimization.[23] New ‘lot,’ new happiness. The drive dynamic, which in the structuring social context of an internalization of labor was oriented towards ‘rewarding’ oneself for work or being rewarded for it after the drive surge from the willingness to work and perform, is reaching its limits. With the dissolution of the objective social relationship between work and reward, the possibilities for sublimation collapse at the socio-psychological level.

More and more people who are thrown back on themselves are in danger of losing touch with the world of objects. Self-optimization is associated with the message: ‘You can do anything you set your mind to!’ Regardless of the objective circumstances, people are called to greatness. When they fail, they experience themselves as small and insignificant, but they are expected to rise to new greatness in processes of self-optimization. “Making oneself big when one actually feels small” and “blaming and judging oneself” – that is, the depressive variant of falling back on oneself – go hand in hand. Both variants “find it difficult to relate to the world of objects, they revolve around themselves, and cannot find the way to the objects.”[24] Delusions of grandeur offer a way to ward off the narcissistic mortification experienced in ‘being small.’ In this process, self-destruction can be experienced as the final expression of self-realization, in which one’s own greatness is staged.

How do people, thrown back on themselves in the face of war, deal with its horrors and its threatening escalation? Russia’s war against Ukraine and its threatening escalation into a nuclear world war also coincides with the other crises that leave little room for respite. The Covid crisis is not over and we haven’t seen the last of its economic consequences. The climate collapse is approaching and is manifesting itself, among other things, in ever new catastrophic weather phenomena. War, Covid, and climate change are exacerbating the social situations of the crisis via scarcity, supply chain disruptions, and price increases. Fears of restriction, descent and death are intermingled in all of this. In view of Russia’s war against Ukraine, it is noticeable that people tend to avoid the subject.[25] Is this a kind of depressive paralysis, fed by the powerlessness of being at the mercy of an uncontrollable and inscrutable dynamic? Covid was unpredictable too, but at least there were masks and vaccinations for protection. The climate crisis may be getting closer, but it seems so far away that it has yet to get under the skin of many.

In the public debates, an extreme moralization based on ‘gut feelings’ is conspicuous. It combines the blaming of others with the blaming of oneself, the blaming of Putin with the self-blaming of having underestimated him and of having given in to illusions of peaceful coexistence. The best way to exonerate oneself from guilt seems to be to support an economic boycott of Russia, including a boycott of Russian energy supplies, and to supply Ukraine with ‘heavy weapons.’ Such atonement, especially as far as the supply of ‘heavy weapons’ is concerned, is reminiscent of the sale of indulgences and the possibility of buying oneself free of guilt that it opened up. But alas, the cycle of ‘guilt and indebtedness’ cannot be escaped in this way. Supplying weapons implies that these weapons will be used to kill and destroy. On the one hand, the economic boycott threatens the standard of one’s own quality of life and is inseparable from the fact that poor people would bear a disproportionate share of the costs of such ‘atonement.’ And the morally necessary release from the guilt of having supported Putin through energy purchases leads to dependence on other morally and politically questionable figures and potentates in the search for a responsible energy supply.

“Whatever you do or fail to do, you are inevitably guilty,” says Stephan Grünewald.[26] If this is not simply understood as a reassuring postmodern statement of an insoluble dilemma, one of the many tensions and paradoxes with which we must live and act, the statement could be illuminated with insights from Walter Benjamin’s fragment on “Capitalism as Religion.”[27] In this piece, Benjamin writes that capitalism “is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement. […] A vast sense guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, […] and thereby awaken in Him an interest in the process of atonement.”[28] With the inclusion of God in the capitalist social context of the cycle of guilt and indebtedness that cannot be atoned for, “God’s transcendence” is “at an end.” It is “not dead,” but is “incorporated into human existence,” and has become a “worldwide state of despair” that “is actually its secret hope.”[29] The disposed transcendence thus does not disappear, but becomes the fetish of capitalist immanence.[30] There is immanently no way out of this fetishistic social context and therefore there is permanent indebtedness, but no atonement. No action cannot escape the cycle of guilt and indebtedness.[31]

The subjects, nevertheless condemned to act, are driven back and forth between powerlessness and greatness. Powerless, they are thrown back upon themselves and are always guilty on various levels, economically, when they have mismanaged themselves, and politically, when they have made the wrong choices. They gain greatness in the illusion of being autonomous and able to act as subjects. Political greatness appears in the illusions associated with the fearless and resolute defense of Western freedom and is manifested in the strength not to be blackmailed by the ‘incarnation’ of evil in Putin. In this way, the “authoritarian-anomic erosion” of the ‘East’ can be simplified to “a new empire of evil.”[32]

One reason for the oscillation between powerlessness and megalomania, or the defense against powerlessness in megalomania, is the loss of the object and thus the reference to reality. It disappears in the ‘gut-based’ ethos. Dangerously binding maxims of action are derived from the righteousness that finds expression in general principles, life-wisdom and ‘common sense,’ without reflection on the social conditions as an object of critique. This may temporarily relieve the morally troubled gut and the powerlessness experienced as humiliating. But it is just as impossible to escape the real powerlessness in this way as it is to escape the socially structured indebtedness inherent in the fetishized relations.

The conceptual tools that could help us to understand what is happening have already been dismantled in the name of an “illusionless pragmatism,” as exemplified by the postmodern aversion to large-scale concepts and theories that are capable ofgrasping the totality of social relations, and in a spreading hostility to theory. Thus, the relationship between thought and social reality has been severed. “The real social contradiction, which is no longer manageable in the way it was before, is simply to be banished from thought.”[33] One result of such processes is that anyone who refuses to follow his gut feeling in the current debate must expect to be insulted as an intellectual patron and “homeland combatant” at Putin’s side.

7. The Dangerousness of The Present Situation

The world order wars are an illusory response to the disintegrating “territorial system of sovereignty, which is beginning to dissolve right before our eyes with the involuntary assistance of the democratic-capitalist apparatuses.”[34] With Russia’s war against Ukraine, the struggle over the disintegrating world order is being fought between nuclear-armed ‘blocs,’ whose sovereignty is simultaneously being eroded by the processes of the disintegration of commodity production. In the USA, the processes of socio-economic disintegration are converging with those in Russia. Russia now seems to have its back to the wall militarily as well. The hoped-for quick successes of the ‘special military operation’ have not materialized. NATO, which hopes to gain geopolitical advantages by weakening Russia, is driving Russia and itself into a situation from which there is probably no way out without losing face. Territorial concessions by NATO, which Putin could portray as a victory, are diametrically opposed to the goals NATO pursues and promotes as non-negotiable. A return to the pre-war situation would completely delegitimize Putin.

