Population Growth as a Supposedly Central Ecological Problem

Thomas Meyer

It should always make us sit up and take notice when critique of the capitalist mode of production and way of life, which leads to ever-increasing consumption of resources and is based on indifference towards people and nature, is sidestepped precisely by making the real scandal the mere number or rate of increase of the human population (of course mostly in the “developing countries” – which undoubtedly also has a racist component). The horror of “overpopulation” was already propagated in the late 18th century by Thomas R. Malthus with his law of population. Supposedly, humans reproduce in a strictly geometric manner, whereas food production can only be increased arithmetically. For Malthus, therefore, caring for the poor would be irresponsible, as it would only worsen their lot. The poor would multiply even further and everything would get worse. The poor are, so to speak, the “unfortunate ones who have drawn the blank in the great lottery of life” (Malthus 1977, 94; on Malthus, see Kurz 1999a, 138ff.; see also Mielenz 2008). Malthus’s law of population and his perfidious justification and misinterpretation of famines did not remain mere theory. When, due to capitalist economic dynamics, the need for food could not be expressed as solvent demand and resulted in hunger, bourgeois ideologues were quick to justify mass death with “overpopulation” and the “struggle for existence.” Accordingly, they also refrained from combating hunger (for example, by banning food exports from the famine region and distributing food without regard for the amount of “work” that had been performed).[1] According to this cruel capitalist logic, humanitarian aid would prevent a market adjustment of “human resources,” i.e., no new “equilibrium” would be established if the “superfluous” were allowed to live.

In the second half of the 20th century, many people saw population growth as the main obstacle to the catch-up development of so-called Third World countries. Efforts were therefore made to reduce population growth in the “Third World.” To this end, development aid was linked to appropriate measures. These measures even included testing new contraceptive methods on women in the “Third World” that had not been approved in industrialized countries (see, for example, the essays in: Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis Nr.14).

In the 1970s, when ecological destruction became a topic of public concern, Malthusian ideas were linked to ecology. The “population bomb” was apparently endangering the planet and the “limits to growth” would allegedly soon be reached.

Such arguments have persisted to this day and, against the backdrop of the crisis and the general tendency to wage war on the poor and the “superfluous,” have taken on a threatening relevance. It is not capitalism that is the focus of critique, but people themselves who are the problem. Capitalism has been internalized and taken for granted to such an extent that it and its peculiarities go as unnoticed as air pressure (especially since capitalism is usually seen only as a sinister machination of the “top 1%” or similar).

Verena Brunschweiger, for example, argued along these lines in her book Kinderfrei statt Kinderlos [Child-Free Instead of Childless], which caused a sensation in 2019.[2] Brunschweiger sees herself as a feminist and rightly criticizes the ideology of motherhood, according to which a woman can only have a fulfilling life if she brings children into the world because that supposedly corresponds to her nature. In doing so, she criticizes the discrimination against childless or “child-free” women. Brunschweiger states that an anti-feminist backlash is taking place in Western societies, not least against the backdrop of a pro-natalist offensive by autocrats and their corresponding rabble.[3]

The insidious thing about Brunschweiger’s book is the link it makes between a child-free lifestyle and climate protection: “It is unreasonable to constantly demand explanations from childless women for their decision. We need a new social norm that, conversely, expects parents to explain why they believe they have the right to further endanger all of our lives on this planet” (Brunschweiger 2019, 50). In other words, we should refrain from having children in order to reduce CO₂ emissions. She refers to various studies (such as Schrader 2019). She assumes that the sheer number of people is the problem and will ultimately lead to the ruin of this planet. The more people there are, the more flights and mountains of waste there are, so to speak. So if the birth rate is reduced so that the total number of people shrinks, the planet can recover. Not having children is also the right decision because “very few children will later, as adults, solve the plastic problem in the ocean or end the unjust distribution of resources on our planet” (Brunschweiger 2019, 130). She apparently rules out the possibility that modern consumerism could be criticized and overcome (ibid., cf. Greß 2022). Children will necessarily become as narrow-minded as their parents. So it would be better if they had never been born in the first place. Anti-natalism thus serves not only to protect women from the patriarchal prison of the family, but also to save the planet. The more people there are, the more misery there is, the more resources are consumed, and the worse off the Earth is. Consequently, she also refers to the anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar, who argued that it is morally imperative to “cause as little suffering as possible.” Therefore, according to Benatar, there is “a moral obligation […] not to reproduce” (ibid., 37 and 36). Fewer people, less suffering. A person who is not born does not suffer. It’s that simple. But it gets even better: Brunschweiger also refers to misanthropic associations such as the VHEM, the “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement,” whose followers are convinced that the biosphere would only have a chance to recover once humans had disappeared from it (ibid., 117). In an interview with the Westfalen-Blatt (March 13, 2019), Brunschweiger said that she found such a position “too extreme.” But, Brunschweiger continued, she “understands that there are people who would like that. Of course, it wouldn’t be bad for the rest of the biosphere if it could recover a little from humans and animals and plants could live in harmony. But if there were 38 million of us in Germany instead of 80 million, then one Earth would be enough. But at the moment, we need three Earths.” On the other hand, she suggests that the destruction of the environment does not depend solely on the sheer number of people; she mentions that a British “child pollutes the environment and wastes resources 30 times more than a child from sub-Saharan Africa” (Brunschweiger 2019, 112). She does not pursue this idea further, especially since she implicitly presumes that greater prosperity also means greater alignment with Western capitalist states, with the corresponding waste of resources and production of nonsense and junk.

If the aim were to pursue a progressive population policy that is not misanthropic and does not deprive people of their very existence, social circumstances would have to be taken into account, since a high number of children is hardly due to a patriarchal ideology of childbearing alone, but above all to socio-economic living conditions (in addition to education, degree of urbanization, etc., cf. Bricker/Ibbitson 2019). Heide Mertens writes: “It is not the availability of appropriate contraception, but the social circumstances in which women have children that determine the number of children they have. It is not the number of people that determines the state of the environment, nor is it solely the level of technology used to cultivate nature, but the way in which people produce” (Mertens 1994, 182).

Nowadays, however, it is not the social system that is the focus of critique, but rather the people who are made superfluous by capitalism and then flee environmental destruction and war who are seen as the real problem. With regard to the present, the “overpopulation discourse” therefore remains extremely controversial, “because, especially in the current eco-movement, it is once again recklessly assumed that, firstly, there are ‘too many’ people and, secondly, that their unbridled consumption is destroying the earth” (Wildcat No. 104, 21).

These are by no means isolated or extreme cases. “The list of reactionary nonsense caused by climate change is long,” as eco-socialist Daniel Tanuro notes (Tanuro 2015, 128). Economists have seriously proposed “supplementing the market for greenhouse gas emission rights with a market for ‘the right to procreate’ (!) in order to control the impact of demographics in developing countries on the climate” (ibid.). Economists at the London School of Economics offset unborn human lives and their presumed CO₂ emissions with the CO₂ savings achieved  by green technologies. These ideological henchmen have calculated that “spending $7 on family planning per year would save more than one ton of CO₂ by 2050. To achieve the same result using green technologies, $32 would have to be spent” (ibid. 130). Two so-called “experts” who wrote a study for the Pentagon in 2003 warn of a “flood of climate refugees” (!) and conclude that countries such as the US and Australia would “probably build fortresses.” They write “cold-bloodedly,” as Tanuro points out, “that ‘around these fortresses, the deaths caused by war, but also by hunger and disease, would reduce the size of the population, which would then adapt to the carrying capacity [of the ecosystem] over time’” (ibid., 127f.). A misanthropic discourse that blames “overpopulation” in the “Third World” for climate change amounts to nothing less than “the mass extermination of the poor, as if they were surplus lemmings” (ibid., 128). Such reactionary population policy discourses also come from the UN, which one might naively think “is above suspicion” (ibid., 128, see Abeselom 1995 for more detail with a focus on Ethiopia). Incidentally, the claim that the population will continue to grow is empirically untenable (this cannot be discussed further here: see Bricker/Ibbitson 2019, Trumann 2024, and Wildcat No. 104, 20ff.).

A “Malthusian discourse” has long since found its way into the ranks of eco-socialists and post-growth economists. In some cases, extremely reactionary positions are represented there. In German-speaking countries, for example, an “overpopulation thesis” is advocated by the eco-socialists Bruno Kern and Saral Sarkar. In his book (translated and edited by Bruno Kern), Sarkar cites numerous wars and violent conflicts and attributes them, using more or less biological arguments, to overpopulation (alongside nationalism and identities). Even the Middle East conflict (!) is said to have overpopulation as its main cause: “But most observers and commentators fail to mention the deeper cause of the conflict’s intractability, namely that it is a war over birth rates” (Sarkar 2025, 45, cf. in contrast: Wistrich 1987 and Tarach 2010)!

Kern expressly distances himself from Malthusianism “in the sense of a ‘selection of the superfluous’” (Kern 2019, 37). According to Kern, overpopulation must be related to the “respective ecological footprint, and measured by this standard, it is precisely the rich industrialized nations that are ‘overpopulated’” (ibid.). This essentially means that “overpopulation” here cannot really have anything to do with the mere “number of people,” but rather with a destructive way of life and production.

On the other hand, Kern writes: “More people means more infrastructure cast in concrete and land sealing, apartments, hospitals, roads, factories, large-scale energy supply systems, etc.” (Kern 2024, 111). And: “It’s trivial: the more people claim resources for themselves, the scarcer they become” (ibid., 106). Consequently, Kern believes it is “essential to examine all possibilities for curbing population growth in a non-repressive manner” (Kern 2019, 38).[4]

Kern points to another aspect, namely the finite nature of agricultural production in general and the fact that the earth cannot feed an unlimited number of people (even in a society free of capitalism), especially since the amount of land suitable for agriculture is declining due to soil erosion and desertification (peak soil). Climate change will exacerbate this situation enormously. Projections showing that ten or more billion people could easily be fed “are based on false presuppositions, such as the current intensive agricultural use of the soil, which is obviously not sustainable.” According to Kern, sustainable agriculture would be “more extensive in terms of land use and less productive” (Kern 2015, 335).

This “argument” can be countered as follows: if, on the one hand, more and more regions of the world become uninhabitable due to climate change, i.e., ecologically ruined, we must prepare ourselves for unprecedented refugee movements and famines. The key point here is that demographic changes have a different timescale and it is therefore nonsensical to try to halt climate change through population policy: “Demographics are a factor that must be taken into account, but they are not a cause of climate change and even less a solution to the challenge of drastically reducing emissions, which must be done in an extremely short period of time” (Tanuro 2015, 129, emphasis added).

On the other hand, Mathusians should instead be asked the question: How can we ensure food security without declaring part of humanity superfluous or the world overpopulated? The fact that organic farming is sometimes less productive does not necessarily mean that there would be less food available overall if eating habits were changed (e.g., less animal products) and the sometimes enormous waste of food were stopped. This deserves attention, rather than talk of overpopulation (which in no way precludes sensible family, education, and sexual policies). What if the planet is really so ruined at some point that it is indeed no longer possible to feed many millions or billions of people (because large areas of agricultural land are devastated or washed away), and humanity does not overcome capitalism, or does so too late? It is doubtful whether the outcome would be any different if the world population had been lower: in this case, the Malthusian argument would no longer apply, because in a devastated world there would actually be too little to go around, as too much land would have been ruined, too little harvested, etc. Even then, it would be a fallacy to say that there were too many people.

Above all, if agriculture is retained as the substrate of capital’s valorizing movement, a decline in population would by no means relieve the burden on the planet (this is demonstrated, for example, by current and future rationalization drives in food production: cf. Becker 2025). The so-called overpopulation discourse never addresses the exact causes of hunger, in particular how hunger can be explained in the midst of abundance. Robert Kurz wrote on this subject: “The social barrier to the production and distribution of food is not determined by a lack of agricultural yields in comparison to the size of the population, but by the economic form of the modern commodity-producing system. The logic of economic profitability forces an irrational restriction of resources, which is particularly evident at the elementary level of nutrition. In principle, people are only given access to food on the condition that their labor can be used profitably. If this criterion cannot be met because ‘excessive’ productivity has made their labor superfluous, they are put on starvation rations, even though food production capacity has increased. While for all pre-modern societies a record harvest promised at least temporary abundance for all, it must appear disastrous to the economic calculations of agribusiness because such an ‘oversupply’ would depress prices. Therefore, it is normal market practice to destroy agricultural products en masse or dispose of them through denaturation when yields are exceptionally high. Hunger becomes a product of abundance itself” (Kurz 1999b, emphasis added).

Making population growth or the number of people the central problem therefore neglects the real reason for the destruction of the world: an irrational mode of production that views all nature as nothing more than raw material, that wants to incorporate all nature into the metamorphosis of capital M-C-M’, completely disregarding nature and its necessary characteristics, and thus increasingly striving to transform nature into a capitalist product (which tends to be synonymous with its destruction). It is the monstrous valorizing movement of capital that prevents a relationship between humans and nature and between society and nature that could enable long-term commitment or long-term reproducibility, not too many people. However, one should not go to the opposite extreme here: we should not consider any so-called “instrumentalization” or “domination of nature” to be negative per se and, in turning away from technology and industry, imagine a harmonious, romantic, and kitschy relationship with nature.

It should be noted that the usually misanthropic recourse to so-called overpopulation has repeatedly served as an excuse not to deal with the critique of political economy and patriarchy, but rather to reproach and deny the poor (especially those in the “Third World’”) their very existence (cf. Abeselom 1995; cf. also Kayser 1985). If capitalism rejects certain groups of people or masses of people in the sense that the labor market (or the world market) cannot absorb them, i.e., they cannot sell themselves as “labor” (and therefore their needs cannot be expressed as solvent demand), then the problem is not seen in the subjugation of people to abstract labor or in the destruction of their subsistence or expulsion from it – no – it is the people themselves, their mere existence, that is made into a problem. The decisive issue remains putting an end to the deformation and destruction of the world by capitalism. Making the number of people as such the central problem ultimately leads to reactionary waters.

Literature

Abeselom, Kiros: Der Mythos der Überbevölkerung als Mittel zur Wahrung der bestehenden gesellschaftlichen Strukturen – Die theoretischen Grundlagen der UNO-Bevölkerungskontrollpolitik: malthusianische und neo-malthusianische Wurzeln, Bonn 1995.

Autorenkollektiv: Wildcat Nr. 104, Köln Winter 2019/20.

Becker, Matthias Martin: Bodenlos – Wer wird die Welt ernähren? – Umbrüche in Agrobusiness und Tierindustrie, Klön 2025.

Bricker, Darrell; Ibbitson, John: Empty Planet – The shock of global population decline, London/New York 2019.

Brunschweiger, Verena: Kinderfrei statt kinderlos – Ein Manifest, Marburg 2019.

Familienplanungszentrum – Balance (Hg.): Die neue Radikalität der Abtreibungsgegner_innen im (inter)nationalen Raum – Ist die sexuelle Selbstbestimmung von Frauen heute in Gefahr?, Neu-Ulm 2012.

Greß, Johannes: Konsumideologie – Kapitalismus und Opposition in Zeiten der Klimakrise, Stuttgart 2022.

Guastella, Dustin: Eine Linke, die Angst vor der Zukunft hat, ist zum Scheitern verurteilt, jacobin.de vom 9.7.2025, online: https://jacobin.de/artikel/zukunft-antinatalismus-strategie.

Kayser, Gundula: Industrialisierung der Menschenproduktion – Zum faschistischen Charakter der Entwicklung neuer Technologien der Geburtenkontrolle, in: Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis Nr. 14, Köln 1985, 55-67.

Kern, Bruno: Das Märchen vom grünen Wachstum – Plädoyer für eine solidarische und nachhaltige Gesellschaft, Zürich 2019.

Kern, Bruno: Industrielle Abrüstung jetzt! – Abschied von der Technik-Illusion, Marburg 2024.

Kern, Bruno: Karl Marx – Texte – Schriften – Ausgewählt, eingeleitet und kommentiert von Bruno Kern, Wiesbaden 2015.

Kurz, Robert: Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus – Ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft, Frankfurt 1999a. Online: https://exit-online.org/pdf/schwarzbuch.pdf.

Kurz, Robert: Natura denaturata: Die Ernährung der Menschheit durch den Kapitalismus, 1999b, Online: https://www.medico.de/natura-denaturata-13898.

Malthus, Robert: Das Bevölkerungsgesetz, München 1977, zuerst 1798.

Mertens, Heide: Frauen, Natur und Fruchtbarkeit – Die Bevölkerungsdebatte und die ökologische Tragfähigkeit der Erde, in: Wichterich, Christa (Hg.): Menschen nach Maß – Bevölkerungspolitik in Nord und Süd, Göttingen 1994, 181-200.

Mielenz, Christian: Wie die Karnickel – Biologisierung und Naturalisierung kapitalistischer Phänomene am Beispiel der These einer »Überbevölkerung“, in: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft Nr.5, Bad Honnef 2008, 105-126.

Riesebrodt, Martin: Fundamentalismus als patriarchale Protestbewegung, Tübingen 1990.

Sarkar, Saral: Krieg, Gewalt und die Grenzen des Wachstums, Marburg 2025.

Sauer-Burghard, Brunhilde: Wie mann Frauen als Aggressionsobjekte unsichtbar macht – Fundamentalismen im Diskurs der patriarchalen „kritischen“ Wissenschaft, in: Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis Nr. 32, Köln 1992, 59-65.

Schrader, Christopher: Die Kinder und der Klimaschutz, spektrum.de vom 13.3.2019, online: https://www.spektrum.de/news/die-kinder-und-der-klimaschutz/1629194.

Tarach, Tilman: Der ewige Sündenbock: Heliger Krieg, die ‚Protokolle der Weisen von Zion‘ und die Verlogenheit der sogenannten Linken im Nahostkonflikt, Freiburg/Zürich 2019, 3. überar. Aufl.

Tanuro, Daniel: Klimakrise und Kapitalismus, Köln 2015, zuerst Paris 2010.

Tharoor, Shashi: Zeit der Finsternis – Das Britische Empire in Indien, Berlin 2024, zuerst Neu Delhi 2016.

Trumann, Andrea: Kostenfaktor Kind – Die Geburtenrate sinkt ungeachtet politischer Maßnahmen, jungle.world vom 16.5.2024, online: https://jungle.world/artikel/2024/20/geburtenrate-weltweit-sinkt-kostenfaktor-kind.

Wistrich, Robert: Der antisemitische Wahn: Von Hitler bis zum Heiligen Krieg gegen Israel, Ismaining bei München 1987.

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[1] During British colonial rule, Indian journalist Shashi Tharoor documented numerous famines whose death tolls were similar to those caused by Stalin or Mao (cf. Tharoor 2024, 265ff.). Of course, these famines had nothing to do with alleged overpopulation.

[2] It should be noted that anti-natalist discourse is much more widespread in the English-speaking world than in Germany, so Brunschweiger’s position is by no means an “exotic opinion”; see also Guastella 2025.

[3] Wherever religious or ethnic extremists gain influence, there has always been an increase in patriarchal terror, which is repeatedly directed against reproductive rights (cf. Balance 2012), as demonstrated recently by Trump’s authoritarian restructuring of the USA. Religious fundamentalism has therefore been rightly described as a “patriarchal protest movement” (Riesebrodt 1990). However, the patriarchal core of religious fundamentalism has often been downplayed by its mostly male critics (see Sauer-Burghard 1992).

[4] I assume that Kern is referring here to eugenic measures or China’s former one-child policy.

Originally published in October 2025 on www.oekumenisches-netz.de

Thomas Meyer

Progress and development have always been among capitalism’s core articles of faith. The (often dubious) successes of the technical transformation and exploitation of nature and human beings cannot be overlooked. However, such developments can also have fatal psychosocial and ecological consequences. We can’t say that technical progress is a good idea in itself or that it actually leads to greater prosperity, as is often claimed. Technical developments, or rather technical development paradigms, exist in the context of the valorizing movement of capital. If a new technology promises a cost advantage or opens up new possibilities for accumulation in the form of process innovation in production or in the form of an (expanded) mass consumption of commodities, it is developed and produced, while at the same time people proclaim its necessity and inevitability. (Whereby it can also be cheaper to wear out workers than to rationalize them away through technology. Automation is by no means implemented everywhere that it is theoretically possible, and in practice automation is not always feasible, see Becker 2017 and Moody 2019.) The capitalist ideology of progress and development always comes with a certain optimism and many promises of happiness. And, conversely, it also comes with a pessimism regarding the familiar and the implicit or explicit threat that we must accept progress as fate and are driven to adapt and reinvent ourselves in the process of “self-determination.” Otherwise, one is simply one of the “losers,” a status for which biologistic rationalizations can undoubtedly also be found, rationalizations that provide a genetic or neurological “explanation” for poverty and conservatism, etc. It is no coincidence that these promises of happiness are based on an ideological or completely exaggerated claim that is often untenable and is based on assumptions and vulgar materialist or utilitarian anthropologies that are not investigated further (see Schnetker 2019). At the same time, technological development with its sometimes insane promises is linked to a corresponding background music of legitimation. People emphasize how unstoppable technological development is, how desirable and unavoidable it is, and what opportunities, but also risks, it holds. When people say that “development can no longer be stopped,” then this development appears unstoppable to the optimists/apocalyptics as well as the “realists,” since the social dynamics underlying this development are not scrutinized and questioned as such. We are not dealing here with an assertive natural law (as in the case of an imminent volcanic eruption, which is actually impossible to stop), and yet the fetishistic valorizing movement of capital appears to the subjects living under its influence as just that, even though it is not (cf. Kurz 2012).

