Some Critical Remarks on the Lacanian Marxism of Slavoj Žižek and Tove Soiland

Roswitha Scholz

1. Introduction

Along with Badiou, Agamben and Negri, Žižek has for some time been one of the most influential intellectuals on the left (cf. on the first two: Böttcher 2019 and on Negri: Jappe 2002, Kurz 2003, 255ff. and Scholz 2005, 247ff.). If you tell someone that you’re writing something about Žižek, you’re met with incomprehension. He is said to be confused, hollow, polemical, and is sometimes even dismissed as a bluffer and a dazzler, and is in this respect completely undiscussable. But, if this is the case, why is he at the same time considered honorable? Why is he often invited to give lectures, to which the masses flock? How can he be published by Verso or W.W. Norton and be considered a “star philosopher”? Why are there articles by and interviews with him in “serious” newspapers like The Guardian and The New York Times? There is even an academic journal called the International Journal of Žižek Studies. This raises the suspicion that there is more authoritarian totalitarianism in the decaying bourgeois postmodern subject than one might think.

            While my primary concern in what follows is to critique Žižek’s theory and his androcentric bias from the standpoint of the critique of value-dissociation, it is also to show, at least to some extent, his role as a key figure in the transition from postmodernity to an authoritarian-anarchic age, which is accompanied by a semi-ironic reference to Lenin and Stalin in his writings.

            It is all the more astonishing that Tove Soiland, whose texts overlap in some respects with the theory of value-dissociation, especially with regard to the critique of the demands for flexibility in globalized capitalism and a corresponding critique of “queer” and “gender” theory, not only takes Žižek’s side, but also tries to make his thoughts fruitful for a feminist “Lacanian Marxism.” In the third part, I discuss Tove Soiland’s approach, with reference to Irigaray. Finally, I draw a conclusion against the background of the critique of value-dissociation.

            Since Žižek is not necessarily comprehensible and his thinking does not always follow logical criteria, I was often forced to resort to secondary literature that tries to make sense of it all. His associative way of writing means that his work sometimes has the character of a collage of text modules glued together, as has often been pointed out. According to Rex Butler, Žižek’s own claim is that he can only be read in such a way that he is not simply original, but that he is given new meanings with every reading (Butler 2005). Certainly, “source studies are important, but in each case at the right place and with the awareness that one is nevertheless always interpreting, always assigning new meanings” (Heil 2010, 11). We are happy to meet this demand, as we will see, but against the backdrop of an (objective) value-dissociation dynamic that calls into question Žižek’s theoretical framework, which still strives for – even rather bluntly – male supremacy within the liberation of humanity. First, however, some key points of Žižek’s theory will be presented.

2. Key Points Of Žižek’s Theory

2.1 Lacan and Hegel

In my opinion, Žižek is primarily concerned with the significance of the symbolic level and the psychological dimension in the sense of Lacan, a way of thinking that can then be easily combined with Hegelian philosophy, according to Žižek. Marx is (actually) subordinate, despite Žižek’s martial insistence on him. He certainly does not arrive at value dissociation as a social principle of form. With Lacan, he assumes a “big Other” and a “small other.” Here, petit a always points to a lack in the subject. The objet petit a refers to (sexual) desire/enjoyment, including women. The big Other, on the other hand, stands for structure, logic, law, God, and the like. In this context, Žižek adopts Lacan’s assumption of an imaginary and symbolic real: The imaginary is the mirror stage, that is, the mother-child stage; the symbolic, on the other hand, is the incursion of the outside world into the world of the child. The real, in the form of a disturbance, is now supposed to represent this symbolic in the first place, whereby the relation between the “real” and reality generally remains indeterminate, i.e. the external world and the internal world are bent back into the subject (cf. Žižek 2007, 15ff., Heil 2010, 62ff.). The objet petit a thus appears in the phantasm, which is not fixed and can attach itself to various things. It is responsible for the possibility of enjoyment after the intrusion of the symbolic order; indeed, it is only through this restriction that this desire becomes truly explosive. Ideology has thus always been linked to the constitution of the subject and the struggle with the unconscious desire to which the dominant politics can attach itself (cf. Soiland 2013, 143f., on ideology see also below).

            In doing so, Žižek connects Lacan and Hegel, whereby Hegel is portrayed as an advocate of contradiction in that he represents the universal and is thus always dependent on the other/particular. In this way, Žižek thinks that both Lacan and Hegel meet in the “lack in the subject.” And so he can once again quite easily return to an androcentric general logic. Hegel’s symbolic level as the general of the symbolic order, of ideologies, thus meets the subjective-symbolic in Lacan’s sense, whereby the signifier as opposed to the signified is decisive, because according to Žižek there is no world in itself (cf. for example Heil 2010, 32ff., Žižek 2012, 905ff.).

            In my opinion, Žižek is thus, as I said, primarily a Lacanian who tries to decipher Lacan’s theory, mediated through Hegel, on a scale critical of capitalism, above all by means of pop culture and politics. For him, this is the central approach to capitalist postmodernity. This is the main source of his critique of capitalism. Here, Žižek is not simply content with a negation that arrives at a synthesis and is somehow completed, but rather the synthesis in turn creates an Other out of itself. In this sense, Žižek assumes that capitalism is capable of boundless renewal. Žižek certainly takes value and fetishism into account, although he also understands them psychoanalytically, with Lacan, as a phantasm/illusion that nevertheless produces reality. In doing so, however, he arrives at the proletariat or partisanship for the proletariat as the true point of reference (more on this later).

            Žižek is not concerned with understanding Marx, Hegel, Freud, etc. as they appear in their original texts, but with interpreting them to the extent that they “concern our present” and thus “repeat” them (Heil 2010, 11). Truth, then, is again subjective; it is basically absorbed in the present and a corresponding point of view. A fetishistic objective social dynamic is not really taken into account.

2.2 Critique of Postmodernism

Against this background, Žižek comes down hard on postmodernism and multiculturalism: “Although Žižek criticizes the postmodern zeitgeist, especially in the form of multiculturalism, in a certain sense he goes against postmodernism itself using the means of postmodernism, and certainly accepts techniques that are generally associated with the term postmodernism. His practice of reading, of taking a text out of its original context in order to make sense of it in a new context, is a postmodern practice. The idea that every concept points beyond itself, that meaning cannot be fixed […] is, of course, also found in postmodern authors. Žižek’s great interest in popular culture […] is closely related to the valorization of popular and everyday culture” (Heil 2010, 15f.). Precisely in this way, even with Lenin, he aims at a post-postmodern Lenin, as we will see. Postmodernism is usually associated with phenomena such as the blurring of high and popular culture, aestheticization/culturalization, the end of ideologies and of the concept of truth, the incarnation of the copy and the original in the copy, and so on. Distance from the existing conditions has become impossible. Žižek is particularly opposed to the latter.

            With Lacan, he assumes that, in contrast to postcolonial and poststructuralist approaches, the subject is not simply produced by invocation, as in Althusser, for example, but that a tension arises between the objet petit a and the subject. Subjectification is therefore never fully successful. This subject is always divided in two from the outset and resists the demands of the object big A, the symbolic level, etc., which actually brings it into the subject form in the first place, which is why subjectification can never fully succeed, as already mentioned above.

            Under advanced capitalist conditions, the subject is no longer invoked ideologically, as it was until about the mid-1970s; rather, in a changed capitalism/consumer capitalism, its decentering is demanded, so to speak, in the course of flexibilization tendencies. Here, too, Žižek follows Lacan (cf. Soiland 2013, 11ff.). Object big A has, as it were, largely diluted itself: the father, the law, the binding symbolic order, etc. The subject is now thrown back on itself and must now erect Object Big A within itself, i.e., it must be its own master, the master of the enjoyment associated with objet petit a. Enjoyment now becomes an imperative. In practice, this manifests itself in demands for self-optimization that are translated into “technologies of the self” (Foucault). A (fragile) “entrepreneurial self” (Ulrich Bröckling) emerges, which no longer knows any authority, and instead the self becomes its own authority. Combined with a tendency towards the pluralization of life plans, there is a demand for the recognition of difference and an ideology of multiculturalism, with a simultaneous emptiness on the level of Object Big A and deficits of meaning on the symbolic level. The dissolution of oedipal structures thus brings with it a new authoritarian rule of the self, beyond (traditional) morality and ethics (Žižek 2008, 85ff.).

            As already mentioned, Žižek also reads Marx against the background of a politicized Lacan. In doing so, he assumes a remarkable mutability of capitalism, because the contradictions of capitalism always lead to its reconfiguration. This corresponds precisely with his own interpretation of Hegel, according to which the world spirit does not come to itself, but rather the “other in capitalism” always leads to its reformation through progression. At the same time, however, he also sees an end to capitalism in the foreseeable future (see, for example, Žižek 2018, 20). A contradiction indeed. But who wants to be so petty? It could go either way. After all, “anything goes,” a motto Žižek supposedly always fights against.

2.3 Economy, Ideology and Fetish Socialization

The economic is supposed to be the foundation that produces social theory and practice. On the other hand, Žižek does not want to economize relations. “In Marxism, ‘commodity fetishism’ provides the coordinates of the way commodities appear to subjects, and this appearance determines their objective social status; in psychoanalysis, “fantasy” provides the frame within which objects appear to the desiring subject, and this frame constitutes the co-ordinates of what the subject experiences as ‘reality’” (Žižek 2002, 182, emphasis in original). He goes on to write: “in reality, capital does not engender itself, but exploits the worker’s surplus-value. So there is a necessary third level to be added to the simple opposition of subjective experience (of capital as a simple means of efficiently satisfying people’s needs) and objective social reality (of exploitation): the ‘objective deception,’ the disavowed ‘unconscious’ fantasy (of the mysterious self-generating circular movement of capital), which is the truth (albeit not the reality) of the capitalist process […] truth has the structure of a fiction: the only way to formulate the truth of capital is to describe this fiction of its ‘immaculate’ self-generating movement” (ibid., 283, emphasis mine). Perhaps Žižek is also alluding here to the Marxian formulation that capital, in its self-movement, acts as if its “body were possessed by love” (Marx cited in Kurz 2012, 178). What Marx means here metaphorically is taken literally by Žižek in a Lacanian-Marxist sense. In this respect, Žižek argues for using Marx for reinterpretations as well: “this means that the most urgent task of economic analysis today is, again, to repeat Marx’s ‘critique of political economy’ without succumbing to the temptation of the multitude of ideologies of ‘post-industrial’ modern societies” (Žižek 2002, 283f.).

            Tove Soiland builds upon this to show what Žižek’s concept of ideology is all about: “Žižek grasps commodity fetishism […] with the concept of an ‘unconscious belief’ […] and thus ideology on the level of what Lacan calls the phantasm. […] The phantasm of self-valorizing value, far from being merely a fantasy, has the capacity to be realized […] which is why Žižek says: ‘The fundamental level of ideology […] is not that of an illusion that masks the true state of affairs, but that of an (unconscious) phantasm that structures our social reality itself.’ […] So people do not misjudge reality, but they overlook the fact that reality itself is structured by illusion: Reality itself is ideological” (Soiland 2013, 147f.). Even when people know that they are caught up in a phantasm, they still behave as usual. This is expressed, for example, in postmodern ironization.

            For Žižek, the commodity fetish as a relation is basically nonexistent, although it nevertheless finds its expression in a modified proletariat. According to Žižek, commodity fetishism disembodies itself today by no longer assuming a “fixed object” but by becoming a “virtual entity,” by no longer buying the thing but, among other things, the illusion of the thing, and by turning money into virtual money (Žižek 2002, 288). He defines today’s virtual capitalism, among other things, as follows: “The key change concerns the status of private property: the ultimate element of power and control is no longer the last link in the chain of investments, the firm or individual who ‘really owns’ the means of production. The ideal capitalist today functions in a wholly different way: investing borrowed money, ‘really owning’ nothing, even in debt, but none the less controlling things” (Žižek 2002, 283f). However, Žižek does not think that this necessarily makes the concept of property obsolete. “What characterizes ‘late capitalism’ is the split between the production of cultural experiences as such and its (partially invisible) material base, between the Spectacle (of theatrical experience) and its secret staging mechanisms; far from disappearing, material production is still here, transfunctionalized into the supporting mechanism for the stage production” (ibid., 289). On the whole, he leaves open the question of the status of the concept of property today (ibid., 294f.). Instead, we must take into account, with Postone, the fact that that since the emergence of Great Industry, it is no longer a matter of potentials taken from producers and privately appropriated by the capitalist. “Rather, they are socially general productive powers and their alienated character is intrinsic to the very process of their constitution.” (Postone 1993, 349).

            According to Žižek, manual labor is now considered obscene. It should apparently be hidden, as sex once was. It can be found on the assembly lines of the Third World, in world market factories, “Chinese gulags,” etc. Žižek does not want to see the difference between material and immaterial production mixed up. In this respect, he rages against the thesis of an end of the labor society. In doing so, he leaves open the question of whether cyber-workers also belong to the proletariat. He goes so far as to ask whether the (precarious) unemployed are not the “true proletarians of today.” From this he draws the conclusion directed against Jeremy Rifkin: “If today’s ‘post-industrial’ society needs fewer and fewer workers to reproduce itself […] then it is not workers who are in excess, but Capital itself” (Žižek 2002, 291, emphasis in the original). By implication, Žižek also identifies himself as a labor ontologist here.

            The question now is how to get out of these circumstances. One would hardly believe it, but for Žižek an “act” (Lacan), an “event” (in reference to Badiou) is suitable to destroy this phantasm (see among others Žižek 2008, 157f., Butler 2005, 66ff., especially 86ff., Heil 2010, 85f.). This does not mean (pseudo) uprisings of black people, trans people, women, etc., but for Žižek, the aim is still class struggle. Thus he writes against postmodern ideologies that focus on the dimension of meaning: “In the Marxist perspective, ‘class struggle’ is not the last horizon of meaning, the last signified of all social phenomena, but the formal generative matrix of the different ideological horizons of understanding. That is to say: we should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of ‘narratives’ […] The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the impossibility of this liberal notion of Form: Form has nothing to do with ‘formalism,’ with the idea of a neutral Form, independent of its contingent particular content; it stands, rather, for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism which “colours” the entire field in question. In this precise sense, class struggle is the Form of the Social: every social phenomenon is overdetermined by it, so that it is not possible to remain neutral towards it.” (Žižek 2002, 190). In postmodernity, Žižek understands slum dwellers, the precarious, etc. (see above) as descendants of the classical proletariat (see also Heil 2010, 91ff.). On the other hand, women, trans people, black people, etc., have long been integrated into contemporary capitalism. According to Žižek, corresponding postmodern ideological positions would have to recognize that it is a matter of the “traversal of the phantasm” (Lacan), i.e. that a full identity never exists, since the phantasmatic objet petit a, which is constituted by lack in the subject and therefore does not exist itself in the proper sense, is unattainable. It is therefore nonsensical to assume a subject that has come into being through invocation, which can then be deconstructed by insisting on its very multiplicity (see also Žižek 2000a, 110ff.). For after the loss of the big Other in postmodernity, people are now, as it were, under the thumb of an abstract enjoyment that enslaves them. Polemically, one could also formulate: Without a father, without renunciation, no real enjoyment is possible in postmodernity. In Žižek’s work, ideology is thus directly equated with psychological processes.

            In an allegedly radical perspective of critique, he is concerned with gaining political control over a production process that has become independent, whereby a conventional understanding of democracy has already become affirmative even in conjunction with political correctness; in this respect, Žižek is concerned with a true post-capitalist democracy. In this context, he also turns against Laclau/Mouffe, who suggest that the economy is under the thumb of politics, thereby equating politics and economy. Tove Soiland notes in this regard: “The adherence to the ultimately determinant status of the economic as the background against which cultural struggles such as the recognition struggles of left identity politics must be seen or referred back to – and thus the insistence on the necessity of political economy, which cannot be reduced to a field of contested meanings – is directed by Žižek against a rewriting of the economic, against a concept of politics such as it […] developed into the project of a ‘radical democracy’” (Soiland 2013, 152). When Žižek thus insists on a vehement attention to the critique of political economy, it must be pointed out, however, that this is done against the background of a massive psychologization of the (commodity) form as a phantasm that creates reality, whereby he often confuses commodity fetishism with the more vulgarly understood consumption fetishism and does not treat it as an inner bond of capitalism (on the critique of such views, see: Ortlieb 2007).

            Thus, the particular standpoint of the proletariat (even if by no means only those affected can and should take it), which seems to be opposed to an indifferent, immanent juxtaposition of various social disparities, continues to be valid for him as an allegedly transcendent perspective. In my opinion, such a particularity of the standpoint of the “proletariat” and a corresponding partisanship for it has nothing to do with “truth,” as Žižek claims, since its “particular position is transcended towards the general” (Heil 2010, 21), but is rather a backward-looking ideology that no longer wants to know “others” and the Other. Žižek basically wants nothing other than a masculine truth and a masculine androcentric desire and enjoyment in combination with a corresponding fetishism of labor. In doing so, even when he speaks of a “self-devaluation of value,” the psychoanalytical assumption as actual precedes it.

            If he now wants to repeat Lenin, this means not “to repeat what Lenin did, but what he did not do, his missed opportunities.” In this respect, Lenin is not simply anachronistic for Žižek, but should be read in such a way that his “impenetrability […] is a sign that there is something wrong with our epoch” (Žižek 2002, 311, emphasis in original). Here in Žižek it once again becomes clear that the fetish as an objective fundamental structure, which also formed the fundamental structure for really-existing socialism and its decline, is not sufficiently grasped from the perspective of the critique of value-dissociation (cf. Kurz 1991).

            In this respect, it is only logical that in introductions and overviews of Žižek’s thought, Lacan and Hegel are usually cited and expanded upon as central references, while Marx appears almost as an accessory. Objective (fetish) structures are basically out of his field of vision, interpreted from a Lacanian-psychoanalytic logic by recommending “remembering, repeating, and working through,” for example and especially in relation to Lenin (see also Žižek 2017). The authoritarian and the clownish are mixed in Žižek’s work like a horror clown.

3. Žižek and The Critique of Value-Dissociation

3.1 Marx and Adorno

In the following, I would like to clarify a few aspects of the fundamental difference between Žižek’s conceptual framework and the critique of value-dissociation (for more on this, see Scholz 2011). In contrast to Žižek, the critique of value-dissociation assumes that value and dissociation are homogeneous and that the one cannot be derived from the other; value, therefore, cannot exist without its other.

            Instead, Žižek proceeds in principle from Hegel, who still wants the Other, in all its contradictions, to merge into an androcentric whole. In doing so, he assumes the incompleteness of the Hegelian system. The contradictory logic of the Hegelian system excludes its Other until the end, so that the contradictory process can always begin anew, from which Žižek, as we have seen, justifies capitalism’s high degree of mutability. In terms of the critique of value-dissociation, however, Hegel must be read as he usually is: Namely, that he considers the Other to be of little importance and yet, in the knowledge of its dialectical indispensability for the general, ultimately subordinates it to this general. Marx, as is well known, transfers this view of Hegel to the analysis of capital, although, as the oft-quoted phrase goes, he stands Hegel on his head. Marx, again like Hegel, does this in relation to something general, specifically to value/surplus value and capital, whereby the moving contradiction (omitting the dissociated dimension) would lead itself ad absurdum, i.e. the value embodied in the commodity becomes smaller and smaller.  It is this process that today finally renders abstract labor obsolete. Reproductive activities, love, nurturing, care, etc., which are usually performed by women, are not systematically given space in this process.

            Identity-logical thinking, the critique of which in everyday life and science is crucial for the critique of value-dissociation, cannot therefore simply be derived from exchange (as Adorno does), whereby the socially average labor time, the abstract labor that stands behind the form of equivalence, is the common third that makes it possible to make unequal things equal, even in theory and science, for example, in positivist thinking. Rather, it is the fundamental value dissociation form that makes this possible. In this respect, it is also inadmissible from a value-dissociation-critical point of view to simply confound the material, symbolic and socio-psychological levels, as Žižek does. For abstract labor and value as the substance of capital, in turn, must exclude domestic labor and the like, the sensual, emotional, non-unique, non-analytical, life-worldly, which cannot be grasped by scientific means, and consider it inferior. This dissociation of the feminine is not congruent with Adorno’s non-identical, but rather represents the dark underbelly of (surplus) value within the logic of capital itself, which does not merge into the commodity form or the logic of exchange, but only comes to itself in the capital form as such. The logic of value dissociation as a whole is thus responsible for the fact that in business, politics and economics, the concrete object is not perceived in its own qualitative specificity, but falls victim to a one-dimensional, identifying thinking. Contradictions, ambivalences, and differences can thus not be taken into account. In this context, the critique of value-dissociation must have the courage to also think outside of itself, against itself, so to speak, and to also allow for other social disparities such as racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Gypsyism, homophobia, economic disparities, etc. to occupy their own logic and to analyze them accordingly (see in detail: Scholz 2005).

            However, the critique of value-dissociation is not concerned with an abstract hypostasis of differences, or anything like that, as is prevalent in various postmodern theories, but rather with various levels, areas and moments that must also be understood as real, irreducibly related to each other in their objective and inner connectedness in the sense of value dissociation as an underlying connection and totality. Thus, it is not a matter of a simple eclectic synopsis of the various moments, but they must be related to each other as “unidentical,” but at the same time “essential” in the sense of a contradictory negative-dialectical value dissociation.

            But what does Žižek do instead? He seamlessly amalgamates the various levels of the psychoanalytic-emotional, the cultural-symbolic, and the general philosophical thought of Hegel into the core point of a “lack in the subject.” Here, in my opinion, disparate things are equated. Respect for the specific content and the different objects of the levels are lost, different levels of abstraction in the lack in the subject are simply equated. They are not related to the fetishistic value dissociation form as a basic interrelation in their contradictoriness as (thought-)forms.

            As we have seen, Žižek fundamentally starts from the subject, from the lack in the subject, from the void, from nothing. From here he determines the outside, the overall capitalist context. His insistence on the split nature of the subject vis-à-vis the postmodernists ultimately leads him back to a hypostasis of the subject that is typical of classical philosophy, which holds the object in its own logic in low esteem.

3.2 Economy, Ideology and Fetish Socialization

In contrast to the postmodernists, Žižek supposedly wants to restore economics to its rightful place. Yet Marx’s economy seems strangely absent from his conception. The suspicion arises that it is primarily intended to serve the subject, precisely in the sense of a lack in the subject. If in postmodernism the big A in the subject is lost, that which actually constitutes it in the first place, since it is only in this way that it really comes to enjoy pleasure, as it were, then perhaps with his recourse to the critique of political economy he also wants to make it clear that he himself, as a kind of psychoanalyst of capitalism, is not so stupid as to fall for a deficient subject that deprives itself of real enjoyment by making itself the imperative as its own master, without there being an outside world. In this respect, then, there is an outside, an objectivity, which, however – and this, I think, must be taken into account – is always already that of the subject. For the world as such does not exist in Žižek’s work, as I said, which means that even a fetishistic world, even if it is first produced by the action of the hands, is at best only partially recognized, conceived in terms of the “proletariat.”

            Žižek sees the world through Lacanian, psychoanalytical glasses, and this is how he interprets Marx (and Hegel). The subject, meaning and desire are in the foreground for him. This can be seen when he determines value from the point of view of the subject, still as a “phantasm.” To see value as a relation and a mere subject-induced thought-thing is common in today’s (postmodern) Marxist left, to which substance is considered anathema. What Kurz writes about Michael Heinrich applies even more to Žižek with his psychoanalytic background. “The ‘real’ in abstraction […] no longer refers to any material substrate, but remains a mere thought-thing. This, however, is only conditionally true. […] It is, however, a matter of a specific thought-thing as a real abstraction in the sense of an action-completion that exists not only in exchange, but already in production: Here, too, the concrete-technical process of production is objectively (not subjectively-consciously) abstracted in the sense of the transcendental a priori, precisely in relation to the real abstract expenditure of human energy, which then reappears in exchange as the object of value; not individually, but socially-mediated by competition” (Kurz 2012, 194). In this context, Kurz speaks of the “abstract-material substance of the capital fetish” (ibid. 192ff.). In doing so, he also castigates a “methodological individualism” in various Marxian readings that take as their starting point the individual commodity or individual capital rather than the complexity of the capital fetish. “The concept of methodological individualism is understood here in a broader sense than is often the case in the social sciences and in economics in particular, namely not only logically-immediately related to the actions of individuals […] but to an ideal individual in general; that is, also in the institutional or categorical sense. In this respect, methodological individualism essentially consists in wanting to represent and explain an overarching logic that determines a whole on the basis of an isolated individual case, which then appears as a ‘model.’ This includes not only individual actions defined as ‘fundamental,’ but also structural so-called ‘embryonic forms’ or elementary parts as that ideal individuality. Of course, this procedure can be extended to ‘meta-models,’ in which the whole is again to appear ideal-typical; but precisely on the basis of a logic of the individual […] acts, structures or elementary parts” (ibid., 59f.). As far as the psychologization of social structures and their effects on the subjects are concerned, Adorno had already formulated in the 1950s: “Whoever, like Freud, thought of sociology as applied psychology would, in spite of all enlightening intentions, fall into ideology. For society is not shaped directly by human beings. Rather, the relations between them have become independent, confronting all individuals in an overpowering way and barely tolerating psychological impulses, which are seen as disturbances in the gears that are ultimately integrated” (Adorno 1998, 89). Although Žižek speaks of the commodity form and the like, he does not really take into account the independence of the fetish vis-à-vis the individuals in the sense of the value-dissociation form as defined above, as the mediated form in itself of subject-object, society-individual, action-structure and the like, which the actions of the subject have to confront as an objective coercive context; instead, a psychologization of value as a phantasm that creates reality takes place.