The aporias that open up in the war situation are once again linked to the crisis of capitalism, which is engulfing state sovereignty, including that of Russia and the USA, in its processes of disintegration. In essence, the processes of disintegration are characterized by the fact that the abstract and irrational end in itself, the production of commodities to augment capital for its own sake, is increasingly coming up against its limits, and can be compensated less and less by accumulation simulated on the financial markets. The financial bubbles burst and cause economic crises. The economy and the financial markets are ‘stabilized’ with new money until a new bursting of bubbles occurs, which in the end can no longer be compensated for.

This emptiness of the process of valorization manifests itself at the individual level in the emptiness of subjects who, with the decline of labor, lose their social and socio-psychological basis and threaten to plunge into ‘nothingness.’ “After the bourgeois, enlightened subject has shed its shell, it becomes clear that the core of this subject is a vacuum; that it is a form which ‘in itself’ has no content.”[35] Self-annihilation accompanied by the annihilation of others, as manifested in killing sprees, becomes the last resort of the self-conscious and free subject from the experience of its ‘self-inflicted’ powerlessness and humiliation, its emptiness without perspective. It offers itself as the possibility of demonstrating greatness and power in annihilation. This will to annihilation plays itself out on the individual level as a double annihilation: “On the one hand, it aims at the annihilation of the ‘other’ for the purpose of apparent self-preservation at all costs; on the other hand, it is also a will to self-destruction that carries out the futility of one’s own market-economic existence.”[36]

Similarly to what happens at the level of the subjects, a double potential for destruction is revealed at the level of the overall structuring social context: one owed to capitalist normality and its enforcement, and a final one when this normality comes up against its final limits. “The concept of the democratic rampage is now to be taken quite literally at the level of military action. […] The more untenable and dangerous the world situation becomes, the more the military perspective comes to the fore and the less the inhibition to use high-tech violence on a large scale without hesitation.”[37]

The “unresponsive world” and “the incomprehensibility of the problems” mobilize a diffuse destructive rage. “It repeats on the level of the administrative psyche of the world market what goes on in the psyche of individual spree killers.”[38] Within the framework of this psychodynamic, nuclear annihilation also becomes conceivable and feasible. In the escalating crisis of capitalist commodity production, it is not good and evil, or rationality and irrationality that confront each other, but rather agents and subjects who are caught up in irrational structures of fetishized relations and their normative and symbolic implications. The nation states, which confront each other as blocs in warlike or dangerous constellations, are parts of the insane commodity-producing fetish system that is reaching the limits of its reproductive capacity. There can be no peaceful coexistence of people within the framework of this system. In defense against the experienced emptiness and powerlessness, a last resort could be sought in the search for one’s own greatness in atomic annihilation as the last expression of powerful self-assertion in order to ward off humiliating powerlessness. “In the world of consummate capitalism, only open madness is realistic. Under these conditions, so-called pragmatism itself inevitably takes on eschatological features.”[39]

How such perverse eschatology can present itself theologically was made clear by Gustav Gundlach, a representative of Catholic social teaching, during the ‘Cold War.’ The right and duty of defense apply unconditionally even in the face of self- and world annihilation, for: “Even in a situation where only a manifestation of God’s majesty and his order, which we owe to him as human beings, would remain as success, duty and defense of the highest goods are conceivable. Yes, if the world should perish in the process, that too would be no argument against our reasoning.”[40] Meanwhile, after all, if we follow Walter Benjamin, God’s transcendence has migrated into the immanence of capitalist socialization as its fetishization. As a “‘secularized’ and reified God,” God now stands for the “form of value expressed in money,” for “the objectified metaphysical real abstraction of modern Dasein.”[41] The “downfall of the world” is to be offered as a sacrifice not to a transcendent fetish as the expression of an ontological order, but to the majesty of immanently fetishized relations.[42] Such “religion” is “not the reform of existence but its complete destruction.”[43] Esotericists play their accompanying music in their longings for extinction in fusion with the cosmos – dreams that have not only become ‘modern’ in postmodernity, but were already dreamed of at the beginning of the Enlightenment, and are obviously in vogue in times of crisis, as they were before the beginning of the First World War.

8. What Remains (To Be Done)?

This question leaves us at a loss. No instructions for action can be derived from the theoretical considerations necessary for understanding – certainly none that are unambiguous. Moreover, the aporia that the question of action encounters is due to the ‘progression’ of the crisis conditions in which the globe is being driven to the edge of the abyss. Immanently, there is no way out and yet action is necessary. From my point of view, it is obvious to refrain from supplying more and more weapons. With more and more weapons, the suffering and death of people and the destruction of the living spaces only threaten to continue and to claim more and more victims. All in defense of an empty form of government.

Thus, by refraining from supplying weapons, an attempt could be made to interrupt the dynamics of escalation. This could open the window for something like what Walter Benjamin had in mind with the concept of interruption. He opposes the continuity of the flow of time and prioritizes interruption in order to recognize the present. He wants to interrupt the meaningless progress of modernity, which leads to catastrophe. Interruption instead of ‘Keep it up!’ could open a window of time for critical reflection and interrupt paths that can lead to a global catastrophe that once again goes far beyond what we experience in the ‘normal’ catastrophes of crisis capitalism.

Knowing the present implies for us a “radical critique of society” as a “critique of earthly real metaphysics,” as a “critique of the fetishistic constitution of society.”[44] Without it, it is impossible to grasp what is ‘going on’ as barbarization and annihilation in the worsening crisis of capitalism. “Radical social critique” interrupts the continuum of fetish relations by reflecting upon them. In doing so, it aims at the “complete break(s) with capitalist real metaphysics, with the economic reality principle, and with the nomos of modernity.”[45] If there are to be realistic perspectives, then they will only emerge through the path of an unvarnished and self-critical reflection, interrupting the continuum of normality, upon the socially delusional system of commodity production and its escalating crises, in which the system itself is increasingly running amok.

---

[1] https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=aktuelles&index=23&posnr=765.

[2] https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=aktuelles&index=2&posnr=805.

[3] Cf. Tomasz Konicz, Auf zum letzten Gefecht, in: Konkret 4/22.

[4] Jan Varwick, Raus aus der Eskalationsspirale mit Russland, Telepolis Jan 14, 2022.

[5] Cf. Sandro Mezzardo, Aus dem Krieg desertieren. Drei Gründe sich dem russischen Angriffskrieg zu widersetzen. Für einen neuen Internationalismus, in: medico international, rundschreiben 01/22, 12-15., 12f.

[6] See also Andreas Umland, Das eurasische Reich Dugins und Putins. Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede, 2014, https://www.kritiknetz.de/images/stories/texte/Umland_Dugin_Putin.pdf.