No matter what the issue is: “progress” is the solution, which often amounts to nothing more than digitalization and cost cutting. The digitalization critic Evgeny Morozov called this way of thinking, where one has the perspective of a hammer and everything appears to be a nail, “solutionism” (Morozov 2013). Particularly zealous disciples of solutionism are Silicon Valley ideologues, especially representatives of transhumanist ideology, who do not even shy away from considering the rationalization of humans as such and even consider it desirable for humans to either disappear or transform into “cyborgs” (cf. Wagner 2016). Transhumanism is therefore a technocratic death cult (see Konicz 2018 and Meyer 2020) that updates social Darwinism and eugenics (see Jansen 2018). These legitimizing ideologies and their “prophets” do indeed have aspects that are usually found among religious fundamentalists. It is not for nothing that the term “technological evangelist” has arisen. AI ideologues believe that humans, because of their fallibility, need a man-made artificial intelligence to deal with things like climate change, for example. Transhumanists strive for salvation through technology, even if this may mean the destruction of humans. In addition to big data and digitalization (Meyer 2018), an almost omnipresent hype in the current capitalist regime (to which “Chinese-style socialism” naturally belongs) is so-called artificial intelligence (cf. e.g. Simanowski 2020). Artificial intelligence has been on everyone’s lips since, at the latest, the publication of ChatGPT at the end of 2022.

What can we make of the hype surrounding artificial intelligence? Some are predicting massive disruptions in the economy (Industry 4.0, Internet of Things) and AI overtaking and replacing humans. Humans are essentially seen as a discontinued model. According to this line of thought, AI can and will be used in education, medicine, logistics, the culture industry, journalism, the military, art, etc., or in other words, everywhere. People hold out the prospect of many jobs or kinds of work disappearing altogether, while once again downplaying the social consequences that this would have. They tend to numb themselves with ignorance or optimism, assuming that many new job opportunities will be created, whereby there is always a latent threat against those who fall by the wayside in this game of “musical chairs” and do not prove to be flexible or resilient enough. However, AI is not creating a high-tech paradise, as the fundamentalist AI preachers would have us believe, but rather predominantly precarious work. AI as “capitalist intelligence” (see wildcat no. 112, 42ff. and Seppmann 2017) serves to rationalize capital, i.e. to cut costs, speed up logistics, compress work, accelerate and maintain the valorization process and continue competition at all levels.

As current or “upcoming” developments show, AI systems are ideally suited for managing the crisis (see Konicz 2024). They are predestined to subjugate capitalist “human material” by evaluating huge amounts of data (big data) and assessing and selecting this human material according to its usability or “future viability” (law enforcement, insurance, health, surveillance, etc.). When AI systems make predictions, they always do so on the basis of a statistical evaluation of “what already is.” This leads to fatal positive feedback loops: for example, someone does not get a job or a loan because they come from a “social hotspot” or presumably from a “criminal milieu,” as evidenced by corresponding “police work.” The police are in turn mobilized to screen said milieus, since crime is also likely to occur there in the future, as their work has already shown in the past and will show again due to AI and algorithms (search and find!). And thus it is “confirmed” that the criminal milieu is a criminal milieu and that black people or foreigners are more “inclined” to commit crimes than those who are less in the crosshairs of the police and justice system (cf. O’Neil 2016). A racist reality is thus perpetuated algorithmically.

If you are caught in the “tentacles” of an AI system or algorithm due to a misjudgment, it is usually not possible to “object” (and the users of an AI system themselves do not know why an AI has “decided” one thing and not another in a specific case – even if the “trade secret” were abolished, the “decision-making” of the AI would remain opaque). The fact that AI systems make mistakes (i.e. mistakes from the point of view of the user and those affected) has to do with the fact that reality cannot be clearly sorted and that AI systems cannot understand (the social and situational) context (which is why language programs have problems with sarcasm and irony). Statistical evaluations of the frequency of words or word combinations do not result in meaning. Statistical evaluations of data do not lead to an understanding of the genesis of said data (or of the social phenomena that are reflected in the data). The fatal flaw of AI is that it is impossible to know what mistakes these systems (will) make and when, or how exactly these mistakes come about. The mistakes that AIs, such as speech and image recognition programs, make show that they do not understand what they have “learned” (cf. Lenzen 2023, 48ff., 133ff.). If AI systems produce nonsensical results, it is very difficult to “repair” them through retraining (in contrast to “normal” computer programs, which can be repaired by finding the errors in the program code).

Artificial intelligence and “computational thinking” in general have a long history and AI has already gone through several periods of hype (see Weizenbaum 1982, Dreyfus 1978, Irrgang; Klawitter 1990, Larson 2021). The fact that such hype always returns at a “higher level,” despite all the criticism, is obviously because of its capitalist “usefulness” and the optimistic promises and apocalyptic fears associated with it. These promises and fears often accompany technological developments and are rehashed again and again. They may have been repeatedly disappointed or denied, but they cannot be killed off. The fact that AI research and the interest in funding it have had a “winter” on several occasions is due to an underestimation of the complexity of developing artificial intelligence and the fact that computer technology has long been inadequately developed (as well as the insufficient amount of digitized data available to train “artificial neural networks”).

Regardless of the repressive applications and capitalist use of AI systems, apt objections are formulated against the concept of intelligence commonly used in the “AI scene.”

The media liked to report, with a great deal of sensationalism, that an AI could play chess or Go better than any human, which some interpreted to mean that humans would soon become a “discontinued model.” Artificial intelligence is indeed far superior to human intelligence when it comes to storing huge amounts of data and evaluating it statistically (with certain weightings and model assumptions). However, conceptualization and judgement are not the same as memorizing a telephone directory or every bit of insurance data. There is no doubt that AI systems can recognize patterns from huge amounts of data that would otherwise have been overlooked. However, a human would never have been able to cope with this amount of data in their lifetime, as the data volumes are simply too large, which is why AI systems should more correctly be referred to as pattern recognition programs. It should be noted that correlations, i.e. patterns that are detected, don’t come close to actually proving causality. This applies to statistics in general, something that those who believe that more and more data will lead to an increase in knowledge (so that theory could therefore be dispensed with) do not seem to consider! In fact, such programs can be usefully employed as a scientific tool (and not as a substitute for theoretical thinking) (for example in astrophysics, medicine, molecular biology, solid-state physics, etc., cf. Bischoff 2022, 109ff.) but they are not suitable solely for the repression or selection of people.

The fact that a computer program can beat a world chess champion has a lot to do with the fact that this program has memorized billions of move combinations (and can estimate the most advantageous next moves based on a programmed heuristic, i.e. it does not have to memorize all of them). What is usually not mentioned is that these programs are hyperspecialists. A chess program (in the sense of an “artificial neural network”) cannot also learn to play Go. A human being can learn both without unlearning something previously learned at the same time (cf. Larson 2021, 28ff.). This is also the reason why some people, when talking about AI, are not referring to such hyperspecialists (weak AI). Instead, they believe the term “artificial intelligence” should be reserved for an artificial general intelligence, i.e. for one that can potentially do “everything” and is capable of doing “everything,” and is ultimately capable of developing consciousness (whatever that is exactly) (which is also called strong AI). However, this kind of intelligence is (and will presumably remain) pure fiction outside the world of science fiction and the delusional world of transhumanists (Schnetker 2019) and the “millenarian redemption rhetoric” of Silicon Valley ideologues (Nida-Rümelin; Wiedenfeld 2023, 252). It should not be forgotten that “artificial intelligence” is also a marketing term; it is used to describe various things that often have nothing to do with AI, but rather with banal statistics programs or databases. This is why you don’t come across too much in-depth theoretical reflection when this term is commonly used in the press (of course, there are always exceptions). This applies all the more to the propaganda of the tech giants (for example, the chatbot LaMDA developed by Google has allegedly developed sentience and consciousness).

A central objection to “computational thinking” or artificial intelligence is the equation of intelligence with computation or rule-based instructions. The computer scientist Erik J. Larson points out that computer programs (regardless of what they are called) can only proceed deductively (symbolic AI) or inductively (sub-symbolic AI) (training an AI with data is nothing other than induction). However, according to Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), to whom Larson refers, what characterizes human thinking is abduction, which combines inductive and deductive elements without being reducible to them. Human thinking can neither be limited to deduction (logic, i.e. the derivation of a concrete from a universal) nor to induction (the collection of facts or data and the generalization that may result from this). Abduction is rather something that could be described as hypothesizing. Hypothesizing implies initially ignoring certain facts or interpretations in order to allow them to appear in a new light in a different context, within the framework of a new “paradigm.” Larson illustrates this with Copernicus: “When Copernicus posited that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa, he ignored mountains of evidence and data accumulated over the centuries by astronomers working with the older, Ptolemaic model. He redrew everything with the sun at the center, and worked out a useable heliocentric model. Importantly, the initial Copernican model was actually less predictive despite its being correct. It was initially only a framework that, if completed, could offer elegant explanations to replace the increasingly convoluted ones, such as planetary retrograde motion, plaguing the Ptolemaic model. Only by first ignoring all the data or reconceptualizing it could Copernicus reject the geocentric model and infer a radical new structure to the solar system (And note that this raises the question: How would ‘big data’ have helped? The data was all fit to the wrong model).” (Larson 2021, 104).

Any thoughts of a “difference between essence and appearance” remain alien to logical reasoning and statistics. With induction and deduction alone, without them being mediated by some third thing, neither “novelty” nor “creativity” can be explained. Artificial intelligences are therefore nothing more than “stochastic parrots” (Emily M. Bender).[1] If you were to train an AI only with circles, it would never suddenly start drawing squares. Artificial intelligences can basically only interpolate, i.e. operate with known values, i.e. with “what has already been,” and not extrapolate (Otte 2023, 60ff.). Only the latter would produce something new, as the new or creative cannot be formalized. In principle, computers and thus artificial intelligences, i.e. “AI devices” (Ralf Otte), can only solve problems that can be represented in terms of an algorithm (an algorithm is a calculation or rule for action that can be formalized and translated into binary numbers, which arrives at a result after a finite number of steps), i.e. that can be translated into a formal language. AIs therefore basically only operate in a world of mathematics (and even this cannot be completely formalized and there are also mathematical problems that have no solution, for which no algorithm can be found), and those aspects of reality that cannot be represented by an algorithm remain alien to AI. This is where an AI device has its fundamental limits, no matter how clever it may seem. This is why autonomous driving, for example, is likely to be an illusion, as AI expert Ralf Otte points out. The only way to realize autonomous driving would be to mathematize the environment, i.e. “transform the natural environment […] into a deterministic environment.” Autonomous driving takes place in a natural environment, and it is not possible to transfer reality as such into algorithms or “artificially enrich the whole world with [IP] addresses or cameras, even with the mass use of 5G technology, just to make it more predictable for the robot cars” (ibid., 342).

Another objection to the concept of intelligence in the prevailing AI discourse, according to philosopher Manuela Lenzen, is the limitation of intelligence to human intelligence (cf. Lenzen 2023). Instead of understanding artificial intelligence as a quality in its own right, people are all too quick to compare it with human intelligence. This leads to unrealistic assessments and a misjudgment of human intelligence. People tend to get hung up on nonsense and ignore what AIs can and cannot actually do. Lenzen argues that we can talk about artificial intelligence without devaluing humans and without falling into mythology (for example, the idea that AI will soon surpass humans in everything and take over the world, etc.). Rather, intelligence should be understood as a more general phenomenon that also occurs in nature and is by no means a monopoly of Homo sapiens (even though Homo sapiens is capable of a capacity for abstraction that far eclipses that of “non-human animals” and is therefore indeed a “unique specimen” in nature). Intelligence is the property of an organism that allows it to be part of an environment and to act in this environment in a “sophisticated” way, i.e. ultimately to survive. Thus, as Lenzen explains, intelligence is by no means just something “mental,” purely cognitive, but is linked to a body acting in an environment. This can be described as embodied cognition/intelligence. The approach of robotics is to “teach” a physical machine to act in a certain environment through trial and error (i.e. not so much by feeding in large amounts of data). Just as a small child learns to grasp or walk (learning by doing), a robot is trained to be able to do the same. Of course, we are infinitely far from being able to create artificial intelligence in the sense of general artificial intelligence.

We can therefore say – and this has been repeatedly stated (cf. e.g. Weizenbaum 1982, 268ff. and Larson 2021) – that the AI discourse reduces the idea of human intelligence to an overly simplistic image. Quite a few AI theorists have adopted a tautology: intelligence is defined as something calculable (rule-based thinking/action), i.e. something that can be translated into an algorithm, and computers can do exactly that. And then you realize with astonishment that computers have intelligence (or at least appear intelligent, so that they would be on a par with humans if humans could no longer tell whether a computer or a human was talking/writing to them; this is known as the Turing test), and will soon have more computing power than the human brain (which assumes that the brain is essentially a computer). The fact that this reduction seems plausible and credible to many is probably due to the actual reduction of human intelligence to the imperatives of the capitalist valorization process (see Seppmann 2017). The panic that AI will replace and enslave us is precisely the echo of capitalism’s general imposition in that a person must always prove and rationalize themselves, as well as the threat of a failure to do so, which is nevertheless rarely expressed. The humanization of machines makes sense precisely when man tends to be reduced to a machine or can “willfully” reduce himself to one and consequently experience himself as little more than an apparatus executing algorithms (undoubtedly with the corresponding psychological consequences, cognitive dissonances and repressions). Emil Post, a (less well-known) computer theorist alongside Alan Turing, used an assembly line worker as a model to theoretically understand a computer and what it can or should be able to do (cf. Heintz 1993, 166ff.). The computer essentially does what humans do (or should do!) when they work on an assembly line, i.e. perform identical actions based on rules. It is therefore not at all surprising that a machine can in principle perform actions much better and more efficiently than a human reduced to machine-like behavior ever could. The fact that artificial intelligence could surpass human intelligence and will almost inevitably enslave humanity suggests that those who propagate and seriously believe this have a rather limited horizon. Take, for example, the “philosophy professor” Nick Bostrom, who spends hundreds of pages in his book Superintelligence dreaming up all kinds of horror scenarios and worrying about how they could possibly be prevented – without, of course, questioning capitalism at any point. So when people talk about humans as a “discontinued model,” this means that the human being, reduced to variable capital, is in fact increasingly a discontinued model, and with it capitalism itself (cf. Konicz 2024a). However, neither optimists nor apocalyptics want to know anything about a crisis of capitalist society, or an inner barrier to capital valorization (cf. e.g. Ortlieb 2009 and Kurz 2012).

Literature

Author collective. 2023. wildcat no. 112.

Becker, Matthias Martin. 2017. Automatisierung und Ausbeutung: Was wird aus der Arbeit im digitalen Kapitalismus? Vienna: Promedia.

Bischoff, Manon (ed.). 2022. Künstliche Intelligenz: Vom Schachspieler zur Superintelligenz? Berlin: Springer.

Bostrom, Nick. 2014. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1978. What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence. New York: HarperCollins.

Heintz, Bettina. 1993. Die Herrschaft der Regel: Zur Grundlagengeschichte des Computers.  Frankfurt: Campus.

Irrgang, Bernhard and Jörg Klawitter (eds.). 1990. Künstliche Intelligenz (Edition Universitas). Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft.

Jansen, Markus. 2018. Radikale Paradiese: Die Moderne und der Traum von der perfekten Welt. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.

Konicz, Tomasz. 2018. AI and Capital: In the Singularity Longed for By Silicon Valley, The Automatic Subject Would Come into Itself. Available on exit-online.org.

Konicz, Tomasz. 2024. AI and Crisis Management. Available at https://exitinenglish.com/2024/08/01/ai-and-crisis-management/.

Konicz, Tomasz 2024a. AI: The Final Boost to Automation. Available at https://exitinenglish.com/2024/08/03/ai-the-final-boost-to-automation/.

Kurz, Robert. 2012. Geld ohne Wert: Grundrisse zur einer Transformation der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie. Berlin: Horlemann.

Larson, Erik J. 2021. The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think The Way We Do. Cambridge: Belknap.

Lenzen, Manuela. 2023. Der elektronische Spiegel: Menschliches Denken und künstliche Intelligenz, Munich: C.H. Beck.

Meyer, Thomas. 2018. Big Data and The Smart New World as the Highest Stage of Positivism. Available at: https://exitinenglish.com/2022/02/07/big-data-and-the-smart-new-world-as-the-highest-stage-of-positivism/.

Meyer, Thomas. 2020. “Zwischen Selbstvernichtung und technokratischem Machbarkeitswahn: Transhumanismus als Rassenhygiene von heute.” Available on exit-online.org.

Moody, Kim. 2019. “Schnelle Technologie, langsames Wachstum: Roboter und die Zukunft der Arbeit.” In Marx und die Roboter: Vernetzte Produktion, Künstliche Intelligenz und lebendige Arbeit, edited by Florian Butolo and Sabine Nuss. 132-155. Berlin: Dietz.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2013. Smarte neue Welt: Digitale Technik und die Freiheit des Menschen, Munich: Karl Blessing.

Nida-Rümelin, Julian and Nathalie Weidenfeld. 2023. Was kann und was darf künstliche Intelligenz? – Ein Plädoyer für Digitalen Humanismus. Munich: Piper.

O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction:  How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Penguin.

Ortlieb, Claus Peter. 2013. “A Contradiction between Matter and Form: On the Significance of the Production of Relative Surplus Value in the Dynamic of Terminal Crisis.” In Marxism and the Critique of Value, edited by Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown, 77-122, Chicago: M-C-M’.

Otte, Ralf. 2023. Künstliche Intelligenz für Dummies. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH.

Schnetker, Max Franz Johann. 2019. Transhumanistische Mythologie: Rechte Utopien einer technologischen Erlösung durch künstliche Intelligenz. Münster: Unrast.

Seppmann, Werner. 2017. Kritik des Computers: Der Kapitalismus und die Digitalisierung des Sozialen. Kassel: Mangroven.

Simanowski, Roberto. 2020. Todesalgorithmus: Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz, Vienna: Passagen.

Wagner, Thomas. 2016. Robokratie: Google, das Silicon Valley und der Mensch als Auslaufmodell. Cologne: PapyRossa.

Weizenbaum, Joseph. 1978. Die Macht der Computer und die Ohnmacht der Vernunft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot

Originally published on exit-online.org.

On the Ongoing Madness of the Capitalist Mode of Production

Thomas Meyer

It is gratifying when the real madness of capitalism is taken note of, specifically with regard to the crisis since 2007/2008, and a critique of this madness is formulated on the basis of the crisis. Paul Mattick Jr.[1] attempts this in his 2011 book Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism.[2]

In this book, Mattick outlines the history of economic crises and argues for a concrete historical examination of capitalism. However, according to Mattick, crises are generally unexplained and misunderstood because most people don’t connect them to the internal history of capitalism and its logic of valorization. This is often because capitalism is perceived as natural, and consequently no consideration is even given to looking at it historically.

Capitalism as Imposition and Crisis

The situation is well known: the so-called financial crisis began with the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2007/2008. Most commentaries were unanimous in their lack of understanding of capitalism. Mainstream economics, mostly of neoclassical provenance, was rightly accused of neither being able to formulate reasonably reliable forecasts nor having plausible explanations for the economic situation at that time.[3] Critics of neoliberalism, deregulation, etc., on the other hand, were as blind to history as the Keynesian Paul Krugman, who “left undiscussed the reasons why Keynesian theory fell into disrepute in the 1970s” (20).

According to Mattick, “clearly there is something wrong with the mainstream approach to understanding current economic affairs. Part of the problem lies in the terms with which commentators attempt to understand the social system in which we live” (25).

To understand the current crisis, Mattick argues, we need to look at the history of capitalism and its historical dynamics. In particular, we should take note of the nature of crises under capitalism, especially in comparison to famine-related crises in pre-modern societies: “Something new emerged when an increasingly money-centered economy gave rise to the Industrial Revolution and the establishment of capitalism in wide enough swathes of territory for it to become the dominant social system: crises of the social system as a whole. Before that, of course, social production and consumption were disrupted by a variety of disturbances: war, plague, bad harvests. But the coming of capitalism brought something new: starvation alongside good harvests and mountains of food […]. Such breakdowns in the normal process of production, distribution and consumption were now due not to natural or political causes but to specifically economic factors: lack of money to purchase needed goods, profits too low to make production worthwhile” (28, emphasis in original).

To the extent that these facts are taken note of at all, it has always been the case that bourgeois economists have sought the causes of crises in extra-economic or extra-societal factors. This includes William Stanley Jevons, who, “starting with a publication in 1875, [tried] to prove a correlation between business ups and downs and the sunspot cycle […].” Marx, on the other hand, was quite different: “Marx argued that capitalism’s basic nature produced a tendency to crisis, which was realized in recurring depressions and would eventually bring the downfall of the system. Marx’s approach differed so fundamentally from the generality of economic theorizing, however, that it proved difficult for others interested in the subject (including most of those who called themselves Marxists) even to understand his ideas, much less find them useful” (32f.).

Some bourgeois economists, however, still managed to recognize what was actually obvious, such as Wesley Mitchell (1874-1948) in his 1927 book on the business cycle, in which he wrote: “In business the useful goods produced by an enterprise are not the ends of endeavor, but the means toward earning profits. […] Economic activity in a money-making world […] depends upon the factors which affect present or prospective profits” (35).

Mattick says it is quite amazing that this insight escapes most economists to this day.

However, Mitchell cannot provide a theoretical explanation for fluctuating profitability. Nor does he address, among other things, the question of what money actually is: “These are questions that even a historically oriented economist like Mitchell did not think to ask, because he took for granted the existence of money […]. Asking them, for an inhabitant of capitalist society, would be like an ancient Egyptian asking why Osiris was in control of the Nile’s ebb and flow and so of the rise and fall of agricultural output. Answering them requires sufficient intellectual distance from the conventions of our own society […] to consider money (and so profit) as historically peculiar social institutions, with particular consequences for the way we live” (39).