            Ideology, too, is broken down in Žižek’s methodological-individualistic, psychoanalytic way. Ideology in the sense discussed here, however, means “nothing other than affirmative reflection, that is, reflexive, content-related thinking in the form, with the form and for the form (positively presupposing and confirming it). […] The fetish form as a social form of reproduction constitutes an everyday life of valorization, in that one translates everyday purposes of reproduction and desires of all kinds quasi-‘automatically’ into the conditions of the fetish form and at the same time submits a priori to these conditions: One must ‘have work’ […] and thus ‘earn money’ in order to guarantee self-preservation. […] Right down to the pores of everyday life, perception, thinking, acting, and long since also desiring and even feeling are pre-structured by the fetish form, its conditions, categories, and criteria, even if people are by no means absorbed in it, but rather suffer from everyday frictions: and this is all the more true for the gender-constituted value dissociation relation it mediates” (Kurz 2003a, 263, emphasis in original). Kurz does include desires and feelings, ‘desire’ if you will, in his definition of ideology, but he does not make them the basic determinations of his definition of ideology as Žižek does. Here, too, it becomes clear that for Žižek, form means class relation; for Kurz it means the overarching fetish form common to all.

            If Žižek thinks that in the “ironization” of postmodernity an ideological “they know it, but they do it anyway” comes to the fore (cf. Soiland 2013, 148), it must be countered that ideology changes in the social process and that such an ironization and vilification of the reality of the crisis, which was still financially based on (private) credit until the concentrated crisis became apparent in the financial crash of 2008 at the latest, has long since reached its limits. Since then, postmodern individuals have lost their irony and laughter. For some time now, authoritarianism, a Carl Schmittian orientation, etc., have been booming again, even in leftist variants such as those represented by Žižek.

            In a different way, Chantal Mouffe and her left-wing populism also find themselves in these waters. In this context, Ingo Elbe speaks of a “postmodern Querfront” (2019), but all three (Žižek, Laclau; Mouffe and Elbe) are caught up in the fetish form of politics and democracy, without reflecting on the fact that it is in decline; I will briefly discuss this again below. Žižek has completely omitted himself here as an ideologically immanent possibility in a decaying capitalism. One can assume that this is because he himself carries out this decay in a postmodern ironic way and does not want to perceive a value-dissociation-induced whole. Žižek would have to be, so to speak, value-dissociation-critically turned here – and this is the real irony! – to be applied to himself.

            In order to make the fundamental dimension clear, I will rephrase the whole thing once again: Žižek displays “methodological individualism” not only with regard to his recourse to his psychoanalytical method, from which he then derives his understanding of ideology, but also with regard to the commodity form, the first 150 pages of Capital. For him, abstract labor, as the inner bond of capitalism in the sense of the exploitation of people in general, is not in itself the scandal. Neither is, in this context, surplus value as the progressive moment of the moving contradiction, i.e. the fact that the quantity of labor per product becomes smaller and smaller. He is concerned only with the exploitation of the worker. Here, as already mentioned, Žižek’s labor ontology becomes apparent. For Žižek, value is primarily a phantasm that then becomes real. In this respect, “production” also reappears, but then only as the exploitation of the working class combined with the assumption of an ontological principle of labor, whereby an “abstract-material substance” cannot disappear, but implicitly remains even in a post-capitalist society. Against this background, he then negates the capitalist system as a whole, as a framework in which the dichotomy of worker and capitalist is inherent and which must ultimately be overcome (cf. Heil 2010, 9). What is crucial, however, is the fetishistic fact that something is going on behind the backs of the actors, both the capitalists and the workers. The self-emancipated end in itself of the “automatic subject,” which ultimately comes up against an absolute barrier, therefore cannot simply be grasped subjectively and psychoanalytically. The consequence of this independence has been, since the mid-1980s, national debt and an inflation of the financial markets, which erupted in the crash of 2008, with so-called real production having long been mediated by the financial markets. This was linked to the development of productive forces (Third Industrial Revolution), which brought with it labor savings and overcapacities, so that capital sought investment opportunities in the financial sphere. This development affects not only individual capitals, but leads to the devaluation of value through the mechanism of competition between them. The creation of surplus value on the scale of society as a whole, of capital as a whole, has now become increasingly impossible. In this respect, a left-wing positivism that sings the eternal song of “capitalism goes to the end” has also disgraced itself (see in detail Kurz 2012).

            Such mechanisms and structures cannot simply be reduced to “practices,” such as those of capital owners, financial market actors, politicians, etc. To some extent, Žižek cites practices as a solution to the frequent objection he faces that he abruptly conflates psychoanalysis and social critique (Žižek 2002, 144). Thus, when Kurz reproaches critics of capitalism who, according to the first volume of Capital, make use of individual capital as a “categorical entity,” this also applies to Žižek. “From this point of view, the character of capital as a fetish object ultimately remains hidden. For at the level of individual capital, it still seems to be an event that can be grasped in terms of action theory, that is, to a certain extent, absorbed in subjective calculation, in which actors of interest directly confront one another. That which constitutes these actors themselves and which does not appear as a distinct object in their narrow-minded perception, namely the presupposed entity of the ‘overall process’ disappears in an immediate world of facts” (Kurz 2012, 177). Žižek also thinks that the three volumes of Capital should be read today, but this must be seen against the background of his erratic reading and, ultimately, his Lacanian fundamentalism. In doing so, all of this would have to be reformulated once again in a value-critical way, namely that the logic of capital itself is based on the dissociation of the feminine, of reproduction, which is not absorbed in the reproduction of capital, but is its precondition (see above). And thus, in order to do justice to a fractured understanding of totality, it would also be necessary to separate the cultural-symbolic and the psychoanalytic levels (in addition to the material) in the context of a contradictory logic of value-dissociation as a whole. In the following, the relation between social critique and (social) psychology will be discussed in more detail.

3.3 Psychoanalysis – Social Critique – Social Psychology – Today’s Narcissistic Social Character

Žižek levels psychoanalysis and social critique, the level of form, the level of the subject in the empty form of the phantasm, of nothingness in the “lack of the subject,” to which one must adapt (but at the end of which the revolution of the proletariat is supposed to stand). In doing so, he jumps from the subject to the social form and implicitly passes off his eclectic, wild approach as a consistent approach in the sense of a lack in the subject that has always existed, which a person, bearing in mind their imperfection, has to and should follow. The real consequence, however, is then an unsparing “psychoanalysis” of capitalism in the lack in the male subject, which, according to Žižek, should make order and adaptation possible again. From a theoretical distance, he is concerned with the “hegemonic ideological coordinates” (Žižek 2002), in contrast to a practical orientation often found among leftists. From my point of view, however, what emerges is a chaotic theoretical design that at the same time serves authoritarian longings.

            What Adorno writes about psychologism also applies to Žižek: “All varieties of psychologism that simply take the individual as their point of departure are ideological. They transform an individualistic form of socialization into an extra-social, natural attribute of the individual. […] As soon as processes which, because they take place between abstract subjects, are actually far removed from the realm of individual spontaneity, are explained in psychological terms, the comforting humanization of reification has begun.” (Adorno 1998, 56). In doing so, Adorno assumes that the relation between subject and object/society is mediated from the outset; he does not simply short-circuit it, as Žižek does, by still deriving ideology psychoanalytically from the “phantasm” of value. “They [the alienated, RS] and their motivations are not exhausted by objective rationality, and sometimes they act against it. Nevertheless, they remain its agents” (ibid.). In this sense, he writes further that: “The separation of psychology and sociology […] is not absolute, but neither is it insignificant and arbitrarily revocable. It expresses a perennially false condition, the divergence between the universal and its legality, on the one hand, and the individual in society, on the other” (Adorno 1998, 87). In Žižek’s case, the universal and the legality are combined externally, with the whole of capitalist society then being conceived, at its core, primarily as psychically imbued. A “methodological individualism” is also at work in Žižek, as I said, because he interprets capitalism as a whole psychoanalytically. When Žižek wants to remember Marx and Lenin, repeat them, and work through communism in order to make the unredeemed visible, he certainly means this in a psychoanalytical sense. He treats history and society as one subject (see also Žižek 2017, 7ff.). This should be opposed: “While the conflicts occur windowlessly, as it were, in the individual and can be derived nominalistically from their individual drive economy, they nevertheless have an identical form in countless individuals. For this reason, the concept of social psychology is not as far-fetched as the colloquial term and its common usage might suggest. The primacy of society is, retroactively, reinforced by those typical psychological processes, without any balance or harmony between individuals and society being manifested in them” (Adorno 1998, 87).

            Against this background, psychoanalytical reflections on the “socio-psychological matrix of the bourgeois subject in crisis” could also be made, as Leni Wissen has done against the background of the critique of value-dissociation, even if she does not explicitly refer to Adorno (Wissen 2017). Wissen assumes that today’s crisis reveals an absolute inner barrier of capital in connection with the third industrial revolution (in the meantime, there is even talk of Industry 4.0), which manifests itself in unemployment, precarious employment, the flight of capital into the speculative sphere, digitalization, new technologies, individualization tendencies, the erosion of the nuclear family, new poverty, the misery of refugees, rampages, and so on. At the same time, she notes a repression of the crisis, which shows itself not only in an addiction to harmony in public discourse, but also in aggressive neo-fascist machinations. In general, a cult of consternation, a false immediacy, and an easy sickliness are signs of our time that correspond to the dominance of a narcissistic social character. Thus, the dissolution of the bourgeois subject is accompanied by a massive tendency toward self-optimization of an “entrepreneurial self” (Ulrich Bröcklung), which ultimately leads to the overburdening of the subject and an increase in depression. “The excessive demands that accompanied behavioral norms based on guilt and discipline broke out in neurosis as an expression of an underlying conflict between desire and repression. Depression, on the other hand, is not characterized by a conflict, but is an expression of the narcissistic inability to make contact with the world of objects – psychoanalytically speaking, depression is an expression of an inability to occupy objects libidinously. However, an object can only be libidinously occupied if it can be perceived as an object outside the narcissistic universe” (ibid.). In this context, “the spread of the narcissistic social type is an expression of the disintegrating bourgeois-capitalist subject, which is incessantly digging its own grave. Narcissism has thus become the last resort for the decomposing subject of the value-dissociation society” (ibid.). On the whole, “a taming of psychoanalytic thought has taken place, which can be seen in the displacement of the concept of drive from the inner-psychoanalytic debate: Freud’s conflictual ‘I’ became, in the environment of a corresponding ego or self psychology, a contradiction-free ‘I’ that no longer knows any drive conflict. The ‘de-libidinization’ of psychoanalysis corresponds to the social developments of a general psychologization and individualization of social interrelations and a centering on a conflict-free imagined ‘self’ or ‘I’” (ibid.). The critique of a “revised psychoanalysis” that Adorno formulated as early as the 1940s and 1950s thus has certain parallels with Žižek’s critique of the subject invoked by Althusser (although he then transfers this critique to a critique of the new social movements, which see the multiplication of subjects as a panacea without taking into account a split in the subject). For Žižek, however, unlike Adorno, this goes hand in hand with an all-round psychologization of social relations, as we have seen.

Wissen assumes that the bourgeois subject with its corresponding “socio-psychological matrix” has developed in the context of the constitution of the capitalist patriarchy (i.e. the emergence of the factory system for the purpose of increasing money in absolutism in order to be able to finance wars, the internalization of the work ethic, witch hunts, the formation of a sphere of production and reproduction with a corresponding gender division of labor, etc.): “Corresponding to this is a drive dynamic in which, when drives surge, the libido skyrockets in joyful anticipation of the ‘reward for this failure.’ This ‘trick’ of the libido to deal with drive refusals also lays the track for drive sublimation processes. The necessity for drive sublimation arises with the enforcement of the capitalist mode of production and the expenditure of abstract labor demanded by it. Thus, it becomes clear that the capitalist social formation could not remain external to the drive structure. From this it can be concluded: Only with the capitalist patriarchy does a drive structure emerge in which ego, id, and superego interact as separate instances that conflict with each other and thus mediate the psychological dynamics” (ibid.).

            The formation of a masculine subject is inconceivable without a dissociation of the feminine. In contrast to Freud and other psychoanalytical approaches, masculinity and femininity are not ontological in Wissen’s view, but “markers” that lead to compulsory identities in a devaluation of femininity, which is grasped as the lack of a phallus (ibid.). This emptiness is then filled with the projections of the male subject. Femininity is not allowed to be anything in its own right. The socio-psychological matrix of the bourgeois subject is thereby characterized by the Oedipus complex, according to which the male child gives up his desire for the mother, since otherwise he is threatened with castration by the father. He then identifies with the father and his law. The female child associates lack with the mother and turns to the father, from whom she wants a boy to compensate for the envy of not having a penis. “Phallocentrism thus structures the ‘formless’ female psychological form” (ibid.). According to Wissen, Freud can certainly be criticized in this regard, but she argues for placing the fate of the female libido in the context of the value-dissociation form and not simply blaming Freud’s thinking for it.

            With the erosion of the institutions of the family and gainful employment in the course of general tendencies towards flexibilization, this socio-psychological matrix is also up in the air, and a narcissistic social character has formed. Although the bourgeois subject was never free of narcissism, in the postmodern subject under crisis conditions, narcissism “implodes.” A “high degree of ‘self’-reference is thereby probably common to men and women, albeit in different ways. […] The form of psychological processing does not simply dissolve, it still indicates the paths of socio-psychological development – but under postmodern auspices, this path can only lead to narcissism” (ibid.).

            Whereas in Freud “primary narcissism” in the psychosocial development of the child was something to be overcome, in postmodernity the narcissistic ego is dominant in the adult, which lacks the classical ego agency in the Freudian sense. This means, among other things, that there is an insistence on the immediate fulfillment of desire without the existence of mediating intermediate agencies. In this context, Wissen assumes that an authoritarian and a postmodern narcissistic character can overlap, since the two never exist in pure form and there can also be intergenerational fault lines. It is the postmodern capitalist reality that encourages, indeed demands, narcissistic character formations. This character must be understood as flexible in an extremely flexibilized and “accelerated” society (Hartmut Rosa). “This also means that the narcissistic type can pass from one extreme to the next completely abruptly. The ‘narcissistic ego’ and the corresponding mediation of drive processes are extremely ‘flexible’ and adaptable in their immediacy, which may be due not least to the lack of formation of the object libido. This in turn is an expression of an immediate (narcissistic) access to the ‘world of objects’” (ibid.).

            Wissen notes that there has indeed been a softening of traditional gender roles and an equalization of the gender-differentiated code as a result of changes in recent decades. She wonders how this relates to narcissistic social character. According to Wissen, it should not be assumed that the narcissistic social character exists independently of the socio-psychological binary matrix and its corresponding gender hierarchies. “The narcissistic social character is, after all, characterized by the fact that it can pass abruptly from one extreme to the other, since its object ties – to put it euphemistically – are quite loose. Even if the primary narcissistic stage does not know the difference between genders, it knows the ‘phallus’ very well. Both girls and boys in the primary narcissistic stage assume that they possess a ‘phallus.’ This means that phallocentrism has not been overcome even when there has been some equalization of binary codes. And under the domination of the ‘phallus,’ in the context of the value-dissociation society, even the binary codes cannot simply disappear” (ibid.). There is, in Wissen’s view, a feralization of codes when patriarchy goes wild, precisely when these codes collide in real terms with contemporary reality. To put it in a pamphlet-like way, the softie-man who attends cross-dressing parties can be lamenting the decline of masculinity the very next day and be on an anti-feminist trip. Queer and gender ideologies do their part to provide cover, so to speak, for a narcissistic social character. With their theoretical approach, they cannot explain why a crisis masculinity, which “finds expression in a brutalization of gender relations,” but also manifests itself in a male mentality of addiction and violence, as exemplified in rampages, is spreading today. “It is evident that sublimation possibilities and thus inhibition thresholds for the direct acting out of affects are breaking down. This is an expression of the narcissistic” (ibid.).

            Women today, as those responsible for both work and family, are not only exposed to male projections and violence; as crisis managers they also have to nurture a child that has long since fallen into the well of the objective fundamental crisis and can no longer be pulled out alive. This leads to exhaustion and depression, which is particularly common among women (although the proportion of men with depression is increasing). “Depression is a ‘female’ variant of narcissism,” according to Wissen, although research should also be done on female narcissistic behaviors, which tend to be indirect, such as “narcissistic passive aggressiveness” (ibid.).

            It can be summarized as follows: In contrast to Žižek, whose central ideas are based on Lacan, Wissen proceeds from a complex critique of value-dissociation. On the one hand, it is aware of the totalitarian character of the value-dissociation interrelation as a central structural principle; on the other hand, however, it takes into account different levels within and outside of it, by taking into account objective social, socio-psychological and cultural-symbolic levels in their separateness and their own logic, but also their simultaneous unity in a contradictory value dissociation form in its brokenness. At the same time, Wissen does not fall prey to any methodological individualism, be it of the simple commodity form, be it in the form of a psychoanalysis that it superimposes on social facts. For in its necessarily monadological character, its indispensable methodological individualism with regard to psychic constitution, a psychoanalytic social psychology can only claim validity in the context of the false whole in relation to a sociality that is separate from it in a negatively dialectical way. In doing so, Wissen makes use of “old” Freudian conceptualizations, which Žižek, with Lacan, significantly translates into structuralist ones, as is typical of postmodernism, even if Žižek otherwise distances himself from a left-wing invocation in the sense of Althusser. Freudian conceptualizations, on the other hand, are still “truer” today, since they are able to represent the bad state of society in a more unadulterated and unideological way, instead of transferring it to a (postmodern) conceptual toolkit and thus affirming it once again.

3.4 Summary: Žižek and the Critique of Value-Dissociation

Žižek thus confounds the cultural-symbolic and the (socio-)psychological levels and then attempts to “ground” Lacan by means of a supposed Marxian down-to-earthness, which he in turn psychologizes. In doing so, he derives society par excellence from a basic pattern of androcentric psychology, to which, against the background of an adventurous interpretation of Hegel in the sense of an eternal capitalism, an admittedly psychologized Marx is added externally. Democracy, social movements and “materiality” are also primarily the outflow of a socio-psychological (postmodern) social character, to which a Lacanianized Marx and a postmodern cult of proletarianism and masculinity are to be opposed as a way out of capitalism, in order to no longer need to know anything about an objective fetish-objectivity in the sense of value-dissociation as a fundamental interrelation. Ideology is thus psychologistically derived from the “phantasm” (which, however, is supposed to create reality!) and manifests itself in postmodern irony, diversity thinking, multiculturalism, and the like. Instead, ideology should be placed in a context of delusion, and also related to everyday life; to the fact that the fetishistic value-dissociation society and its decay today are not recognized and ignored with an “it’s always been like this” attitude. In this context, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and anti-Gypsyism, homophobia, etc. should also be structurally determined in their historicity until today, instead of assuming that they have basically been abolished by a postmodern thinking of difference and that the true main contradiction is the class antagonism, albeit in a modified form. This is ideology from a value-critical point of view.

            Thus, Žižek does not really deal with the fetishistic socialization that has become independent of the individuals, although they have created it themselves. Moreover, female reproductive activities are largely absent from his work and he disregards a dissociation of the feminine that goes across all levels and areas. In this context, the development of productive forces, the development of the financial market and an inner barrier of capitalism should also be considered.

            Žižek does not really want to know anything about the end of capitalism, or when he does mention this, his statements about it are contradictory. The bottom line is a post-postmodern cult of proletarianism and masculinity that works towards right-wing tendencies. At the same time, “the worker” can no longer be found in reality. Žižek takes refuge in the unemployed, who are now supposed to be today’s proletarians par excellence, instead of drawing the conclusion that the proletariat has simply become obsolete today and that exclusion and superfluousness are the central problems. In Žižek, a critique of the fetish system is limited on a sociological level to the category of the worker. In this context, a critique of Laclau/Mouffe should point out more than the fact that the “economy” is missing from their work. It should also include what Robert Kurz had already considered in 1994 in his article “The End of Politics”: “The crisis of the whole frame of reference is today obvious, and has become known to the public as the ‘crisis of politics.’ As that form of the totality of the commodity manifests itself as the dominant principle in the end of its ascendant stage and as the ‘economic subsystem’ consequently imposes its structural dominion over the ‘political subsystem,’ the political sky falls. Politics lives through its economic demystification as a distortion of all its parameters. Although explicitly rightist parties (or parties of the extreme right) still exist and new ones are even being formed, all parties (even those of the left) shift towards the right as a reaction to the crisis; and although neo-liberalism presents itself as a specific ideology and the liberals as a specific party, the position of economic liberalism and market radicalism is being insinuated to some extent into all parties and ideologies, on the left as well as the right. The decisive point is the increasing abandonment […] to autonomized economic criteria. This development, besides extinguishing the historical emphasis of politics, makes the existential crisis of the entire mode of socialization become visible.” (Kurz 1994, 98f.).

            Today, however, it would no longer be appropriate to speak of the “totality of the commodity form,” but rather, due to a metamorphosis of the critique of value, we should speak of the value-dissociation form. Žižek is right to criticize Laclau/Mouffe, but he does so not in a forward but in a backward way. This applies not only to the problem of form, but also to social inequalities beyond the “proletariat,” such as racism, sexism, etc. A lot of time has passed since 1994. Especially since the crash of 2008, backward-looking and right-wing tendencies (also on the left), movements and parties are once again proliferating. Žižek’s prominence corresponds to such authoritarian tendencies. Žižek would now have to show the critical distance he demands of others towards himself in order to realize that his alleged clowning around with Lenin and Stalin ultimately leads into authoritarian waters. Sexist, homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Gypsy discriminations should be determined in their structural conditionality and intrinsic quality in capitalist patriarchy; their thematization cannot simply be dismissed as a postmodern ideology open to criticism.

            Both the assumption of a hollow democratic diversity and a decisionist event-thinking, which corresponds to the thinking of Carl Schmitt, should be questioned in the sense of a critique of value-dissociation in order to reach new shores. Žižek is thus merely Querfront compatible in a different way than Laclau/Mouffe with their emptiness of content of the concept of democracy, with which populist homage is to be paid to diversity (cf. on the critique of Laclau/Mouffe: Flatschart 2010). It is the more or less “unconscious belief” in authorities that is supposed to tame capitalism, even though we no longer really believe in it or how it works. Tacitly, however, one still hopes for immanent coping strategies that could be authoritatively enforced if necessary – and this despite the fundamental fragility and decrepitude of the capitalist patriarchy. In today’s authoritarian-chaotic age, an authoritarian regime would lead all the more to barbarism and savage conditions (see Bedszent 2019, Scholz 2019).

4 Tove Soiland, Žižek, Irigaray and the Outlines of a Feminist Marxism?

4.1 Tove Soiland and Her Feminist Critique of the Post-Oedipal Subject

Tove Soiland criticizes – quite rightly – the postmodern flexi-identities that queer and gender feminism accommodates, but she does so in the context of a Lacanian Marxism that is, among other things, Žižekian. This is irritating insofar as Irigaray had long since criticized Lacan for his androcentrism, and Soiland wrote long doctoral thesis on this (Soiland 2008).

            Soiland assumes that today’s society is no longer shaped by “fixed” gender identities, as it was until the 1970s, but that flexible identities are also demanded of women. According to Soiland, a deconstructivist feminism à la Judith Butler ideologically legitimizes such tendencies by focusing on language and meaning, and from there seeks to undermine gendered fixations and the heterosexual matrix through subversion and ambiguity. Intersectional tendencies and a broad discourse on differences among women are also linked to this. According to Soiland, hierarchical gender relations can no longer really be thematized within this framework, because the thematization of the category of woman supposedly already evokes the order of gender dualism that is to be subverted. Soiland contrasts this poststructuralist type of theory, which is primarily at home in the U.S., with the Marxist-capitalist-critical view of the Ljubljana School, whose most prominent representative is Žižek (I cannot go into the remarks on Foucault, to whom Soiland also refers positively in this context, here). Žižek’s objection to Butler is that hybrid identities have long been a subjective component of the current demand for flexibility. A “gender stereotype […] can be a form of subjectification, but it is not the only form of subjectification. Other forms of subjectification can be, for example, a request: ‘Be plural’” (Soiland 2013, 6). With Žižek, Soiland continues to assume that even a post-Oedipal constellation can be or is affirmative and has nothing to do with the abolition of domination, but rather that “contingency […] is the very ideology of our time” (ibid., 7). In this context, she pits affect against grand categories. Soiland criticizes gender and queer theories for the “dethematization of gender” (ibid., 9) that follows from them and, connected to this, that of the reproductive sphere by suggesting that everything can be done via the market. This, she argues, is in contrast to the situation prior to the 1970s, which still knew the opposition between the private and the public sphere with the male family breadwinner and the housewife. Nevertheless, there are still gender hierarchies in a time when enjoyment has become a duty.

            According to Soiland, this has different consequences for women than for men. Here she again refers to Lacan. “Lacan was the first deconstructionist. He said that gender positions are not biological at all, but always fabricated […] [It] is ultimately a positioning of the social phantasm […]. While the Oedipal form forbade the maternal body, now in this discourse of the university [i.e., the discourse that amounts to an abstract self as master of itself, RS], the maternal body or the gift of the mother is imagined in this phantasm in such a way that this gift would be accessible to all who are guided by proper knowledge. Under the notion of accessibility, the whole care economy, the distribution of care in a market could also be critically illuminated. This phantasm of accessibility of a good distribution of this maternal gift for all involves women in a different ambivalence, in a different problematic than men, because they are identified with an ideal of which they are at the same time a part. You could say that the male position derives from the fact that they simply have this phantasm. The female position derives from the fact that she also has this phantasm, but at the same time she is part of this phantasm” (ibid., 12). 