[7] Throalf Cleven, Des Kremls heiliger Krieg, in ‘Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger,’ 4 May 2022.

[8] See Benjamin Bidder, Russlands rechte Freunde, 2016, https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/russland-wladimir-putins-rechtsextreme-freunde-in-europa-a-1075461.html; see also Patrick Gensing, Silvia Stöber, Moskautreue Rechte, 2016, https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/neurechte-russland-101.html.

[9] Cited from: https://taz.de/Querdenker-unterstuetzen-Putin/!5838247/

[10] See also Gerd Bedszent, Zusammenbruch der Peripherie. Gescheiterte Staaten als Tummelplatz von Drigenbaronen, Warlords und Weltordnungsriegern, Berlin, 2014.

[11] Cf. in detail Robert Kurz, Blutige Vernunft: Essays zur emanzipatorischen Kritik der kapitalistischen Moderne und ihrer westlichen Werte, Bad Honnef, 2004; Roswitha Scholz, ‘Die Demokratie frisst immer noch ihre Kinder’ – heute erst recht! In: exit! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, Spring 2019, no. 16, 30-60.

[12] Cf. Pinochet als Vorbild, Neues Deutschland, 31.12.1993, https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/461493.pinochet-als-vorbild.html.

[13] Quotations from: Katharina Körting, Debatte über Krieg und Aufrüstung: Fortschreitende Verharmlosung, in: der Freitag vom 04/24/2022.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger on 05/02/2022.

[16] Markus Decker in the ‘Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger’ of 05/01/2022.

[17] Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger from 05/03/2022.

[18] Quoted from: Florian Rötzer, Ukraine Krieg geht es nicht um die Ukraine, Telepolis 04/29/2022.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Cf. Bernhard Torsch, Refugees welcome, Ausländer raus!, in: Konkret 4/2022; cf. also Ramona Lenz, Die Grenzen der Solidarität, https://www.medico.de/blog/die-grenzen-der-solidaritaet-18565.

[21] Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger from 05/07/2022.

[22] Cf. Leni Wissen, “The Socio-Psychological Matrix of The Bourgeois Subject in Crisis,” online at: https://exitinenglish.com/2022/02/07/the-socio-psychological-matrix-of-the-bourgeois-subject-in-crisis/

[23] Cf. Ulrich Bröckling, Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform, Frankfurt am Main 5/2013.

[24] Herbert Böttcher, Leni Wissen, “Between Self-Reference and Solidarity?” online at: https://exitinenglish.com/2022/07/09/between-self-reference-and-solidarity/

[25] Cf. Stephan Grünewald, “Das Thema Krieg wird gemieden,” in: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 4 May 2022.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” online at: https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2018/06/08/capitalism-as-religion-benjamin-1921/.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Cf. Herbert Böttcher, Kapitalismus – Religion – Kirche – Theologie, in Kuno Füssel/Michael Ramminger (eds.), Walter Benjamin’s Prophetic Legacy, Münster 2021, 31 – 48.

[31] Cf. Robert Kurz, Geld ohne Wert: Grundrisse zu einer Transformation der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, Berlin, 2012, 389ff.

[32] Cf. Tomasz Konicz, Krieg als Krisenbeschleuniger.

[33] Robert Kurz, Das Ende der Theorie: Auf dem Weg zur reflexionslosen Gesellschaft, in: Robert Kurz, Weltkrise und Ignoranz. Imperialismus im Niedergang, Berlin 2013, 60 – 67, 66.

[34] Robert Kurz, Weltordnungskrieg: Das Ende der Souveränität und die Wandlungen des Imperialismus im Zeitalter der Globalisierung, Spring 2022. Expanded new edition of the original Bad Honnef 2003, 414.

[35] Ibid, 68.

[36] Ibid, 71.

[37] Ibid, 429.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Robert Kurz, Marx lessen: Die wichtigsten Texte von Karl Marx für das 21. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main 2001, 395.

[40] Gustav Gundlach, in: Stimmen der Zeit 164 (1959) 13, quoted from: Rupert Feneberg, Gerechtigkeit schafft Frieden: Katholische Friedensethik im Atomzeitalter, Munich 1985, 126.

[41] Kurz (note 34), 69.

[42] Gundlach (note 40).

[43] Benjamin, (note 27).

[44] Kurz (note 34), 434f.

[45] Ibid, 436.

Originally published on the exit! homepage on 05/27/2022

Action Fetishism in an Unreflective Society

Herbert Böttcher

1. Action and Transformation

“On the struggle for an immigration and post-growth society in Europe” was the motto of the medico Foundation Symposium in 2016.[1] The Austrian journalist and author Robert Misik opposed the fear discourse of both the right and the left. While resentment and the willingness to use violence are promoted by the right, powerlessness is advanced by the left.[2] So what can help against fear and powerlessness?

“The power to act is regained by those who make use of the first virtue of critical thinking: to look for the other world not ‘by looking away from existing evil,’ but by looking in the middle of the ‘real movement,’ ‘which cancels the present state,’” is the answer given at medico, in reference to Karl Marx.[3] And the “real movement” in the 21st century is quickly found. In addition to “explicitly political innovations,” it is the “everyday changes in interpersonal relationships and the ethical and moral attitudes that support them.”[4] Some examples are mentioned: practical solidarity with refugees, self-organized solidarity clinics, and neighborhood networks.[5]

All of this may well make sense. It would only have to be made clear from the self-formulated claim why these activities are not just sensible emergency measures, but would actually abolish “the present state of affairs.” But this state can only be lifted if it is recognized, i.e. if it is clear what is to be lifted. “Real movements,” then, can only be those which are aimed at recognizing the “present state” in order to be able to “abolish” it or – to put it more precisely and less Hegelianly – to overcome it.

Social movements – from the traditional workers’ movements to the new social movements – move a lot ‘in the dark.’ The range extends from the flight into the concrete to the flight into the general – depending on the need. Sometimes it is concrete projects or concrete actors to whom demands are addressed, sometimes it is general ethical-moral appeals or abstract visions that promise an orientation for action. At all costs, however, the question as to what the individual phenomena, from people fleeing their homelands to the permanent deterioration of working and social conditions, which we encounter “in the existing evil,” have to do with the totality of the social conditions to be overcome, is to be avoided. Because this question must not be asked, for fear of paralyzing political impotence, salvation is to be sought in action that jumps back and forth between projects, ‘intercessions’ to economic and political actors, and ethical-moral sermons, between ‘concrete’ and ‘general.’ Such action must remain indeterminate in view of the “condition to be abolished” – as Medico puts it. Its indeterminacy finds expression in empty actionist formulas like: We have to do something. In other words, the main thing is to do something, whatever that may be. Or it leads into moralizing appeals such as: We have to change. Change is everything. It must “become DNA” – as the new NRW Economics Minister Andreas Pinkwart of the FDP inculcates in us.[6]

Two problematic social contexts become clear here: On the one hand, both in labor movement Marxism and in social-liberal reforms, as well as in everyday life, the value-dissociation socialization – that is, the “commodity-producing patriarchy” (Roswitha Scholz)[7] – as a social fetish form has always been presupposed without reflection. Second, with the intensifying crisis of capitalism, a new situation is emerging. The margins of action become narrower because they come up against the limits set by the social form. They cannot be overcome by an effort of the will – according to the motto ‘whoever wants to, can.’ These two problematic social contexts need to be reflected upon.