Of course, we would add other peculiar social institutions of this kind, such as labor, i.e. man reduced to a container of labor power, bourgeois gender relations, i.e. the double idiocy of kitchen and career, and a thinking that, above all in its practice, can only recognize the world as a substrate for valorization.

Moreover, people forget that “[…] in much of the world, even the very recent past – most people made little or no use of money […]” and “[…] that while money appears in many types of society, capitalism is the only one in which it plays such a central role in the production and distribution of goods and services […]. In such a system, money has a different social significance from that of earlier societies. […] In capitalism, […] this allocation is carried out by finding out what quantities of what goods can be sold, rather than by some social process of deciding in what kinds of production to engage” (40ff.).[4]

Mattick notes that crises are linked to the valorization dynamics of capitalism: On the one hand, it is necessary to achieve maximum “profitability” – because making money is the driving force of capitalist production. On the other hand, in order to prevail in competition, it is necessary to reduce costs, for example by increasing labor productivity, or in other words by reducing the proportion of labor employed relative to the quantity of products it produces. This generally has the effect of increasing the cost of the means of production relative to that of wages, so that the individual commodity becomes cheaper. This process manifests itself in saturated markets, declining investment in the means of production, etc., and rising unemployment (49f.). The misery appears as a lack of demand. This is precisely where Keynesianism comes in. The main idea of Keynesianism was that the state would generate demand through credit (e.g., through large-scale infrastructure projects[5]) in order to revive the valorization dynamics, thereby overcoming the depression and eventually paying off the debt through increased tax revenues. Keynes’ model seemed to be successful, since the Great Depression was overcome (not least by the Second World War, 69f.) and parts of humanity were then able to enjoy an economic miracle (the “golden age” as Mattick calls it). Nevertheless, Keynesian methods continued after the depression proper. The economic miracle was thus hardly self-sustaining: “In reality, crisis management turned into a permanent state-private ‘mixed economy.’ After the mid-1970s, throughout the capitalistically developed countries, national debt, far from being repaid, grew, both absolutely and in relation to GDP. […] By the time Reagan left office the national debt had tripled from $900 billion to $2.8 trillion. […] The United States had a government debt of $16 billion in 1930; today it is $12.5 trillion and climbing” (55, 73-75).[6]

Mattick also describes the genesis of finance-driven capitalism: “The slowdown in productive investment meant that money was increasingly available for other purposes. […] This ‘massive shift toward speculative uses of liquidity […] expressed itself in a strong push to legislative deregulation […].’ Deregulation, that is, was a response to the pressure to speculate; though of course it made risk-taking easier; it was not the cause of increased speculation. Similarly, to explain the rise of debt-financed acquisitions and other modes of speculation as the effect of greed, as is often done today, is doubly silly not only does it leave unexplained the sudden increase of greediness in recent decades, but it also ignores the basic motive of capitalist investment decisions, which must always be guided by the expected maximum profits achievable in a reasonably short term” (60f.).

Mattick also points out that the financial crisis of 2007/2008 should not be seen in isolation from the crisis since the 1970s and its roots in the logic of valorization; nor should the smaller crises since the 1980s. Rather, today’s situation is a “more serious manifestation of the depression that first announced itself dramatically in the mid-1970s, but which governmental economic policy was able hold at bay – in part by displacing it to poor parts of the world, but largely by a historically unprecedented creation of public, private and individual debt, in the rich parts – for 30-odd years” (66).

But what is the fundamental difference between the current crisis and the depression of 1929, other than the skyrocketing national debt?

Unfortunately, Mattick does not elaborate much on this crucial idea. He does mention that since government spending counteracted, rather than overcame the earlier decline in profit rates, “it is not surprising that corporations used the funds available to them less for building new factories to produce more goods than for squeezing more profit out of existing production by investing in labor- and energy-saving equipment while labor costs were lowered by moving plants from high-wage to low-wage areas […]. The results of this included a lasting increase in unemployment in Western Europe and what became the Rust Belt of the US” (58f.).

What is qualitatively new, namely the crisis of the labor society, the microelectronic revolution and its still not fully exploited potentials for rationalization, is not really clearly elaborated here. However, referring to Marx, Mattick does say that the valorization dynamics of capitalism must ultimately lead to its downfall (see above), although here he does not explicitly refer to the “The Fragment on Machines” from the Grundrisse, but only to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Another inaccuracy regarding the ineffectiveness of Keynesian methods is his suggestion that “government-financed production does not produce profit. […] For the government has no money of its own; it pays with tax money or with borrowed funds that will eventually have to be repaid out of taxes. […] Government spending therefore cannot solve the problem of depression […]. It can put off the issue by supplying financial and other business with the money they need to continue operations. It can also alleviate the suffering it causes, at least in the short run, by providing jobs or money to those out of work, or create infrastructure useful for future profitable production. […] The underlying problem in a period of depression can be solved only by the depression itself […], which […] can raise profitability by lowering capital and labor costs, increasing productivity through technological advances, and concentrating capital ownership in larger, more efficient units” (81f.).

On the contrary, I would argue that Keynesian methods are effective precisely when they lead to production on an expanded scale; when state measures of concentration and mobilization lead to a greater absorption of living labor, when the cheapening of commodities leads to an expansion of markets, when there is consequently an expansion of total capital, an increase in the total mass of value in society, whether or not this process is mediated by war. This leads to an increase in tax revenues, so that the loans, which represented an anticipation of the future to come, can still be serviced. The fact that this worked to some extent is known to be due to the massive expansion of Fordist industries. Why are Keynesian measures clearly failing today, even though they were effective in the past?

As already indicated, these methods stopped being effective in the 1970s, since the subsequent microelectronic revolution did not lead to a renewed increase in the absorption of living labor power. Therefore, financially driven capitalism and neoliberal ideology were precisely the historical course through which capitalism, although completely blind to history and increasingly resistant to facts, worked out this contradiction.

The idea that a depression could be solved by a market shakeout (which, after all, was averted by unprecedented amounts of credit) is, according to Mattick, completely false today. Further concentration of capital, further rationalization, etc., would only impair people’s ability to function as exploitable containers of labor power, leading to a mass of superfluous people, or the “accumulation of hundreds of millions of un- or under-employed people in gigantic slums around the world” (65). Mattick’s somewhat imprecise definition of the crisis makes him seem a bit ahistorical, although he is quite clear about the extent of the misery, citing Mike Davis’s Planet of the Slums. Fortunately, he does not fall into a false optimism that overlooks reality, as is often the case with the bourgeois lumpenintelligentsia.

Mattick also writes, contrary to many others, that China and India cannot be the hope for a restored capitalism, because “China’s growth […] remains closely tied to that of the developed countries […]. India, where the majority of the population still consists of poverty-stricken rural workers, is even further from being an independent economic power.[7] Indeed, ‘most of the trade of the Indian and Chinese economies is still in the form of re-exports of finished or semi-finished products or services manufactured by multinational firms which are based in Europe or the US’” (88).

What Should We Do?

So, in view of millions of people living in misery, environmental degradation and anthropogenic climate change, what should we do? What are Mattick’s practical conclusions?

According to Mattick, the traditional left, insofar as it is not already marginalized, can hardly be expected to transcend the horizon of capital. For the traditional left (social democracy and real socialism) have had their day historically, since “traditional workers’ politics had turned out to be not a harbinger of the overthrow of capitalism but an aspect of its development, fulfilling the need for the normalization of a new mode of social relations by way of organizations capable of negotiation and compromise” (97f.).

But the decline of the traditional left is no reason for apathetic acceptance of capitalist madness: for it is precisely in the crisis that the difference between material and monetary wealth, as Karl Marx tried to outline it, can become apparent to many, which could motivate people to act. Mattick also sketches this idea: money may be devalued, factories may be closed, but material wealth is still, so to speak, within reach: “While at present they are still awaiting the promised return of prosperity, at some point the newly homeless millions, like many of their predecessors in the 1930s, may well look at foreclosed, empty houses, unsaleable consumer goods and stockpiled government foodstuffs and see the materials they need to sustain life. The simple taking and use of housing, food and other goods, however, by breaking the rules of an economic system based on the exchange of goods for money, in itself implies a radically new mode of social existence”(106).

The independent appropriation of the means of production may be a first step to get rid of capitalism and thus to find another form of society, even if humanity will have to struggle with the disastrous legacies (environmental destruction, etc.) of capitalism for a long time to come: “Whatever it is called, it will need to begin by abolishing the distinction between those who control and those who perform the work of production, by replacing a social mechanism based on monetary market exchange (including the buying and selling of the ability to work) with some mode of shared social decision-making adequate to a global economic system” (109).

But Mattick is wrong when he writes that the means of production are under the control of certain subjects. It is true that only a capitalist use is foreseen for means of production, real estate, etc., and that this will therefore be defended by all means of violence if the people would presume to wrest them from the valorizing movement of capitalism, as Mattick himself implies: “As in totalitarian states, so also in democratic ones the formation of popular authorities poses an immediate threat to the powers that be, however limited the ambitions of the people concerned.[8] Threats to the economic order will certainly be met with repression, going beyond the military and police violence already mobilized in recent years against anti­austerity demonstrators in Athens, striking government workers in South Africa, students in London and elsewhere […]” (107).

Nevertheless, this in principle traditional Marxist formulation suggests that certain subjects would indeed have the power to determine production and its content. The functional logic of the valorization dynamics cannot be traced back to the determination of the will of subjects. This does not mean, however, that no one can be held responsible for anything, since the imperatives of capitalism must be mediated through the subjects so that they can (or rather must) act in accordance with these imperatives. But this does not mean that people are subjects of the overall capitalist event. This is where a subject- and ideology-critical level of critique would come in, which is missing in Mattick (apart from an ideology critique of economics and various views of history).

But a mere appropriation would not be enough: for it is the productive (or rather destructive) legacies of capitalism, and especially the managerial form of their implementation, that need to be criticized and, as a result, not positively occupied. It would be a futile effort to simply appropriate the capitalist “productive forces” in order to continue them on our own (as can be seen in occupied factories[9]). If we are going to transform the mode of production, then we would have to transform the content of production, which of course also means that the production of certain things, like cars, would have to be abolished or reduced.

In its most basic form, by the way, this idea is all that new. The anarchist Erich Mühsam, for example, wrote in 1932: “The childish idea that the revolution has already made the transition to socialism with the occupation of the enterprises by the workers and their simple continuation under their own leadership the revolution is as nonsensical as it is dangerous. Under capitalist conditions, factories of all kind are organized exclusively according to the profit calculations of the entrepreneurs. There is no consideration for the needs of the people, no consideration for the requirements of justice, of reason, for the life and health of workers and consumers. […] An economy which leaves many millions destitute without work, literally starving, and that at the same time burns important foodstuffs, dumps them into the sea, lets them rot in the barns or uses them as fertilizer, such an economy cannot simply be taken over and continued. It must be transformed from the ground up.”[10]

In times of failed states, appropriation occurs anyway, even if in the sense of an economy of plunder. The fact that appropriation takes place, however understandable it may be in the given situation, can also mean that the appropriators see themselves as an ethnic gang, a racist eugenic association or a terrorist religious sect, etc., and consequently exclude other people from their means of production (or what is left of them) and thus continue the competition by other means; in other words, appropriation as a bloody mode of redistribution in the “molecular civil war” (Enzensberger). Mattick’s critique of capitalism, as shown, is almost an exclusively economic one; the subjective moment is left out. He does mention that in crisis situations people are certainly capable of spontaneous solidarity, which gives one some hope. But the fact that they could be just as capable of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Gypsyism, not only in their minds but also in their actions, as a celebrated pogrom, is not further addressed by him. Here at the latest, the omission of the level of ideology and subject critique in a critique of capitalism takes its revenge. Unfortunately, Mattick largely leaves it at the practical conclusions quoted above, without giving them any further thought. An answer to Lenin’s question may be more urgent today than ever, but it should not be demanded by truncating or even abandoning theoretical reflection.

Paul Mattick: Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism, London, Reaktion Books 2011.

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[1] Paul Mattick Jr, b. 1944, the son of Paul Mattick (1904-1981), teaches philosophy at Adelphi University in New York.

[2] See also the interview about the book that Paul Mattick gave to The Brooklyn Rail magazine in 2011.

[3] On the lack of understanding of the capitalism of neoclassical economic theory, see Claus Peter Ortlieb: “Markt-Märchen – Zur Kritik der neoklassischen akademischen Volkswirtschaftslehre und ihrer Gebrauch mathematischer Modelle,” in EXIT! – Crisis and Critique of Commodity Society No. 1 (2001), 166-183. Online: https://exit-online.org/pdf/exit_komplett/exit1.pdf. Conventional economic theory usually thinks of itself as “ideology-free,” since it uses mathematics, which, given the obviously visible and historically effective success in the natural sciences, is supposed to vouch for objectivity. However, we should rather speak of a methodological misuse of mathematics, see Herbert Auinger: Mißbrauchte Mathematik – Zur Verwendung mathematischer Methoden in den Sozialwissenschaften, Frankfurt 1995. For further details, see: Knut Hüller: Kapital als Fiktion – Wie endloser Verteilungskampf die Profitrate senken und, Finanzkrisen? erzeugt, Hamburg 2015.

[4] See, for example: Robert Kurz: Geld ohne Wert – Grundrisse zu einer Transformation der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Berlin 2012 and Hartmut Apel: Verwandtschaft Gott und Geld – zur Organisation archaischer, ägyptischer und antiker Gesellschaft, Frankfurt 1982.

[5] See Wolfgang Schivelbusch: Entfernte Verwandtschaft: Faschismus, Nationalsozialismus, New Deal. 1933-1939, Munich/Vienna 2005.

[6] Currently (March 2016), the U.S. national debt is between $19 and $20 trillion, depending on the source. However, according to various economists, the national debt is much higher: if, for example, you include the ever-increasing cost of Social Security, see http://deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de/2013/08/09/studie-deckt-auf-usa-haben-verdeckte-schulden-von-70-billionen-dollar/.

[7] More precisely, half of the population works in agriculture, 800 million Indians are considered poor, one third of the population is chronically malnourished, and 92% of the working population works in the informal sector without any insurance. Data in Dominik Müller: Indien – Die größte Demokratie der Welt?, Berlin/Hamburg 2014. Whereby girls are more affected by malnutrition: It is quite common that the boys in a poor family get more than the girls, these are often never allowed to eat their fill, if they try it, they are beaten up, and if the food is not enough, they are left to starve (!), see Georg Blume/Christoph Hein: Indiens verdrängte Wahrheit – Streitschrift gegen ein unmenschliches System, Hamburg 2014.

[8] Already self-organized homeless feeding programs are being opposed by the state, see the material at nationalhomeless.org.

[9] When factories were occupied in Argentina, constraints and the extension of night shifts were also discussed there, see “Occupied Factories in Argentina: Movement against Capital or Self-Management of Capitalist Misery?” in Wildcat No. 70 (2004). An occupation can mean precisely a continuation of competition by other means!

[10] Erich Mühsam: Befreiung der Gesellschaft vom Staat, Berlin 1975, 75.

Originally published in exit! 14 in 2017

On Democratic State Terror in Times of Neoliberalism

Thomas Meyer

In the commodity-producing patriarchy, the individual is recognized only insofar as they can prove themselves as a productive container of labor power. The rights granted to them by the state are therefore conditional. They must squeeze themselves into the formal shell of bourgeois subjectivity in order to be able to act as an “agent of abstract labor”[1] (Robert Kurz), which means nothing other than having to sell oneself through and through. In this context, the capitalist real categories such as money, commodities and labor are regarded by bourgeois common sense as ontological determinations of human existence in general. As soon as one begins to question them in practice, the much-vaunted bourgeois tolerance and plurality would reach its absolute limit and the subjects would clearly feel the force of the visible fist of the state (this has actually already been made clear in purely system-immanent social struggles, as history and the present show).[2]

If, however, the sale of one’s own labor power fails, the resulting social disasters are perceived as a “security threat” even by the most liberal constitutional state.[3] As Robert Kurz pointed out in the Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus [Black Book of Capitalism], the reaction against the fallen out and the poor in the third industrial revolution can only take the form of a war on facts, the form of a crusade (“The Last Crusade of Liberalism”).[4]

As far as the war on social facts is concerned, the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant, in his book Punishment of the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, has analyzed the changes in penal and prison policies in recent decades, and the reasons for these changes.[5] These changes are most evident in the ever-increasing prison population.[6] Although this book was published and reviewed several years ago, it is still worth reading because what Wacquant wrote is by no means obsolete in these times of the inner barrier and the permanent state of exception, but is still relevant and powerful. Although Wacquant deals primarily with the situation in the U.S., at the end he also addresses parallel developments in Europe.[7]

From Charitable State to Prison State

At the beginning of the 21st century, there were about 700 people in prison for every 100,000 people in the U.S., or a total of just under 2 million. In 1975, the figure was just under 400,000.[8] “Even South Africa at the close of the civil war against apartheid, with 369 inmates per 100,000 inhabitants in 1993, imprisoned half as many people proportionatelyas the prosperous America of President Clinton” (119, emphasis in original).

In addition, the penal system has become the third (!) largest employer in the country. The neoliberal state spares no expense in financing this enterprise. Thus, for example, “in Texas, the growth rate of the correctional budget was six times that of the university budget” (158).

But not only is the number of people in prison exorbitantly high, so is the number of people who are under “criminal justice supervision,” i.e., people placed on probation or “released on parole after having served the greater share of their sentence […]. In total, the stock of Americans under penal oversight grew by more than four and a half million in twenty years;starting from 1.84 million in 1980, it rose to […] 6.47 million in 2000” (133, emphasis in original).[9]

Their situation remains precarious, with a high probability of ending up behind bars again. Moreover, they are treated as pariahs by being subjected to a rigorous regime of interventions and surveillance: “Thus, in addition to the deployment of ‘intermediate sanctions’ such as house arrest and ‘boot camps,’ ‘intensive supervision,’ day [!] reporting, community service, and telephone or electronic surveillance […] the grasp of the American judicial system has been considerably enlarged thanks to the proliferation of criminal databanks […]. The result is that the country’s various police agencies […] now hold some 55 million “criminal files” – as against 35 million a decade earlier – on about 30 million individuals,corresponding to nearly one-third of the nation’s adult male population. Access to these databases varies by case and by jurisdiction. Some can be consulted only by judicial authorities […]. Others are accessible not only to other public bureaucracies […] and welfare services, but also to private persons and organizations via the Internet. These ‘rap sheets’ […] are commonly used, for example, by employers, to weed out ex-convicts applying for jobs. And it matters little that the information included in them is frequently incorrect, out of date, harmless, or sometimes even illegally disseminated: their circulation places not only criminals and those suspected of offenses, but also their families, friends, and neighborhoods, into the sight of the police and penal apparatus” (134f., emphasis added).

These interventions are no longer designed to help these people “reintegrate” (itself a highly problematic term) into society. These people are to be kept under control so that as many as possible can be “recaptured” (144).

Moreover, in many states these people are disenfranchised not only while they are in prison, but also while they are under criminal supervision, and in 13 states for life (!), so that “over 4.2 million Americans are thus excluded from the exercise of so-called universal suffrage, including 1.4 million black men representing 14 percent of the African-American electorate” (185).[10]

As mentioned at the beginning, civil rights are conditional. The development outlined by Wacquant for the U.S. and Europe is a prime example of this.[11]

But what happened historically that led to a steady increase in the prison population while the rate of violent crime remained constant or even decreased?[12] The quadrupling of the “U.S. carceral population in two decades cannot be explained by the rise of violent crime. It results from the extension of recourse to confinement for a range of street crimes […] that did not previously lead to a custodial sanction, especially minor drug infractions and behaviors described as public disorders and nuisances, as well as from the continual stiffening of sentences incurred.[13] After the mid-1970s […] when the federal government declared its ‘War on drugs,’ incarceration has been applied with growing frequency and severity to the gamut of offenders, be they career criminals or occasional lawbreakers, big-time bandits or small-time hoodlums, the violent and the nonviolent” (125f., emphasis in the original).

Thus, contrary to oft-repeated conservative claims, prisons are not filled with violent criminals, but with nonviolent petty criminals (incarcerated for things like drug offenses), most of whom come from the lower strata of society. Wacquant emphasizes several times that this is primarily a matter of controlling “the disruptive street ‘rabble’” (131). Moreover, the prison population today is now overwhelmingly African-American (relative to its share of the total population), whereas in 1950 it was 70% white (197).[14]

This rapid increase in the prison population, which predominantly affects the poor, is also due to the dismantling of the welfare state, or rather the “charitable state,” since the mid-1970s (41ff.).[15] The resulting social dislocations were countered by an expansion of the penal state; instead of “welfare,” “workfare” and “prisonfare” were now the order of the day – which led to explanatory patterns that are still common today, according to which the poor are only poor or unemployed because of their dependence on social benefits and their “moral depravity” (84). In any case, the numerous reforms led to a new understanding of the state toward the poor, “according to which the conduct of the dispossessed and dependent citizens must be closely supervised and, whenever necessary, corrected through rigorous protocols of surveillance, deterrence, and sanction, very much like those routinely applied to offenders under criminal justice supervision. The shift ‘from carrots to sticks,’ from voluntary programs supplying resources to mandatory programs enforcing compliance with behavioral rules by means of fines, reductions of benefits, and termination of recipiency irrespective of need, that is, programs treating the poor as cultural similes of criminals who have violated the civic law of wage work, is meant both to dissuade the lower fractions of the working class from making claims on state resources and to forcibly instill conventional morality into their members” (59f., emphasis in original).