            Oddly enough, Soiland does not mention Irigaray in this lecture. She somehow seems to be of secondary importance. In an interview, however, she returns to Irigaray. Irigaray, in contrast to Lacan, is concerned with “thinking [about] a different structure of desire in which the impossibility that is constitutive of the human is not a prohibition. Specifically: that it is not the father who must forbid the child access to the mother’s body, but that the woman herself can give the child a structure and thus a limit with which her subjectivity comes into play. This would make possible an entirely different desire, both for girls and boys. […] The real is for her (Irigaray) a back-projected phantasm of an all-encompassing fulfillment, ultimately of fusion with the mother’s body, and it is a problem of our culture that this body remains in the dark. For it is the enigma of the female body that gives rise to the real. Irigaray says: If the status of the woman and the mother were different in our culture, this idea of the real, of the promising fusion, would not arise at all. After all, it is the prohibition of incest that gives rise to the notion of incest in the first place. And this prohibition makes it impossible for the woman, and the mother, to appear as a subject at all” (Soiland 2015, 5f.).

            However, in many of Soiland’s more recent works, there is no explicit critique of Lacan and Žižek and their androcentrism; although she mentions the fact that the female subject position is missing, their theoretical foundations are hardly touched and their approaches are used to critique a post-patriarchal subjectivity, even if this is supposed to be different for women. However, Soiland herself notes that this question remains largely unanswered. In contrast to Wissen, Soiland lacks a recourse to the critique of value-dissociation and, in this context, to the significance of the socio-psychological matrix that produces an unstable subject in postmodernity under conditions of fundamental crisis. Ultimately, she remains trapped in the Lacanian and Žižekian frames of reference.

4.2 Tove Soiland’s Structuralist Critique of Value

Nevertheless, Soiland also resorts to a critique of value, albeit in a structuralist manner; and in doing so, also reads Irigaray with Marx. Like Žižek, who is based on Lacan, she does not hesitate to confound psychology and social theory (see also Scholz 2011, 220ff.). 

            The “exchange value,” according to Soiland (quoting Irigaray), “of two signs, two commodities, two women, is a representation of the needs-desires of the subjects of consumption and exchange, it is in no way ‘proper’ to them. In the borderline case, commodities – or their relations –are the material alibi for the desire for relations between men” (Irigaray cited in Soiland 2003, 163). In this regard, Soiland refers to Marx’s statement, “It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx quoted in Soiland 2003, 163) and comments on Irigaray: “The relation that gives commodity women their value form [is] by no means peculiar to them, but merely reflects the relation of the subjects who exchange them. In other words, in their value-objectivity, which is at the same time their only possible social existence, the relation of the men who exchange them has become incarnate: ‘ghostly figures’ – one must think of their existence as the objectification of the relation between men” (Soiland 2003, 163). Women thus represent natural-form and value-form, use-value and exchange-value in equal measure (ibid., 162). For Soiland, gender – in accordance with the structuralist-psychoanalytic tradition – thus signifies a subject and “position of desire, to which the woman, with her body, has only to contribute the ‘material substratum’ without, however, being herself displaced into it” (ibid., 166). She further writes: “To trade, men used them [women RS], but barter with them they did not” (Irigaray cited in Soiland, ibid., 164, emphasis mine). In Irigaray/Soiland, there is thus also an ontologization of the subject, of exchange, and of the sphere of circulation.

            This leads to the problem that women, from the perspective of the Soilandian/Irigarayan analysis, are basically supposed to attain subject status as Others within the value-form, whereby they assume a simple commodity-form in a subcomplex manner, i.e. they remain limited to a theory of circulation. Abstract labor, the moving contradiction, surplus value and the like, dissociation that corresponds dialectically with value and yet is something different in a dynamic capitalist-patriarchal logic that leads to the present crisis and must be broken through, are anathema in Soiland. I cannot elaborate on this here, but have developed this elsewhere (Scholz 2011, 221ff.). Here, in Soiland, as already in Žižek and Irigaray, methodological individualism becomes apparent on two levels. First, in relation to simple commodity production, and second, in that this is psychically imbued. Also, as shown, the material, the socio-psychological and the symbolic-cultural levels are merged here in an identity-logical way; this is a way of thinking that does not correspond to value-dissociation as a foundational interrelation anyway and should be criticized. The critique of Butler and queer and gender feminism should be nourished by this critique of value-dissociation as an all-encompassing interrelation and not by referring to thoroughly androcentric theorists such as Lacan and Žižek in their backwardness. In the essay “Reading Irigaray with Marx” discussed here, Soiland does not criticize Lacan, Foucault and Althusser as androcentric thinkers; rather, she wants to suggest them to feminism as central theorists of reference in the interpretation she commands, even in her recourse to Irigaray.

4.3 Tove Soiland and Her Outlines of a Marxist Feminism: Luxemburg and Bennholdt-Thomsen From the Perspective of a Capitalism/Capitalist Patriarchy That Can Be Eternally Regulated

Soiland attempts to “outline a Marxist feminism for the 21st century” (Soiland 2018), although it is surprising that Irigaray, who, as we have seen, criticizes Lacan (and who, in turn, must be criticized from a value-dissociation-critical perspective), is once again strangely absent here.

            From the care perspective, Soiland derives what I consider to be a rather simplistic understanding of capitalism/the capitalist patriarchy. Various theories are eclectically assembled, but ultimately a regulation-theoretical perspective and land grabbing theories determine her train of thought. As shown, Žižek, in his whimsical interpretation of Hegel, also wants to suggest that capitalism can continue to develop infinitely. Although Soiland does not explicitly refer to this in her reflections on care, these reflections boil down to such a perspective, albeit in a different way. As a feminist theorist, Soiland refers to Marx because he takes into account material conditions; in bourgeois ideas of freedom, these frameworks are missing, the individual is thought of as abstract.  

            However, Marx – according to Soiland – neglected reproduction in the private sphere, as well as in public institutions such as hospitals, day-care centers, nursing homes, etc., which is primarily performed by women.

            In Fordism, productivity was increased through technical changes and the rationalization of work processes. Profits increased. Consumer goods became cheaper, so companies could now pay good wages, which meant that demand for these goods increased. In the mid-1970s, this production model went into crisis, production growth declined, and capital sought new investment strategies. Neoliberal crisis strategies were designed to stop this trend (lowering wages, weakening trade union power, etc.). The man as family breadwinner of the family became obsolete; the second women’s movement – supposedly in protest against existing gender relations – demanded women’s access to the labor market in accordance with the new socio-economic conditions.

            Reproductive activities were then increasingly professionalized. However, there is little profit to be made from professional social services. The inherent logic of reproductive activities, which cannot be organized according to efficiency criteria like the production of commodities because they contain essentially intersubjective moments, is opposed to this. “The economization of activities that offer few possibilities for increasing productivity aggravates macroeconomically the problem of declining productivity rates, which was at the origin of the Fordist crisis,” says Soiland, referring to Silke Chorus (ibid., 6). According to Soiland, however, the Fordist crisis could be countered by an expansion of the service sector, with social services characterized by low wages and exploitative conditions. Most (women) today lack not only the time to care for those in need of care in their private lives, but also lack the money to pay for such services out of their own pockets. According to Soiland, the decisive contradiction today is not the relation between capital and labor, but the relation between high and low value-added sectors and activities. Soiland borrows from land grabbing theorist Silvia Federici. “Federici therefore speaks of the fact that, globally speaking, we are currently dealing with a ‘restructuring of the reproduction of the commodity labor power,’ and refers to this restructuring as a form of primitive accumulation. By this she means that the way in which people reproduce themselves is undergoing a profound change, which, largely forced by external conditions, ultimately massively deprives households of the resources of time and money that they need for their own reproduction. With this thesis, Federici makes an important contribution to the current discussion of a so-called ‘new land grabs.’ But while this discussion, following Harvey, focuses on the spectacular forms of expropriation of the commons, such as the privatization of water, air, or public infrastructure, expropriation in the private sphere is usually tacit and often barely perceptible even to those affected by it” (ibid., 8f.). Expropriation in the sphere of reproduction thus takes place both in private care activities and in the personal service sector.

            She summarizes provisionally: “Marx assumed that the advancing capitalism would increasingly integrate everyone on the globe into wage labor. This statement is both true and false. It is true in that Marx apparently foresaw the global increase in the speed [ausgreifen] of wage labor at the same time that he foresaw an expansion of wage labor. It is false because an expansion of unpaid labor obviously also accompanied this expansion of wage labor, or in other words, the wage relation is not exclusively that in which the existence of wage earners is grounded. It is neither possible nor in the interest of the capitalist mode of production to convert all social labor into wage labor” (ibid., 9f.).

            Soiland then refers to Bennholdt-Thomsen to make a corresponding critique of Marx. Bennholdt-Thomsen assumes with Rosa Luxemburg that capital can only accumulate through non-capitalist forms and that it is utterly dependent on them. The so-called Bielefeld women, to whom Bennholdt Thomsen also belongs, now transfer this assumption to the sphere of reproduction of the capitalist North. Subsistence labor is thereby, as it were, a kind of foundation of capitalism on which wage labor is based. Bennholdt-Thomsen assumes that in advanced capitalism there is a “marginal mass” that does not reproduce itself exclusively through wage labor. According to Bennholdt-Thomsen, this “marginal mass” has become the norm. She is not referring to the Marxian reserve army; rather, “from the perspective of capital, it reproduces itself free of charge […] [but is] nevertheless at its disposal according to need […], thus assuming a function that is highly important for the overall maintenance of the capitalist system.” Since subsistence production itself belongs to capitalism, Bennholdt-Thomsen also speaks of “marginal subsumption.” “In the case of reproduction, then, it is not only that capitalism produces its own outside. It also has a vested interest in maintaining this outside” (ibid., 11). This also applies to people who live precarious existences today, who at the same time live from subsistence production and therefore have to do “extra work” outside of wage labor. “Therefore, what Bennholdt-Thomsen calls ‘marginal subsumption’ is not about the question of a change in the form of unpaid and paid work, but precisely about the preservation of unpaid work that is necessary for the post-Fordist accumulation regime, or even more precisely, about the interrelation of paid and unpaid care work that is constitutive of post-Fordist relations, both of which together subsidize ‘normal’ wage labor” (ibid., 11, emphasis in original). Soiland sums up: “A classical theory of surplus value and the classical habitus of the labor movement will not get you anywhere here […], since we are dealing with completely different forms of labor” (ibid., 12). Thus, Soiland does not share Marx’s faith in progress and his optimism regarding the development of productive forces as a precondition for emancipation. Instead, she believes that what is needed are feminist economic theories that can make a significant contribution to the discussion of the “persistence of capitalism” (ibid., 3). In this context, according to Soiland, it is only today that reproductive activity can become a major issue, because it has become scarce due to women’s occupation in the course of advanced capitalist socialization.

            How does the socialization of care relate to the subjective dimension of care? Soiland writes here, again following Lacan: “Seen from this perspective […] one must ask whether this modernization does not ultimately seek to control and thus ultimately replace the non-thought gift of the mother, which is constitutive of our culture, with a now admittedly fully enlightened and modernized variant of a bureaucratic-economic managerism” (Soiland 2015a: 126).

            Soiland does not want to advocate for a subsistence perspective and a politics of small networks like Federici and Bennholdt-Thomsen. Rather, she sees the contradiction between wage labor and care work as a kind of new primary contradiction. Basically, she is concerned with a massive revaluation of care work, a pushing back of the profit motive and corresponding spheres and areas in a reformist way. In this context, in contrast to the critique of value-dissociation, it is not the abolition of the gendered division of labor that is important to her; for her, women (and men?) do not have to change that much, but it is rather a matter of recognizing the real significance of the female side in capitalism and taking it into account theoretically and practically. “The idea that we women have to abolish ourselves in order to liberate ourselves I find absurd. Marx also did not say to the workers: abolish yourselves, then capitalism will disappear” (Soiland quoted by Bettina Dyttrich, in: WOZ of 2/2/2012).

            And here Irigaray comes into play again, as Soiland makes clear in a text that deals with the “overthrow of the Oedipal.” She writes that there is a “third position” to be taken up: “It is a matter of putting an end to the mother’s subjectlessness, which still exists, culturally speaking, by finding a cultural representation for what she gives […] so that the loss that is constitutive for the subject when it enters the social, the moment of triangulation, is shaped in such a way that it does not posit the mother’s body from the outset as that against which it would need a barrier, a barrier that then stands precisely in the aporia of preventing that which it itself continually produces anew” (Soiland 2018a, 113). 

4.4 Differences Between Tove Soiland and the Critique of Value-Dissociation

It is worth pointing out again that Soiland was the one who massively challenged queer and gender theory in the 2000s, alongside the critique of value-dissociation, but unfortunately she did so against a background of Lacanian-Marxist assumptions. In doing so, she also assumes a “persistence of capitalism” and thus denies a moving contradiction, in which the value share of abstract labor per product becomes smaller and smaller as production output increases, thus revealing a “contradiction of matter and form” (see Ortlieb 2013), leading to the obsolescence of abstract labor. Underlying this is value-dissociation as a fundamental contradiction that still grounds the moving contradiction as such, which is why value-dissociation must be assumed to be a qualitatively new moving contradiction that underlies the fundamental crisis of capitalist patriarchy. Soiland, on the other hand, uses an inflationary concept of labor to justify a persistence that she takes from Bielefeld/Bennholdt-Thomsen and Federici. According to this, reproductive activities and subsistence activities are also labelled as “labor” without further ado. The result of this is supposed to be that labor expands more and more instead of becoming obsolete. This “succeeds” in that such activities are assumed to be the very basis of capitalism, through which it can accumulate in the first place.

            Soiland is right when she attacks the belief in technical progress and insists on the importance of an intrinsic logic of the care and reproduction sector for the overall reproduction of capitalism, but in the fundamental crisis not only value and abstract labor, but also the dissociated sectors enter into the crisis, as evidenced by the increasing professionalization of social services that do not generate any surplus value and whose precarious financing has to be managed by the state, whereby this financing is itself increasingly reaching its limits (see also Scholz 2013). In my opinion, it is out of the question that capitalism could perpetuate itself; on the contrary, it is clear that the crisis is becoming visible in many respects, so that some are now actually considering an “end of capitalism” (see Scholz 2017). Soiland does not mention this possibility and a “feralization of the patriarchy” today at all, but explains the formation of a “marginal mass” and a “marginal subsumption” in the context of an indestructible capitalism, whereby new class relations would emerge, which, according to Bennholdt-Thomsen, would become stabilizers of capitalism (which are only vaguely determined and not further considered by Soiland). At the same time, Soiland does not take into account the financialization of capitalism, neither in terms of the speculative superstructure, nor in terms of private consumption, nor in terms of the indebtedness of public finances. She also completely ignores things like the doctrine of shareholder primacy, which not least triggered the crash of 2008, among other things. This financialization has also caused professional social services to swell since the 1970s. Such tendencies, however, make it seem likely that major crashes will follow in the near future.

            For Soiland, the tension between areas of high value creation and areas of low value creation (above all the care sector) is decisive; she does not see that it is precisely the areas of high value creation that are falling into a crisis in the course of the “devaluation of value.” Basically, Soiland assumes a new primary contradiction, where the only thing missing is that women are now supposed to be the revolutionary subject; this, however, in a regulation-theoretical context within the framework of the everlasting possibilities for land grabbing in the context of an eternal capitalism. Moreover, both the Bielefelders and Federici start from what I consider to be a problematic identification of women, nature, and colonies, an assumption that turns the concept of land appropriation into a container concept, and which Soiland does not criticize, but simply interprets in her own way for women in the sense of care work and the precariously employed in general. Soiland also fails to recognize that the critique of ‘land grabbing’ as a phenomenon is entirely justified, but as a theorem it is problematic because it is limited by the moving contradiction in the sense of value-dissociation as a foundational interrelation (in terms of the care dimension, after all, this is shown precisely by the fact that the content resists efficient completion). I cannot go into this further here (on this, see, among others, Scholz 2016).

            One thus gets the impression that Soiland is more concerned with the recognition of female subjectivity and of care activities than with overcoming capitalism. This is also evident in her reading of Irigaray with Marx, when she demands that women should also be recognized as exchange subjects in their own subjectivity, albeit in a different way than men, while remaining in the simple commodity form and, moreover, then psychologizing the simple commodity form. In doing so, Soiland also ignores, on the whole, Irigaray’s critique of Lacan’s androcentrism when it comes to defining modern subjectivity. Lacan, Žižek, Irigaray (and Foucault) are cited equally as instances of theory and critique. In many respects, Soiland’s critique of queer and gender theory on this basis is quite astute, but she misses precisely the grand theoretical framework of value-dissociation entirely. For – ceterum censeo – the alleged foundations of capitalism, to which Soiland ascribes in particular the care and reproductive activities, are in fact dialectically mediated with it and not its “true” background. The feminine as dissociation is deeply intertwined with the development of productive forces; but this does not play a major role in Soiland’s work. In this context, it is also not apparent why Soiland wants to see the postmodern turn only in queer and gender theories and practices, and not already with the Bielefeld women, Bennholdt-Thomsen and Co. or Federici, who already insisted on particularities, small networks, subsistence production, etc., in other words, in a completely infantile manner, insisted and continue to insist on an unmediated here and now position in the mode of concern, including plurality. The lack of insight into a lack in the (female?) subject is supposed to be peculiar to queer and gender ideologies, as if corresponding attitudes were not already to be found in the quasi-materialist attitudes of the second women’s movement and the new social movements in general. Enjoyment must be immediate, subito, even in the form of renunciation, for example by not buying consumer goods, which then turns into an over-affirmative attitude of consumption and into a superficial queer and gender ideology. Ultimately, however, Soiland returns, albeit implicitly, to a simplistic ideology of care and a belief in the mother in terms of Lacanian Marxism (in a marginal reference to Irigaray) as the ontologized primordial ground of capitalism. Instead, value-dissociation as a fundamental dialectical interrelation would have to be radically questioned as a whole, not least in relation to the gendered distribution of activity. This would also mean that both women and men, fathers and mothers, can give and refuse at the same time. It would also mean that neither (feminine-connoted) assistance nor (masculine-fatherly-connoted) renunciation would be taken for granted, but rather that, in the sense of a new critical feminism of value-dissociation, enjoyment and renunciation would be made practically dependent on the concrete content and the concrete situation, instead of imputing a primitive attitude of assistance, which must always then be put to an end, to the infant. Such a view is itself a view of patriarchal capitalism; the infant certainly does not know it. It cannot thus be a matter of an ontologization of renunciation. What is crucial here, in the sense of the critique of value-dissociation, is that different stages of capitalism follow one another, and that after an anti-authoritarian-neoliberal phase in which the ego wields the whip, authoritarian longings are reappearing today. Leni Wissen writes – this should be repeated here: “The bourgeois subject and its socio-psychological matrix are centrally based on the dissociation of the feminine, the phantasm of the mastery of nature, and the imagination of self-constitution. They are also essentially linked to the internalization of the work ethic. Corresponding to this is a drive dynamic in which, when drives surge, the libido skyrockets in joyful anticipation of the ‘reward for this failure.’ This ‘trick’ of the libido to deal with drive refusals also lays the track for drive sublimation processes. The necessity for drive sublimation arises with the enforcement of the capitalist mode of production and the expenditure of abstract labor demanded by it. Thus, it becomes clear that the capitalist social formation could not remain external to the drive structure. From this it can be concluded: Only with the capitalist patriarchy does a drive structure emerge in which ego, id, and superego interact as separate instances that conflict with each other and thus mediate the psychological dynamics. This form of psychological mediation has thus only emerged in the wake of the historical assertion of capitalism. Freud, of course, did not write it this way; this is part of the interpretation of Freud made here, which is based on reading Freud in the context of the historical situation in which he developed his theory” (Wissen 2017). And so, the notion of woman as a “domesticated natural being” also emerges.

            Žižek does not perceive all this, but rather, in the context of a false postmodernist consumer hedonism (which should indeed be criticized), he criticizes in a backward-looking way the fact that today it is not the worker who has become obsolete, but the capitalist, and that it is the workers who seek to transcend the given contemporary society. Care is also not only necessary and pleasurable, but in Soiland, butt-wiping is still supposed to be an essential component of emancipation, without any questioning of its historicity in capitalism (as a necessary antithesis to production) or a critique of the necessity of unpleasant shit-cleaning as a feminine affair. Instead, just as abstract labor must be questioned, women must be liberated from the yoke of care activities. Žižek and Soiland thus actually propagate a (neo-)Protestantism, while, as far as the social-objective foundation of such assiduity is concerned, both gainful employment/production and reproduction have long since been in decline in their reference to one another, so that, for example, old people in need of care are actually increasingly left lying in their own shit.

5. Žižek, Soiland and the Critique of Value-Dissociation

            Žižek and Soiland both adhere to a Lacanian Marxism. Although there are other Lacanian Marxists, such as Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupančič, and Jacques-Alain Miller, Žižek is the most prominent and probably the most cited Lacanian Marxist, and Tove Soiland, who is now also widely cited in feminist discourse, follows in his footsteps. However, Žižek is a thoroughly androcentric Lacanian representative, a fact that Soiland does not problematize. On the other hand, she refers to Irigaray, who, in contrast to Lacan, is concerned with the problem of becoming a female subject and the logics involved. She deals with this in a thick book on Irigaray (Soiland 2010). With Lacan/Žižek, Soiland critiques the dominant narcissistic subject in postmodernism/postmodern feminism, which is, however, in principle a masculine subject, precisely because it is dissociated. As Soiland herself says, women’s “identity” is so far a desideratum. Nevertheless, she treats the “new social movements” as gender-neutral in this sense, in line with the Lacanian/Žižekian model, and critiques them accordingly. (Value) dissociation as a form of formlessness is thus not recognized.

            The path between Žižek and Soiland forks when it comes to defining a Lacanian Marxism; here Soiland prefers to read Irigaray with Marx, while Žižek prefers to remember and work through not only Marx, but also Lenin and Stalin, in order to determine the unaccounted for in the present. In her reflections on a feminist Marxism, Soiland then arrives at regulation-theoretical and land grabbing concepts that, with the inclusion of women’s reproductive activities, boil down to the fact that (non-remunerated or poorly remunerated) reproductive and subsistence labor is becoming more and more widespread, thereby to a certain extent also sponsoring wage labor and thus ensuring capitalism’s “persistence.”

            Since Soiland is primarily concerned with the recognition of care work, she affirms existing modes of subjectivity and existence in a different way than Judith Butler in the decay of capitalism. To the extent that flexible identities are relentlessly demanded, this can also mean on the “female side” that women increasingly have to join forces with other women (relatives, neighbors, friends) in order to be able to manage their reproduction and existence, including that of their children, when the male breadwinner individual fails and can no longer be relied upon. Today, women often have to be mothers and fathers at the same time. In addition, women today have the role of crisis managers, more and more often at the levers of power. This necessity could now be ideologically legitimized by an “affidamento” approach based on Irigaray’s theory, which aims to show “how female freedom is created” (Libreria delle donne di Milano 2001). Here, the differences and hierarchies between women are taken into account and further ennobled from the point of view of ideological emancipation. Eva Illouz, in an interview, when asked how young people/women deal with the new insecurity in relationships, says: “One tendency I observe is that young women are entering into relationships with other women. I don’t know the statistics, but I bet the numbers have increased rapidly. And maybe older women should learn from young ones and not enter the (love) market in the first place, where they have so little chance. […] Many of us are more flexible in this regard than we think. Young people want to be this way today and that way tomorrow, multisexual people” (Eva Illouz, in: Stuttgarter Zeitung, 2/7/2019). The overall trend is that women are increasingly joining forces with other women because of socially induced (relationship) conflicts. It is therefore highly problematic to try to sell coercion as freedom, as seems to be the case with the “Milanese women.” If, as in Irigaray and Soiland, the failing mother, the woman, who is supposed to be mother and father at the same time, is supposed to be the alleged agent, this, in my opinion, is an ideological adaptation of capitalist-patriarchal crisis management. It can be assumed that this is also the reason why Antje Schrupp has increasingly found an audience in the media in recent years, to whom a fundamental crisis is obviously alien and who invokes women’s solidarity in the sense of the Milanese women. In this sense, she now proclaims an “end of patriarchy,” as Libreria delle donne di Milano did in the mid-1990s (Libreria delle donne di Milano 1996; Antje Schrupp 2019).

            If women came to power, it would be up to them what they would do with it for the emancipation of all humanity. It seems to me that a virtue is made of necessity. The fact that something independent, the value-dissociation socialization, exists apart from us is completely ignored, and it is completely remote from such views that a new women’s power could be a ruse of the capitalist patriarchy in decay.