2. Action as a Struggle for Equality and Political Influence in the Capitalist Form.

Theologian Ton Veerkamp laments how Fukuyama’s talk of the history ending with the free market and democracy leads to a lack of alternatives:

“The new gospel of Fukuyama was also the end of the great narratives of the occidental bourgeoisie, the narrative of true liberté, freedom, true égalité, equality, true solidarity, as we call fraternité today. It was perpetuated in the Great Narrative of the labor movement, the narrative of those who took seriously the narrative of the bourgeoisie, true liberty, true equality, true solidarity, not only in the church, but also in the factory.”[8]

The history of the workers’ movement becomes here the continuation or the completion of bourgeois history. It is completed by extending its promises of freedom, equality and solidarity to all. The promised equality is to become a reality for all those who were excluded from the blessings of bourgeois society, especially the workers. Equality is to apply not only politically but also economically, not only in politics but also in the factory. Equality in bourgeois society was the aim not only of the largest part of the workers’ movement, but also of the largest parts of the slavery abolition and women’s movements.

In the workers’ movement in particular, the struggles were seen in the social context of the contradiction between capital and labor. Capital represented the point of view of domination, and labor, that of liberation. Social power relations were represented by the power of capital over labor and the means of production, and thus over the means that are indispensable for human life.

It should not be denied that these liberation struggles, as struggles for participation and equality, have made people’s lives easier. However, at the latest in view of the failure of socialism, it would have been necessary to reflect self-critically that all attempts at emancipation fall short if they move within the fetishistic social context constituted by capital and labor and at the same time within the framework of the dissociated area of reproduction. In it, value and dissociation are always already presupposed, value insofar as capitalist society is oriented toward the irrational and abstract end in itself of the multiplication of money through the production of commodities, i.e., through the production of value and surplus value, dissociation insofar as reproduction, with its feminine connotations, represents the mute precondition for commodity production.

It is not recognized that, just like capital and labor, politics and the state also constitute the fetishistic social context of the capitalist form of society. They are dependent on the process of valorization and can only shape and steer within the margins made possible by the creation of value. It is within this framework that the state performs its task as an “ideal total capitalist” (Friedrich Engels). In view of the incoherently competing individual enterprises, it is its task to create an overall social framework for production and reproduction. It can do this only as long as the process of value creation provides it with the necessary means to do so.

Embedded in the fetishistic capitalist social context is also the subject who believes himself to be autonomous and free. His autonomous cognition seems to be unconditional, his actions essentially controlled by his will. At the same time, his thinking and acting is always already subjected to the unreflectively presupposed factual constraints of the structuring social context of valorization and the reproductive foundations dissociated from it. What appears to him as free thinking and acting has always already affirmed the fetishistic capitalist social context as a self-evident and unreflected given.

On this basis, the subject becomes the agent of abstract labor. Whereas in pre-modern societies activities characterized by toil were due to the necessity of a ‘metabolism with nature’ at a low level of productivity, in modern capitalist societies with a more highly developed productive power, labor is subjected to the compulsion to serve the abstract and irrational capitalist end-in-itself of producing abstract wealth, which is expressed quantitatively in money and is indifferent to its material content. The concrete is to be had only as a carrier of something abstract, the use-value of the commodity only as a carrier of the exchange-value, the material-content wealth only as a carrier of abstract wealth.

Labor subjected to the capitalist end in itself of the multiplication of abstract wealth belongs to the constitution of an abstract and unconscious domination, independent of the thought and action of the actors. Marx described it with the paradoxical concept of the “automatic subject.”[9] The subject is in the service of an automatism in which money is used as capital to produce value and surplus-value through the expenditure of abstract labor, which is expressed in surplus-money after the exchange of commodities. Automatism needs subjects to set it in motion and keep it going. In this respect, the subject is “the agent of a blind social system that sets the ‘automatic subject’ in motion through its own pre-structured pattern of activity.”[10]

Then, however, the subject is precisely not autonomous, but integrated into “the self-movement of the capitalist real categories.” These were “unconsciously created” by people. They have now “become independent … precisely because the individuals live their lives within these categories not wanting to imagine anything differently and seek their happiness by hook or by crook, and through their satisfying the demands brought forth by this matrix.”[11] Their thinking and acting is determined by this unconsciously created, independent and unreflected fetishistic social context. Therefore, political action is also fetishistic. It moves within the polarities of market and state or economy and politics, praxis and theory, which are set by the fetish form. Thus, depending on the constellation, the welfare state can be invoked against the market, the market can be made neoliberal against the state, praxis can be played off against theory, or theory can be put at the service of praxis.

In social movements, political action becomes above all a question of political will or of the interests that are to be asserted against political-economic power. With a shift of the balance of power within the capitalist form and the polarities set with it, i.e. between capital and labor, market and state, theory and praxis, however, the ‘present state’ cannot be ‘abolished’ or overcome. Capital and labor are always presupposed as a fetishistic social context and are not put up for disposition, just as little as the dissociation of reproduction and the patriarchal gender relations. People as social beings remain subordinated to the movements of the commodities they produce and the social relations of a ‘commodity-producing patriarchy’ constituted by them. Their thought, will, and action are broken by the abstract domination constituted by value and dissociation.