A preliminary culmination of such reforms was the one passed under Clinton in 1996: This “reform” did not really offer anything historically new, “it merely recycled remedies issues straight of the country’s colonial era even as these had amply demonstrated their ineffectiveness in the past: namely, drawing a sharp demarcation between the ‘worthy’ and the ‘unworthy’ poor so as to force the latter into the inferior segments of the job market […] and ‘correcting’ the supposedly deviant and devious behavior believed to cause persistent poverty in the first place” (79).

The criminalization of poverty also took on new dimensions under Clinton: “The penalization of public aid extends even to its material setting and ambiance. The physical resemblance of the post-reform welfare office to a correctional facility is striking […].[16] The mandatory activities purported to instill the work ethic in welfare recipients and the string of incentives […] and especially penalties (escalating benefit cuts, eventually leading to permanent ineligibility) look like a first cousin of intensive supervision programs for probationers and parolees, or other ‘intermediate sanctions.’ Classes such as the ‘job readiness’ and ‘life skills’ workshops are redolent of the contents-empty rehabilitation courses given to convicts behind bars. […] Furthermore, upon closer examination, aside from strict spatial confinement, the employment circumstances of the convicts are not that different from the degraded conditions of the unskilled wage earners on the outside after ‘welfare reform’” (102, 184).

When the poor are treated like criminals, it is a sign that the former are deprived of their status as bourgeois subjects and reduced to their “bare life” (Agamben). The state of exception is imposed upon them. As the excluded, they are the object of control by the visible fist of the state, armed with batons, guns, and desk murderers. In effect, the poor are turned into ‘gypsies’; for their treatment is very similar to that of the Sinti and Roma – who for centuries represented the antithesis of the well-behaved and hard-working bourgeois philistine – in anti-Gypsy racism.[17]

What remains unclear, however, is why there has been a change in penal policy since the mid-1970s. Wacquant notes at various points that at that time there was a “fragmentation of wage labor” (287), a “deskilling of the labor market” (70), and the “advent of desocialized wage labor, vector of social insecurity” (281, emphasis in original). Wacquant takes phenomenological note of the precariousness of work, but without explaining it in terms of value theory.

As a result of the economic upheavals that began in the 1970s, black people in particular, who had previously been employed in the Fordist industries, became economically superfluous. For many, drug dealing became the most important source of income.[18] Hence the proclaimed war on drugs, which was a way of making poverty invisible by putting the economically superfluous behind bars. The prison, as Wacquant accurately describes, is “a container for undesirable dark bodies” (61).

For Wacquant, however, economics alone does not fully explain the growth of the prison population because it does not explain the blatantly racist character of this development, which disproportionately affects black people.[19] The black civil rights movement, which also received support from parts of the white middle class, broke up urban black ghettos and made social advancement seem possible. But when Martin Luther King Jr. went from attacking the legal inequality between blacks and whites to attacking the socioeconomic inequality between the two groups, white support waned. According to Wacquant, the dismantling of the welfare state (which many black people had taken advantage of) should be understood as an attempt to re-establish exclusionary racism after the success of the civil rights movement (195ff.). The accompanying policy of locking people away turned the prison into a “judicial ghetto” (205).

The Perverts to The Pillory!

But it is not only black people and the poor who are under the heel of the new penal regime. Another main target group of this regime clearly demonstrates the hysteria and vindictiveness into which the bourgeois addiction to harmony (of the Protestant variety) transforms: the (alleged![20]) sex offenders.

Wacquant writes in this regard: “To be sure, those suspected or convicted of sexual offenses have long been the object of intense fears and severe sanctions, owing to the particularly virulent stigma that befalls them in a puritanical culture strangled in taboos that until recently, made crimes of contraception, adultery, sex play (such as oral and anal intercourse) even between spouses, and of autoerotic practices as banal as masturbation and the perusal of pornographic materials, not to mention interracial marriage” (210).[21]

The hysteria about sex offenders is nothing new. Today’s hysteria has several historical antecedents: The years 1890-1914, when “sexual ‘perverts’ were first identified and singled out for eugenic intervention, and the period 1936-57, when hordes of ‘sex psychopaths’ were believed to be roaming the country in search of innocent victims, ready to strike at every turn” anticipated today’s culture-industry-fueled hysteria (210).[22]

Again, the “legislative activities” of the punishment regime have nothing to do with the actual “statistical evolution of offenses.” In the 1990s, for example, a whole series of laws were passed which, for the sake of simplicity, are referred to as “Megan’s Law.”[23] These include interventions that can only be described as totalitarian. In Louisiana, for example, it is an ex-sex offender “himself who is responsible for revealing his status in writing to his landlord, neighbors, and officials running the neighboring schools and public parks, on pain of one year imprisonment […]. Beyond which the law authorizes ‘all forms of public notification,’ including the press, signs, flyers, and bumper stickers placed on the fenders of the sex offender’s vehicle. The courts can even require ex-convicts for a sexual offense to don a distinctive garb [!] indicating their judicial status – much like the star or yellow linen caps [!!] worn by Jews in the princely cities of late medieval Europe” (217).

Of course, former sex offenders are registered in databases that are made available to the public (and are available on CD-ROM). Needless to say, these databases are growing; in 1998, for example, one in every 150 adult males in California was registered. But this “data, which no one takes the trouble to verify, turned out to be erroneous in many cases. […] Moreover, Megan’s CD-ROM reports neither the dates of the infractions – which can go all the way back to 1944 – nor the fact that many of these infractions have long since stopped being punishable by law […]” (220).

In addition, many states have enacted “two strikes” laws, under which recidivist sex offenders are automatically sent to prison for life and can be forced to undergo chemical castration (!) (216). The use of once effective psychotherapeutic methods for sex offenders has also been massively curtailed (230). Once a prison sentence has been served in full, it is still possible to be forcibly committed permanently (!) to a psychiatric ward, which is no different from the high-security wing of a prison (complete with solitary confinement, etc.). The mere assumption of dangerousness (!) on the basis of a “mental abnormality” (236) is sufficient for this course of action.

Moreover, in the case of sex offenders, the media use sensationalism to exaggerate individual incidents to the point where the middle-class idiot gets the impression that there must be an ‘epidemic.’ This conveys a certain image of the sex offender: They are deviant and dangerous, so no one talks about possible rehabilitation, and the sentences imposed appear too lenient anyway (209ff.). A lynch mob is not far away. If it becomes known that a sex offender has moved in nearby, he may have to be relocated because of the civil-protestant lynch mob, which is why in California “the state correctional administration is considering creating a kind of ‘judicial reservation’ in a desert zone […] where it would resettle sex parolees rejected by the population” (223).[24]

It should be emphasized that anyone who has committed or is alleged to have committed an applicable act is placed in the category of “sex offender,” with all the consequences implied here.[25]

The treatment of the fallen out in the U.S. is a prime example of neoliberalism’s war on social facts. Potentially hovering over everyone is the state of exception. It is becoming more and more the norm and, in principle, extended to more and more people. Accordingly, the democratic state cudgel is being armed. State terror is becoming a program that promises law and order. Bludgeoning and imprisonment have always been the ultima ratio of the state –this is especially true for Western democracies –but the difference between today and earlier times may be that today’s criminal law regime with its disciplinary interventions no longer sets (and probably cannot set) limits for itself. Thus Wacquant writes: “In February 1999, the state assembly of Virginia debated a bill aiming to put on free access via internet the complete list of all those convicted of a criminal offense, adults and minors, including minor driving violations and violations of licensing and registration statutes. Punitive panopticonism has a bright future ahead in America.” (237, emphasis in original).

When the crisis-ridden bourgeois state does not succeed in its struggle against reality, with its practice of discipline and punishment, and when a bourgeois paradise of virtue does not want to emerge, it reacts only with a further intensification of its practice of terror, which grows more and more into a paranoid delusion. In this way, the bourgeois penal fanatic continues to misunderstand the chaotic world and, in his madness, decrees interventions and ordinances that, while promising to save “security” and “freedom,” increasingly turn the whole of society into a prison and thus make a farce of all freedom and security.

Loïc Wacquant: Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, Durham 2009.

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[1] See Robert Kurz: The Substance of Capital, London, 2016.

[2] It is also particularly evident in the reactions to resistance to emerging capitalism in times of primordial accumulation, see e.g. Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker: Die vielköpfige Hydra – Die verborgene Geschichte des revolutionären Atlantiks, Berlin/Hamburg 2008; see also Silvia Federici: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitve Accumulation, New York 2004.

[3] Here, too, one finds what one is looking for if one looks at the historical origins of bourgeois security thinking, see Matthias Bohlender: Metamorphosen des liberalen Regierungsdenkens – Politische Ökonomie, Polizei und Pauperismus, Weilerswist 2007. And if the social dimension is perceived at all, then social remedies, state handouts, are granted with the intended goal of loyalty to the existing system; poverty has thus also always been seen as an “educational problem.”

[4] Robert Kurz: Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus – Ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft, Frankfurt 1999, 667ff.

[5] Wacquant teaches at the Universitiy of California at Berkeley, see Loïcwacquant.net.

[6] Wacquant is not the first to present such an analysis: about a decade earlier, the Nils Christie published the book: Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style. In the first edition, the subtitle still had a question mark, which was dispensed with in the subsequent editions for obvious reasons.

[7] The experience of recent decades shows that for the core capitalist states it is true that certain developments in the U.S. also appear in Europe with a certain time lag. However, if the connection with capitalism as a whole is not reflected upon and if they are causally attributed to the U.S., this can be a source of anti-Americanism, cf. Barbara Fried: “Antiamerikanismus als Kulturalisierung von Differenz – Versuch einer empirischen Ideologiekritik”, in: Associazione delle Talpe, Rosa Luxemburg Initiative Bremen (eds.): Maulwurfsarbeit II – Kritik in Zeiten zerstörter Illusionen (2012), 70-88.

[8] 132ff. More recent figures, which not surprisingly tend to be higher today, can be found at prisonstudies.org. In addition, about a quarter of the world’s prisoners are in U.S. prisons, although it remains unclear how reliable these figures actually are. Wacquant notes, for example, that about 726 people were executed in China in 2003. However, if one were to count executions not ordered by the courts, the figure would be 10,000-15,000 (36). For some prison populations, there may be similar discrepancies between “official” and “unofficial” figures. The catastrophic conditions in the overcrowded prisons, about which Wacquant provides much harrowing material, will not be discussed here for reasons of space; those interested will also find what they are looking for, for example, at hrw.org.

[9] More recent figures speak of about 7 million people who are in prison or under criminal surveillance, that is, one in 31 (!) adults.

[10] A recent study cites a number of 5.85 million people affected by disenfranchisement, see Jean Chung: “Felony Disenfranchisement: A Primer”, May 10, 2016, at sentencingproject.org.

[11] In the course of the fight against terrorism, the surveillance and control mania has once again intensified. The effects on civil rights etc. were already examined years ago in various books, for example in Ilija Trojanow, Juli Zeh: Angriff auf die Freiheit – Sicherheitswahn, Überwachungsstaat und der Abbau bürgerlicher Rechte, Munich 2010. Jihadism is by no means to be trivialized here, as is common among some leftists, but the anti-terrorism measures are hardly those explicitly directed only against Islamism; thus Trojanow and Zeh show that these laws are now being applied in completely different areas: “The mania for control has long since left the sphere of counter-terrorism and has also affected health care, the tax system […] and even everyday life on the street. In the UK, local authorities are using anti-terror laws (namely the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, RIPA) to spy on citizens who might be littering in the street, failing to properly dispose of dog poop, or selling pizza illegally. […] Parents are being spied on to find out if they are enrolling their children in a school outside of their designated district. In the first half of 2008, 867 terror investigations were opened against everyday criminals. In the blink of an eye, the ‘fight against terrorism’ becomes a sharp sword in the hands of a law-and-order bourgeoisie, as if the best form of society were realized in an education camp […] The fight against terrorism tends to turn into a fight against ‘socially harmful behavior’. By then, at the latest, there is a little terrorist lurking in every citizen, and free society is on its way to ruin” (134 f.). In the end, everything is sacrificed for so-called “security.”

[12] Figures from 1960-2014 can be found at http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm.

[13] Particularly piquant is the so-called “three-strikes law,” under which a life sentence is automatically imposed after a third conviction. In California, this applies to about 500 offenses, including non-violent offenses, such as simple shoplifting (!) (85).

[14] In 2013, for example, out of a total of 18.5 million black males, 745,000 were in prison, see, e.g., Antonio Moore, “The Black Male Incarceration Problem is Real and It’s Catastrophic,” huffingtonpost.com, Feb. 17, 2015; A black man is six times as likely to end up behind bars as a white man, see George Gao: “The black-white gap in incarceration rates,” pewresearch.org, July 18, 2014.

[15] That this has not changed to this day is repeatedly shown by various studies, such as Bernadette Rabuy and Daniel Kopf: “Prisons of Poverty: Uncovering the pre-incarceration incomes of the imprisoned” (2015) on prisonpolicy.org.

[16] By the way, the local offices of the social ministries are called “Job Centers” (!), (p.119). Obviously, the Clinton reforms are equivalent to the later Hartz IV reforms in Germany.

[17] Cf. Roswitha Scholz: “Homo Sacer und die ‘Zigeuner’ Antiziganismus – Überlegungen zu einer wesentlichen und deshalb ‘vergessenen’ Variante des Modernen Rassismus,” in EXIT! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, no. 4 (2007), 177-227, cf. also the two anthologies Antiziganistische Zustände, Münster, edited by Markus End et al. (2009) and (2013).

[18] See the interview with Curtis Price, “In den Ghettos sind die Drogen zum wichtigsten Wirtschaftsfaktor geworden” in Wildcat – Zirkular no. 42/43 (1998).

[19] The bottom line is that the war on drugs is a war against blacks, according to Michelle Alexander, see e.g. Larry Gabriel: “Jim Crow’s drug war: Why the War of Drugs is a war against black people,” in: Detroit Metro Times,11/28/2012. On the racism of the penal system in the U.S. see also the conversation with Michelle Alexander in: Junge Welt, 08/25/2012.

[20] The “alleged” is emphasized here because consensual sex between young adults and adolescents is also considered a sexual offense. In the U.S., this is called statutory rape. However, the tightening of sexual criminal law, which continues to this day, and of course also in Europe, has de facto led to an increasing criminalization of consensual (!) youth sexuality, with all the consequences mentioned above. Corresponding reports are occasionally circulating in the German media, such as the “case” of Kaitlyn Hunt (queer.de). It is therefore hypocritical or downright ignorant for some to complain about homophobic politics in Russia while remaining silent about sexual politics in the U.S.

This topic (and the parallel developments in Europe/Germany) was systematically dealt with in the German-speaking world by Max Roth: Uncle Sams’s Sexualhölle erobert die Welt – Die neue Hexenjagd auf Kinderschänder? und die weltweite Enthumanisierung des Sexualstrafrechts unter US-Diktat, published by the anti-imperialist Ahriman-Verlag, Freiburg, 2013. Although Roth can be criticized for his anti-feminism and crude anti-Americanism, the material gathered on the subject (mostly from U.S. sources) speaks for itself.

[21] See further Roth, “Amerikas puritanisches Erbe,” (114-156).

[22] On eugenics in the U.S., see the chapter “A Eugenic Civilization” in Jeremy Rifkin: The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World, New York 1999.

[23] But it did not stop there. “In 2006, the Adam Walsh Act was passed. It provides for mandatory public registration of juvenile “sex offenders.” The Adam Walsh Act created a separate new federal agency (with the obscene acronym SMART) to handle registration, and the cost to states of implementing the law was estimated to total nearly a billion dollars for the first year alone. The Adam Walsh Act expands both the scope of data recorded in registries (e.g., to include fingerprints, palm prints, and DNA samples) and the scope of persons covered. […] Nonviolent acts which the U.S. Sex Offender Act declare a crime, explicitly suffice as grounds for registration. This includes consensual sexual contact among or with juveniles or even just nudity in public, e.g., skinny dipping […] (Roth 231f.).” Also noteworthy is the current definition of “child pornography,” which includes homemade nude images exchanged between children under the age of 18, cf. Roth, “Eine islamoide Definition der Kinderpornographie,” (240-263). This can only be described as a paranoid delusion.

[24] Such settlements are now a reality.

[25] In 2015, there were approximately 750,000 registered “sex-offenders” in the U.S., see statisticbrain.com.

Originally published in exit! 14 in 2017.

On the Misery of the (Late) Bourgeois Discourse on “Freedom”

Thomas Meyer

1.

It is not five to twelve, but five past twelve, to quote the philosopher Slavoj Žižek (Žižek 2021, 219). The fact that climate change is indisputable (even if its nuances continue to be debated) and represents a serious threat to the future of humanity should be clear even to the last fool by now.[1] What is more, it is now obvious that emissions of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases will need to be radically and rapidly reduced if the climate catastrophe is not to assume an even more catastrophic proportion. This means not only a complete transformation of our infrastructure, but also a complete change and upheaval in the way that we produce and live. It is thus a program of abolitions and shutdowns that we must demand. The “locomotive” of the development of productive forces burns everything in its path. Pulling the “emergency brake,” as Walter Benjamin put it, is inevitable, unless one wants to risk or accept the death of the “passengers” (see Böttcher 2023).

Apart from the questions of how the capitalist mode of production could be abolished, how a corresponding “transformative movement” could be set up, or what kind of “transitional society” (?) would have to be dealt with (since “the train” would only be stopped), there is also the problem of the affective rejection of these facts by many people. What they should already know and that which should lead to a rethinking and a “re-action” is affectively pushed back. The (decades-long) downplaying or denial of climate change and the dissemination of propaganda and disinformation by think tanks, corporations and the media fall on fertile psychic ground (see Quent, Richter, Salheiser 2022).

Criticizing one’s own identity (and therefore work, consumption, home ownership, etc.), which is necessary to rethink and change one’s actions, is avoided by invoking a vulgar bourgeois concept of freedom. Freedom is reduced to the freedom of the consumer, which, like the freedom to produce what is to be consumed, must not be restricted under any circumstances. (Bourgeois) freedom, on the other hand (see Lepenies 2022), originally had to do with “responsibility”; it was about limiting and modernizing domination (checks and balances, protection against arbitrary state or judicial power, freedom of religion and publication, enforcement of private property, production of security, etc.), it was about shaping and disciplining people to become “useful” parts of a community or society.[2] The freedom of one citizen ended where the freedom of another citizen was violated. It was not about unlimited consumption, but about renunciation of consumption, inner-worldly asceticism, affect control. This was interpreted by some as a process of civilization.[3] Many philosophers believed that man could not be free if he indulged his passions without restraint. He who is at the mercy of his passions, who follows them directly, is not free but a slave. However, passions were not only judged negatively, they could also prove to be “useful” for the state and the economy, if they were guided by “reason.”

Now, “developed capitalism” (since about the Fordist boom) no longer depends on ascetic subjects who (have to) try to limit their consumption, but on consuming subjects who want to buy all the bullshit that is produced[4] (and even sensible things turn out to be bullshit in capitalism: planned obsolescence and the like – so that money is fed into the valorization process M-C-M” as soon as possible). The spectacle of advertising, with which whole world is littered (today mostly “individualized” in the form of “apps” etc.), serves as a propagandistic “means of motivation” (so that the now mass-produced goods can also realize themselves as value) for this. Work, performance and “well-earned” consumption became the central identity of modern capitalist societies (especially of the “middle class”; the car as a famous “status symbol” see Kurz 2020 & Koch 2021). Self-denial and discipline in working life were rewarded or “compensated” by the fact that one could privately carve out a “successful life” for oneself through one’s own performance, which found its confirmation in being able to afford or buy this and that (a vacation, car, house and the “cricket on the hearth”). The ecological costs of Fordist mass consumption were usually of no interest (or were dismissed as left-wing propaganda, as in the case of Ayn Rand: Rand 1971).

This consumerist self-centeredness has been intensified by neoliberalism, under which people have been thrown back on themselves and urged to constantly optimize themselves in order to “freely” and “self-determinedly” submit to the imperatives of the (labor) market as “responsible citizens” who do not allow themselves to be “patronized.” The “responsible citizen” finds his freedom in submitting to the dictates of the capitalist crisis in a fully enlightened and self-determined way, and still interprets this as self-realization and self-optimization. The freedom to consume is supported by the freedom to realize oneself in submission and to shit on all those who can’t keep up (anymore); those who are considered “underachievers” or even “work-shy” and fail in the competition are just “unlucky.” The society of total competition (i.e. competition on all levels), i.e. of “individual self-responsibility,” of the “entrepreneurial self” is a breeding ground for antisocial affects of all kinds. The narcissistic social character proves here to be the precondition and result of unrestrained consumer capitalism (see Wissen 2017 & Jappe 2022).

In developed capitalism, consumption is no longer primarily aimed atsatisfying needs shaped by the commodity-form, but above all at creating identity. Philipp Lepenies writes (citing to Zygmunt Bauman): “The individual no longer pursues his own needs, but satisfies desires that have been awakened in him by the producers and that, in extreme cases, obey only the pleasure principle. As soon as the longings for certain products can be constantly renewed and adapted, consumption becomes an endless vicious circle. Individuals succumb to the illusion that they can define their personality and identity, even their social status, through consumption. Consumption becomes an island of stability, one’s own identity a function of consumption. If a certain desire is denied, people perceive this as an attack on the person they want to be” (Lepenies 2022, 234, emphasis T.M.). Therefore, nothing enrages the bourgeois reactionary more than the fact that some “Left-Green” people question his unrestricted freedom of consumption or want to prohibit or even “take away” something from him (whereby one must also be able to afford freedom of consumption, which poor people cannot, see Mayr 2020). It is seen as an attack on one’s own identity (what a joke, when these people rail against the “identity politics” of the left or left-liberals at the same time). The bourgeois reactionary has earned all this himself, has worked hard for it, and therefore it is his “natural human right” to buy and consume what he likes. It is therefore unacceptable, in this view, for the “achiever” to be “patronized” by the state or by some alleged communists or eco-socialists (and yet at the same time he claims for himself the freedom to patronize the freedom of others, such as Hartz IV recipients, or to harass them).