            Soiland does not refer to the “Milanese women”’ who were instrumental in developing the affidamento approach. Nevertheless, the consequence of an abstract community of women based on difference is drawn from her analysis of Irigaray, e.g. by Letsch & Merkle (2018). This consequence, however, could work to the advantage of conservative and affirmative orientations when it comes to the practical management of capitalism in decay and its relative stabilization for the time being. The idea of a separate femininity, even if it sees itself as undefined for the time being, and corresponding images of women with a hypostasis of reproductive activities as a utopia could thus also unintentionally work for right-wing tendencies and be appropriated by them. The theory of value-dissociation, on the other hand, assumes that wage labor and reproductive activities have developed historically and are logically of the same origin. Female and male individuals were thus gender-coercively fixed until they became more flexible in postmodernity, though no individual is ever wholly absorbed into masculine and feminine coercive ascriptions. However, the internalized cultural patterns shift in historical development in the context of the disintegration of value-dissociation socialization, also with regard to the psychological dimension, as Leni Wissen has shown, without the gender hierarchy and its identitary determinations simply disappearing. In some feminist analyses today, however, one can almost get the impression that we are living in the 1960s, which may also have something to do with the fact the psychological and bodily dimensions have been completely negated in the deconstruction hype of recent decades. Now a problematic difference feminism is also rearing its head again. Not to be misunderstood: Solidarization among women is absolutely necessary today, but it would have to be directed against the new impositions of beingcrisis administrators, “self-employed” (Irmgard Schultz), and single mothers, instead of still accepting them in self-organization and thus in effect affirming the bad conditions in the decaying capitalist patriarchy. Today’s female individuals have to be so flexible that they can/must also profess to be women again. However, we also know that left-wing and feminist protest movements have also been useful for dealing with the contradictions of capitalist patriarchy (for example, by demanding that women work since the 1970s, which the market itself demanded). This “old” insight must be made fruitful and not naively thrown to the wind in the honeymoon euphoria of new feminist movements (as, unfortunately, Koschka Linkerhand, who in many respects argues in a value-dissociation-critical manner, does – see, for example, Linkerhand 2018).

            With his variant of Lacanian Marxism, Žižek now self-consciously affirms a new insanity of manhood and work. As shown, a protest against the work ethic has the same classification for him as the suppression of sexuality. A lack in the subject, which in postmodernity can only be satisfied by the consumption of commodities, obviously calls for Žižek’s calloused fist at the blast furnace, so that it can once again advance to a real enjoyment. Or is the work at the blast furnace perhaps itself already the real enjoyment, as opposed to a visit to the gym? The worker as already thoroughly disciplined in capitalist patriarchy is completely left out in all his dirt and “dirty industriousness” (Robert Kurz), which is suddenly ontologically attributed, by way of Lacan, to desire! Žižek and Soiland – to put it polemically – thus represent, at the end of postmodernity, the wonderful combination of authoritarian male domination and the need for female care as the basic necessities of capitalist postmodernity, despite all its distortions. Both fail to see that it is the logic of value-dissociation in its brokenness and real-historical dynamism that constitutes it in the first place.

            In this, Žižek himself is a pivotal figure from postmodernity to post-postmodernity in the era of the disintegration of capitalist patriarchy. As mentioned above, he himself uses postmodern means of textual analysis, irony, etc. to rail against postmodernism.

            But that’s not all. Once highly respected by former postmodernists, today he mutates into a seemingly only ironic and clownish post-postmodern Lenin and Stalin, from whom he does not simply want to save the unfulfilled parts of their project in order to revisit them today, but actually, in my opinion – just as it seems – wants to establish a Lenin and Stalin again today. In this, he is fully in line with the right-wing, authoritarian zeitgeist, which wants to give the supposedly “soft” postmodernism a run for its money. In some respects, Žižek’s appearance is reminiscent of Trump, Johnson and Bolsonaro, a part which Berlusconi is a classic example of (cf. Ferraris 2014), but in a leftist-intellectual way. Leni Wissen draws attention to the fact – and here the above needs to be repeated – that neither the authoritarian character nor the narcissistic character exists in “pure form,” but rather that the path taken depends on social and historical changes. This affects not only younger people, but also older ones (cf. Wissen 2017). Wissen further writes that: “The crisis surges since the late 2000s have shattered the illusion of a never-ending party, and the reality of the crisis is breaking out ever more drastically. This constellation encounters a narcissistic social character whose fragile ego makes him highly susceptible to being offended or threatened. The ability to immediately move from one position to another – especially when one sees themselves threatened – is inherent in the narcissistic social character. With this, however, the narcissistic social type, who is losing more and more opportunities to keep its fragile self alive, is very susceptible to banishing its narcissistic fears of powerlessness into ‘new’ unambiguities. This is precisely the gateway for anti-Semitism, anti-Gypsyism, racism, anti-feminism, neo-fascism, etc… Not least for this reason, a critique of the narcissistic social character against the background of a radical critique of the subject is necessary” (ibid.).

            And so it is not surprising that Žižek in his book with the significant title “The Fragile Absolute” refers to Badiou’s “groundbreaking […] book on St. Paul” (Žižek 2000, 2). Thus, for Žižek, and this cannot be elaborated here, what Herbert Böttcher wrote about Badiou in an announcement of his text “Hilft in der Krise nur noch beten” in the editorial of exit! 16, also applies, namely that the reference to Paul “leads to a circumstantial instrumentalization of Paul for one’s own thinking. The philosophical turn to a religious figure goes hand in hand with a postmodern religious enthusiasm that bears decisionist-authoritarian and anti-reflexive features. It is akin to an existentialist philosophical and theological thinking that seeks certainty about existential experiences and the venture of decision” (Meyer 2019, see also Böttcher 2019 and Scholz 2006). The act and the event have a central meaning for Žižek (see above). Ideology in the conventional sense is itself obsolete for Žižek. However, in the negation of itself, in the sense of the critique of value-dissociation, it must itself be negated again, both beyond conventional Marxist notions of ideology and those of Butler or Irigaray. In this way, Žižek is in a certain sense the purest ideologue of postmodernism in its transformation into the authoritarian.

            So Žižek and Mouffe are actually complementary. According to Žižek, philo-multiculturalism can easily turn back into racism, but it seems to me that there is a rationalization at work here in Žižek: For he does not really take racism (along with sexism and homophobia) seriously, but claims that such individuals and groups have long been integrated into capitalism and that the thematization of their exclusion is primarily ideology (see above). I am not saying that the critique of the discourse of multiculturalism is simply wrong, but it would be important not to use this insight in an authoritarian way, but to use it in an emancipatory way in a recognition, but also, if necessary, in a critique of the “others.”

            In the phantasm dimension, Žižek and Soiland either ignore financial capitalism (Soiland) or bend it back onto its calloused fist (Žižek) in a corresponding interpretation of Marx, even though the “proletariat,” to the extent that it can still be called that, is highly diverse today and the lower strata are formed primarily by women and migrants. In the case of Žižek, the precarious unemployed must necessarily be passed off as the new proletariat. In my opinion, this is today’s obfuscation/delusion par excellence, when being superfluous is currently the determining factor. An independent sphere of the financial market is passed off as a psycho-ideological matter that is basically supposed to exist in a secondary reality, “perfectly healthy” ahead of a steeled male body in production. An independent real-abstract level is willfully ignored, and it has to be bent back to the concrete again and again, instead of thematizing this dichotomy between abstract and concrete in the sense of the critique of value-dissociation in order to overcome it. The main thing is labor! In doing so, Soiland also inflates the concept of labor by extending it to all kinds of subsistence, care, etc. activities. In contrast to Žižek, she tries to consider reproduction and care activities as fundamental to the reproduction of the social whole. However, new subsistence activities, the shadow economy, etc. – not only in the so-called Third World (corresponding tendencies have long since advanced into the Western nations) – are an expression of the fundamental crisis of capitalist patriarchy and not of its “persistence.”

            Instead, it should be recognized that politics as a form of reproduction and democracy as a corresponding form of organization have also entered into a fundamental crisis in the course of the obsolescence of abstract labor and female reproductive activities in the context of a moving contradiction that must be reformulated in a value-critical way.

            Against the questionable background of a workers’ movement Marxism, Žižek questions the social framework, capitalist sociality as a whole: “Žižek is not concerned with a ‘no to something,’ but with a ‘no to everything.’ […] Within the framework of a classless society it is not even possible to contrast workers and bourgeois” (Heil 2010, 9). Soiland, on the other hand, is basically concerned with a reform and regulation perspective, which she reaches via the detour of regulation theory combined with land-grabbing theories (on the critique of regulation theory, see Kurz 2005 423ff.).

            In Soiland’s work, too, as we have seen, different levels get mixed up. Not only Irigaray, but also Žižek, Lacan and Marx remain completely unmediated among themselves. Irigaray is equated with the others helter-skelter. Finally, the sphere of feminist economics is added to this. Unlike Irigaray, I would have been in a murderous rage if I, as a student of Lacan, had stood up to Marx for so long, and now he and Žižek are being courted equally by an Irigaray expert! The fact that Rosa Luxemburg, together with Henryk Grossmann, was the collapse theorist in the first place, is likewise studiously overlooked in Soiland’s reflections, when she assumes a primitive accumulation (meaning, presumably, original accumulation) until Ultimo. Luxembourg is simply incorporated in a reformist manner.

            Even Žižek simply confounds different levels. This is what Richard Heil writes at the end of his introduction to Žižek’s thought: “What is problematic about Žižek’s thinking is […] a certain lack of clarity. It is often not clear on what level his critique operates. At times he distinguishes between authentic actions and inauthentic actions within the existing social order, at other times he rejects any action within the system as stabilizing in principle, insofar as it does not call the basic capitalist order into question. Thus, Žižek […] is positively disposed towards parts of the feminist movement, although feminism in particular is often concerned with equal rights for women within the existing system” (Heil 2010, 143). It may be true that Žižek makes such statements with regard to feminism. However, no one can expect the reader to investigate all possible contradictory statements in Žižek. Theoretically and systematically, feminism and its corresponding problems do not enter into his considerations at all. In this respect, he is also far from including the value-dissociation-critical perspective in its full, broken totality and complexity. In Žižek’s case, one also gets the impression that when he texts people, he is counting on the queries being forgotten. Likewise, the listener/reader never knows whether Žižek has already invalidated a potential objection somewhere in his mass of texts, and so prefers to remain silent, feeling caught off guard and wondering whether Žižek might not be right after all. Respect for his immense knowledge contributes to this. Žižek should not really be criticized in this way. One should always be prepared for it: Here and there, however, it can be found in his complete works. We don’t go along with this immunization strategy. If Žižek advocates certain statements and theses, he has to answer for them and cannot retreat into the greatness and contradictory complexity of his work (whose logical faux pas cannot always be justified with “dialectics”!). It is not possible to go into all of Žižek’s sparring and gamesmanship and his corresponding alpha-male affectations; the situation is too dramatic for that. Perhaps he wants to provoke its very negation in this the exaggeration, but on the other hand he does so in the gesture of male supremacy, which still wants to celebrate itself martially in its decay and downfall. Žižek apparently cannot imagine a society without renunciation, insofar as it is really necessary in emergency situations.

            If some think that I have misinterpreted Žižek himself, it should be recalled once again that he himself does not take very seriously precise analyses of Marx, Hegel and others in a postmodern and psychoanalytic manner on the basis of a diffuse (neo-proletarian-male) point of view (see above); that’s why he has to present himself all the more “playfully” within (old) notions of masculinity; a form of pseudo-irony in which an old masculine supremacy continues in its apparent denial.

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Originally published in Exit! no. 17 in 04/2020

Critical Remarks on a Classic of Feminism

Roswitha Scholz

Introduction

For a long time, Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex played almost no role in feminist theory. Recently, however, de Beauvoir has reappeared not only in new overviews of the classics of feminism, but also in an increasing number of conferences and events devoted to her and her theory. She is also mentioned more frequently in the arts pages. This is probably not only due to the usual events on the occasion of the 100^th anniversary of her birth in 2008 and the 25^th anniversary of her death in 2011, but also to the self-reflection of feminism and gender studies in the current crisis situation.

As late as the 1970s, an equality feminism in particular had invoked de Beauvoir with the slogan: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Soon, however, difference feminism accused her of applying male criteria of normality to women. Finally, in the 1990s, a deconstructive feminism accused her, despite all her criticism of gender relations, of clinging to a dualistic way of thinking and pursuing a renewed production of gender dualism.

Today, a time of balancing/reflection has begun: What comes after equality, difference and deconstruction? What will happen to gender studies after it has been questioned on the one hand and postulated as necessary to maintain on the other? In this time of uncertainty, people are returning to classics like de Beauvoir. However, there seems to be no desire to enter new territory; the appetite for a transcendence of previously existing thought has not yet emerged. The old theory is apparently supposed to remain within the familiar immanent frame of reference. Thus, there is a convulsive attempt to make “queer” theory compatible with the claims of a materialist feminism. It is precisely in this context that de Beauvoir is invoked, as I will briefly show below.

My paper deals with three questions: First, the objective significance of de Beauvoir in the context of a critique of capitalist value-dissociation society; second, agreements and disagreements with de Beauvoir from the point of view of the critique of value-dissociation that I represent today; and third, why and in what way de Beauvoir is currently being brought out of obscurity again. My main concern here is, in the context of a historically specific subject-object dialectic of capitalism, to highlight the object side of her own structuring social environment, which is to a certain extent independent of the subjects and which is largely neglected today. The isolation of the subject, an important point of reference of (also Sartrean) existentialism in the wake of a problematic reception of Heidegger, is, in my view, the result of the capitalist value-dissociation socialization and its presupposition is, conversely, not a (gender-neutral) ahistorically-ontologically conceived “existence.”

I would like to begin by restating some of the basic ideas of The Second Sex. As is well known, de Beauvoir’s thinking is rooted in existentialism and here especially in Sartre’s; a thinking that she helped to shape on the basis of a lifelong dialogue. The core point is that man is condemned to “freedom” because of his “thrownness” [Geworfenheit] into the world. He must invent himself and is absolutely responsible for himself. To cite external conditions as the reason for his decisions is therefore considered a mere evasion. There is no presupposed human being, man and his existence basically coincide with the “act” in which he transcends himself; indeed, in acting he goes beyond his existence. This is true not only for the individual, but for the whole of humanity.

This idea is also the basis of The Second Sex. Here, the man is considered the subject, the woman the other/particular. The category of the other characterizes existence as such. However, while it is generally characterized by reciprocity, this is precisely what is lacking in gender relations. Women consent to this one-sided relationship. Not least for reasons of convenience, i.e. to escape responsibility, they choose to remain in patriarchal immanence. Although de Beauvoir believes that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (an often quoted phrase), she vacillates between biological and social explanations, to which she attaches her existentialist worldview. For her, biology is primarily ballast that must be discarded if women are to achieve transcendence. Consequently, she rightly supported abortion campaigns and saw lesbian love as an alternative to heterosexual relationships, because the heterosexual sexual act “always represents a kind of rape.” For her, however, it is not sexual practice as such that is crucial, but the compulsive exclusivity of heterosexuality (de Beauvoir, 2011, summarized by Hagemann-White, 1992). 

For the women’s movement in the wake of 1968, The Second Sex was, as has often been noted, a kind of bible. This is true for protagonists like Shulamith Firestone and Alice Schwarzer, for Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (an anti-rape book), and for Christina Thürmer-Rohr with her “complicity” thesis, which to this day is traded as a mere counter-position to “victim feminism” instead of seeing that both variants of feminism (the victim’s side and the complicity side) basically have an existentialist foundation. Even in difference feminism, be it that of Irigaray or that of the so-called Bielefeld women, the patriarchal conception of woman is to a certain extent taken over as a utopian conception and always thought of as transcendent, now in fact from the – in reality just as immanent – female side.  Irigaray and de Beauvoir in particular are to be seen as complementary, insofar as de Beauvoir defines woman as the deficient other of the male subject, while Irigaray instead sees the hidden other of the feminine as the actual thing to be respected.

On the Significance of Existentialism in the Capitalist Value-Dissociation Society

De Beauvoir and Sartre, like other theorists, underwent transformations in their work. A phenomenological and existentialist phase in the narrower sense was followed by a return to Marxian theory after the Nazi invasion of France. The formation of French existentialism is often associated with this invasion and with the necessity of the Resistance. This is, of course, different from Heidegger, to whom Sartre and de Beauvoir also refer. Heidegger’s philosophy developed against a very different social background in Germany. His existential philosophy articulated the basic feeling of the National Socialist petty-bourgeois mob. De Beauvoir, on the other hand, also incorporates Marxist thought into her theory. However, this is less with regard to the socio-economic causes of women’s oppression, but, as is usual in a phenomenological-existentialist view, with a more descriptive intention to determine the primarily existentialist underpinnings of The Second Sex.

Even though the theoretical development of Sartre and de Beauvoir has undergone metamorphoses, I would like to briefly refer to the core message of Sartre’s essay “Materialism and Revolution” in order to confront it with a central argument of “History and Class Consciousness” by Lukács. In doing so, I want to show the opposition of existentialism to a critique of social fetishism with regard to the fundamental dimension of form (and in this context, as already mentioned, of a dialectic of subject and object) from the perspective of the critique of value-dissociation. Important impulses for this were given to me by Winfried Dallmayr in his essay “Phenomenology and Marxism in Historical Perspective” from 1977.

For Sartre, a vulgar materialism is the basis of his critique: “In order to eliminate subjectivity, the materialist declares that he is an object, that is, the subject matter of science. But once he has eliminated subjectivity in favor of the object, instead of seeing himself as a thing among other things, buffeted about by the physical universe, he makes of himself an objective beholder and claims to contemplate nature as it is, in the absolute” (Sartre, quoted in Dallmayr, 1977, p. 32). According to Sartre, Marxism equates social structures with the laws of nature. Instead, Sartre argues, Marxism must be linked to existentialism. For him, this means abandoning a contemplative materialist position. In contrast, he is concerned with the interplay of knowledge [Erkenntnis] and praxis, conceived in existentialist terms, linking praxis to “labor” in an ontological sense, much like other traditional Marxists. According to Sartre, conventional Marxism, which he identifies as a materialist, contemplative ideology, is based on the thinking of the ruling class. By contrast, the proletariat is predestined to engage, even if it requires an Marxist epistemological foundation.

Phenomenology, his own existentialism, and a Marxist conceptual schematism are now linked in Sartre as follows. Sartre demands an epistemology “which shows that human reality is action and that action upon the universe is identical with the understanding of this universe as it is” (Sartre cited in Dallmayr, 1977, 33). Being, or being understood in Marxist terms, materiality, is thus ultimately dissolved in Sartre’s truncated understanding into consciousness understood in existentialist terms, with the construction of the possibility of a completely different design of society, starting from the proletariat. Therefore, he argues, Marxism must be a theory of transcendence. Dallmayr comments that even in the postwar period, Sartre “remained basically faithful to the radical concept of freedom of his early writings, although the concept was now more strongly mediated with reality by the emphasis on labor. The naturalization of this concept of freedom in Marxism, however, has serious consequences that Sartre does not mention. Just as the early phenomenological work was characterized by the opposition of consciousness and the world of things, so now revolutionary practice only makes sense against the background of permanent exploitation, just as in Being and Nothingness consciousness as ‘for itself’ could never merge with ‘in itself’ despite assiduous efforts, so too in ‘Materialism and Revolution’ the class struggle can never come to an end. Sartre’s historical perspective, therefore, does not so much envisage a classless society as an alternation of different varieties of social sadism and masochism. His later writings may have mitigated this dilemma, but they never eradicated it” (Dallmayr, op. cit., pp. 34 f.). Somehow there must always be something to “go beyond”; this belongs to Sartre’s concept of philosophy par excellence.

Thus, from the point of view of the critique of value-dissociation, Sartre remains trapped in ontological thinking and, in principle, in an indissoluble subject-object dualism. Even when he emphasizes Marxism, he must ultimately hold on to the existentialist act, to the project, which is basically always that of a labor-act. Dallmayr notes that Sartre falls behind Lukács’s comparable essay “History and Class Consciousness” “in some respects – for example, in the individualistic accent and conceptual schematics” (op. cit., p. 35). However, Dallmayr does not concretize this, certainly not with regard to the social form, the value form or the value-dissociation form, as I will try to do  now on the basis of a central idea of Lukács.

To be sure, Lukács is also undoubtedly an apologist for class struggle and labor in the sense of traditional Marxism. Nevertheless, in his famous essay on reification (1967), he was the first to comprehensively address the problem of the overarching fetish form of the commodity, which transcends both capitalist and proletarian and cannot be grasped in terms of a cheap immanent functional contradiction. In this respect, the object cannot be dissolved into the subject, as is ultimately the case with Sartre, but rather, mediations are necessary. This contrasts with a traditional base-superstructure scheme in the sense of a simple theory of reflection. Central to this is the historical perspective. Lukács, for example, writes: “However, it should not be forgotten that immediacy and mediation are themselves aspects of a dialectical process and that every stage of existence (and of the mind that would understand it) has its own immediacy in the sense given to it in the Phenomenology [Hegel’s, R.S.] in which, when confronted by an immediately given object, ‘we should respond just as immediately or receptively, and therefore make no alteration to it, leaving it just as it presents itself.’ To go beyond this immediacy can only mean the genesis, the ‘creation’ of the object. But this assumes that the forms of mediation in and through which it becomes possible to go beyond the immediate existence of objects as they are given, can be shown to be the structural principles and the real tendencies of the objects themselves. In other words, intellectual genesis must be identical in principle with historical genesis [in contrast to Hegel, R.S.]” (Lukács, 1967, p. 155; emphasis in original).

Lukács is thus not always concerned with an objectively conceived Marxism, but he goes beyond the notorious external dualism in traditional Marxism of materialism/objective structures on the one hand and subjectivity/consciousness on the other in dialectical mediation. Even though he relies on the proletariat as an immanent force, he is not, at least in this famous essay, at the mercy of immediacy to the extent that existentialism fundamentally is. Of course, Sartre, along with Heidegger, has always been concerned with the abstract man in the world, that is, with the man in the street who “exists” directly and absolutely; his philosophy is inconceivable without this figure and begins with it in a directly “practical” way. His concept of totality, or his concept of the concrete totality as a “synthetic totality,” thus always already has this “immediateist” [unmittelbaristischen] reference, even when he has in mind the whole of humanity, whose existence is to be transcended from precisely this starting point, which is itself abstract. Thus, what is decisive for Sartre and then also for de Beauvoir is actually an ideology of dismay against the background of an abstractly posited “existence,” which basically gets by without a fundamental reference to a socio-historically constituted outside world in the sense of a fetishistic constitution.

For Sartre, existentialism is an (abstract) humanism; the individual in itself, the “human being” also in the sense of humanity in general, is grabbed by the lapels in false immediacy. In the case of women, this may fall on particularly fertile ground due to patriarchal history, although it must be said that this immediate concern in the sense of existentialism turns out to be less than maudlin and tends to end in a kind of pessimism, for example, in de Beauvoir a downright indictment of “the woman” who is content in immanence. But what is accused here is also hidden in her own theoretical presuppositions. For from these, the woman can bend to the conditions sadomasochistically-immanently, as testified by Thürmer-Rohr’s existentialist-confessing-humility complicity thesis. This thesis is problematic because it cannot locate the problem structurally-objectively in an overall social context that is upstream of the subjectively confessing complicit woman. The aim should be to criticize this social context, not the woman herself.

Gender Relations and Social Structure

Both Sartre and Lukács basically start their analysis with labor and the working man as their point of departure. While Sartre, because of his existentialist philosophical background, is already relegated to the ground of immediacy, Lukács opens up the possibility of critiquing the social form in the same way as Marx. This can potentially be used both in the sense of questioning abstract labor as a basic principle and in the sense of a critique of value-dissociation, which again modifies the status of abstract labor. In this case, however, the above quotation from Lukács would have to be extended in terms of the critique of value-dissociation in order to redefine the “structural principles and the real tendencies” that, as forms of mediation, transcend the immediacy of Dasein. I can only sketch this in broad outline here.

As is well known, the critique of value-dissociation assumes that certain reproductive activities (housework, “love,” nurturing), corresponding attitudes (such as caring) and inferior qualities (such as sensuality, emotionality, weakness of character and intellect, etc.) are dissociated from value and abstract labor and assigned to women. Such attributions also essentially characterize the symbolic side of the commodity-producing patriarchy, a side that cannot be grasped by the Marxian conceptual apparatus. Likewise, socio-psychologically, the male child must turn away from the mother and perform a dissociation/devaluation of the feminine in order to be able to form a masculine identity; while the girl must identify with the caring mother in order to become a “woman.”

Gendered dissociation is necessarily established co-originally with value, belongs to it and is its mute precondition, without which it cannot exist; at the same time it is its other and as such unrecognized by it or its “subjects.” Thus, the one cannot be derived from the other, but both moments emerge from each other and thus establish a historically dynamic movement of the extraction of surplus value, which is historically unique. At the same time, value-dissociation as a basic principle runs through all spheres and domains, so it cannot be mechanically divided into the opposition of the spheres of private-public, production-reproduction. Even if women today are “doubly socialized,” and thus considered equally responsible for family and career, as Becker-Schmidt says, and are to a large extent integrated into official society, they still remain, in contrast to men, primarily responsible for household and children, they earn less than men, although they surpass them in terms of education, and they have to fight harder for access into the upper echelons. Even in today’s call for quotas, there is still a traditional patriarchal imagination, according to which the woman in crisis is declared to be the all-responsible “born rubble woman” of the social, when the commodity-producing patriarchy comes apart at the seams. In this context, the androcentric social unconscious that still enables patriarchal commodity-producing relations today would have to be made an issue.

“The woman” in the material, socio-psychological, and cultural-symbolic fabric of value-dissociation as a fundamental principle is thus confronted with both immediacy and the mediated overall context in a different way than it appears in de Beauvoir, who makes an abstract “existence” the socially indeterminate primordial ground when, oscillating between using and relativizing biology, she writes: “Thus we will clarify the biological data by examining them in the light of ontological economic, social, and psychological context. Woman’s enslavement to the species and the limits of her individual abilities are facts of extreme importance; the woman’s body is one of the essential elements of the situation she occupies in this world. But her body is not enough to define her; it has a lived reality only as taken on by consciousness through actions and within a society; biology alone cannot provide an answer to the question […]: why is woman the Other?” (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 2011, emphasis in original). The ahistorical abstractness of the point of departure and the related indeterminacy of the social mean that de Beauvoir cannot adequately grasp the projections onto the biological.