As an agent of abstract labor, bound into the fetishistic structuring social context of labor and capital, the subject cannot be a ‘revolutionary subject.’ Through its integration into the fetishistic social context, its supposedly autonomous thought and action is reduced to the framework set by the social form. In this, the subject turns out to be “a category of capital itself, or a function of the ‘automatic subject’ of abstract labor and value.”[12] Then the category of praxis, or the primacy of praxis over theory, also becomes problematic. The praxis of subjects, before there is any thinking, is always already integrated into the dominant fetish forms that seem plausible to the acting subject:

“Working, earning money, gender relations, etc. are in a certain way similar to the way the wild sow digs for acorns or the way the spider weaves its web. Therefore, the absurdity that individuals do not consciously act socially, but according to blind mechanisms, appears as self-evident and is always already presupposed. The consciousness of individuals, precisely because they are separated from these mechanisms, and the fetish forms and their mechanisms, does not refer to the social character of their actions, but to the given immanent calculation according to the given criteria in these immanent forms.”[13]

Just like the praxis of the subjects, the theory produced under the primacy of such praxis remains integrated into the fetishistic social context presupposed without reflection. Such theory becomes either – e.g. in the form of business administration/economics or systems theory – the justification of the relations presupposed in praxis or the justification of a praxis of modernization of relations, which seeks change within the framework of the presupposed social forms by shifting the power relations within the fetishistic social context of capital and labor, market and state, etc. Such theory enters into the service of practical work on contradiction. It moves in the tracks laid by the struggle for recognition in the forms of law and state and for self-assertion in the forms of abstract labor, value, and dissociation.[14]

3. Action in an “Unreflective Society”

3.1 Limits of Action in the Crisis of Capitalism

As the crisis of capitalism progresses, the scope for acting in the presupposed fetish forms becomes narrower. Accordingly, the actors of individual and political action come up against the limits of their action and experience their individual and political impotence. The crisis of capitalism affects the ability of subjects to act insofar as its basis is the expenditure of labor, the ‘substance of capital.’ Because of the ‘moving contradiction’ (Karl Marx) associated with capital, capital producing in competition is forced to replace labor with technology. With the microelectronic revolution, this logical contradiction also comes up against historical limits that can no longer be compensated for, since now more labor substance has to be disposed of than could be compensated for by expanding and cheapening the products. In this way, however, capitalism undermines not only its own foundations, but also the ability of subjects to act as agents of abstract labor.

The illusion of agency is nevertheless maintained insofar as money, too, is detached from its objective social context and declared to be a sign, true to postmodern logic in which the world consists of a multiplicity of signs. Its validity is detached from the objective social context of commodity production, in which it represents abstract labor and thus value and surplus value. It is now recognized as valid on the basis of social convention. Accordingly, the money supply can be increased according to economic necessities. New possibilities for action seem to be opening up via the control of the money supply even to the point of alternative dreams of being able to both secure stability and free up money for social investment via a transaction tax. Negative reality seems to be able to be leapfrogged and to dissolve into an all-determining intentionality. Against such illusions, Robert Kurz has pointed out that “the meaning of an objective validity (in the sense of the fetish relation being independent and reified)” should not be understood in terms of “‘validity’ as subjective kind of ‘validity’ (in the sense of the bourgeois notions of contract and decree).”[15] The ‘objective validity’ of money results from the fact that it represents the expenditure of ‘abstract labor’ and thus value. Fictitious money can only prolong the crisis as long as the connection with the expenditure of abstract labor and the associated production of value and surplus value does not break.      

The extent to which this thread is being put to the test is shown by the increasingly rapid interplay between the capitalist polarities of market and state, economy and politics, in the course of the crisis. In the face of intensifying state financing and economic valorization crises, neoliberalism focused on strengthening the market and the economy through privatization, deregulation and social cuts. Against the supposed omnipotence of the economy and the growing social problems, trade unions and social movements called on the state and its regulatory power. A way out seemed to be found in the miraculous multiplication of capital without going through real commodity production via the buying and selling of financial securities. A simulated accumulation was created which resulted in “money without value” (Robert Kurz), on whose drip the real economy became dependent via global deficit cycles. The ‘natural’ limits of a simulated economy supported by money without value were shown again and again in the bursting of bubbles. The bursting of the real estate bubble in particular called the state back onto the scene to rescue the “systemically important banks” (Angela Merkel). It is becoming clear that not only the state-driven modernization processes in countries of the two-thirds world are coming to an end with the collapse of states that can no longer be financed, but also the ping-pong between market and state or economy and politics in the countries of the global North.

3.2 False Immediacy in an “Unreflective Society”

In view of all the social experiences of crisis and catastrophe, it would seem obvious to critically reflect on the limits of capitalist socialization. Instead, theoretical thinking that seeks to reflect on individual phenomena in the context of social relations is denounced. At the beginning of the new millennium, Robert Kurz had already predicted the path to a “unreflective society”:

“The real social contradiction, which is no longer manageable using the previously employed methods, is simply to be banished from thinking. The dark end of modern development is absurdly celebrated as a transition to an ‘illusionless pragmatism.’ Along with social criticism, reflective thinking ceases altogether.”[16]

The contradiction connected with the inner logical barrier of needing labor for the multiplication of capital, but at the same time having to replace it with technology because of competition, which forces efficiency and cheapening, could be dealt with in capitalist immanence as long as there were sufficient possibilities to compensate for the disappearance of labor. Because this logical barrier now also encounters its historical barriers and thus becomes topical, the perspective would suggest itself to reflect on these barriers and with them on the end of capitalist socialization. Insofar as thinking moves within the unreflected, presupposed social forms, it also encounters the limits of its possible reflection with the logical and historical barriers of capital valorization. Reflection also feels the powerlessness that is established by the objectivity of the relations. There is immanently no more praxis towards which one could think in the interest of change. But instead of making these immanent limits of action and of reflection itself the object of critical reflection, reflection stops its operation.

And yet action is being taken. After all, the crisis ‘must’ be ‘managed’ – among other things, by cutting social benefits and activating companies as well as individuals. The further the crisis progresses, however, the more clearly the limits of its manageability become apparent. Thus it becomes clear: the game is up – both the game of increasing money without value in the casino and the associated illusions of ‘anything goes’ as well as the ping-pong game between market and state that tries to stretch out the crisis. With labor disappearing, both – market and state – are losing their foundation. The latter is most evident in the phenomena of disintegrating states and the looting economies spreading in the voids.[17] But here, too, a ‘need for action’ arises: military intervention is needed to protect the remaining spaces of accumulation from the violence threatening the collapsing regions, as well as from the refugees. The chairman of the German Commission Justitia et Pax and Bishop of Trier, Stefan Ackermann, also does not want to refuse his blessing to such an ‘urgent need for action.’ “Strengthening European cooperation – militarily where expedient – is a prerequisite for the demanded long-term capacity to act.” Against the background of the fight against terrorism, the military participation of the Federal Republic is completely understandable, the episcopal press office of Trier let the bishop announce.[18]

The “illusionless pragmatism” that prides itself on being able to dispense with the burdensome ballast of reflection in the form of theoretical thought and at the same time denounces critical thought as superfluous and detached elitist theory that misses the point of people’s concrete problems amounts to crisis management that is enforced in an increasingly authoritarian manner as the crisis intensifies. In the horizon of easy thoughts and easy language, an easier path is obvious for many: instead of the critical examination of the conditions, which seems too theoretical, the guilty are concretized in “false immediacy” (Theodor W. Adorno) – in ‘the’ foreigners, ‘the’ refugees, ‘the’ politicians, ‘the’ bankers, etc: The unreflective rage of concerned citizens is given an object on which it can act out.