2.

It is undoubtedly correct and necessary to criticize the bourgeois freedom of “earlier times” in the sense that it was effectively the freedom of the white and male propertied bourgeoisie and its realization had to take place within the framework of the capitalist “cage of bondage” (Max Weber). This will not be elaborated in detail here (see for example: Losurdo 2010, Hentges 1999, Kurz 2004 & Landa 2021). What is crucial here is that the appeal to one’s own so-called freedom has the effect of making one unwilling or unable to deal seriously with problems. The perspective of the individual’s freedom as a monad of consumption and work, of an immediate self-centeredness, prevents from the outset the ability to deal with problems that require a social perspective, i.e. one in which the “individual” would have to transcend his or her narrow-minded self-centeredness. Contradictions and dissonances are thus avoided and covered up with verbiage and affective indignation. Finally, the aggressive self-centeredness of “consumer freedom” and often accompanying defense of fossil capitalism – which, not coincidentally, is often part of androcentric identity, leading Cara Dagget (2018) to coin the apt term petro-masculinity – points to an inherent “possibility” of bourgeois freedom itself, that is, to the possibility of freedom turning into unfreedom. As Andrea Maihofer writes, “The common neoliberal rhetoric of the individual self-responsibility of each person now means that freedom is understood by many only as individual freedom. This can be seen in the current protests against the Corona measures, when people claim the right to the individual freedom not to wear a mask […] or to evade the requirements in general – regardless of the consequences for themselves or others – with the slogan: “My health! My choice!” […] In this way, freedom is not only understood exclusively as individual freedom, but also explicitly rejects any responsibility for the social consequences of one’s own actions. In other words, the concept of freedom is increasingly used in an explicitly anti-emancipatory sense. But this is not a new phenomenon. Not only has an authoritarian understanding of freedom always been present in (right-wing) conservative to right-wing extremist discourses, but this danger of turning into unfreedom has been inherent in the bourgeois understanding of freedom from the very beginning” (emphasis in the original). It is therefore not surprising that “in the name of freedom, right-wing conservative to right-wing extremist social actors not only legitimize growing social inequalities, social exclusions and divisions, but also claim the right to exclude and discriminate against others in the name of freedom” (Maihofer 2022, 327).

Freedom is thus understood not as something social, as a historical social relation, something that could potentially be realized by hitherto oppressed and discriminated minorities or classes, but as something that an individual subject possesses and is willing to assert against others, regardless of the possible consequences (thus this “freedom” has a “business-like” character – consequences are “externalized” or ignored, see also: Amlinger & Nachtwey 2022). It is precisely the freedom to be autonomous, i.e. to make use of one’s freedom to submit to systemic constraints without the guidance of another. A fundamentally socially- and ecologically-ignorant “view of life” is almost a necessary consequence and prerequisite for successful “adaptive performance.” This freedom, as it has been propagated especially in neoliberalism as a “guiding culture” [Leitkultur], is thus nothing other than the ability to autonomously adapt to heteronomous conditions. The “autonomy” consists in flexibly taking into account the overwhelming dynamics of the valorizing movement of capital and the increasing existential insecurity, in order to always remain profitable and exploitable, so that one can count oneself among the “high achievers” and naturally derive certain claims for oneself from this. These claims can consist of “well-deserved” unlimited consumption (certainly limited only by the amount of money or credit available), or of feeling empowered to always see oneself as the actual victim. This is probably the origin of the blatant affectation (“prohibition politics,” “eco-dictatorship,” etc.) that we see when people talk about introducing a vegetarian day in the cafeteria, limiting speed on the highways, or abolishing domestic flights. Under no circumstances should one reflect on one’s own habits in any way, certainly not in connection with a particular mode of production that is destroying the planet. Philipp Lepenies comments again: “However, the planned measures that the irritating words “ban” and “renunciation” evoke today are – and this must be clearly emphasized – reactions to the decisive fundamental crisis of our time and to an increasingly urgent need for action. It is not a question of a complete change of behavior according to a certain ideology, nor of the homogenization and suppression of other ways of life. Behind the ban and renounce proposals is an attempt to mitigate or reverse the negative effects of our consumption patterns that have led to and continue to exacerbate the climate catastrophe. The idea that we should ban and renounce certain things does not stem from a perverse and sadistic desire to ban and call for renunciation for no reason. They are concrete proposals for saving our climate” (Lepenies 2022, 263f.).

Bans and restrictions can point out how certain types of production and consumption are environmentally problematic and should be abolished. In this way, they are similar to environmental protection measures: They are immanent stopgap measures that are (or must be) enforced by the state, but they do not point to a radical critique of the commodity form or the self-purpose of capital accumulation. It makes perfect sense to insist on the political enforcement of bans and restrictions if we want to prevent the ecological crisis from becoming even more catastrophic. It is important to make the immanent limits and contradictions recognizable in the process. Of course, such bans and restrictions can aim to merely “paint capitalism green” and place the responsibility on the individual, the supposedly autonomous individual (see Hartmann 2020). Also, debates about “healthy and sustainable nutrition” or the like can contain a paternalistic and puritanical moment (here, some liberal critics of nudging, etc. are partly right).[5] However, consumption cannot really be separated from production, both of which have a specifically capitalist character. Here, Lepenies could be criticized for writing about (and dwelling on) “consumer behavior” and its critical questioning. With regard to the “disintegration of production and consumption already inherent in the simple commodity form,” the consequence of which is the degradation of the “consumer competence of people,” Robert Kurz writes in his book critical of postmodern lifestyle leftists (some of whom were so narrow-minded in the 90s that they celebrated consumption as an allegedly subversive act – “the consumer as dissident,” they said in all seriousness): “Capitalist consumers are de-skilled precisely in this capacity because they have already been de-skilled as producers. As illiterates of social reproduction and/or specialized idiots, they consume in a de-aestheticized, functionally oriented social space. From the grotesque incomprehensibility of the often real-satirical instructions for use to the perpetual “uncomfortableness” of public spaces, this de-skilling expropriation of consumer competence is evident at all levels. The professional idiots are always also consumer idiots and vice versa. The universalism of commodities cannot therefore correspond to a universality of individuals […]” (Kurz 1999, 155ff.).

What is to be consumed is present in a reified form, it is the materialization of the value abstraction; the “addressee” is the incapacitated, isolated and alienated subject. “Use-value,” often asserted only as a promise of use-value, is shaped and realized by managerial rationality. The goal is not the common production of use-values that can be collectively consumed. On the contrary, the objective is that on the managerial level a single capital asserts itself in competition via the successful sale of commodities and thus registers “profit” for itself, in order to then be able to continue with the production and realization of (surplus) value forever (M-C-M’-C’-M’’…). The goal of production is mediated on the level of society as a whole with the irrational and abstract goal of the overall capitalist process, to increase capital/money for its own sake. What happens to the goods after the sale, whether the promise of use value is really redeemed – if this was not only clumsy propaganda anyway – where the individual parts for the production of this commodity came from and in turn how they were produced, etc., is of no interest to the individual capital, nor is their disposal and all of the corresponding ecological consequences (these appear to the individual capital only afterwards in the form of state interventions and regulations – if at all!)

The consumer has the freedom to insert himself into this process and to buy what is for sale. What can be chosen for consumption has long since been “decided” by the valorization process of capital. In the words of Robert Kurz: “On the other hand, however, the general capitalist commodity form expropriates not only the competence to consume, that is, the ability to use things universally in their social context and their sensuous qualities, but also the determination of the content of what individuals have to consume. Since they produce what they do not consume, and consume what they have not produced (even if only in the sense of an institutional communal determination of the content of production) even in consumption they become objects of managerial rationality, from which nothing is further removed than human self-determination” (ibid.).

There is no social understanding about the content of production and consumption. The freedom of the consumer is therefore a chimera. It is a mirage that one must be able to afford. It is the reverse of the “freedom of the assembly line worker.” The “responsible consumer” can only choose what has already been put in front of him anyway: “Demand never determines supply, it is always the other way around. If it were otherwise, then the members of society would have to agree in advance how to satisfy their needs and then organize production accordingly; in other words, in the social-institutional sense (not directly from the activity of the individuals), there would have to be an identity of producers and consumers. Then, of course, demand would no longer be demand for commodities, but rather the direct social discussion, negotiation and realization of the structures of need” (ibid.). This is where a critique of consumer behavior would have to start, however, if it does not want to advocate for bans and renunciations alone and appeal to an abstract common responsibility or to a kind of socio-ecological common sense.

When we talk about needs and their realization, we must do so in the context of the form determination of needs by capital. For certain needs, the compensatory character of consumption is obvious. However, necessary social and material needs and their realization are also determined by capital. Out of necessity, the realization of necessary needs must still be demanded and fought for in the capitalist form (affordable housing, for example), but it is by no means necessary to perceive them in this form or to naturalize their capitalist form. The question here is what “necessity” actually stands for. Adorno notes in this regard in his Theses on Need (2017): “The notion, for example, that cinema is as necessary as housing and food for the reproduction of labor power is “true” only in a world where people are organized by the reproduction of labor power, a world that also forces their needs into harmony with the profit and domination interests of employers [or, at the level of the overall social context, with the imperatives of capital accumulation, T.M.].” Necessity is thus relative, since it implies a necessity for the bourgeois subject.

On the one hand, needs are compensatory, since their realization through freedom of consumption promises identity and self-realization – and are thus necessary for the conditioning and reproduction of people as variable capital; on the other hand, the form determination of capital thwarts the realization of actually necessary social and material needs. Their realization, to the extent that they are at all sufficiently “materially” available or affordable for those in need, is capitalistically adjusted, as can be seen, for example, in the capitalist housing system. On the one hand, for the better-off, a fenced-in bourgeois home of one’s own (i.e., the idiocy of the socially isolated bourgeois nuclear family), the construction of which is defended by some as an elementary human right; on the other hand, concrete boxes constructed in such a way that the individual “housing units” can have nothing to do with each other socially. Both are depositories for containers of labor power – housing goods.

Housing and food are necessary, in contrast to, say, air travel and individual transportation, because they relate to the generic traits of human beings. But “generic traits” here are not to be understood in a naturalizing way. In the words of Agnes Heller, ““natural needs” […] refer to the simple maintenance of human life (self-preservation) and are “naturally necessary” simply because, without satisfying them, man is not able to preserve himself as a mere natural being. These needs are not identical with those of animals, because for his own self-preservation man must also have certain conditions (warmth, clothing) for which the animal has no “need”. The necessary needs for sustaining man as a natural being are therefore also social […]: the mode of satisfaction makes the need itself social” (Heller 1976, 31).

Although nature and thus “natural needs” cannot be dissolved into “discourse” or understood only as something “socially constructed,” both are always already mediated by society and history. In Adorno’s words: “Each drive is so socially mediated that its natural side never appears immediately, but always only as socially produced. The appeal to nature in relation to this or that need is always merely the mask of denial and domination.” (2017). Naturalizations usually had to do with the legitimation of domination. While in the Middle Ages, for example, domination and hierarchy were justified with “God,” in “enlightened” bourgeois society this was done with “nature” (or with what one thought one understood about it). In this way, racism, sexism, eugenics and other things were “scientifically” justified (see for example Reimann 2017, Gould 1996, Weingart et al. 1992, Honegger 1991).

It is precisely the specifically capitalist socialization of needs and their realization that must be the focus of critique if certain forms of production and consumption are to be restricted or banned. These bans and restrictions on their own may be as ineffective as state environmental protection laws, but that would not change the fact that the corresponding discourses as to why we need such abolitions and shutdowns are linked to the climate catastrophe and the urgent need for action – and it is precisely this insight that is affectively repelled from the outset. But an abolition of the capitalist mode of production, of the self-purpose of capital accumulation (and thus also of all senseless or insane consumption), cannot be envisaged or even made conceivable if people cannot detach themselves from their “consumer identity” (and from their identity as “achievers”), do not reconsider their affects and also justify their bigotry with a completely stupid concept of “freedom”; a concept of freedom that always means their freedom and is meant to maintain and enforce their status quo (if need be, with exclusion and violence, see Koester 2019).

3.

The realization of needs that are not offered by the market and/or are not profitable, and the planning and discussion of what to produce when this “what” is not determined by the valorizing movement of capital, are not part of bourgeois freedom. As Kurz writes: “the aspiration to deliberate, conscious cooperative sociality is represented as a sin against the Holy Spirit of an anti-social and blind social machine which has again and again been proclaimed as the law of nature” (Kurz 1999a, 645). Any attempt, even any claim or thought, to want to plan production and not leave it to the so-called spontaneity of the market (which implies nothing other than fundamentally short-term thinking) was always suspected of totalitarianism. A concept of freedom that included freedom from social need was considered by bourgeois ideologues like F. A. Hayek as a path to servitude (ibid., 644ff.). Instead, Hayek sees submission to the imperatives of the market as the epitome of freedom. Anything else, he argues, leads to the gulag (so simply can Hayek’s redundant works be summarized). The framework in which bourgeois freedoms are realized is the valorizing movement of capital: “Nothing may be thought, written, done, or made that would go beyond this society […]” (Adorno 2017). One receives recognition (and even this has to be fought for and is by no means a matter of course – even worse than having to be a subject is not being allowed to be a subject, although so far there is no alternative to having to be a subject), provided that one successfully proves oneself as an agent of abstract labor. Civil liberties and human rights are thus valid only with reservations (if they are valid at all – as is well known, capitalism also runs without them). Their validity and enforcement depend on a successful accumulation of capital, during which people are incorporated as variable capital, and on a financing state, by which they are administered as subjects of the state. These reservations become particularly evident in the crisis, when people”s existence should be profitable. Bourgeois recognition thus presupposes a fundamental non-recognition of people as corporeal beings. This can be seen very clearly in the debates on euthanasia (in addition to the situation of refugees and the “punishment of the poor,” see Böttcher 2016 & Wacquant 2009). For example, active euthanasia has been legal in Canada since 2016. Initially, this was intended for people who are terminally ill and whose imminent death is foreseeable. However, the choice of assisted suicide is by no means “only” for the terminally ill, but has long since been extended to people who are lonely or poor, who do not want to be a burden on their family, or who simply see no point in living.[6] Economists rejoice that this reduces the costs of the health care system![7] Euthanasia, which is anything but “self-determined”, does not even stop at Long Covid patients (!): “The Canadian Tracey Thompsen (50) suffers from Long Covid and is unable to work. For two years, the former cook has had to struggle with chronic fatigue and other severe symptoms. She can hardly cope with her everyday life. As a result, she has now applied for active euthanasia. The reason she gives is that her savings would only last for five months. She doesn’t really want to die, but the hopelessness of her situation and the lack of financial support have made her do it.”[8] Patients who cost a lot are persuaded or pressured to opt for the less expensive (!) euthanasia: “In fact, in Canada, people with severe disabilities can choose to be killed even if there is no other medical problem. Human rights groups complain that the country offers no safeguards. Families are not allowed to be informed. Instead, healthcare workers are urged to suggest euthanasia even to those who have not considered the procedure on their own. Unsurprisingly, this targets people who need expensive treatment but don’t receive adequate government support.”[9] So-called bioethicists and pediatricians (!) are still calling for an expansion of euthanasia: “Some Canadian pediatricians and bioethicists, for example, argue in an essay published in the Journal of Medical Ethics (!) that killing on demand should be classified as palliative end-of-life treatment and thus be part of health care. This would mean that the “treatment” would not have to be preceded by any special information or forceful determination of the ability to form a will. If euthanasia is now considered part of health care, the question arises as to why it should not be offered to everyone, including minors, according to the authors of the essay. Physicians should be encouraged to make patients aware of all the options available to them as part of health care – including active euthanasia. The authors further argue that minors who are capable of giving consent should be allowed to make decisions without parental consent, if necessary.” [10][11] The “self-determined” liquidation of people as “part of health care”! Orwellian newspeak really cannot get any more perfidious than this!!!

The euthanasia discourse in Canada thus followed a similar trajectory to that in the Netherlands (van Loenen 2009). However, it was “pursued more ruthlessly and rapidly” in Canada (Yuill 2022) than elsewhere. In the Netherlands, the legalization of so-called euthanasia did not lead to an end of the debate; rather, the debate then really took off: if euthanasia is granted to the terminally ill, why not to the disabled or mentally ill? If it is granted to the elderly, why not to the young? If it is granted to the terminally ill, why not to the depressed or simply to people who no longer see any meaning in their lives because they are lonely? Or because they are poor. Or at risk of homelessness (!!)![12] It is not chronic pain, disability or illness that drives some people to “euthanasia,” but poverty and lack of perspective. It is not that they want to die, but that they see no way out.[13]

Those who are superfluous for capitalism and those whose labor cannot be exploited in the valorization process are denied any right to exist; a denial that is above all – and this is especially disgusting – legitimized by bioethics and the like. How repulsive that euthanasia henchmen even dare to publish a propaganda brochure for children![14] So that children learn that it is “normal” for grandpa or their disabled brother to be murdered because of cost concerns? In the end, the “superfluous” and “human cost factors” are to be “disposed of” just like unsold tomatoes. Freedom under capitalism is in the last instance nothing more than the freedom to die!

So one still dares to speak of freedom and self-determination without recognizing and radically criticizing the logic of the capitalist social system at all, which always objectively questions both and makes the submission to and internalization of the valorization imperatives of capital the precondition of all freedom and self-determination! This applies all the more if by freedom and self-determination people really mean consumer freedom. No thought is wasted on how the capitalist mode of production (and thus the mode of consumption) prepares and destroys man and nature for the “monstrous end in itself” (Kurz 1999a, 648) of capital accumulation. For the bourgeois philistine, everything should remain as it is (although it is becoming increasingly obvious that nothing will remain as it is). Under no circumstances should one’s own freedom of consumption, freedom of vacation or the like be questioned. In order to stop or at least (!) slow down the climate collapse, however, all kinds of things have to be questioned…

If, on the other hand, we are to speak of freedom, then it should be in a completely different sense than it is at present. In the words of Robert Kurz: “Freedom would consist solely in circumstances in which the people who come together for the purpose of the reproduction of their lives not only do so voluntarily, but also discuss and decide both what they will do and how they will do it together. […] A freedom of this kind, which would be the exact opposite of the liberal universal serfdom under the diktat of the labor markets, is in principle possible, in practical terms, on all levels of social reproduction—from the household to transcontinental networked production.” (ibid.). There would have to be a social agreement on what, how and for what purpose production should take place without ruining the planet – and not in order to accumulate capital, even if it is “green” capital. Climate protection and economic growth are not compatible, as even some Greens have come to realize (e.g. the Taz editorUlrike Herrmann, who in her new book advocates a war economy, similar to that of Great Britain during World War II, as an alleged means to overcome capitalism and its destructive valorization dynamics; for a critique see Konicz 2022). The fact that people would no longer have to sacrifice themselves and nature for the monstrous end in itself of capital would be, so to speak, the basis for real freedom and self-determination, which, however, would have nothing to do with bourgeois freedom and self-determination (a fortiori not with the so-called freedom of consumption), since the latter are nothing other than the freedom to servitude and self-valorization, to self-stupefaction and finally – as the euthanasia debates show clearly – the freedom to die.

To evade the radical critique of the existing, and the crises and catastrophes that go along with it, by means of affectation and freedom mumbo-jumbo, in order to cling to a historical model that is on its way out, has indeed something suicidal about it in the medium to long term; “freedom to die” can thus hardly be an exaggeration. To conclude in Tomasz Konicz’s words, “The adherence of late capitalist ideology to the existing, which is obviously in the process of decay, thus comes close to a suicide, a suicide out of fear of the death of capital. In the end, death is unconsciously sought as a way out of the growing social contradictions that permeate every individual. The nothingness of death thus becomes the last resting place in the face of the escalating contradictions of the late capitalist permanent crisis and the accompanying abyss between the increasing renunciation of drives and social requirements that can hardly be fulfilled anymore. […] The death drive latently inherent in capital, manifest in its deadly crisis, wants to transfer the world into nothingness, into the yawning void that forms the concrete substance of the real abstraction value. It is a subjectless nihilism that unfolds due to the crisis: The world is to be made identical to the black hole of the value-form, which is at the center of the whirlwind of rampant accumulation of dead wage labor that has been devastating the world for some 300 years. Consequently, everything that cannot be pressed into commodity form and valorized by sale on the market is consigned to destruction in times of crisis rather than the grip of the world’s valorization machine on man and nature being loosened because of its decline. The destruction of unsaleable goods in times of crisis, which in the meantime are increasingly withdrawn from the access of impoverished people by corresponding legal regulations (e.g. by laws against “containerization”), is only the obvious outflow of this urge for self-destruction” (Konicz 2022a, 79f.).

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

Reimann, Sarah. 2017. Die Entstehung des wissenschaftlichen Rassismus im 18. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.

Landa, Ishay. 2021. Der Lehrling und sein Meister: Liberale Tradition und Faschismus. Berlin: Dietz Berlin.

Lepenies, Philipp. 2022. Verbot und Verzicht: Politik aus dem Geiste des Unterlassens. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Losurdo, Domenico. 2010. Freiheit als Privileg: Eine Gegengeschichte des Liberalismus. Cologne. PapyRossa.