Nevertheless, her works also belong to the theoretical preconditions of the critique of value-dissociation, which determines the dissociation of the feminine as the “other of value” and thus takes up a basic idea of de Beauvoir. However, the concept of the Other in terms of gender relations does not remain in the air, as it were, in a kind of existentialist immediacy, but rather is placed in the specific historical constitution of capital and its structural-dynamic context, so that it is no longer just a question of gender relations as such, but, starting from value-dissociation as a basic principle, of the “structural construction” of the social fetish relation as a whole.

The common ground with de Beauvoir here is that in the capitalist-patriarchal reality, the man is the (general) subject and the woman is the particular, and corresponding evaluative hierarchies are established. This, of course, also concerns the relation between official production (in the diction I advocate for with Marx conceived as abstract labor) and “housework” as a complementary activity for the determination of male generality and female particularity. Likewise, the critique of value-dissociation shares with de Beauvoir the radical critique and rejection of the role of women; today, therefore, also of the imposition to be equally responsible for family and job in order to bring into the world, in the post-post-society, high-performing, perfect middle class children. In addition, Simone de Beauvoir, like the theory of value-dissociation, questions compulsory heterosexuality, without, however, denying the existence of a sexual body as such; even if de Beauvoir still partly assumes false ontological-biological foundations, which have made her vulnerable to the attack of an equally false radical constructivism.

The critique of value-dissociation decisively agrees with de Beauvoir that the existing gender relation still has to be thematized as hierarchical, but precisely by returning to the specific social form-determinacy of this hierarchy and not by separating from it in an abstract and existentialist way. Even in this critique of de Beauvoir, both her approach and the critique of value-dissociation stand in clear contrast to today’s dominant deconstructivism, which systematically obfuscates hard hierarchies. Finally, the critique of value-dissociation, like de Beauvoir, also criticizes a classical feminist perspective of difference, but not in the context of an equality-thinking, but by striving to overcome abstract-bourgeois equality, biologist difference and postmodern-affirmative deconstruction in equal measure.

Gender Relations and History

It is de Beauvoir who, for the first time in modern history as a woman, systematically presents a large-scale analysis of gender relations, albeit on her existentialist foundation, which makes it impossible for her to locate herself historically in the process of capitalist development. In doing so, she also works through the few male-feminist thinkers that have existed in history. It is no coincidence, however, that her point of view has gained new effectiveness. In recent decades, women can no longer afford to be merely housewives, even in their own minds. Today, when men can no longer manage due to the obsolescence of abstract labor, women are supposed to become responsible for everything, in the sense of rubble women [Trümmerfrauen], even their own gender-symbolic devaluation. Andrea Truman is undoubtedly right in her criticism of de Beauvoir’s fixation on labor and a conception of transcendence based on it, of all things.

Crucial for a sufficient understanding of the modern (and postmodern) historical development is the overarching structure of the value-dissociation relation, which processes itself, even if this context does not exist independently of the actions of individuals; for Marx, too, the fetishistic social context, which has become independent, is created by people themselves, even if unconsciously. From the point of view of the critique of value-dissociation, which is oriented towards historical dynamics, the reception of de Beauvoir was significant for the treatment of contradictions in a certain phase of capitalism, namely the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism.

The female urge for a certain kind of transcendence, which was not yet linked to the whole of the capital fetish, thus inadvertently became fitting for the immanent development. As Susanne Moser notes: “Existentialism anticipated much of what is still the order of the day today: no longer does a God-given order determine the place that the individual occupies. One has to fight for one’s place in society. […] We all have to find ourselves, from our jobs to the meaning of our lives. So what was discussed purely theoretically back in Beauvoir’s time has become reality today” (2008).

After an emphatic celebration of Simone de Beauvoir in the 1970s, the evaluation of her views changed into the negative after a phase of difference feminism, insofar as in queer politics and queer theory gender was now considered completely contingent and some even think today, in a shallow scene interpretation of Judith Butler’s theory, that gender can be changed like clothes. However, gender has in common with queerness the fundamental idea of the assignment of meaning and the “production of gender” against the background of a hypostasis of culture and language that is largely uncritical of the capitalist form.

De Beauvoir is thus accused of reifying gender dualism. In this vein, Butler writes: “The discursive construction of ‘the body’ and its separation from ‘freedom’ in Beauvoir fails to mark along the axis of gender the very mind-body distinction that is supposed to illuminate the persistence of gender asymmetry” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 1990, p. 17). Ergo: De Beauvoir is accused of not fully hypostasizing the cultural gender track that Butler supposes to be decisive! On the contrary, de Beauvoir’s analysis, with its insistence on thematizing real hierarchies, is a prerequisite for illuminating the fundamental patriarchal constitution of capitalism. This cannot be invalidated by a superficial deconstructivist intermingling; quite apart from the fact that Butler herself falls prey to this mind-body dualism when she assumes that sex is always already gender, and that for her culture, quite in line with classic patriarchal views, prevails over nature in a non-dialectical way and is the main creative force. Although de Beauvoir, against the background of her existentialism, ultimately tends towards a biological-ontological view of hierarchical gender relations, which is to be criticized, she is nevertheless more correct in saying that this gender asymmetry is not in a state of unquestionable harmony than Butler with her all too smooth culturalist analysis.

It is true that Butler criticizes de Beauvoir, as I do, for the humanistic-existentialist understanding of the subject, but with a completely different and downright opposite context of justification. For Butler, the social totality, especially in Gender Trouble, is in a sense merely a totality of language and discourse. A comprehensive understanding of totality as a subject-object dialectic of the fetishistic formal context is absent; indeed, in Butler’s work there is virtually a mere reversal of the base-superstructure scheme, in that culture, discourse, and language are made, as it were, the substructure of material realities. Thus, their theory is ultimately false and, as is common in postmodernity, “over-simplified” in an ontology of the cultural that is not able to address the real social relation in its fetishistic mediatedness as value-dissociation socialization. (Cultural) identity in general or cultural gender identity, on the other hand, is not the very first problem for the critique of value-dissociation. It is primarily concerned with the fundamental form of value-dissociation as a basic social principle, which as such constitutes “objective forms of existence” (Marx) and is therefore also the presupposition of cultural identity formations. Without the critique and analysis of this presupposition, deconstructivism, like existentialism, hangs in the air.

Why A Reminiscence of de Beauvoir Today?

These days, collections of essays with titles such as “All Gender?” “Gender in Motion,” “What Comes After Gender Studies?” etc. are appearing, even if the generic, boring consequence is that after gender studies is before gender studies. But “gender” is apparently kind of worn out. In retrospect, it seems to me to be a mere welfare-state theory ideologeme, appropriate for a phase in which women had won rights of participation and on this basis, with the assumption that this would probably continue, displayed a rather phlegmatic attitude. Today, a criminal neglect of the still hierarchical realm of gender is evident. After this problem was considered to have been almost “eaten,” it is now clear that gender structures and gender identities apparently run deeper than assumed, even if it was initially reserved for bourgeois alpha girls to formulate such an affirmative “uneasiness” compatible with neoliberalism.

In addition, the general social crisis situation, which makes even middle class individuals increasingly suspect the fall, suggests a recourse to material levels, which a culturalist queer and gender perspective not only lacks, but from this point of view has also arrogantly dismissed as secondary for a long time. The representatives of this attitude are now losing hope, thus hastily rediscovering the material level, which is suddenly supposed to be wonderfully congruent with deconstructivist thinking. The assumption is that different feminist concepts supposedly all want the same thing anyway. The much-invoked respect for difference, for the differences between the individual concepts, is thus eclectically leveled at the very moment when it can no longer be exhausted in a non-committal pluralism, in order to plow over these very differences in a still postmodern “anything goes.” Different theoretical concepts are to be made compatible almost by force and brought under a postmodern tailor-made mantle of reconciliation.

And it is precisely in this context that Simone de Beauvoir, now neglected for decades and even reviled by both difference feminism and deconstruction feminism, suddenly reappears as a controversial foundation: “Because of their questioning of the supra-temporal and supra-regional category(ies) of ‘woman’ (and ‘man’), and their rejection of a common ground for all women, Butler was accused of making it impossible to effectively combat the oppression of women in society. Here, again, a look at Beauvoir is helpful. She proves the opposite in several ways. On the one hand, in a very practical way, her book has fueled the struggle for equality between men and women. On the other hand, by fundamentally questioning a ‘natural’ basis for gender, she in no way denies that there are currently in fact and in very real terms men and women in this society, and that a permanent offensive struggle is necessary to end discrimination and violence against women. Thus, it must be about a coexistence of these two perspectives if, on the one hand, one wants to take into account the current needs of people (and thus also act effectively against current discrimination and violence) and, on the other hand, hold on to the goal of a better society in the future, in which patriarchal and capitalist relations of domination are overcome” (Voß, 2011, p. 15).

Voß simply omits the fact that de Beauvoir was extremely ambivalent about the biological body. Silvia Stoller writes: “In Beauvoir’s time there were serious inequalities, so the demand for equality was important – and we still cannot do without it. But thinking in terms of difference is also important today. In times when plurality is a positive value, we need to have a notion of difference. The problem, however, is that difference is handled very criminally […] There is a compulsion to assimilate others – for example, if you wear a headscarf, don’t speak German or whatever. In this respect, we are not yet thinking radically enough about difference. And last but not least, we cannot do without the idea of construction. Butler has taught us to look behind the obvious. She shows us that the all too ‘natural’ is not natural, and encourages us to ask questions such as: Who is really a woman now? […] Every one of these theoretical analyses and demands is relevant today. […] If you were a deconstructionist, you could hardly [in the nineties, R.S.] bring Irigaray’s notion of difference into play. ‘Difference’ immediately evoked the notion of ‘gender dualism,’ ‘heterosexuality,’ ‘conservatism,’ and so on. I never understood this negative evaluation, because the plurality that construction theorists call for is, after all, built on difference. Without difference, there is no plurality” (Stoller, 2011).

Instead of overcoming the various truncated perspectives in feminism and arriving at a new view at the cutting edge, what is eclectically proclaimed here is equal acceptance and at the same time a conciliatory seeing of commonalities, with gender difference appearing contingent, as one difference among others.

When the situation of life becomes more precarious, more “existential” in the literal sense of the word, it is precisely this development of crisis that makes an abstract-universalist calibrated and sometimes shallow phenomenologism increasingly fashionable. It is also in this ideological context that a renewed return to de Beauvoir can be observed, especially with regard to her problematic philosophical foundations. “Man in the world,” the most absurd question of all, has not by chance become topical again; it has even turned against post-structuralism, whereby today the problem of alienation collides with new stratifications beyond the traditional class society. Thus, in the wake of middle class fears of falling away, Heidegger is increasingly being reconsidered. And even where Heidegger is not explicitly mentioned, one basically uses his questions and the corresponding approach. Carl Schmitt and his decisionism have also been celebrating a happy reign in the post-Foucauldian age for some time now. A sanguine, postmodern reception of Heidegger in the sense of “vive la différence” with recourse to Derrida, for example, who still wanted to surpass Heidegger with his own metaphysical critique, seems to be coming to an end; it still seems to have belonged to the consumption based phase of post-Fordist financial bubble capitalism.

In this context, it also seems to me that Sartre, but also de Beauvoir, are reappearing today with their problematic philosophical ideas in a left phenomenological-existentialist turn. For example, in the “anti-German” context, as far as the analysis of anti-Semitism is concerned, as if a dangerous anti-Semitism as an ideology of crisis could be answered at all in the context of “decision-philosophical” questions, out of hasty fears of abstraction, which are themselves anti-Semitically mediated. In the concrete historical situation of the interwar period, there was still the alternative between National Socialism and a Stalinist “real socialism” (which itself had anti-Semitic features in a different way). For this reason, however, no decisionist analogy can be drawn from an abstract existence as a general ground underlying a fundamental critique of capitalism or decisive parts of it. Even if the actual possibilities of decision are not always determined in this way in the concrete, they always move as such within a fetishistic coherence of coercion, which also conditions these decisions, even if they do not merge into it and responsibility for them can be imputed.

Voluntarist attitudes are today newly legitimized both by situationism (or neo-situationism or vulgar situationism – see the bestseller The Coming Insurrection with its dangerous proximity to Sorelism) and by some “anti-Germans” who, without justification or mediation, put an abstract “decision” into space (i.e. for or against socialism, in truth for or against capitalist enlightenment reason). It is not by chance that there are already congresses on the compatibility of, but also difference between Sartre and Adorno, in which a fundamental desire for reconciliation, rather than resolving the differences anew, is clearly on the program. Instead, the responsibility of individuals for social development can only be determined in a context of critical reflection on fetishism, which in no way denies a dialectic of structure and action in this sense (i.e. including the blind presupposition of social forms).

Almost completely unnoticed, and unfortunately I cannot go into this in more detail here, is the “gypsy” as subhuman/non-human/homo sacer par excellence in the constitution of modernity. Anti-gypsyism as a variant of racism is finally being increasingly addressed, but hardly in its full scope. In the history of modernization, Sinti and Roma, as populations declared per se declared outlaws, form a necessary presupposition of value-dissociation relations, marking in an extreme way a dimension of “existential” repulsion and feeling this “indiscriminately.” This basis remains largely unmentioned as such, especially when it is projected as an ideology of fear onto today’s potential decline of the middle class (see Scholz 2007).

In this context, I consider it an illusion and a rationalization to ignore or to “existentially-ideologically” dissolve into the subject what might be called the existential question of overcoming the fetishistic value-dissociation relation, which appears as an (always also practically-immediate) subject-object question not least and especially in the persecution of the “Gypsy.” Rather, the balancing act between subject and object in a historically understood sense, which includes the immediacy conveyed in a practical understanding, must be endured in order to arrive at a concrete-historical transcendence. Structurally, therefore, the value-dissociation society is necessarily to be presupposed, irrespective of the empirical women (and men) who, although individually not absorbed in it, nevertheless cannot escape this social context of constitution. The fetishistic social synthesis of modernity in its concrete totality forms the deeper reason why abstract questions about “the” existence of “man” in the world arise in the first place; because an unhistorical-abstract man does not exist like that at all. The problem, which is absurd in itself, can only be explained concretely, historically and logically by value-dissociation and its history.

From this, I would like to emphasize once again, also follows a perspective of critique that is oriented beyond capitalistically determined equality, difference and deconstruction, and thus also beyond existentialist or other attitudes, in order to open the way for something radically different. It is necessary to distrust both the ideologies and abstractions of a false notion of transcendence and those of an equally false determination of immanence, which do not know their own presuppositions – however appealing the black turtlenecks and the filterless Gauloises[1] of the French existentialists may seem. Today, however, the Gauloises existence would be exchanged for a Heideggerian herbal existence. For us, however, “existence” only really exists within the fetishistic conditions of value-dissociation, and not as an ontological “thrownness,” whose concept itself has always been primarily middle class prefigured. That an ahistorical concept of “existence” must always necessarily be maintained is a self-misunderstanding of the consciousness of these relations, which apparently need an ontological underpinning.

In this context, value-dissociation as a basic social principle, which cannot be grasped directly-empirically, should be emphasized. This even more today when one can hardly find fundamental theoretical considerations with regard to social fetishism or asymmetrical gender relations. The fact that women in particular were not enslaved within their own societies, as de Beauvoir notes, points to the relevance of the body (see De Beauvoir 2011). A superficial comparison with Jews and blacks, as de Beauvoir makes it, may be appropriate to a certain, but it does not touch on the deeper dimension of value-dissociation socialization. Sheer “existence” as the ultimate vanishing point is meaningless. Such (fashionably speaking) “intersectional” questions can only be clarified with reference to this fundamental dimension [value-dissociation], and, only in this context, also in their own meaning, which is not absorbed in it.

In times of postmodern discourse hegemony, however, one can obviously no longer afford to ask the damnable question about the body; on the other hand, it is still a mute pre-theoretical presupposition in many conceptions of gender. Only non-essentialist and non-biologistic reflections on the sex-gender dialectic would lead out of this dilemma. However, this is not in vogue because it does not simply merge into a culturalist race-class-gender dimension. The category of “gender” is radically different from such understandings and cannot be “deconstructively” equated with other forms of inequality. Only this insight would make a mediation of gender with the latter as truly “other” possible in the first place.

If Lukács demanded that the “immediate immediacy” and the negative-fetishist objective structural laws or objective principles of construction be dialectically mediated against a materialist Marxian background, I have tried to do so in a modified way with regard to the historical assessment of de Beauvoir in the context of my value-dissociation theory. In order to really transcend the structures described by this term, we need insight into this concrete-historical doom instead of existentialist “attitudes” that end up in a false voluntarism that no longer cares about negative objectivity.

The conceptuality of dissociation designates the mute presupposition of modernity as the “other” (here Simone de Beauvoir speaks) of commodity production and the capital fetish, and as such it represents a completely different fundamental – in a sense even deeper –structural level that goes beyond the Marxian concept of fetishism. Thus, the dimension of value-dissociation does not merely encompass an asymmetrical gender relation, but targets society as a whole. Transcendence in the sense of the critique of value-dissociation is therefore something different from an androcentric-universalist critique of value, but also something different from de Beauvoir. In this respect, feminism, in the sense of thematizing value-dissociation as a basic principle that offers structure, can no longer afford a mere clumsy admission of complicity, which ultimately leads treacherously into the factually neutral gender perspective. Likewise, the thematization of this presupposed principle (insofar as it is aware of its mediations) is precisely necessary in order to allow for the relevance of the “other others” in the sense of a concrete totality that is not conceptually hierarchically inferior.

In this sense, against all new editions or variations of the abstract-ontological existential philosophy I must insist, even out of individual self-defense in the “existentialist” sense, if you like, that I speak as a historically constituted (female) individual and as a theorist on a certain historical stage of socialization, and to that extent also in a certain “situation” in the decay of the fetishistic and automatized value-dissociation socialization. This conditional context has brought me forth in the first place, even if I am not absorbed in it, otherwise I could not speak as I do. But the “transcending” of these conditions requires first of all the insight into the historical dimension of this complicated subject-object-dialectic, which goes not only beyond me as an individual, but also beyond an imagined abstract humanity in the humanistic sense.

This subject-object dialectic, which also constitutes the single (gender-)individual, limited in his or her so-being, must be approached radically and critically in its historical limitation. Precisely in this respect, one is “individually” thrown back to an existentially lost position, which cannot be ignored even by a critical understanding. But this understanding cannot be achieved by ignoring negative objectivity and taking ontological-existential shortcuts. Only on the contradictory basis of a will to transcend that is aware of its own conditions can we speak of a real “possibility of decision” at all, if it is not to remain stuck in the abstract-immediate. This is particularly important in view of today’s objective crisis situation, which is also subjectively threatening.

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[1] TN: Gauloises are a brand of French cigarette

This text is the written version of a presentation given at the “Institut für vergleichende Irrelevanz” (Frankfurt/Main) on November 10, 2011.

Interview by Clara Navarro Ruiz with Roswitha Scholz

First of all, we would like to share some moments of your career with the Ibero-American readers. What were your defining experiences as a student? How did your politicization take place? In what social context? Which theoretical references or concepts were important in this process? Were there any breaks? How did you come to join the Krisis Group, or how were you involved in its founding? What significance did the split of this group and the founding of EXIT! have for you, where you further developed your theoretical approach of the value-dissociation critique?

As a young person, I read a lot. In the 1970s, the zeitgeist was left-wing, and I was infected by it. In my youth I read a lot of existentialist texts. Especially novels and plays by Sartre, but also Camus. I also read The Second Sex by de Beauvoir. Other authors included Erich Fromm, Bertrand Russell, and psychoanalytic literature by Freud, Adler, Jung, and Wilhelm Reich. Whether I understood all this at the time is debatable. I also read feminist literature by Alice Schwarzer, Carla Lonzi, Shulamith Firestone, Klaus Theweleit and others, as well as anti-psychiatry texts by Basaglia, Szasz, Laing and many others. I read an introduction to Marxism by a Polish Jesuit priest whose name escapes me. Basically, though, I identified Marx primarily with Eastern Bloc Marxism and the K-groups, all of which were deeply suspect to me. In any case, my attitudes placed me on the anti-authoritarian left.

I was already in a women’s center when I was 17, but I was an absolute outsider and didn’t dare to say much. Then I went to a second-chance school and concentrated on that for a couple of years. Before that, I had trained as a pharmacy assistant and worked for a pharmaceutical wholesaler for a few years. I come from a lower class background. When I was studying social pedagogy at the University of Applied Sciences, I attended seminars on the Frankfurt School. That was something quite different from the Marxism of “really existing socialism” and the K-groups! I soon realized that I needed to know more about Marx in order to understand these texts and so I joined the “Initiative Marxistische Kritik,” which offered a Marx course, and Robert Kurz was a central figure there. In the meantime, I had also become suspicious of the “sponti” left, which couldn’t live up to its own claims, e.g. everything was supposed to be anti-hierarchical and pro-social, but de facto there were many authoritarian informal structures; free love and sex were advocated, while in reality others were treated as commodities on the love market, so to speak. The promise of emancipation in the here and now was a lie. Anyone who didn’t habitually fit into this scene (language, clothing, etc.) was effectively excluded. There was a double standard. But it was not only these experiences that led me to distance myself from a “false immediacy.” It was also leftist teachers at school in the course of my secondary education who taught me that leftist theory is necessary and not just useless chatter that is of no use in practice.

Incidentally, the study of Marx and critical theory made me realize how questionable existentialism is, e.g. the talk of the “abstract individual” in the “German Ideology” – and how it comes about at all – was very enlightening for me. This individual is presupposed in existentialism without justification. Later, when I went to university (I studied mainly sociology, education and philosophy, but also attended seminars in other subjects), I looked for interesting non-Marxist theories that could be made fruitful for feminism. Feminism was a topic that had been on my mind since puberty. The value critics of the time were not exactly open-minded about feminism, to say the least. At university I also attended several seminars on symbolic interactionism and phenomenology. In the end, however, I came to the conclusion that the “Dialectic of Enlightenment” with its inclusion of psychoanalysis is a key work to which feminist theory must critically connect.

I was involved in the founding of the Krisis group as an outsider, so to speak, because of the conflicts around feminism, but also because of questions of the subject and ideology. I did go to the bar with them, but unlike in previous years, I was no longer involved in a working context within the Krisis group. Together with others, I had formed an outsider group, which, however, did not go as far as the critique of value-dissociation, but moved in the dualistic cosmos: patriarchy-capitalism critique. In this group we dealt with the history of the women’s movement and feminist theory.

In the first years of our being together, there were always fierce clashes with Robert Kurz about feminism. To my amazement, it then made perfect sense to him when I presented him with the thesis that “value is the man.” From then on, he tried to introduce this thesis into the Krisis group, which consisted of men, as its mastermind, but to his surprise he succeeded only with difficulty, in contrast to other innovations. There were fierce arguments and resistance. Some thought that critique of value-dissociation was only an aspect of the critique of value, not a dialectically conceived basic context, whereby neither value nor dissociation were to be deduced separately as origins, i.e. dissociation was to be categorically subordinate to value. This remained the case until the Krisis split.

Then, in the mid-1990s, I started working more intensively on the value-dissociation theory. I was pretty much alone in this. On the one hand, there were the androcentric Marxists and value critics (Robert Kurz was busy at the time with a large number of his own publications; moreover, he had little idea of theoretical approaches that were relevant to the development of value-dissociation critique from a feminist perspective). On the other hand, however, there were hardly any Marxist approaches left at that time, feminist theory was mainly oriented towards the deconstructivism of a Judith Butler; objective structures were hardly an issue in this discussion. In our working group on surplus value theory, I was under massive pressure to consider queer theoretical approaches. And so, I was relegated to working in silence. Especially as a woman, you do need a certain amount of steadfastness to “do your thing” when there is a lot of resistance from the outside. I think I also internalized a little bit of an attitude that came from my time with existentialism.

As far as the split in the Krisis group is concerned, I have already said that there was a tension here between the critique of value-dissociation and the critique of value in the Krisis group. However, the differences were not only based on theoretical content. Sexist behavior also characterized the general atmosphere in the Krisis group – as in many left-wing groups. This went so far that one Krisis man slapped me in the face after a disagreement. I was completely taken aback; I would not have thought that such a thing was possible. Nevertheless, I dismissed this as a slip. The reason I didn’t fight back harder at the time was because I was afraid the whole group would break up, and then where would I have published? At the beginning of the 2000s, a woman was to be expelled from the editorial board (she was the only other member of the inner core of the Krisis group besides me, not so much as a purveyor of theory as I was, but as a member of the editorial board) because she rejected a Krisis man who tried to get involved with her. After she had turned him down, he could no longer stand her in the group because he felt unappreciated. This was the immediate cause for the split of the group. Parts of the group went along with it, others did not. In addition, Robert Kurz had written a large number of books and texts since the early 1990s. If he had been the driving force of the Krisis group until then, and if he had been expected to be the “Supreme Leader,” so to speak, he was now reproached for exactly that. In short, it was, as the cliché would have it, about patricide in the male alliance. In the process, I was accused, also stereotypically, of having broken the Krisis group. And in fact, I had rebelled in many ways, thus disturbing the peace of the Brotherhood.