The turn to a relieving false immediacy, which manifests itself in concretisms, did not just fall from the sky with the increased ‘turn to the right,’ as was evident in the 2017 federal election. The indicators of false immediacy and concretism were already visible before the 2008 financial crisis:

• In 2005, Franz Müntefering wanted to revitalize the ossified SPD with a concrete critique of capitalism. He focused attention on the “plague of locusts.” The problem is identified as ‘rapacious finance capital.’ If it were stopped, the problems would be solved. The fact that the distinction between good, creative and evil, ‘rapacious capital’ connoted with Jews serves structural or even direct anti-Semitism is not a problem for such an alleged critique of capitalism, but an advantage: it can be used to reach those who, in view of the crisis of abstract labor, have to circulate on the market as precarious wage workers between changing wage employment situations, pseudo-self-employment and state benefits – i.e., in situations in which they are not able to work. In other words, in conditions in which everyone becomes a “petty bourgeoisie of himself”[19] who, as individualized human capital, is responsive to concretizing right-wing populist slogans.

• This corresponds to the individualization of the social crisis, in which everyone is supposed to become an entrepreneur of his or her human capital and is obligated to keep themselves competitive in processes of permanent self-optimization, and is supposed to present themselves in such a way that he or she stands out through eye-catching design. In the process, self-optimization and self-presentation remain empty of content. Self-optimization is about optimizing formal competencies and self-staging is about being eye-catching by doing whatever.

• The individual is not only “Me, Inc.,” [Ich-AG] but is also supposed to be “Germany,” as the campaign carried out in 2005 propagated. “While the Germany Inc. is being wound up in real economic terms, in the midst of the hurricane of globalized crisis capitalism, the German people’s community is to rise as an ideological community of need and compulsion.”[20] The “state of patriotic optimism,” as Jürgen Klinsmann put it in view of the summer fairy tale of the World Cup, “in one’s own country,” with German flags everywhere, came just in time.[21]

Behind the false immediacy that is already apparent in the above-mentioned examples is the need to concretize problematic situations and to banish them in a fetishistic way. It is no coincidence that Pegida, AfD, etc. can grow and flourish in this conglomerate of crisis repression, which marginalizes content and reflective thought. They articulate society’s need to concretize guilty parties for complex problems in a false immediacy. They are offered in the form of ‘the’ foreigners, ‘the’ refugees, ‘the’ bankers, ‘the’ politicians. What shows up at the supposed margins of society is not a ‘marginal phenomenon,’ however, but an expression of processes in the ‘center’ of society, which also show up on the so-called ‘left’ : in the structural or direct anti-Semitic concretization of the crisis of capitalism to casino capitalism, in the polarization of German and foreign poor in the party ‘Die Linke.’ Such immediate concretizations open up possibilities for immediate action. When culprits and responsible parties are identified, complex problems seem manageable. They can seemingly be “sorted out by immediate action. Instead of the realization that there can be no solutions in the value-dissociation form, there is an attempt to banish the resulting powerlessness in an action-fetishistic way.”[22]

In the processes that aggressively deny and repress the crisis, in which the false immediacy of action is combined with the elimination of reflection on content, a narcissistic social character finds expression. It arises in the structuring social context of the crisis of capitalism, which has to be dealt with by individuals who are pressed into the subject form. With work and family, the foundations of bourgeois subjectivity collapse. The labor subject runs out of work and the family as a place of reproduction loses its foundation. Thus, the possibilities of sublimation of bourgeois subjectivity associated with work and its promise of success and prosperity break down. In the face of empty promises, drive stimulation makes as little sense as binding commitment to an object. Needs cry out for immediate satisfaction through an ever new mother’s breast, problems for an immediate solution through the concretization of guilty parties and correspondingly immediate strategies of action. The relation to the external world of objects is fundamentally disturbed. Thus the narcissistic social character is under the compulsion to assimilate objects, repel them as threatening or destroy them.[23] In this matrix, questions of content are only significant if they can be “perceived and processed in direct relation to the self”[24] or, as personal questions, trigger consternation and can be handled. Otherwise, they are denied as an offensive, excessive demand or a threat, or are aggressively warded off.

This helps to understand why people react so allergically, either ignoring or aggressively defending themselves, to strenuous, complex analyses that are perceived as disempowering and, moreover, block a way out of the false immediacy of concretism and fetishism of action. They can withstand neither reflective distance nor the lack of an immediate action strategy.

As the crisis progresses, people who become devoid of reflection seem to merge with the world as it is in an authoritarian and aggressive anti-intellectualism. Individuals who are reduced to subjects threaten to become one with their valorization or with their exclusion in the state of their devaluation.

Reflection as the ability to step beside oneself in order to look at oneself and the conditions one occupies ‘from the outside,’ as it were, seems to become more difficult. The realization that, as a supposedly self-aware subject, one is only an appendage or material of a process of valorization and its accompanying moments of dissociation is painful because it is disappointing and disillusioning. Moreover, no alternative that could be immediately realized offers itself up. Theoretical reflection, which remains within the immanence of capitalist socialization, reaches a limit, because it can no longer hope for a new stage within a process of development. It gained its dynamism in the critique of an achieved state as a stage of passage to a better future, a next step on the ladder of development within the framework of a perpetual movement of progress. Such progress, however, was bound to the metaphysics of money, which multiplies endlessly in a supposedly infinite process of the self-valorization of capital.

It seems increasingly difficult to think beyond the immediacy of individual phenomena or experiences. In the face of growing burdens, on an individual level – not least due to the irreducible constraints of self-optimization and the omnipresent danger of failure despite all efforts – immediate, i.e., without any thought, relief is sought and offered. This implies the activation of racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and anti-gypsy attitudes at any time in service of a crisis administration that is under pressure to act but remains bound up in the social form. The crisis administration is also becoming more and more incapable of action – and nothing at all can be done when it comes to the claim of coping with the problems in an emancipatory way. Thus, the inability of crisis administrations to act, which is advancing with the crisis, threatens to turn into authoritarian tendencies and, where the military and police security apparatuses are also deprived of their economic foundations, into the savagery of a struggle for existence, which is fought out in a ‘war of all against all.’    