Maihofer, Andrea. 2022. “Zur Aktualität des Verständnisses von Freiheit bei Engels.” In Naturphilosophie, Gesellschaftstheorie, Sozialismus: Zur Aktualität von Friedrich Engels, edited by Smail Rapic. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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

Pfeisinger, Gerhard. 2006. Arbeitsdisziplinierung und frühe Industrialisierung 1750-1820. Vienna: Böhlau.

Quent, Matthias, Christoph Richter and Axel Salheiser. 2022. Klimarassismus: Der Kampf der Rechten gegen die ökologische Wende. Munich: Piper Paperback.

Rand, Ayn. 1971. The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. New York: Meridian.

Richter, Susan, Angela Siebold, and Urte Weeber. 2016. Was ist Freiheit?: Eine historische Perspektive. Frankfurt: Campus.

Rutschky, Katharina. 1997. Schwarze Pädagogik: Quellen zur Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Erziehung. Berlin: Ullstein.

van Loenen, Gerbert. 2014. Das ist doch kein Leben mehr!: Warum aktive Sterbehilfe zu Fremdbestimmung führt, Frankfurt: Mabuse-Verlag.

van Ussel, Jos. 1970. Sexualdrückung: Geschichte der Sexualfeindschaft, Reinbek bei Hamburg.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor. Durham: Duke University Press.

Weingart, Peter, Jürgen Kroll and Kurt Bayertz. 1992. Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Wissen, Leni. 2017. “The Socio-Psychological Matrix of the Bourgeois Subject in Crisis.” https://exitinenglish.com/2022/02/07/the-socio-psychological-matrix-of-the-bourgeois-subject-in-crisis/.

Yuill, Kevin. 2022. “Kanadas Euthanasiegesetze sind ein moralischer Skandal.” https://www.novo-argumente.com/.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2021. Heaven in Disorder. New York: OR Books.

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[1] https://www.deutsches-klima-konsortium.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdfs/Publikationen_DKK/basisfakten-klimawandel.pdf

[2] For a historical overview (with a focus on Germany), see Richter, Siebold, Weeber 2016.

[3] On the other hand, on the disciplinary history of modernity, see e.g.: Dreßen 1982, Pfeisinger 2006, van Ussel 1970 & Rutschky 1997.

[4] See, for example, the Chinese fast fashion group Shein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shein.

[5] See Consumer Issues in Focus – A Special Issue of Novo Arguments for Progress, 2016, https://www.novo-argumente.com/images/uploads/pdf/novo_plus_1_inhaltsverzeichnis.pdf

[6] https://www.imabe.org/bioethikaktuell/einzelansicht/kanada-sinnloses-leben-und-einsamkeit-sind-gruende-fuer-aktive-sterbehilfe

[7] https://www.imabe.org/bioethikaktuell/einzelansicht/sterbehilfe-spart-kosten-kanadas-oekonomen-favorisieren-sterbehilfe-ausweitung

[8] https://www.imabe.org/bioethikaktuell/einzelansicht/kanada-euthanasie-auch-fuer-long-covid-patienten

[9] https://www.stern.de/gesundheit/-haben-sie-schon-mal-ueber-sterbehilfe-nachgedacht–teure-patienten-offenbar-zum-assistierten-suizid-ueberredet-32628792.html

[10] https://jme.bmj.com/content/45/1/60?papetoc

[11] https://www.ief.at/kanada-ueberlegt-sterbehilfe-fuer-minderjaehrige/

[12] https://ottawa.citynews.ca/local-news/ontario-man-applying-for-medically-assisted-death-as-alternative-to-being-homeless-5953116

[13] How poverty, not pain, is driving some disabled Canadians toward medically assisted death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD0O_w3HzJg see also Yuill 2022.

[14] https://www.virtualhospice.ca/maid/media/3bdlkrve/maid-activity-book.pdf

Originally published on the exit! homepage on 05/24/2023.

Some remarks on cancel culture and its critique

Thomas Meyer

“Cancel culture […] is a political buzzword that describes systematic efforts for the partial social exclusion of individuals or organizations that are accused of offensive, discriminatory, racist, anti-Semitic, conspiratorial, bellicose, misogynistic, chauvinistic, or homophobic statements or actions” (Wikipedia). Today, many see the freedom and diversity of opinion as threatened by cancel culture. Liberal classics such as Voltaire or John Stuart Mill are often quoted. The critics of cancel culture point out the importance of being able to hear and take note of dissenting voices (because of course, without a plurality of opinions there would be no progress in knowledge), as well as to the danger of censorship and exclusion from civil society (boycott, deplatforming).

As the anthology Cancel Culture und Meinungsfreiheit – Über Zensur und Selbstzensur [Cancel Culture and Freedom of Expression – On Censorship and Self-Censorship] points out, critics also complain that Cancel Culture prevents free scientific discourse.[1] Cancel culture acts emotionally. It operates in the mode of argumentum ad hominem. It opposes the “misconduct” of individuals. The aim is not the truth, but the moral or professional destruction of public figures who have expressed a “wrong opinion.” The opponent is not refuted, but cancelled, i.e. the person is dismissed, he is forced to resign, becomes a non-person. The discourse is broken off. Or so these critics claim.

A fundamental problem of cancel culture, we are told, is its tendency to “equate verbal expression with physical violence” (p. 64). This encourages “censorious thinking” (ibid.) and leads to a “cult of vulnerability” (p. 24). Comparatively harmless statements are scandalized (e.g., so-called microaggressions). On the basis of individual statements, conclusions are drawn about the defendant’s “attitude,” and they are accordingly judged as guilty. It is the fact of being affected and of belonging to a certain group that is decisive for this assessment, not an unbiased argumentation. There is an aggressive protest culture whose central argument is being offended. If certain people or groups felt offended, they feel as if they are on the right side as victims. Being offended is used as justification and reason (especially on “social media”) for militant agitation. This ranges from preventing events (i.e. restricting freedom of speech and teaching) to death threats (e.g. against J.K. Rowling, because she believes that trans women are not “real” women). So far, no representative of “TERF” (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism) has been beheaded for insult, transphobia, or the like (unlike people who would have “insulted” Islam, such as French teacher Samuel Paty in 2021). Rowling’s books, however, have been burned[2] (by Christian fundamentalists as well, by the way).[3] Such events are used to argue that “cancel culture” (or what is considered as such) poses a threat to democracy. The consequences are (self-)censorship and a narrowing of the space of discourse. A “climate of fear” (p. 57) emerges. The purge of the classical educational canon in schools, in art, in museums, etc. is also criticized. One can summarize this criticism of Cancel Culture by saying that the agitators of Cancel Culture appear thoroughly authoritarian and self-righteous, but adorn themselves with the halo of being progressive and forward thinking.

According to Stefan Laurin, cancel culture has its origins in postmodernism, “which in turn has its roots both in linguistics and in the rejection of democracy, the Enlightenment, and the market economy” (p. 175).[4] In the United States in particular, Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay[5] point out that identity politics agitators, unlike classical postmodern theorists (such as Michel Foucault), espouse an absolute truth claim (queer theory, “critical race theory”, disability studies, fat studies, and others).[6] According to Pluckrose and Lindsay, it is hardly possible to disagree with these people without this disagreement being quickly identified as part of a pernicious normality.[7]

It is indeed a problem when substantive differences are not resolved through “sober discourse” but when everyone starts a shitstorm from within their own filter bubble (if they are capable of receiving or understanding content outside their own bubble at all). The inability to deal with content or other positions outside of one’s peer group or filter bubble is characteristic of authoritarian and narcissistic subjects.[8] Disagreeing with one or another premise of certain identity politics practices or theories does not necessarily indicate a reactionary point of view (one is not, for instance, immediately a Western imperialist or a racist with a “colonialist view” if one rejects certain aspects of non-Western cultures as authoritarian or reactionary, or if one criticizes Islamist anti-Semitism).[9] Although postmodernism spoke out against essentialist and binary thinking, it falls into these very waters when it acts in an identitarian way. Terry Eagleton therefore accused postmodernism of not applying its methods to itself.

The critiques of cancel culture and of the claims to the absoluteness of postmodern “cynical theories”[10] and their agitators described here certainly have their true and justified moments. However, against the background of emerging right-wing or fascist movements and agitations, a critique of postmodern thought and its identitarian derivatives remains highly inadequate if this critique remains based on the idea of a liberalism of “free” discourse and the progress of knowledge through sober argumentation. This critique of cancel culture is therefore problematic in several respects: the first concerns the “idealism of domination-free scientific discourse.” Free discourse at universities is often not possible, even without cancel culture. After all, there is the standard academic pecking order. Then there is the academic filter-bubble thinking itself, which emerges out of hyper-specialization and precarious employment. The latter encourages conformist behavior. If you do not conform, your contract will not be renewed (or your grant application will not be approved). Instead of open and non-hierarchical discourse, ass-kissing is the order of the day. Professional bans are not even necessary in the entrepreneurial university.[11]

It is not that every idea is freely discussed and disproven theories disappear. On the contrary. One example is Peter Singer, the philosopher and animal rights activist. While he wants to grant personhood to certain animals, he simultaneously denies personhood to certain humans. What he proposes is a concept of “life unworthy of life” – as one would have formulated it in earlier times. Today, the right to life is denied to those who only cost money and, according to Singer, would be better off if they had never been born. Misanthropic positions do not disappear just because they have been refuted in a free scientific discourse. Capitalist conditions themselves reproduce Social Darwinist ideologies that deny the right to exist to those who are not exploitable (any longer). Finally, such positions do not remain only “gray theory,” but become a program.[12] And is it really an expression of an authoritarian character and of a ‘hostility to democracy’ to try to prevent events with Peter Singer, who has not revised his position since the 1980s until today, by demonstrations and agitation?

Secondly, we have seen quite a few people (Thilo Sarrazin comes to mind) that have received a career boost and a growing degree of recognition as a result of shitstorms and cancellations (or attempted cancellations), i.e. people who have not disappeared from the public eye or lost their jobs. But to then stand up and claim that the corridor of opinion is being narrowed or something like that shows nothing other than that those who criticize racist or anti-Semitic etc. positions are being excluded from the supposedly free discourse. Cancel culture can thus also be classified as a right-wing rallying cry that isinstrumentalized to deny legitimacy to the political movements of those who are marginalized and discriminated against. This rallying cry is meant to immunize against criticism. Of course, no one is racist, anti-Semitic or sexist anyway.[13] Nor is the lumpen intelligentsia. From this point of view, any accusation is pure denunciation: Criticism of racist positions is not criticism, but a shitstorm and a suppression of freedom of speech (which is ironic, given the fact that these opinions are pushed by the mainstream media and the “victims of leftist do-goodism” are invited to a thousand talk shows). Criticism of discriminatory language is not criticism of the linguistic devaluation of certain people or groups of people (think of the endless denigration and harassment of the unemployed!),[14] but nothing other than the unacceptable paternalism of “free citizens.” Privileged people[15] feel that they are being “trampled on” when the official channels of criticism are not followed, or when they encounter any opposition at all (what were the times when sexist and homophobic hostility could be expressed without those affected having the opportunity to complain!).[16] Criticism thus becomes “censorship.” If Friedrich Merz regards cancel culture as the “greatest threat to freedom of speech,” it is not exactly difficult to guess what he will probably invoke in the next election campaign in order to avoid criticism of himself and his reactionary positions. Merz thus instrumentalizes “cancel culture” in order to be able to delegitimize and denounce his political opponent from the outset.[17]

We can see that the public discourse has shifted more and more to the right in recent years. So-called “taboo breakers” have played an active role in this.[18] The aim of the right-wingers was to push back the “limits of what can be said.” This was apparently successful. Fighting the extremism of the center is entirely justified and necessary (those who see it differently may be part of the problem). The repeated demand to “talk to the right” because freedom of speech requires it can be interpreted as an unconscious desire to let the right say what one has secretly been afraid to say.[19] The liberal critique of cancel culture thus suffers from the fact that freedom of expression – freedom of opinion – is formally conceived and usually depoliticized. There is a reluctance to admit that there are social struggles and antagonisms that cannot be erased by arguing with each other in the lecture hall. The connection of certain positions with a social (crisis) dynamic that promotes anti-human viewpoints is ignored. Instead, all opinions (except, of course, those that violate the law, i.e., Holocaust denial) are made equal. A supposedly free and neutral scientific and democratic discourse, i.e. a free exchange of arguments, is supposed to pave the way to truth. Of course, this presupposes a positivist understanding of science, which makes no distinction between a natural order, which would be what it is even without human intervention (e.g. the movement of the planets), and an objectified social order, which is, however, historically contingent, i.e. has only come into being through human action itself. Positivist thought can only trace reality, but cannot criticize it as a false or alienated reality. It makes “the existing reality appear as the only possible and historically necessary one.”[20]

The prevailing conditions are not soberly “analyzed” by the critics of cancel culture at all. Rather, they blindly assume them, and their catastrophic consequences for man and nature are trivialized, distorted, naturalized, or denied altogether. That the critique of cancel culture remains only a bourgeois critique, i.e. one that is unable to establish a connection to the capitalist enclosure of bondage, is shown, for instance, by the publicist (and Novo editor) Kolja Zydattis when he documents the following example of cancel culture from 2017: “A planned lecture by the federal chairman of the German police union Rainer Wendt at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main on the subject of ‘Everyday police work in an immigration society’ was cancelled. Left-wing groups had previously mobilized against the event. An open letter from 60 academics at Goethe University and other German universities also demanded that Wendt not be allowed to speak. The head of the police union reinforces ‘racist thought structures’ and positions himself ‘far away from an enlightened discourse.’ Wendt had spoken of Germany ‘not being a constitutional state’ in reference to Merkel’s opening of the border to refugees in 2015 and claimed that police officers in Germany do not engage in so-called racial profiling.”[21]

Positions that promote isolationism, view refugees as disruptive factors and security risks, and trivialize racist police violence should apparently still be discussed “with an open mind.” The demand to open discussion ignores the fact that there are already “results.”[22] You don’t have to discuss all the shit people say, especially when it is clear that what’s being discussed is meant to shift the discourse and public opinion further to the right,[23] and criticism is dismissed as unfounded leftist intolerance anyway. A leftist critique would certainly say that such agitation is insufficient and that the reference to “enlightened discourses” initially sounds somewhat naive. But a more far-reaching critique that goes beyond this, one that addresses the causes of migration[24] and places them in the context of the crisis of capitalism, would not even occur to the liberal critics of cancel culture in their wildest dreams. No critic of cancel culture would ever think of calling the closure of hospitals, libraries, and swimming pools for “economic reasons” cancel culture (or all kinds of IMF austerity policies and structural adjustment reforms, etc.). If people cannot successfully sell their labor power in order to participate in the valorization process of capital, if they are thus only “social waste” and a “security risk” for the allegedly “open society,” their existence is cancelled in real terms, they can freely and openly discuss different opinions as much as they want… But at the same time, on the contrary, the space of the free opinion and discussion may not be so wide after all, if in it people dare to question the sanctified capitalism. To take the liberty ofcriticizing and pointing out the limits and restrictions of bourgeois freedom[25] would certainly be considered by some an “abuse of freedom” by the “enemies of freedom,” especially if this criticism were not limited to language and argumentum ad hominem, but went as far as the realization of this freedom. The mendacity of the bourgeois critics of the cancel culture lies precisely in the fact that the bourgeois public itself is unable or unwilling to argue neutrally, soberly and openly when, for example, there is talk of expropriation (to the detriment and not the advantage of capital)[26] or if the “C-word” is even mentioned, i.e. when capitalism is considered as a fundamental problem! There is no mention of Voltaire here, but right away comes an aggressive shitstorm from the liberal Twitter mob (again, just a coincidence that they are mostly men).[27] The bourgeois ideal of an open-ended debate is disgraced by the reality of its bourgeois bigotry!

The emptiness and meaninglessness of the monstrous capitalist self-purpose (M-C-M’) finds its expression in the emptiness and groundlessness of positions charged in an indentitary manner (“free ride for free citizens” or the like). Just when identities fall into crisis because their social foundations are breaking down, they are defended all the more fiercely. Their disintegration or obsolescence is blamed on an “external threat” (leftists, politicians, migrants, feminists, the “gay agenda,” etc.). The insistence on the formal correctness of a “dominance-free” discussion ultimately leads to what is called “dominance-free” and “democratic” – what is considered “normal” – shifting further to the right. This does not make all bourgeois criticism of cancel culture wrong (it is right to criticize senseless purges of historical artifacts and affective shitstorms instead of discussions), but it would have to grow out of its bourgeois bigotry if it wanted to contribute to the critique of ideology against widespread brutalization. However, the bourgeois critique of cancel culture, with its idealized liberalism and its adherence to capitalist real-metaphysics (sometimes summarized as “common sense”), makes it more compatible with right-wing positions or, as it is called in popular jargon, connectable [anschlussfähig]tothem. It is therefore no coincidence that some Novo authorsalso write for magazines such as Achse des Guten or Eigentümlich frei. In fact, the focus of the bourgeois critique of cancel culture is not the critique of right-wing cancel-culture: think here of “political masculinity,”[28] which aggressively mobilizes for patriarchy, and the agitation against Fridays for Future.[29] The ban on gender studies in Hungary apparently did not count as cancel culture to liberal/conservative and right-wing critics.[30] On the contrary, gender studies is considered by many to be a pseudo-science that should be abolished!

The decisive factor in criticism is the question of content and not the formality of a so-called domination-free discourse. If one follows the liberal critics of cancel culture, and only focuses on the freedom or openness of discussion, the question of the historical and social context of “controversial” positions remains unanswered. Likewise, the constraints and structures of domination that prevent (or at least make very difficult) an open discussion – for example, about the possibility of a non-capitalist mode of production – remain unthematized. But that is exactly what ison the agenda![31]

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[1] See for the following remarks: Sabine Beppler-Spahl (ed.): Cancel Culture und Meinungsfreiheit – Über Zensur und Selbstzensur, Frankfurt 2022.

[2] Cf: https://www.fr.de/panorama/jk-rowling-neues-buch-boeses-blut-vorwurf-transphobie-harry-potter-autorin-90045507.html.

[3] For example, in Poland: https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/harry-potter-polnische-priester-verbrennen-buecher-von-j-k-rowling-a-1260746.html.

[4] Stefan Laurin: Ein Angriff auf die Aufklärung, in: Sabine Beppler-Spahl (ed.): Cancel Culture und Meinungsfreiheit – Über Zensur und Selbstzensur, Frankfurt 2022, 175-190.

[5] Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody, Durham 2020.

[6] Authoritarian tendencies have also been noted in the German queer scene, as is well known: Patsy L’Amour Lalove (ed.): Beißreflexe – Kritik an queerem Aktivismus, autoritären Sehnsüchten, Sprechverboten, Berlin 2017. The situation is no better in the anti-racist scene: Vojin Sasa Vukadinovic (ed.): Freiheit ist keine Metapher – Antisemitismus, Migration, Rassismus, Religionskritik, Berlin 2018.

[7] On the critique of postmodernism, see: Terry Eagleton: Die Illusionen der Postmoderne, Stuttgart/Weimar 1997, first, Oxford 1996, as well as Robert Kurz: Die Welt als Wille und Design: Postmoderne, Lifestyle-Linke und die Ästhetisierung der Krise, Berlin 1999, and ders: Der Kampf um die Wahrheit – Anmerkungen zum postmodernen Relativismusgebot in der gesellschaftskritischen Theorie, in: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft No. 12, Angermünde 2014, 53-76.

[8] Cf. Leni Wissen: The Socio-Psychological Matrix of the Bourgeois Subject in Crisis – A Reading of Freudian Psychoanalysis from a Value-Dissociation-Critical Perspective, https://exitinenglish.com/2022/02/07/the-socio-psychological-matrix-of-the-bourgeois-subject-in-crisis/.

[9] Cf. Sama Maani: Respektverweigerung – Warum wir fremde Kulturen nicht respektieren sollen. And neither should we respect our own, Klagenfurt/Cleovec 2015.

[10] Pluckrose & Lindsay cannot be discussed further in the following.

[11] Cf: Gerhard Stapelfeldt: Der Aufbruch des konformistischen Geistes – Thesen zur Kritik der neoliberalen Universität, Hamburg 2011.

[12] Cf: Peter Bierl: Unmenschlichkeit als Programm, Berlin 2022, and Gerbert van Loenen: Das ist doch kein Leben mehr! – Warum aktive Sterbehilfe zu Fremdbestimmung führt, Frankfurt, 2nd ed. 2015, first Amsterdam 2009.

[13] The satirical magazine Titanic put this denial and downplaying of anti-Semitism in a nutshell a few years ago https://shop.titanic-magazin.de/war-hitler-antisemit.html.

[14] Cf: Anna Mayr: Die Elenden – Warum unsere Gesellschaft Arbeitslose verachtet und sie dennoch braucht, Berlin, 3rd ed. 2021. As if it were the most normal thing in the world, the culture industry is also busy generalizing and hounding, see Britta Steinwachs: Zwischen Pommesbude und Muskelbank – Die mediale Inszenierung der “Unterschicht,” Münster 2015.

[15] As, for example, Herfried Münkler: Cf. Peter Nowak: Münkler-Watch – Neue Form studentischen Protestes?, Telepolis, 11.5.2015, https://www.heise.de/tp/news/Muenkler-Watch-Neue-Form-studentischen-Protestes-2639903.html. Cf. also https://www.wsws.org/de/articles/2015/06/20/medi-j20.html.