Since the founding of EXIT!, the critique of value-dissociation has been taken more seriously and has become part of our self-representation, but there is a tendency, especially when new people join – and these are mostly men – to treat the critique of dissociation as a subordinate contradiction. Over time, however, we have become picky about this. For example, if someone doesn’t acknowledge value-dissociation as a basic structuring social context from the outset, he/she won’t be included in the editorial board. But we nevertheless accept articles for publication in EXIT! even if their content does not strictly conform to the criteria of the “value-dissociation” critique, but contain topics and ideas that are interesting, whatever their shortcomings. On the whole, however, we regard the critique of value-dissociation as an absolute framework. It has also long since been clarified how it is to be taught in the so-called theory-practice context. This was also an important point in the Krisis split: they thought that value critique should become more practical and meet people where they are in their everyday lives. At EXIT! it is clear: we are a theory group and we see theory as an independent field of social practice, and theory cannot be directly and platitudinously broken down to the political level. We are by no means against a practical socio-critical engagement – on the contrary – for example against neo-fascist tendencies, but such an engagement cannot be played off against a necessary theory formation on another level.

Theoretically strong groups like EXIT! are hard to find in the Spanish context outside of the academic framework. How would you define the social-theoretical context of the EXIT! group, which has no firm ties to so-called social movements, party-political foundations or the university? This has to do not only with the social location of the theory, but also with the ability to influence and change the existing.

It is indeed the case that there are few theory groups that do not have some sort of institutional background – especially nowadays. When I was a student in the 1980s, it wasn’t quite like that. There was still a lot of the spirit of ‘68. Marxist theory, even in the universities, began to establish itself in the 1970s and for a long time still had an APO[1] smell to it. In the first half of the 1980s, being established was still rather frowned upon– unlike today. Critical social theory cannot simply be reserved for a reified university business and its associated constraints in terms of content and methodology, which, when combined with careerist intentions under precarious living conditions, allow a conformist attitude to flourish.

It is not easy to maintain oneself as a separate project for the development of leftist theory. This is not only because of financial problems (we are financed by private donations). In addition, there is always the insistence on the practical relevance of the critique of value-dissociation. This is a structural problem for a theory group that is not associated with a university, which would automatically legitimize theoretical endeavors, so to speak. Most people interested in theory on the left have some kind of connection to the university or want to get into the university. Today we are confronted with this is on the one hand, and on the other hand with the demand to become practical. Once again, one needs strong nerves and a certain steadfastness to resist the demands  made of non-university theory. It has always been the position of the old critical theory that, if necessary, one must have the courage to go outside the city walls if there is no other way. In this sense, I think that extra-institutional theory formation is very important. Precisely because it seems all too obvious today that alternatives to capitalism must be sought, a theoretical distance and a categorical classification of one’s own position and situation are essential in order not to fall for pseudo-concepts that do not really advance the process of social transformation, but rather inhibit it.

Especially after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, Marxist and feminist theorizing has become hand-wringing. I very much hope that in the future there will also be movements of intellectuals on the left who resist the university or otherwise institutional Procrustean bed into which they are supposed to fit if they want to get a job, and who dare to swim against the tide. Usually you don’t have any real chance to influence or change things at the university, you are rather made to fit in and mutate into a “lurch” (Horkheimer/Adorno) for the sake of self-preservation. This doesn’t mean that you can’t accept outside money or participate in left-wing establishment events, just that there would be a cost. There may be niches in academia where other things are possible, but that is not the rule. From these niches, it would then be necessary to carry the corresponding ideas into the university and to create unrest.

Can you tell us something about your collaboration with Robert Kurz? How did you influence and enrich each other’s work? Were there any differences? Were they mediated?

As far as the collaboration with Robert Kurz is concerned, it’s quite simple. We never sat down together according to a schedule and had structured, disciplined discussions; we just did it. We weren’t divided into two parts: life here, and our theory projects and the associated collaboration there. Correcting each other’s texts was sometimes quite conflictual, but we dealt with it humorously, calling it “bickering on the computer.” What is not true, however, is that Robert Kurz and I wrote several books together, as the Wikipedia entry about me says. We wrote our texts separately and then it was time for the “computer bickering.” In the evenings, in a relaxed atmosphere, over a glass of wine, we discussed all sorts of things, and in this way – even in controversy – we influenced each other. We had different focuses. Roughly speaking, Robert Kurz’s main topics were economics and politics, and mine were feminism, “race,” class, gender and the “subject.” Atmospherically, our cats were important – but I won’t go into that here. Our lives were often scrutinized – even in the context of Krisis. We didn’t have any children, which was somehow unnatural. Poor Robert Kurz had to talk to his wife all the time, he wasn’t even allowed to relax in a separate private sphere! Some people simply cannot understand that the formation of theory is not simply toil and trouble, but can be a passion, as it was with Marx, despite having many children, especially when women have this attitude.

There were, of course, substantive differences between Robert Kurz and myself. At the beginning of our relationship, these mainly concerned feminism, the subject and ideology (see above). A controversial issue in the early 1990s was the assessment of racism and anti-Semitism, which were making waves at that time. There were tendencies in Robert Kurz to say that these were to be understood as a symptom of the process of the decay of capitalism; for me, on the other hand, it was equally important to see such tendencies in a country-specific context, i.e. as far as Germany was concerned: the Nazi rule and the Holocaust had to be taken into account. I then wrote an article about this in Krisis: “The Metamorphoses of the Teutonic Yuppie,” in which I also criticized the positions of Krisis. While Kurz accepted and appreciated this article and later, for example in the “Black Book,” classified Germany’s specificity in the process of modernization with regard to the Holocaust, there were fierce defensive reactions against this text in the rest of Krisis. Today, after the split, the Krisis homepage is full of texts that target precisely the kind of structural anti-Semitism that had been fiercely contested in the discussion of the text at the time. Of course, there is no written evidence of this dispute. But the discussion with me at that time is not mentioned at all, and it seems as if people had always held this view.

In this context, one area of conflict in the relationship between Kurz and myself was the confrontation with the so-called anti-Germans in the first half of the 2000s. Kurz was very angry about their bellicose attitude and then broke with all sorts of journals in which he had been publishing regularly. He then wrote a whole book about the anti-Germans; in my opinion, that would not have been necessary – two or three basic articles on the subject would have sufficed. Today I understand his agitation at that time a little better; after all, the Iraq war accomplished nothing. Many people died in the process, and it was based on lies about the weapons arsenals, as even Colin Powell admitted afterwards. Moreover, such interventions only prepared the ground for the Islamic State, as was widely reported in the press. Nevertheless, I don’t think that such an intense engagement of Robert Kurz with the “anti-Germans” would have been necessary. In order not to be confused with them – they, too, have a value-critical foundation, albeit a different one than the critique of value-dissociation (which cannot be pursued here) – a few texts would have sufficed.

Another difference between me and Kurz concerned the question of whether pre-modern societies are also fetish societies or whether fetishism refers to modern societies. Kurz took the former position, I the latter. I am also not sure that firearms play the central role in the constitutional process of capitalist patriarchy that Robert Kurz ascribes to them. There were other differences as well, not all of which I can go into here. They were just there in our life together. That’s just the way it was. We were able to deal with them, they were not so dramatic that they would have developed a centrifugal force. Once Robert Kurz said to me that he couldn’t be with a Bavarian monarchist; admittedly we both laughed heartily.

On the whole, however, we pulled together. Besides Adorno’s critical theory, Kurz was the second main pillar of the critique of value-dissociation. The critique of value-dissociation would not have existed if Kurz, as the leader of the Krisis gang, had not massively supported it – against all the resistance from within the group. Thus, in addition to the immediate practice of the value-critical men’s alliance, which was opposed to its content, this was ultimately another major cause of the Krisis split. Moreover, one must see that Kurz correctly predicted the desolate crisis situation in the world today. Today there is a lot of talk about the end of capitalism, but not so long ago Kurz was often declared crazy and not to be taken seriously.

The approach of the critique of value-dissociation is based on the incompleteness of the critique of value. To put it simply (and without taking into account individual critical statements of the EXIT! group), it places at the center of its critique only the category of labor as a social relation and a central concept of the commodity-producing society. Capitalism is to be understood as a total civilizational whole and at the same time as a particular and historical entity. This in itself represents a decisive correction to traditional Marxism, which is centered on surplus value and its distribution/appropriation. For your part, you have developed the thesis that the assertion of the value dynamic is necessarily accompanied by a “dissociation” of reproductive labor and of the “femininity” traditionally associated with this labor. Could you explain the central elements of this thesis and its unfolding?

In doing so, I assume that it is not only value as an automatic subject that constitutes the totality, but that equal account must be taken of the “fact” that in capitalism there are also reproductive activities that are primarily carried out by women. In this context, “value-dissociation” essentially means that female-determined reproductive activities, as well as the feelings, characteristics and attitudes associated with them (sensuality, emotionality, caring, etc.) are dissociated from value/surplus value. Female reproductive activities in capitalism thus have a different character than abstract labor, which is why they cannot be easily subsumed under this concept; it is a side of capitalist society that cannot be grasped by the Marxian conceptual system. This side relates to value/surplus value, necessarily belongs to it, but on the other hand it is outside of it and is therefore its precondition. (Surplus) value and dissociation are thus in a dialectical relationship. The one cannot be derived from the other, but both emerge from each other. In this sense, value-dissociation can also be understood as a metalogy that transcends the internal economic categories.

The categories of political economy, however, are not sufficient in another respect; the dissociation of value must also be understood as a specific socio-psychological relationship. Certain inferior qualities (sensuality, emotionality, weakness of character, and the like) are dissociated from the male subject and projected onto the woman. Such gender-specific attributions essentially characterize the symbolic order of capitalist patriarchy. Thus, beyond the moment of material reproduction, both the socio-psychological and the cultural-symbolic dimensions of capitalist gender relations must be taken into account. It is precisely on these levels that capitalist patriarchy reveals itself as a social totality. However, in the case of value-dissociation, understood as a basic social context, it is crucial that it is not a matter of a rigid structure, as in some sociological structural models, but of a process.

It can be assumed that a contradiction of substance (products) and form (value) is, in a sense, the law of crisis theory, which ultimately leads to crises of reproduction and the disintegration/collapse of capitalism. Schematically speaking, the mass of value per individual product becomes smaller and smaller. The result is an abundance of products while the total mass of value decreases. The decisive factor here is the development of productive power, which in turn is related to the formation and application of (natural) science. With the microelectronic revolution (culminating today in “Industry 4.0”), in contrast to the Fordist era, in which the production of relative surplus-value was compensated by the additional need for labor to generate surplus value, abstract labor is now becoming obsolete. The result is a devaluation of value and a collapse of the (surplus) value relation. Robert Kurz wrote as early as 1986 that this collapse should not be thought of as a single event, even though sudden collapses, e.g. bank failures, mass bankruptcies, will certainly be part of it, but rather as a historical process, a whole epoch, perhaps lasting several decades, in which the capitalist world economy will no longer be able to escape from the maelstrom of crisis and devaluation processes, swelling mass unemployment, and so on. Today, it has long since become clear that the very impossibility of making profits through the extraction of surplus value, mediated by this process, has led not only to a shift to the speculative level, but also the decline of capitalism.

This structure and dynamic, however, must now be modified according to the critique of value-dissociation. Dissociation is not a static moment in contrast to the dynamic moment of the logic of value, but is itself at the same time dialectically upstream of it and makes the moving contradiction possible in the first place, which is why a moving logic of value-dissociation must also be assumed. Dissociation is thus deeply involved in the elimination of living labor. In the process, it has also changed itself.

Especially in the natural sciences, whose application to the production process constitutes the development of productive power in capitalism in the first place, but also in the development of labor science, which is concerned with the optimal increase in efficiency and rational organization of the production process (keyword Taylorism), a dissociation of the feminine and corresponding images of women were almost the silent socio-psychological prerequisite of their existence, which also finds its expression on the symbolic-cultural level (women are less rational, worse at mathematics and the natural sciences than men, etc.). But it is not only in scientific, philosophical, theological, etc. discourses since modernity that a dissociation of the feminine can be observed. Rather, this classification was realized and materialized in the Fordist phase itself, which was conditioned by the dissociation of the feminine, in that the man now became the breadwinner of the family and the woman the housewife in the enforced nuclear family, at least according to the ideal. The more social relations became objectified, the more a hierarchical gender dichotomy took hold. This dissociation of the feminine is a precondition for the development of the productive forces, which first establishes capitalist patriarchy with its “moving contradiction” and as such first brings about its development as a decisive condition for the production of relative surplus value, and that the gap between material wealth and the form of value finally widens more and more. From the point of view of historical processes, objectification and the formation of hierarchical gender relations are mutually dependent and not contradictory. Such a dissociation of the feminine as a prerequisite for the development of productive power ultimately led to the microelectronic revolution, which made not only abstract labor, but also classical-modern gender norms and the housewife obsolete.

From an economic point of view, the expansion of reproductive, caring and nurturing activities, which used to be carried out privately, and which have now been transferred to the professional sphere, is a component of the crisis, since the mass of surplus value has to be redistributed in order to finance them; however, in the context of moving contradiction and a capitalism that has reached its limits, these redistributive possibilities no longer exist. Thus, there is also a reproductive deficit when women can no longer carry out such activities because they are doubly burdened, i.e. they are equally responsible for family and work. Professionally performed care and welfare activities also reach qualitative limits, since they are largely contrary to considerations of efficiency, even though they often end up professionally in the care sector or similar services. In principle, women today are expected to take on all kinds of work, including work that has traditionally had a masculine connotation, even though they are still responsible for care work, including in the private sphere.

Dissociation has thus by no means disappeared, which is also reflected, for example, in women’s lower earning potentials and opportunities for advancement. It should be emphasized that value-dissociation is not located in the split spheres of private and public, with women assigned to the private sphere and men to the public sphere (politics, economy, science, etc.). Rather, value-dissociation runs through all levels and spheres, including those of the public sphere; it forms the basic structuring context of society as a whole. This is shown, among other things, by the fact that women often earn less than men, even though they do the same work and are on average better educated than men today.

On the other hand, when abstract labor becomes obsolete, there are also tendencies toward the “housewifification” of men. The patriarchy becomes feral when the institutions of family and gainful employment erode in the face of increasing tendencies towards crisis and impoverishment, without patriarchal structures and hierarchies having fundamentally disappeared. Today, women are forced to work just to survive. In the slums of the so-called Third World, it is women who initiate self-help groups and become crisis managers. At the same time, however, they are expected to take over the functions of “rubble women” [Trümmerfrauen] in the commanding heights of the economy and politics in this country [Germany], when the cart is stuck in the mud in the fundamental crisis.

The dissociation of value as a historical-dynamic basic structuring context combined with the development of productive forces based on it thus undermines its own foundation, the caring activities performed in the private sphere. The central point here is that the changes – not only in gender relations, but in social relations as a whole – must be understood in terms of the mechanisms and structures of value-dissociation in their own historical dynamics and not, as has already been said, in terms of “value” alone.

Theoretically, then, the hierarchical gender relationship is thus limited to modernity and postmodernity. This does not mean that this relationship does not have a pre-modern history, but under capitalism it took on a completely new quality. Women were now supposed to be primarily responsible for the less valued private sphere, while men were supposed to be responsible for the capitalist sphere of production and the public sphere. This contradicts views that see capitalist-patriarchal gender relations as a pre-capitalist vestige. For example, the nuclear family as we know it did not emerge until the eighteenth century, and public and private spheres as we know them did not develop until the modern era.

The critique of value-dissociation does not simply assume that a critique of value is inadequate; rather, it raises this critique to an entirely new level of quality.

In addition, your theory of value-dissociation has engaged with the discourses of difference that were widespread in the 1980’s and 90’s, coming from feminist critique. This engagement had important implications for the qualitative determination of your own theory, which then defines itself as a “realist dialectic” and configures a “broken totality.” How does the critique of value-dissociation assess these discourses of difference? How does it critique these discourses and how does it enrich itself through this critique?

In order to do that, I have to say something about the history of feminism/feminist theory in Germany since 1968. First of all, the 1970s were about the connection between Marxism and feminism. How can the oppression of women be theoretically integrated into a workers’ movement Marxism? Then, in the early 1980s, it was mostly about making the connection between capitalism, women’s oppression, the destruction of nature, and colonization/the Third World. Then in the second half of the 1980s, the discourse on women’s differences began. The white women’s movement was accused by black women, Latinas, lesbians, etc. of stereotyping them and making the white woman’s position as housewife the standard for theorizing. This discourse overlapped with one that assumed a multiplicity of life trajectories, individualization tendencies, etc. in the Western industrialized countries against the background of welfare state security. It was now assumed that “the woman” (but also the man) did not exist, but that there were “many” different shades of these two genders. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, Marx became passé in feminism. Now a culturalist deconstructivism in the sense of Judith Butler reared its head and became the feminist master theory. Materialist theory was mega-out, culturalist, poststructuralist theory mega-in. It was no longer about the gender division of labor, for example, but about how gender is discursively produced. Gender now no longer seemed to be something real, fixed, but discursively negotiable and, in a vulgar constructivist understanding of the left milieu, freely selectable. Cultural relativist theories moved in. Gender relations were supposed to differ fundamentally from culture to culture, and a universal view of them was taboo. Language, discourse, and culture were, so to speak, substitutes for an old materialist understanding of totality.

Instead, the critique of value attempted to explain the collapse of the Eastern bloc itself in Marxist terms, beyond an old workers’ movement Marxism, by making the category of value the center of its essays and interpreting Marx from there. By that time, I had long since landed as a feminist in the critique of value – with all the dissatisfactions I have already explained – when, in the late 1980s/early 1990s, in my preoccupation with feminist theory, not least the persecution of witches, the thought came to me: “value is the man,” and in this context I also realized that a reference to the dialectic of the Enlightenment on the part of feminist theory was unavoidable. And so it came about organically, as it were, that the previously posed questions about the connection between the domination of nature, the oppression of women, anti-Semitism and racism could be dealt with through a critique of value-dissociation. As far as differences, not only between men and women, are concerned, Adorno’s critique of the logic of identity was very illuminating for me. In contrast to the postmodernists and poststructuralists, he was not concerned with hypostatizing difference, but with respecting and looking at the individual, particular object. This was what the theory of value-dissociation was supposed to convey. By the way, it was by no means the case that the women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s was simply blind to other dimensions of inequality, such as “race”/ethnicity, and certainly not to class, and was only concerned with women’s emancipation, as was often claimed in the 1990s. It was just that at that time it did not hypostatize difference against the background of culturalist and poststructuralist views. A primarily cultural relavatist view has the consequence that existing commonalities in the oppression of women can no longer come into focus. In this respect, I did not first adopt a way of thinking about differences from a post-structuralist oriented women’s movement, because this was already there before. Nevertheless, I think that for a long time, even in Marxist theory as a whole, the importance of culture and the symbolic order has not been given enough attention. It is therefore important not to negate this level in the abstract, but to include it in the sense of a certain negation in the critique of value-dissociation, as something separate and at the same time belonging to it, similar to the psychoanalytical level.

Of the various authors in the EXIT! group, you are undoubtedly the one who has most strongly emphasized the connections between the critique of value-dissociation and the Critical Theory of the so-called first generation of the Frankfurt School. Theodor W. Adorno seems to be very important for your thinking, as some texts (The Significance of Adorno for Feminism Today, The Theory of the Sexual Dissociation and Adorno’s Critical Theory, Social Form and Concrete Totality) show. You claim his importance for feminism in general and for the critique of value-dissociation in particular. Could you tell us in what sense one can speak of the topicality of Adorno’s thought?

Adorno was not on the workers’ movement Marxist steamship, nor was he an Eastern Bloc socialist. The struggle for money was not his central point of reference; rather, he was concerned with alienation, reification and fetishism at the heart of society. The economy played only a marginal role for him. His critique of fetishism should be taken up again today in economic terms, but without adopting his primitive recourse to “exchange” as the basic form of capitalism. Instead, the moving contradiction and the abstract labor/care activity in the sense of the (surplus) value-dissociation theory are to be taken as the core of capitalist-patriarchal socialization. Adorno, in a reversal of Hegel, had already seen that the whole is the untrue and thus argued for a broken totality in order to explode the hermetic. A broken totality is indeed what we have today. At the exit of postmodernism, however, it becomes clear that this does not necessarily lead to emancipation, but to (civil) war. If differences are allowed to float freely, as poststructuralism had theoretically anticipated, this, in conjunction with processes of material impoverishment in the “collapse of modernization” (Robert Kurz), leads to barbarism. As already mentioned, however, Adorno was never abstractly concerned with differences per se; in his case, non-identity was always claimed against the background of total capitalism and its reifying thinking. The positivist thinking of difference in postmodernism, however, corresponds only laterally to a classical modernist thinking of identification and classification. In this respect, one should continue to insist on the recognition of the non-identical as a prerequisite for a different society, without, however, leaving it in abstraction, and this also means not recognizing every barbaric difference, but also not making the identical the standard. In this respect, a further developed Adorno is highly topical today. A new recourse to Lenin and a workers’ movement Marxism, as can be observed again today, is of course far removed from this and desperately tries to activate old ideas that have long since lain in their graves.

On the other hand, you have had to distance yourself from Adorno’s thinking, especially from the confusion between Adorno’s non-identical and your own concept of the “dissociated.” Could you explain this difference?

Adorno derived a critique of the logic of identity from exchange. What is decisive, however, is not simply that the common third – disregarding qualities – is the socially necessary labor time, the abstract labor, which stands, as it were, behind the equivalence form of money, but that this in turn makes it necessary to exclude what is connoted as feminine, namely “domestic work,” the sensual, emotional, non-identical, not clearly ascertainable by scientific means, and to regard it as inferior. In this way, however, the dissociation of the feminine is by no means congruent with Adorno’s non-identical. For it is precisely the “special” object of the gender relation, which is at the same time a fundamental social relation, that would itself require a “concept” on a very fundamental theoretical level; for it is significant that it is precisely this relation and “the feminine” that was regarded as a dark realm that existed precisely as a dualistic opposition to the conceptual. It would be somewhat absurd to declare half of humanity to be non-identical; nevertheless, and precisely because of this, the thought-form of the non-identical emerges from this basic structure. The thought-form of the logic of identity is thus established with value-dissociation as the socially-constituting basic structuring context, and not first with exchange or value. Dissociation is therefore not the non-identical. It is, however, the precondition for a formal and positivist way of thinking that abstracts from the particular quality of the concrete thing and any corresponding differences, contradictions, breaks, etc. becoming dominant in science and politics. However, it is crucial to start from a modified conception of the moving contradiction according to the theory of value-dissociation (see above), which ultimately leads to the obsolescence of abstract labor, but also of household activities in the modern sense. We can only speak of abstract labor when capital has begun to move on its own foundations and has taken a course within itself against the background of the logic of value-dissociation. Non-identity is that which is not absorbed in the concept, the structure. At the same time, the non-identical cannot be concretely defined from the outset, since it is itself always bound to the concrete content and to the thing in itself.

For the critique of the logic of identity from the perspective of the critique of value-dissociation, this means that the various levels and areas and the “thing” itself must not only be irreducibly related to one another, but must also be equally considered in their “inner” connection on the level of  value-dissociation as a negatively dialectical basic context of the in-itself broken social totality. In this respect, however, the critique of value-dissociation goes much further than the traditional critique of value. Since the critique of value-dissociation has always been aware of its limitations, it does not make itself absolute as an overarching meta-level, but knows exactly how to acknowledge the “truth” of other, particular levels and areas as well. For example, it must acknowledge the socio-psychological and psychoanalytical dimension, which it cannot theoretically grasp because of its necessarily high level of abstraction. In Adorno’s case, “woman” is not the non-identical, but this is only established through exchange; the dissociation of the feminine merely ekes out a descriptive existence, it has neither a categorical status nor is it the non-identical.

Incidentally, in accordance with such a certain critique of the logic of identity, one must not take a linear view when analyzing the capitalist-patriarchal development in the different regions of the world. This development has not taken place in the same way in all societies, up to and including (formerly) gender-symmetrical societies that have not yet completely adopted modern gender relations; however, it must also take into account differently knitted patriarchal relations that have been superimposed by modern Western, objectified patriarchy in the course of the development of the world market, without having completely lost their distinctiveness.

Another reference figure in your thinking is undoubtedly Karl Marx. I would like to ask a few questions about this figure: What are the main theoretical challenges for Marx-inspired thought? This question does not refer to an academic Marxism, but a Marxism that understands itself as a contemporary radical critique of capitalism.

Marx is, of course, the classic of the radical critique of capitalism, who showed that capitalism must collapse not for moral reasons but because of its objective dynamics, without, however, denying the subjective level. Individuals repeatedly generate the fetishistic dynamic, which becomes independent of them and thus ultimately dominates them. It is, of course, the fundamental dimension of value-dissociation in its contradictory complexity that poses the greatest challenge, since, as I have said, it cannot be grasped in simple economistic terms. Marx was a child of his time. One cannot simply say that we need to work out this and that about Marx and then his theory will be perfect and we will have worked him out correctly – in the sense of what he lacked. The dynamics of the moving contradiction has led to the fact that in its historical realization, at the latest in the 4th Industrial Revolution, dimensions of capitalism become visible that Marx himself did not yet have systematically on his radar: specifically racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Gypsyism, and the destruction of nature. A merely androcentric theory of the moving contradiction, a dynamic that has long concealed these repressions that are becoming visible today, must deal with this.