The options for action of social movements, which are linked to capitalist immanence, are also blocked. Instead of critically reflecting on their own powerlessness in the formal social context of capitalist immanence and advancing to a radical critique of capitalism, i.e. one that reaches to the roots, their highest goal seems to be to participate in crisis management or to want to create alternatives without having gone through the purgatory of a radical critique of capitalist society.[25] Thus, individual facets are broken out of the whole of the conditions in the illusion of being able to create an alternative through a niche. Thus it remains with Regiogeld, with exchange rings and free stores, with basic income on the level of misery, with solidarity and common good economy, which do not touch the form of capitalist socialization. In the ecclesiastical field, Caritas and pastoral work take refuge in ‘lifeworld’ orientations, which find their expression in the concept of a so-called ‘socio-spatial approach.’ At least in the ‘small details’ of the immediate life worlds, successes are sought in a praxis that unspokenly admits that it can no longer reach the level of social macrostructures. Praxis becomes the shaping of small life worlds in the immediacy of one’s own social space and is reduced to the framework that the crisis conditions still allow. Playgrounds can then be designed, dilapidated facilities repaired, green spaces tended, and so on. The activated people are given the impression of having influence and of being practically effective. The possibilities of being able to do ‘something’ remain limited to the local area and the framework that the crisis situation allows. Ultimately, behind the often euphorically proclaimed socio-spatial approach is the admission that pastoral praxis and Caritas cannot shape more than the small world of local areas. Thus, it is an expression of adaptation to conditions that are immunized from any critical reflection. Such reflection could, after all, recoil against one’s own praxis and make it recognizable for what it is: as a flight into ‘pseudo-activism’ or into the concretism of false immediacy and as an evasion of the challenge of critical reflection and the necessary overcoming of destructive conditions. The insistence on praxis becomes here – far from being a “forum for appeals against self-satisfied speculation” – a “pretext used by executive authorities to choke, as vain, whatever critical thoughts the practical change would require.”[26] At the same time, the humanitarian significance of solidarity-based crisis management should by no means be underestimated, nor should the improvement of the quality of immediate living conditions against barbarizing savagery in the struggle of all against all. However, without reflection on the structuring context of the social whole, no overall social alternatives to the barbarization inherent in capitalist socialization can emerge from these movements.

4. Religion in a Unreflective Society

Analogous to an unreflective society, an unreflective religion is also developing. As early as the 1990s, Johann Baptist Metz summed up a newly awakened religious enthusiasm with the formula “Religion, yes – God, no.”[27] With this, he described a trend in which religion is very much in demand as a spiritual exaltation and relief from the stress of everyday life, but talk of God is falling into crisis or evaporating. Today René Buchholz speaks of a “false return of religion.”[28] What is false about it is the fundamentalism that is attached to this new interest in religion.

In original religious texts such as the Bible or the Koran, certainties are sought that cannot be shaken by critical reflection on the historical social contexts of the texts. The sacred original texts are just as withdrawn from historical-critical reflection as they are from the question of whether and how their statements can be substantiated. They are valid without time and without justification – then as now.

While religious movements after the 1960s had understood themselves in the horizon of socially critical ‘political theology’ or the ‘liberation theology’ that emerged in Latin America, “today a worldwide religious regression has become the driving force of barbarization. This applies to all religions without exception, from the Catholic fundamentalism of ‘Opus Dei’ to the Protestant sects, Islamism, the messianic-theocratic Jewish ultras, the ultra-right Hindu movement and the racist Buddhists in Sri Lanka, etc.”[29]In the transfiguring retrospection of an ideal situation of origin, they gain their aura and “appear as a way out of the precarious situation and at the same time as a threatened part of one’s own identity, which is regarded as unchangeable.”[30]

In addition, a softer but no less fundamentalist variant of religion is emerging. It is offered as spirituality on esoteric markets, but also by churches that want to remain competitive as entrepreneurial churches in the face of dwindling demand for God. The programs seek success by directly addressing the sensitivities of individuals: the search for an expansion of happiness through intensive and spiritual experiences, for relief for the stressed through wellness, for meaning and closeness for those who have failed in competition or are plagued by fear of social decline. In the immediacy with which individual needs are addressed, the structuring social context is not abolished, but made invisible. The impositions that people have to put up with, as well as the nonsense of a society that has subjected itself to the irrational compulsion of the multiplication of money, is omnipresent, but it should not and will not be grasped.

If spiritual offerings are to be successful on the market, this structuring social context and with it reality must be faded out. They must be experience-intensive and at the same time content-empty and reflection-free. Their fundamentalism lies in the fact that the world as it is, and the merging of individuals with it, is always already presupposed to be without justification, authoritarian, and hostile to reflection. They reflect what Theodor W. Adorno described in his studies on the authoritarian personality as follows: “The superiority of the existing … over the individual and his intentions” is to be “acknowledged” as realism and implies “classifying oneself as an appendage of the social machinery.”[31] With the authoritarian presupposition of the world as it is, any idea that the world could be otherwise remains excluded. It is confined in a closed immanence that is exalted by a contentless spirituality that renounces any thinking that could transcend its object to a level that supersedes it.

5. What To Do?

If the processes of crisis are not to drive further into barbarization, it cannot be a matter of anything less than “abolishing the present condition.” The ‘power to act’ cannot be gained without recognizing and negating what constitutes this condition as a structuring social context of form, namely value and dissociation and the levels of ideology production that are mediated by them, but also connected with a momentum of their own, as well as the cultural-symbolic and the socio-psychological level. In view of this social context, the proclamation of a primacy of praxis is also misleading, since praxis, like the subject as its bearer, always presupposes the ‘condition to be abolished.’

In view of the constraints of immediacy, a reflection is necessary that can gain distance from the condition of a society closed in the form of capitalist socialization. This presupposes an epistemological break with the form and its characteristic thinking in the polarities of capital and labor, market and state, as well as those of subject and object, and theory and praxis. Instead of instrumentalizing theoretical knowledge one-dimensionally from and to praxis, it would be important to understand theoretical reflection as an independent moment of social emancipation. As a mere instrument of praxis, it must remain within the limits set by the form of capitalist relations. In this prison it becomes – just as in the Middle Ages philosophy was once understood as ancilla theologiae (handmaiden of theology) – “the Cinderella of unscientific and pre-scientific premises and forms of life, to which it has to serve as a handmaiden of legitimation.”[32]