[16] No kidding: Jasper von Altenbockum (of the FAZ) writes in all seriousness, in the Novo anthologyI listed here, about the Adenauer era: “The question is, however, whether political mores were not much more open, tolerant, interested, and argumentative back then than they are today. Debates about Thilo Sarrazin, Boris Palmer, Sahra Wagenknecht and Hans-Georg Maaßen show a degree of political prudishness in the respective parties and beyond that even the Adenauer era, which was truly uptight and taboo-laden in other respects, seems like a haven of freedom” (p. 73f.). What a mockery of the victims of the Adenauer regime! (Communists, opponents of rearmament, homosexuals, etc.).

[17] Cf. The Dark Parabolic Knight: Fritz Meinecke and the Cancel Culture Danger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Uzu9Whzd9g.

[18] Cf: Annett Schulze, Thorsten Schäfer (eds.): Zur Re-Biologisierung der Gesellschaft – Menschenfeindliche Konstruktionen im Ökologischen und im Sozialen, Aschaffenburg 2012.

[19] Cf. Christine Kirchhoff: Gefühlsbefreiung by proxy – Zur Aktualität des autoritären Charakters, in: Katrin Henkelmann, et al. (eds.): Konformistische Rebellen – Zur Aktualität des autoritären Charakters, Berlin 2020, 213-230.

[20] Miladin Zivotic: Proletarischer Humanismus – Studien über Mensch, Wert und Freiheit, Munich 1972, first Beograd 1969, p. 39.

[21] Kolja Zydatiss: Cancel Culture – Eine Begriffsbestimmung, in: Sabine Beppler-Spahl (ed.): Cancel Culture und Meinungsfreiheit – Über Zensur und Selbstzensur, Frankfurt 2022, 50-65, pp. 53f.

[22] Cf: Herbert Böttcher, “Wir schaffen das!” – Mit Ausgrenzungsimperialismus und Ausnahmezustand gegen Flüchtlinge, 2016, https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=autoren&index=20&posnr=554&backtext1=text1.php.

[23] On Rainer Wendt, see https://amnesty-polizei.de/das-prinzip-rainer-wendt-ein-kommentar/.

[24] Cf: Georg Auernheimer: Wie Flüchtlinge gemacht werden – Über Fluchtursachen und Fluchtverursacher, Cologne 2018.

[25] Cf. e.g.: Leo Kofler: Zur Kritik bürgerlicher Freiheit – Ausgewählte politisch-philosophische Texte eines marxistischen Einzelgängers, Hamburg 2000 and especially: Robert Kurz: Blutige Vernunft – Essays zur emanzipatorischen Kritik der kapitalistischen Moderne und ihrer westlichen Werte, Bad Honnef 2004.

[26] Tomasz Konicz: “Comrade Kühnert,” Telepolis, 12.9.2020, https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Genosse-Kuehnert-4892403.html.

[27] Cf. Der Fall Elisa Avesa – Das Gespenst des Kommunismus, Neues Deutschland, June 9, 2022, https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1164402.der-fall-elissa-asesva-das-gespenst-des-kommunismus.html.

[28] Cf.: Susanne Kaiser: Politische Männlichkeit – Wie Incels, Fundamentalisten und Autoritäre für das Patriarchat mobilmachen, Frankfurt 2020.

[29] Cf: Enno Hinz, Lukas Paul Meya: Headwinds for the climate movement, akweb.de of 12.11.2019 or Analyse & Kritik No. 654.

[30] Cf. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/zwei-jahre-nach-dem-verbot-wie-geht-es-den-gender-studies-in-ungarn/26978612.html.

[31] Cf. Tomasz Konicz: Emancipation in Crisis, https://exitinenglish.com/2023/02/22/emancipation-in-crisis/.

Originally published in Grassroots Revolution No. 475 (January 2023)

Thomas Meyer

1.

The rapid spread of the climate protection movement throughout the world is indeed remarkable (cf. Haunss; Summer 2020). Also remarkable is the hatred that this movement sometimes experiences, especially that directed towards Greta Thunberg. The bourgeois subject in crisis simply does not want to admit that its capitalist way of life has become unsustainable. Even the smallest changes in the set screws send the ‘concerned citizen’ into a fit of rage. Thus, the climate movement is not perceived as an occasion or opportunity for reflection. Rather, this is nipped in the bud by “hysterical defensive reactions” (cf. Hartmann 2020, 118ff.). ‘Toxic masculinity’ discharges itself in countless hate comments and in absurd and completely reactionary counter-movements such as ‘Fridays for Hubraum’ (which currently has about 500,000 members).[1] Those who see their big car as an extension of their dick apparently feel symbolically castrated by a teenager.

Although climate change has become unmistakable, it is stubbornly denied by right-wing populists and radicals (such as Donald Trump and Beatrix von Storch). Even where they don’t outright deny it, they deny the human contribution to climate change or they say that nothing can be done anyway.[2] The apologists of a capitalism that has run amok apparently only have a ‘freedom to die’ to offer. Of course, they also reject all measures against climate change, no matter how shallow and insignificant. Or they strive for environmental protection instead of climate protection.[3] Environmental protection as form of ‘homeland security,’ of course. Homeland security, as a racist defense against everything that does not fit into the völkisch image, includes the defense against (climate) refugees as a ‘climate protection measure.’ From this would follow all the more an exclusionary imperialism (cf. Böttcher 2016) with even more wall building and orders to shoot. Although in recent years fascists have not been able to gain a foothold in the newer ecology movement (e.g. in the protests around the Hambach Forest, Ende Gelände), this does not mean that it will stay that way.[4] This is made clear by efforts to (re)formulate ‘environmental protection’ from the right, as shown not least by the founding of new right-wing ecology journals (see in detail: Jahrbuch Ökologie 2020; cf. also Hartmann 2020, 135ff.).[5]

2.

It seems a little strange that Fridays for Future, in addition to all the hate, receives a lot of support from many different sides. This initially suggests that Fridays for Future does not really cause any offense: As Gerhard Stapelfeldt put it “Resistance that does not cause resistance is not resistance” (cf. Stapelfeldt 2019, 3). According to him, recent climate protests are more of a conformist rebellion: “In each case, overcoming climate change is sought in socially and economically conformist ways. This conformism is the starting point of the current protests – that is why it is ‘low-threshold,’ that is why the invitations to participants of the protests from governments, parliaments and parties are never ending” (ibid., 4, emphasis in original).

As Stapelfeldt points out, the protesters are all people who grew up under neoliberalism, so it makes sense that the protests have an individualistic character and display a “social illiteracy”: There is talk of a climate crisis at Fridays for Future, but not of a crisis of capitalist society. Politicians find it appealing to finally give the findings of climate research the attention they deserve and to act accordingly. But it is not asked why, despite all of our knowledge and all of the promises and climate summits etc. nothing effective has happened for decades.[6]

It is true that Fridays for Future partly points out that a fixation on the individual and his or her consumption habits is insufficient, since the individual by no means has a free choice.[7] However, to reduce Fridays for Future to an ‘individualistic sustainability protestantism’ (as is clearly evident in post-growth economists such as Niko Paech, cf. Meyer 2021) misses their actual core concern.[8] Thus, I think it is correct to state that the reflections and the demands of Fridays for Future move within capitalist immanence. On this level, however, perspectives for society as a whole are considered necessary and developed (whereas the demand for a CO₂ price, for example, has long since proven to be complete nonsense, cf. Hartmann 2020, 65ff.). Nevertheless, ‘what the individual can do’ or should do, e.g. renouncing air travel and meat, is mentioned, especially in the ‘public discourse.’[9] The social and especially the mode of production do not come into view through such appeals. This arises from blindness to the social form. It seems as if everything is just a matter of the ‘right technology’ and the ‘right consumption habits.’ Especially in the ranks of the Olive-Greens,[10] who “do not want to shake” capitalism, but “only want to regulate and green it” (Hartmann 2020, 42), such thinking is widespread. “The magic word is green growth” (ibid.).

In any case, the public interest in Fridays for Future remains for the most part inconsequential. The impending climate catastrophe has been the subject of discussion for decades,[11] but climate protection measures continue to be simulated or blocked. All measures, however inadequate they may be from the outset, are always defused so that they fizzle out as ineffective. The ‘location’ always takes precedence. “If you want to protect jobs, you can’t be too squeamish about ecological damage” (Hartmann 2020, 16). The fabulous ‘climate protection package’ of the German “Groko-Haram coalition” (Martin Sonneborn) in the fall of 2019 also showed that nothing serious is to be done. Everything is to essentially remain the same.[12]

As has already been formulated several times in the context of the critique of value-dissociation, immanent protests are important: for example, against social cuts, rent madness, the care crisis, etc. In individual cases, they have the potential to prevent something worse. But if they remain in immanence, do not question the funding proviso, etc., then they either come to nothing or run the risk of becoming part of crisis management (see, e.g., Kurz 2006, Böttcher 2018, and Meyer 2019). The situation is similar with climate protests. Thus, it remains right to put pressure on all the crisis management regimes, as the climate change movement is trying to do, in order to push for an ‘ecological transformation’ “no matter how inconvenient and unprofitable it may be” (Thunberg 2019, 47, emphasis TM).

Here Greta Thunberg makes clear that profitability should be rejected. The necessary goal is to preserve the world as a liveable place. So to let something be calculated for oneself is not an option. However, a critique of the capitalist mode of production, the valorization movement of capital, etc., sometimes do not play a significant role in the climate protection movement. Nevertheless, Fridays for Future is not a homogeneous movement (During 2019, it became more diverse. While it is essentially a middle-class movement, i.e., a movement of the rather better-off, it has long since ceased to be ‘only’ one of students, cf. Haunss; Summer 2020). There are indeed some groups (such as ‘Change for Future’) that claim or attempt a critique of capitalism (although a critique of capitalism does not amount to a radical critique of its fetish constitution). However, for the most part, positions critical of capitalism do not play a key role in the movement. It is said, for example, that the climate crisis cannot be solved in the current economic system. The ‘system question’ is thus posed. But at the same time, some Fridays for Future activists think they can make a difference by voting or being elected.[13][14][15] Whether Fridays for Future will succeed in breaking its capitalist immanence and not fall into affirmation or opportunism remains to be seen (cf. Konicz 2020).[16]

3.

It certainly makes sense to criticize certain products and consumption habits and to stop their production. But it’s problematic if we stop there and think it’s enough to get rid of plastic bags and SUVs without taking a critical look at the mode of production itself. It is by no means only a problem of the ‘right’ technology. Above all, the “contradiction between matter and form” should come into view (cf. Ortlieb 2014). As in earlier debates about veganism or green capitalism, it is not realized that even a green or vegan capitalism must prevail in competition, so that ‘sustainable production’ can end up being not so sustainable after all, especially when solvent demand collapses and environmental regulations etc. prove to be dysfunctional and disruptive for further capital accumulation. The fact that high earners in the capitalist core states can stock up on all kinds of ‘eco-friendly products’ (and go shopping with their SUVs) should not obscure the fact that this is only possible because those social strata still belong to the world market winners.

So if it is claimed that less meat should be consumed so that less rainforest is destroyed for the production of soy as animal feed, why would a collapse in demand for soy then make soy production less destructive if soy is grown as human food? The rainforests would continue to be destroyed for the production of soy chips or biofuel. A green ‘critique’ that targets the individual and works concretely on individual consumer goods thus misses the destructiveness of the capitalist mode of production. Under capitalist conditions, a ‘Green New Deal’ is just another illusion of wanting to get rid of the destructiveness of capitalism without making it an issue and overcoming it. A Green New Deal would be the same thing in green (cf. Reckordt 2019). The destructiveness of capitalism would only be modernized. So if one complains about species extinction, industrial agriculture, and car mania, then the focus must be on how nature is being trimmed according to capitalist criteria of valorization and consequently destroyed by it. It is therefore necessary to make the domination and destruction of nature an issue and to question the reduction of nature to a mere raw material. In this context, reference should be made to the profoundly patriarchal character of the domination of nature by capital, as is evident, for example, in reproductive medicine (cf. Meyer 2018). However, this connection is not touched upon in the climate change debate, as Fridays for Future does not have a critical concept of the (natural) sciences (cf. Ortlieb 2019).

Robert Kurz emphasized that it is not possible for man, although a natural being, to exist ‘harmoniously’ with nature, because man is not ‘one’ with nature. The relationship to nature consists in entering into   a specific metabolism with nature, which also leads to nature being transformed and thus itself being changed (cf. Kurz 2002). Nature, then, is not something static. A conception of nature as something that is supposed to be something pristine and untouched is just the projective wishful thinking of the bourgeois subject that cannot or does not want to critically deal with its own relationship to nature and thus to itself. If there is talk about protecting nature, it has to be made clear which nature should be protected and why nature has to be protected at all: i.e. from whom or from what! It would have to be made clear why environmental destruction is the result of a certain mode of production and not the result of a certain technology or product alone, which the individual then consumes. Or in the words of Robert Kurz: “It would be too cheap to attribute the dynamics of the modern destruction of nature to technology alone. Certainly, there are technical means that intervene directly or indirectly in the interrelationships of humans and nature. But these means do not stand for themselves; they are the result of a certain form of social organization which determines both social relations and the ‘process of metabolism with nature’” (ibid.).

It therefore makes little sense to try to protect nature or the climate by merely banning certain products or practices. As we know, these bans are intended to reduce the emission of CO₂.The alternative then is investing in products that promise lower CO₂ emissions. However, the products are not considered as specific results of a mode of production, that is, as products in their sociality. In this context, the “form of social labor […] determines the specific purposes and driving forces of production and consumption and the type and extent of interventions in nature” (Böhme; Grebe 1985, 27). The ‘form of social labor’ (i.e., labor as a real abstraction) does not come into view in Fridays for Future. This form consists in abstraction from content and intrinsic qualities. Nature is only used as a substrate for the valorization of value, so that through labor, nature is also reduced accordingly, clearly noticeable, for example, in agriculture, where the industrialization of agriculture led to a massive loss of varieties (cf. Mooney; Fowler 1991). In addition, capitalism is not at all capable of using resources sparingly. If productivity increases, so that a single capital has to expend less labor to produce the same output of goods, this leads to the fact that due to the cheapening of products accompanying the increase in productivity, the single capital increases its market share, displaces competitors and increases its output of goods in total. If a productivity increase or product innovation leads to a (supposedly) more environmentally friendly version of the product winning out over competitors, then its environmentally friendly component is quickly overcompensated for when a single capital then floods the entire world with that product. The introduction of the catalytic converter in cars, for example, did not lead to more environmentally friendly mobility, but to even more personal transportation.[17] If the world market winners could possibly produce environmentally friendly and cheaply, the rest of the world would fall by the wayside and would then have to do without ‘environmental regulations’ all the more. Competition ensures that the cheaper product will always prevail. So if it is cheaper to destroy the environment, to ignore natural cycles and regeneration times, then competition will force us to do so even more in the crisis of capitalism. Due to the dynamics of capitalism, even a more environmentally friendly product leads to more environmental destruction, since resource consumption usually increases anyway. This is the so-called rebound effect, which was also noticed by bourgeois economists of the 19th century, but remained misunderstood.

Marx can be used to explain the rebound effect: If the total mass of value decreases with increasing productivity, because less labor has to be spent for the total amount of goods, then the number of products has to be increased in absolute terms in order to maintain the same mass of value. This is all the more true since it is not a matter of merely maintaining the mass of value, but rather that this mass itself must be constantly increased, i.e. production that does not yield       any surplus value is discontinued (cf. Ortlieb 2014, 91ff.).

So it is not ‘man’ or the use of nature that leads to the destruction of nature and to the climate catastrophe at all, but an irrational mode of production, which is about the production of abstract wealth, about the valorization of value. In this process, the ability to valorize is coming up against historical limits, which is evident in capitalism’s increased lack of restraint and destructiveness. However, hardly anyone wants to admit this. It is much easier to suppress the reality by pretending to be ‘green/sustainable’ or by putting the ‘blame’ on man ‘per se,’ i.e. when it is concluded that the existence of man himself is the real crime here! Verena Brunschweiger, for example, suggests in all seriousness that one should do without children for the sake of the climate (In her book: Kinderfrei statt kinderlos – Ein Manifest, for criticism: see Meyer 2020).[18] That way, one would save CO₂. Here you can already see that the less the capitalist way of production and life is made an issue and radically criticized, the more denial of the problem and reality displacement take hold and lead to a situation in which human existence itself appears as a problem. Capitalism is assumed as an anthropological constant and seen as an inescapable fact of nature, so that it seems more realistic to make man himself disappear instead of facing the realization that the production of abstract wealth must be stopped. Without an understanding/critique of the social constitution of form, an ideological processing of the crisis, due to the erosion/feralization of value-dissociation socialization, will bring forth such barbarities.

References

Böhme, Gernot; Grebe, Joachim: Soziale Naturwissenschaft – Über die wissenschaftliche Bearbeitung der Stoffwechselbeziehung Natur-Mensch, in: Böhme, Gernot; Schramm, Engelbert (eds.): Soziale Naturwissenschaft – Wege zu einer Erweiterung der Ökologie, Frankfurt 1985.

Böttcher, Herbert: “Wir schaffen das” – Mit Ausgrenzungsimperialismus und Ausnahmezustand gegen Flüchtlinge, 2016, online: https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=autoren&index=17&posnr=554&backtext1=text1.php.

Böttcher, Herbert: We Have To Do Something! Action Fetishism in an Unreflective Society, 2018, online: https://exitinenglish.com/2022/02/07/we-have-to-do-something-action-fetishism-in-an-unreflective-society/

Cunha, Daniel: The Anthropocene as Fetishism, in: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft No.13, Berlin 2016, 25-45. With revised epilogue (2021) also on exit-online.org.

Hartmann, Kathrin: Grüner wird’s nicht – Warum wir mit der ökologischen Krisen völlig falsch umgehen, Munich 2020.

Haunss, Sebastian; Sommer, Moritz (eds.): Fridays for Future – Die Jugend gegen den Klimawandel – Konturen einer weltweiten Bewegung, Bielefeld 2020.

Jahrbuch Ökologie: Ökologie und Heimat – Gutes Leben für alle oder die Rückkehr der braunen Naturschützer? , Stuttgart 2020.

Konicz, Tomasz: Klima für Extremismus, Telepolis on 05.08.2018.

Konicz, Tomasz: “Wir brauchen ein neues System!” – In Teilen der Klimabewegung reift die Erkenntnis heran, dass nur ein Systemwechsel den Klimakollaps verhindern kann. Doch was muss eigentlich überwunden werden?, in: Ökumenisches Netz Rhein-Mosel-Saar (Hg.): Bruch mit der Form: Die Überwindung des Kapitalismus in Theorie und Praxis, Koblenz 2020, 246–257.

Kurz, Robert: Gesellschaftliche Naturkatastrophen – Die synchronen Überschwemmungen und Dürren in der ganzen Welt kündigen eine neue Qualität der ökologischen Krise an, 2002, online: https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=autoren&index=31&posnr=74&backtext1=text1.php

Kurz, Robert: Unrentable Menschen, 2006, online: https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=autoren&index=31&posnr=237&backtext1=text1.php.

Meyer, Thomas: Zwischen Ektogenese und Mutterglück – Zur Reproduktion der menschlichen Gattung im krisenhaften warenproduzierenden Patriarchat, 2018, online: https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=autoren&index=35&posnr=583&backtext1=text1.php.

Meyer, Thomas: “Neue Klassenpolitik?” – Kritische Anmerkungen zu aktuellen Diskursen, 2019, online: https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=autoren&index=35&posnr=590&backtext1=text1.php.

Meyer, Thomas: Kinderfrei statt CO₂ – Gebärstreik als Maßnahme für den Klimaschutz, 2020, online: https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=autoren&index=36&posnr=614&backtext1=text1.php.

Meyer, Thomas: Alternativen zum Kapitalismus – Im Check: Postwachstumsbewegung und Commons und die Frage nach der ‘gesellschaftlichen Synthesis,’ in: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft Nr.18, Springe 2021. In publication.

Mooney, Pat; Fowler, Cary: Die Saat des Hungers – Wie wir die Grundlagen unserer Ernährung vernichten, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1991.

Ortlieb, Claus Peter: Zur Kritik des modernen Fetischismus – Die Grenzen bürgerlichen Denkens – Gesammelte Texte von Claus Peter Ortlieb 1997-2015, Stuttgart 2019.

Ortlieb, Claus Peter: A Contradiction Between Matter and Form: On the Significance of the Production of Relative Surplus Value in the Dynamic of Terminal Crisis, in Marxism and the Critique of Value, Chicago 2014.

Stapelfeldt, Gerhard: Klimawandel. Heiße Sommer, Trockenheit: Fridays for Future und Die Grünen als neue Volkspartei, 2019, https://www.kritiknetz.de/images/stories/texte/Stapelfeldt_globaler_Protest_gegen_Klimapolitik.pdf .

Reckordt, Michael: Dasselbe in Grün, in: oekom e.V. – Verein für ökologische Kommunikation (ed.): Green New Deal – Fassadenbegründung oder neuer Gesellschaftsvertrag? , Munich 2019, 46-52.

Thunberg, Greta: I want you to panic! – My speeches on climate protection, Frankfurt 2019.

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[1] Cf. https://www.akweb.de/politik/gegenwind-fuer-die-klimabewegung/. Cf. also the lecture by Ricarda Lang of 21.3.2019: Feindbild Klimaschützerin: http://emafrie.de/audio-feindbild-klimaschuetzerin/?hilite=%27Ricarda%27%2C%27Lang%27. 

[2] Thus Gauland in the 2018 ZDF summer interview: “I don’t think there is anything we humans can do against climate change.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWUvTqlbsjg. From 2:31 min.

[3] Cf. Gauland Lecture: Sustainability is a Conservative Principle, youtube.com, Aug. 22, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyxCIhhCVM0.