There are many things in Marx’s work that still need to be worked out: for example, the problem of the relationship between productive and unproductive labor, the rate of profit, the problem of price transformation, etc., which would need to be examined even more closely than in Robert Kurz’s Geld ohne Wert. And all this has to be thought about. However, I do not believe that a solution to the problem of a value-dissociation society as a fragmented totality can be found by focusing only on such problems. It’s necessary to work on both, although I don’t think it’s worthwhile to cram Marx indefinitely and still aspire to reconstruct him into old age when you have snow-white hair. It cannot just be a Marx-philological approach. Today, we have long been aware of its limitations, which is why one cannot promise oneself access to the ultimate truth from a meticulous reading of Marx. The crucial and difficult point here is that, in terms of the critique of value-dissociation, the critique of (surplus) value and the critique of dissociation can neither be lumped together nor treated separately from each other. They are thus to be regarded as both separate and negatively-dialectically intertwined, but this also means that they cannot exist as a logically coercive unit.

In some of your recent texts (After Postone, Fetish Alaaf) and in reference to Geld ohne Wert by R. Kurz, you have begun to speak, in contrast to commodity fetishism, of a “fetishism of capital” as a central critical point for cogent critique of capitalism. Could you briefly explain the difference between commodity fetishism and capital fetishism?

This is, of course, a difference that is still entirely within the realm of an androcentric reading of Marx’s “Capital.” But I will first explain the difference against the background of this contrast. The chapter on the commodity fetish in Capital follows methodological individualism for didactic-methodological reasons. Abstract labor is mentioned here, but it is not systematically considered. The first 150 pages are an introduction to the understanding of capital, which is what Marx is actually concerned with. Capitalism in the narrower sense does not exist until capital has begun to stand on its own feet, that is, since the second half of the 18th century. Many interpretations of Marx assume a simple commodity form as the cell form of today’s capitalism, even though this simple commodity form never existed as a principle of socialization, not even in niche form. This is not to say that the commodity fetish chapter should simply be neglected. But Marx wants to point to the capital fetish, which only comes into effect from a higher density of socialization. Only then does the moving contradiction begin to “work” and society become truly independent vis-à-vis the individuals. This would not even be possible in a fictitious situation of simple commodity production, because here there would still be personal, not objectified domination. Within this reading – and only within this reading – the analysis of the commodity form then also has its place. In this context, Kurz criticizes not only a “methodological individualism” with regard to the commodity form (“cell form”), but also with regard to the concept of capital, the capital fetish, and a Marxian understanding that takes individual capital as the starting point. “What transcends the acting subjects and constitutes the real movement of valorization, however, is the whole of the ‘automatic subject,’ the constitutive and transcendental a priori, which only appears in individual capital, but is not categorical. Total capital alone is the self-movement of value, so to speak, a ‘breathing monster’ that confronts the actors, even though they themselves produce […] in Marx’s words, ‘self-valorizing value, a breathing monster that begins to ‘work’ as if it had ‘love’ in its body’” (GoW, p. 178). One of the central moments is the competition between the individual capitals as a necessity of mediation to the capitalist whole which is mediated in-itself. It is not possible to start from individual capital and then aggregate this level upwards.

Within the theory of value, there seems to be a certain proximity between your thinking and that of Moishe Postone, who is better known in the Ibero-American academic space. He too speaks of labor as a specifically capitalist “social relation.” What connects and what distinguishes your approach from that of the North American author?

Postone’s thinking overlaps in many respects with the old critique of value; my criticism of it, as of the old critique of value, is that he does not assume value-dissociation as a basic structuring context, but argues reductively in terms of value theory. But even within the framework of value theory, Postone knows no crisis theory. For him, it’s not a matter of abstract labor becoming obsolete, but rather he assumes a treadmill effect; when jobs are eliminated, new ones are created. This is actually illogical if one thinks the “moving contradiction” through to its logical conclusion. Moreover, labor in capitalism is not simply a “social relation” but an “abstract-material substance,” as Robert Kurz calls it. And in this respect, abstract labor is the inner bond of capitalist socialization.

In principle, the capital form is the actual starting point of an analysis of capitalism and not the commodity form, as in Postone (see above). Robert Kurz formulates this as follows: “Under the condition of this a priori whole, production is already the unity of ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ labor, in the result the unity of material product and the object of value. In social terms, only the aspect of ‘abstract’ labor, as the expenditure of human labor or life energy (nerve, muscle, brain), is ‘valid’ in ‘concrete’ labor. Thus, ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ labor do not fall apart into two separate spheres, but are aspects of the same logic, which overlaps all spheres, but allows the concrete side to be valid only as a manifestation of the (real)abstract. The product, for its part, is therefore only socially ‘valid’ as an object of representation of this real-abstract substance, as the object of value” (GoW, p. 204). Against this background, “labor” only emerged in capitalism and can and must be abolished. For Postone, on the other hand, the concept of labor is ambiguous. There are certainly passages in which he ontologizes labor. But as little as (concrete) labor can be ontologized, one must insist on an abstract-material substance of social labor, which Postone – and here he is contradictory – sees as the “creator of value,” but then determines this value as a social relation and only insofar assumes a dialectic of “concrete” and “abstract” labor.

In Postone, surplus value is primarily an emanation of value (as it is also in part in an old critique of value); in a new critique of value (of dissociation), on the other hand, it is an indispensable dynamic moment in the self-realization of value, without which abstract labor as a tautological end in itself would have no meaning and a “moving contradiction” would be impossible. It exists in Postone, but it is a secondary moment. And, of course, care activities, which are predominantly carried out by women, are not systematically considered in Postone. A care crisis in the context of a general fundamental crisis of the capitalist-patriarchal system as a whole cannot be grasped by Postone, whereby, to repeat, gender relations and the dissociation of value as a basic capitalist-patriarchal social context are not included in the care dimension.

Given theMarxist and critical-theoretical roots of your thinking, does the theory of value-dissociation have, in your opinion, the possibility of being a critical theory of the present? How do you evaluate this possibility? How do you see the relationship between theory and politics?

For a long time, the critique of value (and dissociation) with its thesis of the end of capitalism, of capitalist patriarchy, was presented by the ruling left establishment as crazy; today, the mainstream left assumes the end of capitalism, even if it is then often supposed to be saved from itself (for example, by Varoufakis). Politics is seen as the salvation, instead of seeing without blindness that it has come to its end with capitalism itself. It is merely itself the fetish administration in the form of a general will. Politically-practically, it is a matter of turning against the new fascism, but not of renouncing its androcentric-democratic roots for that reason.

In the spirit of the last question and considering your work on postmodern individualization and its theoretical reverberations, do you think that both have lost their relevance and impact due to the current deep crisis? What role have theories of individualization (difference vs. inequality) played in recent decades? What other forms and theories of subjectivation can replace them?

I think that in recent years, even in the so-called developed countries, the individualization of prosperity supported by the welfare state has turned into a self-responsible individualization of misery without a safety net or a double bottom. For a long time, the perspective of (accepted) difference corresponded to this individualization of prosperity– after all, it also corresponded to a lifestyle orientation of its own for many years. However, when the middle class threatens to fall, the inequality dimension is quickly activated and an obsolete working class and proletariat are conjured up, especially when it comes to the falling, poor, pitiful Western man. The real underclasses/“proletariats” today are formed via “race” and gender, with the “Jew” as the alleged string-puller in conspiracy theories bringing the world to the brink, and with the “Gypsy” as the alien-racial anti-social person occupying the lowest rank. To this I can only respond with my critique of value-dissociation, which has always been paradoxical in itself. I, as a theoretical individual, cannot concoct new forms of subjectivation; these must already emerge from the dynamics of value-dissociation, which, since they are fetishistic, have always known the dialectic of the logic of structure and action, with the former having the upper hand. The dynamics of the Third World and the fear of antisociality now strike back at members of the First World and the middle classes. Social AND economic inequalities must now be put on the agenda beyond a traditional class struggle thinking. “Class” in the Marxian sense is not a category that has any essential meaning in today’s decaying patriarchy. It is history. Today’s talk of workers and a proletariat that would have helped Trump and the right to power is at best a political fighting term, but in times of Industry 4.0 and a globalized world society it is not even suitable for a sociological determination of the social fabric. Social and economic inequalities can no longer be dealt with in such terms.

I would now like to come back to feminism. How do you assess the current situation within academic feminism? Even if critical economic texts are regaining space, they are sharing it with a revival of sociological discourses, which is opening up a so-called “fourth wave of feminism.” Gender studies is also still receiving a lot of attention. What do you think about this situation?

The crux of the matter is that the critique of value-dissociation is not taken seriously as a basic logic. Academic feminism does not assume a fragmented totality in a negative dialectical way, but is based on a sociological understanding of society. In Germany, an attempt has already been made at the university level to make my theory of value-dissociation explicitly sociological and political. On the other hand, there have also been efforts, especially outside the university, to incorporate central moments of the critique of value dissociation into non-university feminist theory groups. I can only mention this here without going into further detail. On the whole, the critique of value dissociation, as well as the simple critique of value, is being cut off at the university level in Germany. I hope, of course, that the critique of value-dissociation will spread beyond the long-established university and scene establishment, and that within leftist universities and leftist milieus there will be protests against entrenched organizational structures, methods, and content that move in well-trodden paths and do not want to allow anything else.

As the crisis increases the number of subjects who are monetized but do not have access to money, forms of feminism that focus on care work are also spreading: the valorization of motherhood, the rediscovery of the feminine as “the other” of capitalism, the return to communal bonds, to a certain immediacy, and so on. How are we to understand these approaches in the context of the social decomposition in which we currently find ourselves? (see above).

I have already said that value and dissociation are dialectically mediated with each other, that one emerges from the other. It also follows that the dissociated can thus be conceived as an Other, as something abstractly different from value, not as something better, as it is also conceived in some leftist and feminist approaches. In times of social decomposition, this also awakens a need for an imagined ideal world of the past. In a highly complex globalized and technologically sophisticated world, people want manageable structures, especially when living conditions become precarious and even the middle class is threatened with collapse. Then the call for women as mothers, as gentle crisis managers, becomes louder (“Mary spread out her mantle, make it a screen and protection for us,” as it says in an old Catholic hymn). As I said, women in the slums of the Third World are often crisis managers in their immediate lives, having to secure money and survival. It is completely wrong for this to be seen as emancipation in left-wing and feminist groups; rather, such crisis management tendencies can be exploited to maintain the status quo on the basis of a supposed maintenance of order. False immediacy can be costly for feminist and leftist intentions that settle into a comfort zone built on fantasies. What is ignored is the need for a planning perspective that does not simply dictate from above, as in the socialism of the Eastern bloc, but rather, formulated in terms of systems theory, places the overall system and the subsystems in an appropriate relationship to one another. Moreover, the recourse to old gender roles and the left’s turn to the communitarian correspond to new needs for normality and conformity, which in their Biedermeier-like character appear oppositional and thus provide a breeding ground for Querfront politics.

What can we learn from the women in the peripheral countries of capitalism if we want to counteract the processes of social decomposition that are coming upon us with the collapse of modernization? What do the possible differences show about the inequalities of  value-dissociation and how it develops?

It would be a complete fallacy to believe, after what has been said so far, that women in the Third World, when they are responsible for money and survival in the slums, are brave and tough and should be held up as role models. The fact that women in patriarchal capitalism have to be egg-laying mealy-mouths has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with emancipation. It is not the case that the housewife and mother in Western countries is the model of progress for the Third World as well, as was long thought; rather, in the course of the decomposition tendencies of capitalist patriarchy, the crisis existence of women in developing countries is the harbinger of things to come for women in the so-called highly developed countries as well. To be a woman in such a situation is a misfortune, not a fortune. It is true that in Germany, for example, the welfare state coffers are still somewhat larger than in the so-called Third World; however, the crisis is eating its way further and further into the European centers via Southern Europe (Greece, Spain, Italy, etc.). The further decline of the middle class will mean that women will no longer be able to afford domestic and nursing help, e.g. from Eastern Europe, as they have been able to do in the past, but will have to do these jobs themselves, taking on many additional jobs at the same time. At the same time, men no longer have the role of breadwinner and therefore do not feel responsible for their families and offspring. The institutions of family and gainful employment have long been eroding in this country too, and this will become even more pronounced in the course of Industry 4.0 and increasing robotization and abstraction.

Women are supposed to do the social work as crisis managers, so to speak, while men are supposed to be authoritarian and, in the Carl Schmittian sense, the keepers of order, one might say. The fact that there are also a few female leaders on the right is irrelevant here; it only shows that value-dissociation is a basic structuring social context in which individuals are not absorbed into the cultural patterns and women can also be or are (co-)perpetrators.

You have also made important contributions to the theory of anti-Semitism and racism as false solutions to capitalist crises. These phenomena are undoubtedly gaining new relevance in the face of the xenophobic, nationalist resurgence in Europe (AfD, Front National, Donald Trump’s election victory in the US, etc.). How can the intensification of xenophobia and racism be countered from the perspective of value-dissociation theory?

A broad anti-fascist movement is necessary in any case. But it would be completely wrong to fall into a hurrah-democratism. Because democracy itself is the womb from which anti-Semitism, antiziganism, racism and also sexism and homophobia crawl. The famous people, the demos, voted for Trump by a majority, for example. That’s why you can’t just appeal to an idealized democracy, which is itself essentially exclusion. Postcolonialist works and historical studies, for example, bear eloquent witness to this. I don’t want to deny that Obama wanted overcome these mechanisms of exclusion. But he deported more migrants than any US president before him. But he did it with a humane and democratic discourse. Trump presents himself as the wolf who cannot hold back, as the one who dares to proclaim reality in all its harshness. The state and democracy are institutions for moderating the fetishistic relations that are now going off the rails; that is why, in their impotence, they are increasingly resorting to relations of domination based on “strongmen.” Certain developments in law should not be understood as civilizational ruptures beyond democracy, but are a structural part of this process, part of the “civilizational process” itself.

This process of civilization now also brings with it corresponding forms of consciousness; a positivist view, also in science, a view that hypostatizes alleged data, facts and supposed everyday certainties. The critical accusation of “post-facticity” against Trump etc. merely refers to this basic fact. Superficially, then, it is the others who are responsible for one’s own misfortune in this “pathic projection.”

This (everyday) positivist view is by no means limited to the dominant culture. From a particular point of view, equality feminists and multicultural feminists, gays and Islamists, right-wing gays and conservative feminists, etc. are fighting each other today. The problem between Turks and Kurds has been existed for a long time, different strands of Islamism are also fighting each other, and so on. This shows today the omnipresence of a general competition resulting from the moving logic of value-dissociation. There are tendencies of a “multicultural barbarism” today, as Robert Kurz once said. Group-specific and individual identities are to be fettered in various ways, instead of seeing that they, and also the struggles for them, are the result of the capitalist-patriarchal form.

It is therefore crucial to make it clear that a view outside of this overarching level leads to barbarism. This does not mean disregarding particularities, peculiarities, or individuality, including hybrid identities, as long as one always thinks of such dimensions as liquefied at the same time.

However, all this has to be related to the value-dissociation-form as the dominant social relation, even if they do not merge into it and represent something else. In THIS sense, it would also be a matter of achieving a new universalism, beyond the universalism of the Enlightenment, which already has exclusion inherent in itself.

Even in broad “anti-fascist” movements, massive imbalances can arise that reproduce what they seek to thwart. In this respect, from the perspective of the critique of value-dissociation, it is necessary to consider with whom one can ally oneself, and with whom not. There is no patent remedy for this. However, it is crucial to always maintain a reflexive distance that does not join cheap antifa impulses that are barbarically divided within themselves. In Germany, for example, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this has been the case for anti-imperialists/anti-nationals on the one side and anti-Germans on the other, although even here the fronts no longer seem so clear-cut and bizarre ideological distortions sometimes occur. But I cannot go into this here. It is necessary to assert a broad vision within an antifascist movement that is bitterly necessary. But this cannot be posed from the point of view of the critique of value-dissociation, but must be set in motion by itself; an external and voluntarist invective along the lines of value-dissociation would make no sense. A rule of thumb here is never to make oneself compatible with Querfront movements or to give them even the smallest concession. Syriza, Podemos, or even “Die Linke” in Germany, for example, which in any case only pursue system-imminent reformist goals, are by no means immune to this, as is well known. An emancipatory, value-critical perspective goes beyond this from the outset. No false compromises, even if one is then thrown back on oneself. I find particularly dangerous a perspective close to the critique of value that defends small networks, solidarity economy and decentralization, sometimes with open source and new technologies tendencies, and that has gained strength since the split of the Krisis group; this includes the return of old-new tendencies that rely on technology from an apology of progress that expects – in the line of traditional Marxism – that all problems will be solved in the future, as happens in accelerationism and speculative realism, which puts its hopes in an extraterrestrial mission to conquer other planets.

Note: “GoW” is “Geld ohne Wert” [Money without Value], Horleman-Verlag Berlin, 2012.

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[1] TN: APO, short for Außerparlamentarische Opposition, or extra-parliamentary opposition, was a political protest movement in West Germany during the late 60’s and early 70’s, and formed a central part of the German student movement.

Originally published in Spanish in Constelaciones. Revista de Teoría Crítica, no. 8-9 (2017)

Declassification, Degradation, and the Renaissance of the Concept of Class

Roswitha Scholz

1. Introduction

At least since the election of Trump and the rise of AfD, Pegida, etc., the question of class is on everyone’s lips again. It is precisely in the industrial wastelands that Trump was elected, mostly by industrial workers. The criticism is that the left has been too concerned with culture, women, and migrants. Class and social issues have been neglected. Since the 1980s, sociological research has focused on Ulrich Beck’s individualization thesis and on theories of milieu, subculture and lifestyle. Today, after the crash of 2008 and what followed, there is a return to “class” – and by no means only in traditional Marxist circles – after the middle class was brought to the fore in the noughties (not least as a result of Hartz IV). In the meantime, the literature on the topic of “classes” has really mushroomed. In my presentation I will deal with the approach of Oliver Nachtwey’s “Descent Society” from a value-critical point of view on the one hand, which reflects recent developments against the background of Ulrich Beck’s concept, which was hegemonic in the 1980s and 1990s, and, on the other hand, with the booklet “Middle Myth” by Ulf Kadritzke, who, as the title suggests, himself still vehemently questions the reckoning of the middle (which was the very foundation of Beck) and determines capitalist society as a class society par excellence. These books reflect the basic tenor of today’s debate, which is why Kadritzke, as the seemingly stupid one, should also be given a due, relatively brief place here.

2. Class and the Middle in Value-Critical Contexts

For the first time, Kurz / Lohoff deal critically with the so-called class question in post-Fordism in the text “The Class Struggle Fetish.” According to them, class struggle Marxism does not penetrate to the critique of the commodity fetish as the basic constituent of capitalism. In Fordist socialization, class antagonism as the potential of a transformation of capitalism comes to its end. Through the development of artificial intelligence, computer technology, corresponding expert systems, etc., human labor is substituted on a large scale for the first time in history: “The deepest contradiction of the capital relation consists precisely in the fact that, on the one hand, it binds social reproduction into the form of value and thus chains it to the process of spending abstract labor of immediate producers, but on the other hand, in the competitive mediation, it also annuls these immediate producers in the process of the scientification of labor” (Kurz/Lohoff 1989: 34). In doing so, they argue for the formation of an “anticlass.” Its place is seen in the developed areas of the scientification process, in which “wage-dependents today seek to decouple themselves from subsumption under abstract labor through the negation of family reproduction (‘family refusal’), part-time work, conscious exploitation of welfare state networks, etc., in open opposition to the traditional workers’ movement as well as to ‘alternative’ reactionaries of the crude ‘self-maker’ and self-exploitation scene” (ibid.: 39f). As is well known, the “anticlass” propagated here has not yet formed. Instead, precarious self-entrepreneurship constitutes the “new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski/Chiapello). Individuals have to be flexible under the threat of Hartz IV while being forced to work at the same time. Old anti-authoritarian impulses of the 1968 movement, which in my impression still appear in the Kurz/Lohoff text, now become a crisis-management imperative.

Such developments are reflected in the 2004 text “The Decline of the Middle Class” (Kurz 2004). In it, Kurz first refers to the famous Kautsky-Bernstein debate. Orthodox Marxists in the 19th century initially assumed that the old middle class, which had modest means of production (workshops, stores, etc.), would be absorbed by competition from large enterprises and that this petty-bourgeois class would eventually be absorbed into the proletariat. The discussion between Bernstein and Kautsky centered on the “new middle class” (as opposed to the “old”), which was associated with an increasing scientization of production. It involved “functionaries of capitalist development in all spheres of life,” i.e., administration, law, media publicity, engineering, health care, etc. (ibid.: 51). Kautsky argued that the new middle classes belonged to the proletariat. Bernstein, on the other hand, discovered a consolidation of capitalism and took a reformist standpoint. Education and knowledge, not capital ownership or ownership of the means of production, were the resources of these strata, he argued, which grew more and more in the course of the 20th century, especially with the implementation of Fordism and thus of the leisure industry. “In this context,” Kurz says, “a momentous concept emerged, namely that of ‘human capital.’ White-collar workers, engineers, marketing specialists or human resource planners, self-employed doctors, therapists or lawyers, and teachers, scientists and social workers paid by the state ‘are’ capital in two ways under certain circumstances: On the one hand, because of their own qualifications, they behave strategically, in a guiding or organizing manner in relation to the labor of other people in the sense of capital utilization; on the other hand, they partly relate (especially as self-employed or managerial employees) to their own qualifications and thus to themselves as ‘human capital,” like a capitalist, in the sense of ‘self-exploitation’ (ibid.: 52). The 68er movement was also a result of this development in the postwar period.

At the same time, the first signs of decline in the new crisis epoch, which had been manifest since the 1980s, were already becoming apparent. Initially, the microelectronic revolution primarily affected the reproduction sector; gradually, however, it extended to the middle classes or new middle classes. The crisis of industrial exploitation was accompanied by the financial crisis of the (social) state. Funds for education, culture, social welfare, health care, etc. were successively cut and eliminated. Qualified activities were also increasingly rationalized away in large companies. In the course of the crash of the “new economy,” even high-tech specialists were laid off.

Kurz sees here that the obsolescence of the old industrial worker not only gives rise to potentials for emancipation, but also calls into question the new middle classes (together with the old ones) in post-Fordism: “Through privatization and outsourcing, the ‘human capital’ of qualification is also devalued within employment and degraded in status. Intellectual day laborers, cheap laborers and misery entrepreneurs as ‘freelancers’ in the media, private universities, law firms or private clinics are no longer the exception but the rule. Nevertheless, even Kautsky is not right in the end. For the new middle class is crashing, but not into the classical industrial proletariat of the immediate producers, who have become a slowly dwindling minority.

Paradoxically, the “proletarianization” of the qualified strata is connected with the “de-proletarianization” of production” (ibid.: 54). The division between rich and poor can no longer be explained today with the capitalist-worker class opposition and the power of disposal over the means of production. Instead, social positions today become precarious in the derived areas of production, circulation and distribution, which are still irregular and unsecured according to legal criteria. These include the long-term unemployed, low-wage workers qua outsourcing (also in the centers), recipients of state transfer payments, up to street vendors, waste collectors, etc.

Capital, according to Kurz, has become more anonymous today in an increasingly socialized society, it includes joint-stock companies, state apparatuses, infrastructures, and so on. Today, the substance of capital is gradually melting away, less and less real surplus value is being created, capital is fleeing into the financial markets, thus creating financial bubbles that are threatening to burst or have already burst (the 2008 crash being the high point so far). The middle classes are now threatened with descent/crash. “The ‘independent means of production’ is shrinking down under the skin of the individuals: everyone is now becoming their own ‘human capital,’ even if this is just the naked body. An immediate relationship emerges between atomized individuals and the economy of value, which reproduces itself only simulatively through deficits and financial bubbles” (ibid.: 55).

3. The Descent Society

Oliver Nachtwey has written a book that has received much attention – not only on the left: “The Descent Society. On Rebellion in “Regressive Modernity” (Nachtwey 2017). Together with Ulrich Beck, he starts out from the so-called elevator effect. According to this, the entire society was driven one floor higher. Social differences remained, but there was a collective increase in income, education, law, science, and mass consumption. This was the prerequisite for individualization processes and a diversification of lifestyles. Upward mobility for working-class children had increased, with traditional class milieus dissolving and distance from the family of origin growing. Nachtwey subsumes this phase under the term “social modernity.” Since the 1990s, however, we have been living in “regressive modernity,” meaning that incomes, education, mass consumption, etc. are shrinking. Nachtwey prefers the image of the “escalator” instead of the image of the elevator. “Some of the affluent have already reached the next floor on the escalator … For most of those who have not yet reached the top floor, the direction of travel is now changing. While it was going up for a long time, they are now going down.” But that also means that people now have to struggle to maintain the level they have reached. “Individual descents or crashes have not yet become a mass phenomenon … Viewed collectively, however, things are going downhill again for employees” (ibid.: 127).

Nachtwey sees the background for such tendencies in economic developments. After the Second World War, there was economic growth of about 4% per year until the 1970s, but in the last boom years in Germany this was only 1.5 – 1.8%. Due to the high growth rates, there was also the chance for redistribution, and new consumer goods were produced (washing machines, refrigerators etc.). Mass consumption became possible. Nachtwey sees the background for the decline in growth in a fall in the rate of profit (although he does not consider theoretical discussions on the rate of profit to be very important) and in an over-accumulation crisis. As rationalization measures reduce the surplus value created compared to the capital employed, companies go to the financial markets.

Nachtwey provides empirical evidence for net incomes, among other things, that they have fallen since the early 1990s (even if there was an outlier in 2005, for example), although it is necessary to differentiate between different industries and companies. They are twice as high in the financial sector as in the restaurant industry or temporary work. Since then, the rich have been getting richer and the poor poorer, which is the central characteristic of the descent society for Nachtwey. Since 2000, descent has not increased, but it is more difficult to rise. This shows, among other things, that almost 17% of those at risk of poverty have problems heating their homes (ibid.: 128).