“The recovery of theory’s independence lies in the interest of praxis itself,” Adorno says in his “Negative Dialectics.”[33] The background of this statement is the insight that in the demanded unity of theory and praxis, theory succumbed and became “a piece of the politics it was supposed to lead out of; it became the prey of power.”[34] A different praxis is only possible if theoretical reflection can step out of its functional subjection to a praxis already determined by the circumstances and gain its own weight. But then, against the attempts to reconcile the tension between theory and praxis by including critical reflection as ‘theoretical praxis’ under the concept of praxis, the tension between theory and praxis must be endured. It is necessary “to refuse any ‘fusion’ of critical reflection with the given ‘counter-praxis’ of immanent contradiction processing or even an everyday metaphysics.” “In order to be able to shatter this fetishist constitution, both ‘theoretical praxis’ as well as immanent ‘counterpraxis’ must undergo, each in its own respective domain, a process of transformation, until both go beyond themselves and can only merge in the result. Thus, the celebrated ‘unity between theory and praxis’ can no longer be a presupposition, but only an immanent telos of categorical critique; it coincides with real transcendence, or else it will not exist.”[35] Such transcendence is in the interest of social emancipation. It opens up possibilities for recognizing and negating the limits imposed on praxis by capitalist socialization. Without such recognition, “there would be no changing the praxis that constantly calls for change.”[36]

Nor can a royal road to overcoming capitalism be derived from a theory as an independent element of emancipatory praxis and implemented as a model. Theory cannot replace emancipatory praxis. Only in a social movement that negatively reaches beyond the limits set by the capitalist form do paths to overcoming capitalism seem possible. In this sense, it would be important to insist on and fight for demands that cannot be met under capitalism. This includes the struggle for the satisfaction of basic needs as well as the struggle against low wages and precarious working conditions and for ‘public services,’ in short for everything that is possible in view of material wealth and the state of the productive forces, but fails because of the constraint that material wealth in capitalism can only be represented and have meaning as abstract wealth. In this sense a ‘different world would be possible,’ but only in the break with the capitalist form of abstract wealth. This would be the precondition for an orientation towards the life needs of people and the production of the goods that are necessary for this. Corresponding demands would therefore have to know and make clear that they are by no means raised from a situation beyond the form of value and dissociation, but that they lay claim to its overcoming. However, this claim would already be denied if, in the interest of mediation and mobilization, the limits of the capitalist form of society that are to be overcome were no longer allowed to be thematized: For “no theory may play dumb for the sake of agitational simplicity against the objectively achieved state of knowledge. It must reflect it and push it further. The unity of theory and praxis was not meant as a concession to the weakness of thought, which is the spawn of repressive society.”[37]

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[1] Cf. Thomas Seibert, Stiftungssymposium: Vom Kampf um eine Einwanderungs- und Postwachstumsgesellschaft, in: meidico international, rundschreiben 2/16, 41-43.

[2] Cf. ibid., 41.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Cf. ibid.

[6] Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 10.11.2017.

[7] Cf. Roswitha Scholz, Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus. Feministische Theorien und postmoderne Metamorphosen des Kapitals, Bad Honnef 2nd ed. 2011.

[8] Ton Veerkamp, Die Welt anders. Politische Geschichte der Großen Erzählung, Berlin 2012, 423.

[9] Cf. Karl Marx, Capital Vol I, Penguin Publishing Group 1992, 255.

[10] Robert Kurz, The Substance of Capital, Chronos Publications 2016, 184.

[11] Ibid, 183f.

[12] Robert Kurz, Marxsche Theorie, Krise und Überwindung des Kapitalismus. Fragen und Antworten zur historischen Situation radikaler Gesellschaftskritik, in: ders., Der Tod des Kapitalismus. Marxsche Theorie, Krise und Überwindung des Kapitalismus, 19-34, 26.

[13] Robert Kurz, Die antideutsche Ideologie. Vom Antifaschismus zum Krisenimperialismus: Kritik des neuesten linksdeutschen Sektenwesens in seinen theoretischen Propheten, Münster 2003, 233.

[14] Cf. Robert Kurz, Grey is the Golden Tree of Life, Green is Theory, online here: https://libcom.org/library/grey-golden-tree-life-green-theory-robert-kurz.

[15] Robert Kurz, Geld ohne Wert. Grundrisse zu einer Transformation der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Berlin 2012, 231.

[16] Robert Kurz, Das Ende der Theorie. Auf dem Weg zur reflexionslosen Gesellschaft, in: ders., Weltkrise und Ignoranz, a.a.O., 60-67. 66.

[17] See, among others, the text by Tomasz Konicz in this publication, see: https://www.oekumenisches-netz.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Festschrift-Die-Frage-nach-dem-Ganzen-25-Jahre-Netz-Webversion-full.pdf.

[18] Diocese of Trier – Press Service Koblenz from 11.12.2015.

[19] Cf. Robert Kurz, Die Heuschreckenplage, in: Neues Deutschland, 20.5.2005.

[20] Robert Kurz, Du bist billig, Deutschland, in: Neues Deutschland, 30.9. 2005.

[21] Cf. Robert Kurz, Wirtschafts- und Fussballpatriotismus, in: Neues Deutschland, June 30, 2006.

[22] Leni Wissen, The Socio-Psychological Matrix of the Bourgeois Subject in Crisis, 2017, online here: https://exitinenglish.wordpress.com/2022/02/07/the-socio-psychological-matrix-of-the-bourgeois-subject-in-crisis/

[23] Cf. ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Cf. Dominic Kloos’ text on the common good economy: https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=autoren&index=8&posnr=591.

[26] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Routledge 2004, 3.

[27] Johann Baptist Metz, Religion, ja – Gott, nein, in: ders, Tiemo Rainer Peters, Gottespassion. Zur Ordensexistenz heute, Freiburg 1991; ders, Gotteskrise. Versuche zur geistigen Situation der Zeit, in: Diagnosen zur Zeit, Düsseldorf 1994, 76-92.

[28] René Buchholz, Falsche Wiederkehr der Religion. Zur Konjunktur des Fundamentalismus, Würzburg 2017.

[29] Robert Kurz, Weltordnungskrieg. Das Ende des Imperialismus im Zeitalter der Globalisierung, Bad Honnef 2003, 435.

[30] René Buchholz, op. cit., 148.

[31] Theodor W. Adorno, quoted in Buchholz, op. cit. 141.

[32] Claus Peter Ortlieb, A Preface to the Memory of Robert Kurz (1943-2012), located here: https://libcom.org/library/memory-robert-kurz-1943-2012-claus-peter-ortlieb

[33] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Routledge 2004, 143.

[34] Ibid, 143.

[35] Robert Kurz, Grey is the Golden Tree of Life, Green is Theory.

[36] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, op. cit. 143.

[37] Ibid, 206.

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Originally published in: Ökumenisches Netz Rhein-Mosel-Saar (ed.): Die Frage nach dem Ganzen – Zum gesellschaftskritischen Weg des Ökumenischen Netzes anlässlich seines 25 jährigen Bestehens, Koblenz 2018, 357-380. Slightly shortened and with minor changes for the Exit homepage.