Precarious work, another feature of the descent society, is expanding and becoming institutionalized; the normal employment relationship (characteristic of men in social modernity) is no longer a given. Nachtwey proves with figures that marginal employment relationships (part-time work, temporary employment, solo self-employment, etc.) have increased overall. Precarious employment is particularly prevalent among poorly educated young people. There are more and more breaks in the employment biography. There are status inconsistencies, e.g., when an academic works in a cleaning crew for more than just a short time. One reason for the obsolescence is that women are working more than they once were, not only for reasons of self-fulfillment, but also because men can no longer be the sole breadwinners of the family. In the case of core workforces, which have hardly eroded in recent years and for which, in contrast to the low-skilled marginal workforces, the normal employment relationship usually applies, advancement is becoming more arduous; marginal workforces are usually assigned the unpleasant jobs. Temporary workers are paid less than internal workers even if they have the same qualifications; they are a constant reminder to the core workforce that they are at risk of relegation. Nachtwey writes: “The unemployed industrial reserve army (the unemployed) was reduced in size at the price that the underemployed (part-time work) and overemployed (low-wage workers who have to do several jobs at once) … has grown” (ibid.: 147). Services and service workers are particularly at risk of low wages, although Nachtwey still assumes an industrial service society. The share of personal services (nurses, educators, qualified personnel at the level of sales, consulting, catering) has increased.

In particular – and this has been extensively debated since the mid-2000s – the middle has been destabilized. Nachtwey counts craftsmen, traders, merchants, farmers – in other words, the old middle class – as well as civil servants, freelancers and, more recently, white-collar workers and skilled workers as part of the middle class. Nachtwey says that “the middle is polarizing. While the lower middle is at risk of falling off, the upper middle exhibits stability, yet feelings of precarity are growing in it as well. This promotes a willingness to conform and a readiness for self-optimization. Competition is also growing among highly qualified workers, e.g., engineers and IT experts. In particular, people are afraid of what will become of their children. Social stabilization comes much later for many academics’ children than in previous generations. A higher level of education no longer necessarily guarantees a higher status – a self-employed lawyer is worse off than one in a renowned law firm. A media precariat is spreading among journalists. In particular, the up-and-comers of social modernity, i.e., working-class children of the lower middle, are now again at risk of falling away. In addition, there has been a fundamental devaluation of qualifications, with 40% of one cohort now graduating from high school. For men, there is a downward trend, for women an upward trend, but within given gender-specific inequalities. Women and men are now in a competition for advancement. In eastern Germany, the downward tendencies have increased more than in the west.

Nachtwey also sees tendencies toward a new underclassification, which is particularly evident in Hartz IV recipients, low-wage earners and top-up workers. This primarily affects women and migrants, who work in call centers, the food industry, the cleaning and care sector, and retail, for example. Nachtwey’s main thesis here is that “In a very contradictory way, at least, the refutation of Marx has been refuted. Indeed, in a broad sense, class society in the Marxian sense has only emerged today. For Marx, class is a relational concept: the exclusion of ownership of the means of production implies a fundamental asymmetry of power and distinguishes workers from capitalists … Seen in this light, Marx’s concept of class is certainly relevant again today, for never before have more people been in wage-dependent employment, primarily because they do not own the means of production … At the international level, social differences between nations have … diminished, but within states they are increasing immensely. Nevertheless, there can be no talk of a dichotomous class society. The importance of the middle classes is great despite the descents” (ibid.: 171 ff.) Here Nachtwey complements Marx with Weber, according to whom class situations are primarily “related to property and employment situations”; with Weber, resources, market opportunities and the way of life can thus be included. Nachtwey thus uses class and stratum synonymously. As middle and upper classes again insist more on themselves, according to him, a “ständisches Prinzip” also returns, in that distinctions about degrees, nutrition, culture are again emphasized more. Poverty and wealth are also increasingly inherited again.

In this context, Nachtwey does not speak of “classes in the sense of homogeneous life situations” from which interests can be formulated, because “the new class relations are fragmented and complicated … The salaried teacher who is laid off during the summer vacations has more in common in some dimensions with the qualified temporary worker than with the civil servant senior teacher … In terms of their job requirements and their lifestyles, however, they differ considerably. Below the classes of asset owners, top managers, etc., there is a growing highly qualified service class, which in turn does not have the same security prospects” (ibid.: 174 f.).

As far as the inequality dimensions of “race” and gender are concerned, Nachtwey comes to the following conclusion: “While higher up the hierarchy one can observe increased equality of opportunity and a reduction in the horizontal disparities of men and women as well as migrants, at the other end of the ladder various dimensions of class disparities accumulate. Women are the most discriminated against, and horizontal disparities are the most pronounced. A female manager has a completely different chance of equality than a female migrant cleaner; in short, gender and ethnicity merge at the bottom of the descent society into a conglomerate of mechanisms of oppression and exploitation” (ibid.: 177).

Nachtwey sees Pegida and AfD as an expression of this rebellion, in which outsiders and a middle class threatened by relegation are gathering. Together with Honneth, he assumes a “savagery of social conflict,” which also speaks of a “crisis of representation,” which means that the political position of the parties can no longer be relied upon. According to Nachtwey, a lack of solidarity as a result of processes of singling out combined with a struggle for status, whereby, as one moves down the escalator, one has to make an effort to maintain one’s status, thus leads to a “market-conformist extremism.” AfD voters and Pegida supporters are not concerned with the expansion of the welfare state, but they are definitely market believers and blame their fears on migrants, etc. (cf. ibid.: 218).

I think that Nachtwey phenomenologically paints a reasonably accurate picture of social inequalities since the 1990s in their contradictions and dislocations. It is all the more surprising that he again makes the commonplace of class society, class antagonism, and ownership of the means of production his overarching framework for doing so. He goes so far as to claim that class society is only coming true today. What is interesting about Nachtwey in this context is that he does not speak of service society, but of an industrial service society. The basic tendency that capitalism necessarily tears itself away from production and becomes more virtual is perhaps meant to be understated in this way; it is thus suggested that production and the worker are still the basis of capital. The anonymity of capital is basically an alien idea for him, that today it has just taken the form of joint-stock companies, state apparatuses, infrastructures. The social structure of inequality, which no longer fits into the old pigeonholes, is to be imprisoned in old crude explanatory patterns, regardless of the new quality, even if they contradict these in their own description. In his view, all wage earners are workers, while the superfluous and the precarious belong to the reserve army, i.e. he remains within the interpretive framework of labor society. The basic tendency that abstract labor is becoming obsolete does not play a role for him, or he leaves it open whether digitization in the course of Industry 4.0 will lead to a corresponding thinning out.

Otherwise, Nachtwey, who is an economic sociologist, refers to Marx and works with Marxian concepts (accumulation, M-C-M’, etc.). The central category for him is the fall in the rate of profit – I will not go into a special discussion here as to whether or not this is true. Nachtwey sees that another financial crash is imminent, but does not penetrate to the fetishism of capitalism and that it undermines its own preconditions, which leads to the obsolescence of abstract labor, to financialization and to the bubble economy. Against this background, however, the development from social to repressive modernity would have to be considered, which has descent tendencies as its central content (assuming one wants to make this phase division); instead, Nachtwey remains primarily on an economic and sociological surface.

Robert Kurz writes in 2004: “The greater the income differences between rich and poor become in the context of the financial bubble economy, the more the structural differences of the classes in the structure disappear. That is why it is pointless when some ideologists of the crashing new middle class want to claim for themselves the former ‘class struggle of the proletariat’, which no longer exists. Social emancipation today demands the overcoming of the social form common to all” (Kurz 2004). In this context, Kurz states an overarching petty-bourgeois thinking that leads to barbarism. Today, this can be seen in a massive shift to the right and a “market-conformist extremism,” to speak with Nachtwey, although Kurz already stated this in 2004.

Andreas Reckwitz, in his book “The Society of Singularities” (2017), a book that also received a lot of media attention, comes out more culturally mediated/postmodern than Nachtwey, likewise in recourse and simultaneous negation of postmodernism to a new class society in the sense of Bourdieu, which is why it will not be debated again here in all its retrospect in relation to the culturalist 1980s and 1990s.

4. Myth of the Middle

Like Nachtwey, Ulf Kadritzke also wants to point out that we live in a class society today (Kadritzke 2017). He laments the focus on the middle classes in recent years and the fear that they are at risk of falling away, whereas the lower classes are no longer an issue. Kadritzke begins by noting that, despite all the differentiations in the Weimar Republic, the middle classes were placed in a class context in various approaches; he speaks of a wage-earning class. I will not go into this further here. Then, after the Second World War, the part of wage-dependents working not only in the production sector but for the overall reproduction process grew relevantly (I think he alludes to services). According to Kadritzke, the class point of view was now largely abandoned. Thus, in contrast to his work in the Weimar Republic, Theodor Geiger spoke in 1949 of a “class society in the melting pot.” Helmut Schelsky came to the diagnosis of a “leveled middle-class society.” According to this, class antagonism is weakened precisely by leveling, caused by increased consumer opportunities and an increase in living standards. Kadritzke states that in most studies inequalities have increased again since 1989. In sociological discourse, vertical differentiation is being pursued on the one hand, but on the other hand, there is an even more intense debate about the middle and its vulnerability to fall, with the assumption that the majority belongs to the middle. At the same time, an underclass is created, although everyone is wage-dependent. In this context, he also criticizes Heinz Bude’s assessment that there are no common interests when, for example, precarious people look down on the lower class. The overarching class interests are thus lost from view.

He criticizes the fact that modern stratification models, in contrast to class theories, do not start from production relations. Although new lines of differentiation that went through the wage-dependent class indeed made the formulation of a common interest more difficult, according to Kadritizke, a focus nevertheless emerges with regard to the demands for fair wages, good work, social security and the struggle for the welfare state. Kadritzke thus speaks with Dörre of the “end of the integrated class society.” Different wage labor fractions are thus played off against each other (for example, the core workforce and temporary/precarious workers). This is an expression of the “modified, but by no means ‘new relations of production’ with which the social movements have always had to deal” (ibid.: 75). Furthermore, he writes: “The dividing lines between workers and the majority of white-collar workers have long since faded; far more important is the differentiating view of the role of gender and milieu, of habitus and ways of life, which are influenced by present changes AND by the past” (ibid.: 77, emphasis in original). In addition to gender, this should include gays and refugees. He notes this, at least in an endnote, because poverty, for instance, is intertwined with gender (cf. ibid.: 94, note 55). Thus, he argues for “grasping the socioeconomic dimension of modern class society …even if questions remain unanswered. Working on this involves the use of new, mediating categories if one wants to grasp the historical-political and cultural, gender- and occupation-specific manifestations of concrete class relations and the milieus, some of which differ dramatically” (ibid.: 8). Kadritzke claims that talk of the middle “works toward the bourgeoisie of contemporary society” (ibid.: 81).

In Kadritzke’s opinion, the class concept is bent until it fits into the present time. It does not really need to be mentioned that Kadritzke has nothing to do with a fetish critique. With him, there is nothing going on behind people’s backs; his considerations take place solely within a class sociologism. Economic relations and the processual contradiction, the melting of the surplus value mass combined with a development of productive forces (microelectronic revolution, Industry 4.0), the de-substantialization of capital, the obsolescence of abstract labor, financialization and the formation of bubbles, which today culminate in the fundamental crisis, have no meaning for him. History as a capitalist process does not exist for him; capitalism is always the same. Changes occur only externally; he cannot imagine an end of capitalism. Nachtwey, on the other hand, at least includes economic and social changes and also gives a place to the middle, even if he then strangely defines today’s society as a class society. Race and gender are included only externally in both. Both from a perspective that Ulrich Beck wants to push beyond himself and from a traditional Marxist class perspective, allowing for major distortions, one ultimately comes down rather vulgarly to the good old class perspective, disregarding the whole false past suspension of the class problem that took place in “real existing socialism.” One does not care about that.

It is particularly hypocritical when Kadritzke today presents the class problem in the wake of the labor movement as a blanket partisanship for the poor and weak. Thus Kronauer writes with regard to the old workers’ movement: “(The) trade union and political organizations of the workers as well as the institutions of self-help (were) based primarily on the skilled workers. The unskilled, on the other hand, were underrepresented or not represented at all as risk factors (as in the case of self-help). However, those who had permanently dropped out of the work process or who at best still found work occasionally had no place in that milieu from the outset. They no longer represented a power factor in the struggle of the social classes and were excluded in two respects: from bourgeois society anyway, but also from the ‘counter-society’ of the organized labor movement” (Kronauer 2002: 86 f.). Kadritzke’s view, by the way, could thus also feed a structural anti-Semitism by making personalizations possible again. There are all kinds of contradictions in Kadritzke’s work: on the one hand, the middle classes are supposed to exist, but on the other hand they have always been negated in his understanding of class society.

5. Value Dissociation as a Social Form Principle, Class, Middle Class and the Social Question Today

So far, the starting point on the topic of “class and the social question today” here has only been “value.” In conclusion, I would like to discuss what it means for this topic, if one determines not only value, but value-dissociation, as a social principle of form. According to this view, not only is (surplus) value constitutive of totality, but it is equally to be assumed that under capitalism there are also reproductive activities that are primarily performed by women. Thus, value-dissociation means in essence that certain reproductive activities, but also related feelings (sensuality, emotionality, caring activities, and the like) are separated from value/surplus-value and abstract labor. Female reproductive activities thus have a different character from abstract labor, which is why they cannot be subsumed without circumstance under the term “labor”; it is a side of capitalist society that cannot be captured by the Marxian conceptual toolkit. Value and dissociation stand in a dialectical relation to each other. One cannot be derived from the other; rather, the two emerge apart. In this respect, the value-dissociation can also be understood as a metalogy that transcends the capitalist internal categories. In this context, the cultural-symbolic and psychosocial side of this value-dissociation must also be taken into account in order to grasp the social whole, but I will not go into this in detail here.

The “fundamental critique of value” now assumes with Marx that a contradiction of substance (commodities) and form (value) is, in crisis theory, ultimately something like the law that leads to crises of reproduction and the disintegration/collapse of capitalism. Schematically expressed, the mass of value per single product becomes smaller and smaller. The decisive factor here is the development of productive power, which in turn is closely related to the formation and application of (natural) science in the context of the overall capitalist context. With the microelectronic revolution and today, Industry 4.0, abstract labor is increasingly becoming obsolete. There is a devaluation of value and ultimately a collapse of the value relation, with Robert Kurz writing as early as 1986 that “one must not imagine the collapse as a one-time act (although sudden collapses and collapses, e.g. bank crashes, mass bankruptcies, etc., will certainly be part of it), but a historical process, a whole epoch of perhaps several decades, in which the capitalist world economy cannot get out of the maelstrom of crisis and devaluation processes, swelling mass unemployment and the like” (Kurz: 1986, on: exit-online.org). Today, it has long since become clear that not only the very impossibility of achieving returns through the extraction of surplus value, mediated by this process, has led to a softening at the speculative level, but that the overall dynamic culminating in it is actually leading to the decay of capitalism. This structure and dynamic must now be decisively modified with respect to the critique of value-dissociation. The “dissociation” is not, as it might appear, a static quantity, while the value logic represents the dynamic moment, but it is in a dialectical way also upstream of it and makes this dialectical process possible in the first place, which is why a processive value-dissociation logic must also be assumed. The dissociation is thus deeply involved in the elimination of living labor. In the process, it also changes itself in the historical process. Today, the housewife-nurturer model that was characteristic of the Fordist phase has long since dissolved. Today, women must stand their ground in gainful employment, although they are still primarily responsible for reproductive activities. Despite better educational qualifications, they earn less than men and have fewer opportunities for advancement. For men, this results in status inconsistencies because they no longer play the role of family breadwinner and are themselves exposed to precarious employment conditions. At the same time, care activities that are performed professionally today are, in Marx’s terms, dead costs; they do not generate surplus value, but are rather sponsored by the state from a redistribution of surplus value, which today, however, can be skimmed off less. Patriarchy is running wild today as the institutions of family and gainful employment erode in the face of increasing tendencies toward economic pauperization. The principle of surplus value, which goes hand in hand with the striving for a constant increase in money, leads to competition and the desire to be better than others. In this context, the achievement principle has primarily male connotations. Thus, Frigga Haug, referring to the symbolic gender order in capitalism, writes: “The man … is hero and laborer … The idea of competition as distinction and identity formation also determines notions of the polity in the history of Western social theory” (Haug 1996: 146). It is the dynamic mediated by surplus value that the achievement principle has thus always been inherent in and that must be thought together with the dissociation of the feminine.

Here, the problem of capital-productive labor is crucial for the crisis process. At the level of individual capitals, unproductive labor can also be profitable, for example in the form of an outsourced accounting firm. As mentioned, this also applies to professional care activities, although women cannot simply be subsumed under these activities, but must be available everywhere from an exploitation point of view. In this context, the unproductive costs, as mentioned earlier, are mostly borne by the state, which finances qua taxes what would be too costly for companies (infrastructure, highways, education, etc.). (Because the state itself has less money today, such areas were to be partially privatized in recent decades).

It is obvious that Fordism and state-interventionist Keynesianism corresponded with the leveled middle-class society in Schelsky’s sense. State activity, expansion and the sponsorship of services were mutually conditional. Thus, in contrast to the classical petty bourgeoisie, new middle classes emerged in administration, the media public sphere, health and education, etc., and student numbers rose.

Since the 1970s, the microelectronic revolution has made large amounts of labor superfluous. This led to a crisis of real utilization. The inflation of fictitious capital is a consequence of this, which was first unleashed in the crash of 2008. Such tendencies are at the expense of the welfare state, but also at the expense of e.g. bankers, high-tech specialists, insurance employees. After the financial crash of 2008, rescue packages had to be put together for systemically important banks to prevent them from collapsing.

From the subjective side, it is the “male”-connoted scientification and development of productive forces, which is centrally based on the dissociation of value as a basic context, which undermines the capitalist-patriarchal form of socialization, individualizes women, allows them to become employed on a large scale, etc. Precarization of the middle classes in more recent times is a consequence of these processes. Equality of opportunity, as it is always called, and opportunities for advancement, which always imply competitive intentions, were thus produced in the Fordist phase by a welfare state sponsorship. Underclasses remained and consisted primarily of guest workers and migrants. In the transition to post-Fordism since the 1970s, the leveled middle-class society was transformed into a fragmented and pluralized middle-class society, which is why sociology turned to research on milieus and lifestyles. At the latest with Hartz VI, this kind of middle-class society was accompanied by the fear of relegation, of falling into the abyss. Since then, at the latest, people have had to struggle to stay in the same place on the downward-moving escalator. As Nachtwey has shown, it is initially the lower middle classes that are at risk of descent, i.e. skilled workers, middle employees, etc. However, in the event of another financial crash and the successive implementation of Industry 4.0, occupational groups in the upper middle classes could also be massively affected, i.e., even well-saddled doctors, lawyers and the like. The segment of marginalized groups could then increase: Hartz IV recipients, the long-term unemployed and solo entrepreneurs, people lacking vocational training, single women, the disabled, migrants and the elderly could expand massively, with social benefits then being thinned out even further. Existing right-wing extremist resentments could increase massively, as right-wing extremism researcher Heitmeyer has been showing for years. Migrants without a German passport have always been marginalized, since citizenship basically presupposes marginalization.

6. Conclusion

Capitalism has always depended on social inequalities with the extreme vanishing point of exclusion and falling out, and I have not even gone into the processes of exclusion and slum existences in the so-called Third World. In capitalism, by the way, the “gypsy” is the excluded par excellence. He was always covered with special laws, even if he had, for example, a German passport; as the epitome of the lawless, superfluous, expendable in the social internal space, he is considered the “very last one,” whereby the attribution of “asociality” and “foreign racialization” are united in the Gypsy stereotype (I cannot go into this in more detail here, see Scholz 2007).

If today the concept of class is no longer valid with regard to socioeconomic inequalities, this must not lead to leaving the complexity of inequality relations to stand for themselves and to see an everyman declassification at work, in which everyone is, so to speak, equally at risk of descent/fall. It can be assumed that a class society led via a class compromise to a leveled middle class society in Fordism, which via Keynesian interventions finally led to a fragmented and pluralistic middle class society, until mediated via the microelectronic revolution, an Industry 4.0 and an inflation of the financial markets with corresponding crash developments descent tendencies and descent fears of the middle classes emerged. The background to this development is the litigious contradiction, which in turn has its basis in a contradictory dissocation of value as a basic social context. Ownership of the means of production and position in the production process are no longer suitable for determining inequality, if, as it were, the proletarian is now deproletarianized, if “the labor society has run out of work.” In this context, bourgeois stratification models say more than Marxist class definitions, which convulsively believe that they have to subsume every development under class categories. Today’s complex inequalities are thus themselves historically mediated by collective social inequalities and corresponding gradients into the present. Those who have academic parents and parents with dough still have greater educational opportunities than children of poor parents; even if they are devalued today, they are minimum requirements for maintaining status. The decisive factor here is the “Fordist bacon” that one had accumulated, which is no longer easily available to younger poor people today.

Other relations of inequality, however, which are distinguished from this, are already out of the question from the outset. It must by no means be assumed that socio-economic disparities were solely determined by class relations in the sense of the capitalist-worker antagonism, rather learned workers and their organizations tried to exclude weaker ones, the lumpenproletariat, once again, as becomes clear in the Kronauer quote above. A “native” middle class and class standpoint today is thereby decisive for the resentment against “others” who come “to us.”

It is to be assumed that the recourse to the concept of class is again used by ideologists of the middle class today because they do not want to accept the danger of descent or falling into the “lumpenbürgertum” (Claudio Magris), and because the society of descent is meanwhile actually threatening to change into a society of crash. Hence the differentiation of upper, middle, and lower middle, as in Nachtwey’s work, which has long since become blurred. This is to be countered with the class category as a concept of order; in this way, one still wants to take a place in the albeit hierarchical structure, instead of falling out of it and being the “very last”. The discussion about social inequalities has become more vulgar Marxist in recent years, one could say, in that everything is to be bent back into the class category, the more a yoga-middle increases. On the other hand, the concept of class is still understated and inadequate in the context of a downward movement of value-dissociation-society, because it is about degradation, declassification, exclusion and being superfluous.

The insistence on the generic concept of class thus expresses not least the convulsive evasion of the insight that the classical patriarchal working subject might have had its day, as Claudia von Werlhof already wrote in the early 1980s in the essay “The proletarian is dead, long live the housewife!” (even if she must otherwise indeed be reproached for life-philosophical/reactionary tendencies), namely that the man must descend from his high horse of the free and equal by eroding the normal employment relationship and by making him a woman, so to speak, in unsecured conditions, by tying an apron around him and cutting off his wiener (Werlhof 1983).

Today there are strong tendencies to subsume “race” and gender again under the class category and to declare this more or less implicitly as the main contradiction, instead of considering different dimensions of inequality in their own logic and placing them in the inherently broken context of the value dissociation. This would have to be investigated more closely not only on a socio-structural, but not least also on a socio-psychological level. This becomes clear, for example, when Demirovic titles an article: “Gender Relations and Capitalism. A Plea for a Class-Political Understanding of the Multiple Contexts of Domination” (Demirovic 2018). In this context, by the way, it was not the case that race/ethnicity and gender had ever been in the foreground in recent decades, as is often suggested or claimed today; it is downright ridiculous to declare this mainstream; rather, an individualization, milieu, and lifestyle orientation against the backdrop of the male working individual, beyond all these dimensions of inequality, were prevalent in the social sciences. I could not go into detail here on the connection between “class”/economic inequalities, “race,” gender, anti-Semitism, and antiziganism from the point of view of the value-dissociation critique, but I have done so elsewhere (Scholz 2005).

References

Demirovic, Alex: Die Geschlechterverhältnisse und der Kapitalismus. Plädoyer für ein klassenpolitisches Verständnis des multiplen Herrschaftszusammenhangs, in: Pühl, Katharina/Sauer, Birgit (eds.): Kapitalistische Gesellschaftsanalyse, Münster, 2018.

Haug, Frigga: Knabenspiele und Menschheitsarbeit. Geschlechterverhältnisse als Produktionsverhältnisse, in: Haug Frigga: Frauen-Politiken, Berlin 1996.

Kadritzke, Ulf: Mythos Mitte, Berlin 2017.

Kronauer, Martin: Exklusion, Frankfurt/Main, 2002.

Kurz, Robert: The Crisis of Exchange Value 1986 ( www.exit-online.org)

Kurz, Robert/Lohoff, Ernst: The Class Struggle Fetish 1989 ( www.exit-online.org).

Kurz, Robert: The Decline of the Middle Class 2004 (Exit! in English)

Nachtwey, Oliver: Die Abstiegsgesellschaft, Frankfurt/Main 2017.

Reckwitz, Andreas: Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten, Frankfurt/Main 2017.

Scholz, Roswitha: Homo Sacer and the Gypsies 2007 ( www.exit-online.org).

Scholz Roswitha: Überflüssigsein und Mittelschichtsangst, in: Exit! No. 5, Bad Honnef 2008.

Werlhof, Claudia: Der Proletarier ist tot. Long live the housewife? in: v. Werlhof/Mies, Maria/Bennholdt-Thomsen: Frauen die Letzte Kolonie, Hamburg, 1983.

Scholz, Roswitha: Differenzen der Krise – Krise der Differenzen, Bad Honnef 2005.

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This paper was originally presented at the Exit! seminar “Class and Social Question” on Oct. 6, 2018. Parts of the paper were taken from the article “Überflüssig sein und Mittelschichtsangst,” in Exit! No. 5, 2008. Thus, the text predates the Corona crisis.