[4] Cf. https://www.freitag.de/autoren/elsa-koester/die-allzuvielen as well as Konicz 2018.

[5] Cf. https://die-kehre.de/.

[6] Cf. Stapelfeldt’s presentation: Climate and Protest, youtube.com, Aug. 25, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS4h34A9jHc.

[7] For example, Fridays for Future activist Clara Mayer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Eqf7UlNWo.

[8] Cf. https://fridaysforfuture.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Forderungen-min.pdf.

[9] This is what is repeatedly referred to in interviews: Luisa Neubauer from “Fridays for Future” as a guest in the post-report from Berlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFUb6wMIHxU. From 17:20 min.

[10] Bzw. Polizei-Grünen: Cf. e.g. Jörg Tauss: Brandmelder gelöscht: Grün, Olivgrün, Polizeigrün, Telepolis vom 20.7.2020, https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Brandmelder-geloescht-Gruen-Olivgruen-Polizeigruen-4847325.html.

[11] For example, the Spiegel of 11.08.1986 states “The world climate is coming apart at the seams“ https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13519133.html.

[12] See, for example, https://www.spektrum.de/kolumne/klimaschutzpaket-der-bundesregierung-springt-zu-kurz/1675002 and https://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/das-ist-unglaublich-fahrlaessig. Cf. also: Wolfgang Pomrehn: Groko verhöhnt die Jugend, https://www.heise.de/tp/news/Kohlevertrag-Groko-verhoehnt-die-Jugend-5024350.html.

[13] See the interview with Change for Future: https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Ein-Wirtschaftssystem-das-auf-Wachstum-und-Profit-ausgelegt-ist-kann-nicht-nachhaltig-sein-4401440.html.

[14] Cf. https://www.rnd.de/politik/klimaaktivistinnen-greta-thunberg-und-luisa-neubauer-an-eu-die-uhr-tickt-5HPDTQ4QWLEM2CXMAHFPNMXW2E.html.

[15] Cf. https://taz.de/Aktivisten-treten-zur-Wahl-an/!5704234/. Cf. also: https://www.klimaliste.de/.

[16] See also discussion between representatives of Fridays-for-Future, Gerhard Stapelfeldt and Dorothea Schoppek, youtube.com, 9/28/2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5ytkTQQtvA.

[17] Cf. https://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/monster-unter-artenschutz

[18] Which, however, has nothing to do with Fridays for Future.

Originally published in Telepolis on 02/18/2020, updated and revised for publication on the Exit! homepage

Thomas Meyer

The rise of right-wing populism in recent years demands an explanation. It has been pointed out in various places that the right-wing movements of recent years did not simply fall from the sky, but should rather be seen in the context of neoliberalism and the social distortions it has caused in recent decades. According to Wilhelm Heitmeyer (cf. Heitmeyer 2018), authoritarianism, as expressed and demanded by right-wing populists or right-wing radicals, is already contained in neoliberalism, which is always presented as having no alternative. The erosion of democratic processes, the dismantling of the social safety net, the expansion of the police state, the fundamental social insecurity and the immediate surrender of the individual to the valorization imperatives of capital make the authoritarianism of the neoliberal regime clear (see also Wacquant 2013). Last but not least, the proportion of the population with a racist or otherwise discriminatory worldview has been consistently high over the years. Thus, there has always been a high potential of ‘group-based misanthropy’ and is therefore by no means a novelty of recent years (Heitmeyer 2018).

The strategies of the right aim at ‘pushing the boundaries of what can be said.’ The ‘raw bourgeoisie’ (Heitmeyer) undoubtedly contributed to this, as was evident, for example, in the works of Sloterdijk (cf. Kurz 2005, 387ff., 458ff., as well as Winkel 2010) and Sarrazin (cf. Lux 2012 as well as Konicz 2015a). It is, as Heitmeyer writes, “a fact that hidden beneath a thin layer of civilized, genteel (‘bourgeois’) manners are authoritarian attitudes that are becoming increasingly visible, mostly in the form of rhetoric that is becoming more thuggish” (Heitmeyer 2018, 310). This hiddenness has been broken open continuously in recent years. One occasion (not cause!) was provided by the “foreclosure crisis” (David Goeßmann) in the fall of 2015. The ‘raw bourgeoisie’ thus became apparent in the debate about refugees, in which even so-called opponents of the AfD incorporated right-wing arguments or ‘narratives’ that differed only slightly or not at all from those of the AfD (cf. Goeßmann 2019).[1] Finally, ‘arguments’ of racist agitation were taken up by the mainstream: It is the fine bourgeois center itself that is on the right; it gives birth to the “extremism of the center” (Konicz 2016, 158ff.). As Heitmeyer points out, normality itself is the problem: “It stands to reason that the extreme, with its openly brutal forms of communication and action, is inseparable from the normality of social and political social life, and merely emerges from it. […] the normal [is thus] not to be understood as a guarantee of security, but as potentially dangerous. […] Therefore, the question of how the destructive develops within normality (and not only against it) must be raised” (Heitmeyer 2018, 279, emphasis in original).

Thus, with Heitmeyer, one can speak of the fact that it is bourgeois normality that contains the authoritarian within itself and constantly updates authoritarian attitudes anew. In this context, critical theory and its study of the authoritarian personality gain renewed interest (Ziege 2019, 135ff.). Moreover, in light of the ongoing electoral successes of right-wing populist parties and the strengthening of radical right-wing movements, a publicly delivered lecture by Adorno from 1967 on right-wing radicalism was published in print for the first time. In this lecture, Adorno listed what constitutes modern right-wing radicals and what drives fascist agitation and makes it successful. This little book, “Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism,” made quite a splash: It was discussed in bourgeois feuilletons and on state radio. It was pointed out that Adorno’s remarks were very relevant and sounded as if Adorno was talking about the AfD. The background to the lecture was the electoral successes of the NPD at the time.[2] In the lecture text, Adorno emphasized, among other things, that fascism owed its success primarily to the fact that its causes were still present. Adorno saw a central cause of fascist agitation above all in the concentration of capital and the accompanying or threatening declassification of the petty bourgeoisie and others. A threatening crash of the middle class was also ‘processed’ by calls for national sovereignty. This national sovereignty was demanded all the more because its objective conditions no longer existed. Adorno arrived at this assessment against the background of the bloc confrontation and the EEC (European Economic Community) (cf. Adorno 2020, 9-13). The similarities to the present are obvious: today’s right-wing radicals and right-wing populists also strive to regain national sovereignty,[3] especially in their criticism of the European Union. However, the objective conditions for ‘national sovereignty’ are even less present today than in the 1960s, due to the transnationalization of capital, so these demands are, therefore, completely illusory (cf. Kurz 2005).

Although Adorno’s lecture is praised for its analytical soundness, it is also noted that the differences between now and the 1960s should be acknowledged. Volker Weiß, who wrote an epilogue, remarks: “What value do these analyses have for the present? First, it is important to note the differences. Adorno’s warning against simply linking right-wing radicalism to the cyclical movements of the economy must be taken seriously. The effects of the recession of 1966/67, as the immediate background of the developments described, cannot be compared with the consequences of the world economic crisis of 1929, nor with those of current financial and currency crises. […] Nor are the political front lines readily comparable. Unlike anti-Semitism, the confrontation with global jihadism, a key agitational element of right-wing populism, is not purely a matter of pathic projection. Political Islam is a real actor and must itself be seen as the product of a collective narcissistic injury” (cf. Adorno 2020, 65f.).[4]

Indeed, a theory or a critique must always be examined for its ‘time core,’ which Adorno also emphasized. But what this core should consist of remains quite unclear in the current ‘Adorno debate.’ Thus, the current crisis is perceived only superficially. There is no mention of accumulation or crisis theory in liberal publicists like Volker Weiß. Therefore, the differences between the crises of the 1960s and those of 1929 and 2008 have to be guessed at with Weiß more than they are explicity laid out.

Adorno points out the objective anachronism of nationalism already at that time, but Adorno alone would not make clear why nation-state sovereignty as such is eroding today, why the political regulatory capacity of transnationalized capital is reaching its limits, why democracy is continuously de-democratizing itself (police states, free trade agreements), why state apparatuses are going wild (cf. Kurz 1993 as well as Scholz 2019 and Konicz 2018), or why more and more states are disintegrating (cf. Kurz 2003, Bedszent 2014 and Konicz 2016). In this respect, the celebrated topicality of the lecture is exaggerated, not least because the commentators, like Weiß, are far from being able to formulate a critique on the cutting edge.

Weiß also makes it clear that he criticizes the new right primarily because of its anti-liberalism. Now, this criticism is justified, but right-wing anti-liberalism also feeds on a certain ‘discomfort in modernity.’ Instead of making the discomfort in modernity (the impositions of modernization, bourgeois freedom, and equality) an issue, Weiß commits the mistake of “thinking that the world of the global market would be fine if only the brown-fascist (or currently: green-Islamist) ‘barbarians’ did not exist” (Hanloser 2018, 167). Not only would a right-wing ‘anti-modernism’ (which is itself very modern) thus have to be rejected, but also a bourgeois apologetics of ‘freedom and equality,’ not least against the background of police states and states of emergency, which the bourgeois democracies push on their own initiative (one only has to think of the new laws regarding policing). Adorno’s warning that the continuation of fascism in democracy rather than against it is therefore more dangerous has to be considered further.[5] I.e.: Today’s right-wing extremism would have to be seen as an ideology of crisis, as a continuation of democratic crisis management by other and/or the same means.[6]

Ignorance of the crisis is matched by the unconditional claiming of democracy. This can be linked to a problematic and anachronistic side of Adorno’s lecture. This is how Adorno presents the idea that aims at a genuine democracy yet to be realized: “One very often hears, especially when it comes to such categories as the ‘eternally incorrigible’ and similar consolatory phrases, the claim that there is a residue of incorrigibles or fools, a so-called lunatic fringe, as they term it in America, in every democracy. And then there is a certain quietist bourgeois comfort in reciting that to oneself. I think the only response to this is that, yes, something like this can be observed to a varying degree in every so-called democracy in the world, but only as an expression that, in terms of its content, its socio-economic content, democracy has not yet become truly and fully concrete anywhere but is still formal. In that sense, one might refer to the fascist movements as the wounds, the scars of a democracy that, to this day, has not yet lived up to its own concept.” (Adorno 2020, 14f.).

Today, however, it is quite wrong to claim bourgeois ideals against bourgeois reality, especially if one takes a closer look at what these bourgeois ideals consist of and what is the presupposed framework in which they (should) be realized, even more under conditions of crisis. The danger of being blinded by bourgeois ideals has already been described by Marx.[7] Thus it says in the Grundrisse: “What this reveals, on the other side, is the foolishness of those socialists (namely the French, who want to depict socialism as the realization of the ideals of bourgeois society articulated by the French revolution) who demonstrate that exchange and exchange value etc. are originally (in time) or essentially (in their adequate form) a system of universal freedom and equality, but that they have been perverted by money, capital, etc. […] Exchange value is a system of freedom and equality for all. […] The exchange value or, more precisely, the money system is in fact the system of equality and freedom, and that the disturbances which they encounter in the further development of the system are disturbances inherent in it, are merely the realization of equality and freedom, which prove to be inequality and unfreedom. […] What distinguishes these socialists from the bourgeois apologists is, on the one hand, the feeling of the contradictions of the system, and, on the other hand, the utopianism of not grasping the necessary difference between the real and the ideal form of bourgeois society, and therefore of taking on the superfluous business of wanting to realize again for themselves the ideal expression, the transfigured luminous image reflected from reality itself as such” (Marx 1993, 248f).

If, looking back on earlier times, we may perceive even more democratic conditions in contrast to today, this can be explained by the fact that the political ‘ability to shape’ was still present in earlier times, during the Fordist boom, when reforms indeed still opened up the possibility of social advancement and the scope for political action was still much greater. However, if these shrink, not least against the backdrop of a crisis of public finances, then democracy also loses its ‘ability to shape’ (cf. on this Konicz 2016, 180ff.). Thus, when valorization encounters its limits, democracy also erodes. Despite this, more than a few people today are calling for a ‘real democracy,’[8]  without really seeing through democracy’s logic of domination: “The dominant consciousness […] is of course least insightful with regard to the totalitarian character of the sanctified democracy itself” (Kurz 1999, 574). For even the earlier ‘formative capacity’ of democracy was always subject to narrow limits: The subordination of subjects to the valorization imperatives of capital are presupposed in democratic discourse and as such are non-negotiable. All democratic action has to move within this framework. The “democratic thinking of any hue never comes up with the idea of wanting to mobilize and organize resources and social wealth in any other way than in the commodity or money form; and that thus its supposed freedom and humanity always unconsciously sets the systematic laws of the modern commodity form itself as a hard limit” (Kurz 1993, 18). Furthermore, “the abstract freedom of abstract, monadized individuals, who must constantly ‘self-valorize,’ implies the merciless competition of all against all” And: “the real capacity for action as freemen and equals is limited to the ability to pay” (ibid., emphasis in original).

Even when this is only rudimentarily and selectively questioned in practice, the bloodhounds line up and democracy reveals its repressive core. This is the realized democracy and it is therefore not only a formal or formally limited one that has merely not yet realized itself. Its realization consists precisely in formally granting rights, but also in suspending or limiting them again when they prove dysfunctional for crisis management and capital valorization (or devaluation). Therefore, police state terror is not a contradiction to democracy. Since one can realize oneself as a free and equal only when one has proven oneself as a capital-productive subject, realized democracy is also compatible with enormous social inequalities. The opposite of freedom and its contradictions thus belong to this freedom itself, as Marx already pointed out. Surprisingly, this is not denied at all. Friedrich August von Hayek, for example, formulated that freedom includes the freedom “to starve,” and even that “voluntary conformity is a condition for the beneficent effects of freedom.” Consequently, according to Hayek, a “democracy […] can exercise totalitarian violence, and it is conceivable that an authoritarian government will act according to liberal principles” (Hayek 1960, 25, 82, 132). Liberal homages to Pinochet!

When there is a crisis, social protests and any dissent at all can prove to be ‘disruptive.’ It is no coincidence that during the Greek crisis there was talk that Germany’s austerity dictate should not be negotiated democratically (Konicz 2015b). Not coincidentally, Merkel said that democracy must be ‘market-compliant.’ If the ‘market’ no longer allows immanent decision-making possibilities, then all decisions boil down to ‘save and die,’ and democratic freedom then consists of nothing more than helping to shape one’s own execution by decree and parliament.

In a democracy, legal capacity is tied to the ability to valorize. If labor contracts can no longer be entered into, the right itself erodes (cf. Kurz 2003, 324ff.). People who lose the ability to valorize by devaluing their labor power or the like become de facto citizens of lesser rights, as the Hartz IV regime proves (cf. Rentschler 2004). People whose devaluation is more advanced, such as refugees, end up being denied the mere right to live, or having their deaths accepted. This is shown not only by the foreclosure policy of the ‘free and democratic West’ and the ongoing death in the Mediterranean, but also by the more or less ‘final storage’ of people in concentration camp-like facilities, in so-called ‘reception camps.’ The roughest pig work is gladly left to others.[9]

Since democracy as a state form is bound to the form of value and dissociation and thus erodes in the crisis of valorization, it neither makes sense to lament the loss of democracy nor to sue for the realization of an ‘actual’ democracy. In no way, therefore, would it suffice to denounce democracy as merely formal in order to demand that it finally be realized: perhaps through more ‘direct democracy,’ as right-wing populists also demand. It is therefore not enough to criticize insufficient participation or representation or unequally distributed wealth. Rather, the object of critique would have to be the bourgeois subject’s form of interest and will, and thus the capitalist form of wealth and (re)production itself. It would have to be made clear that democracy is not a free discourse, not an “association of free men” (Marx), in which all are required to come to an agreement about the meaningful use of resources. On the contrary: this is just as little a subject of democratic discourse as it is of an authoritarian command economy or of a folkish ethno-regime. The submission to the fetish constitution of the value-dissociation society, to the commodity form and the valorization movement of capital is precisely the basis of every democracy. This repeatedly occurring false juxtaposition of liberal democrats and authoritarian, crude or even fascist bourgeoisie must therefore be rejected.[10] If, as Marx said, the truth of bourgeois society is to be seen in its colonies,[11] the truth of real democracy is to be seen in the crisis and in the state of emergency. A critical theory at the height of the times must take note of this, or it is none.

References

Adorno, Theodor W.: Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism, 1st ed. Wiley 2020

Adorno, Theodor W.: Bemerkungen zu ‘The Authoritarian Personality,’ Berlin 2019.

Bedszent, Gerd: Zusammenbruch der Peripherie – Gescheiterte Staaten als Tummelplatz von Drogenbaronen, Warlords und Weltordnungskriegen, Berlin 2014.

Davis, Mike: Die Geburt der Dritten Welt – Hungerkatastrophen und Massenvernichtung im imperialistischen Zeitalter, Berlin/Hamburg/Göttingen 2011, 3rd ed. first London/New York 2001.

Feit, Margret: Die Neue Rechte in der Bundesrepublik – Organisation, Ideologie, Strategie, Frankfurt/New York 1987.

Goeßmann, David: Die Erfindung der bedrohten Republik – Wie Flüchtlinge und Demokratie entsorgen werden, Berlin 2019.

Hanloser, Gerhard: Die libertäre und die liberale Linke und die Neue Rechte – Bemerkungen zu einer drängenden Frage, in: Ne znam: Zeitschrift für Anarchismusforschung, No.7, Lich 2018, 157-168.

Hayek, Friedrich A. von: Die Verfassung der Freiheit (Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 3), Tübingen 2005.

Heitmeyer, Wilhelm: Autoritäre Versuchungen – Signaturen der Bedrohung I, 3rd edition, Berlin 2018.

Jäger, Margarete; Wamper, Regina (eds.): Von der Willkommenskultur zur Notstandsstimmung – Der Fluchtdiskurs in deutschen Medien 2015 und 2016, Duisburg 2017, online: http://www.diss-duisburg.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/DISS-2017-Von-der-Willkommenskultur-zur-Notstandsstimmung.pdf.

Konicz, Tomasz: Failed State BRD, 2018, online: https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Failed-State-BRD-4232674.html.

Konicz, Tomasz: Generation Sarrazin – Eine kurze Skizze der Genese der neuen deutschen Rechten, 2015a, online: https://www.streifzuege.org/2015/generation-sarrazin/.

Konicz, Tomasz: Kapitalkollaps – Die finale Krise der Weltwirtschaft, Hamburg 2016.

Konicz, Tomasz: Welcome to Postdemocracy, 2015b, online: https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Willkommen-in-der-Postdemokratie-3374458.html.

Kurz, Robert: Das Weltkapital – Globalisierung und innere Schranken des modernen warenproduzierenden Systems, Berlin 2005.

Kurz, Robert: Die Demokratie frisst ihre Kinder – Bemerkungen zum neuen Rechtsradikalismus, in: Rosemaries Babies – Die Demokratie und ihre Rechtsradikalen, Unkel/Bad Honnef 1993, 11-87.

Kurz, Robert: Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus – Ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft, Frankfurt 1999.

Kurz, Robert: Weltordnungskrieg – Das Ende der Souveränität und die Wandlungen des Imperialismus im Zeitalter der Globalisierung, Bad Honnef 2003.

Lenin, V.I.: The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, in: Selected Works Volume III, Berlin 1970, 69-163.

Lux, Vanessa: Verschiebungen in der biologistischen Diskussion: das Beispiel Sarrazin, in: Schulze, Annett; Schäfer, Thorsten: Zur Re-Biologisierung der Gesellschaft – Menschenfeindlichen Konstruktion im Ökologischen und im Sozialen, Aschaffenburg 2012, 129-152.

Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich: MEW Vol. 9, Berlin 1960.

Marx, Karl: Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Penguin 1993.

Rentschler, Frank: Der Zwang zur Selbstunterwerfung – Fordern und Fördern im aktivierenden Staat, in: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, No.1, Bad Honnef 2004, 201-229.

Scholz, Roswitha: ‘Democracy still eats its children’ – today even more so, in: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, No. 16, Springe 2019, 30-60.

Trenkle, Norbert: Der Demokratische Mauerbau – Elendsmigration und westlicher Abgrenzungswahn, in: Rosemaries Babies – Die Demokratie und ihre Rechtsradikalen, Unkel/Bad Honnef 1993, 227-262.

Wacquant, Loic: Bestrafen der Armen – Zur neoliberalen Regierung der sozialen Unsicherheit, Berlin/Toronto 2013, first Paris 2004.

Weiß, Volker: Die autoritäre Revolte – Die Neue Rechte und der Untergang des Abendlandes, Stuttgart 2018.

Winkel, Udo: Der Geist geistloser Zustände – Sloterdijk u. Co.: Zum intellektuellen Abstieg der postkritischen deutschen Elitedenker, in: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, No.7, Bad Honnef 2010, 251-259.

Ziege, Eva-Maria: Nachwort der Herausgeberin, in: Adorno, Theodor W.: Bemerkungen zu ‘The Authoritarian Personality,’ Berlin 2019b, 133-160.

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[1] This is shown, for example, by shifts in discourse in the wake of the end of the ‘welcome culture,’ cf. Jäger; Wamper 2017.

[2] The NPD then narrowly missed entering the Bundestag in 1969. The consequence was a ‘change of strategy’ by parts of the right, which ‘modernized’ the right, cf. Weiß 2018, 27ff, and in more detail Feit 1987, 23ff.

[3] It is no coincidence that Jürgen Elsässer’s radical right-wing magazine has the subtitle “Magazine for Sovereignty.”

[4] Volker Weiß emphasizes the similarities between right-wing radicalism and Islamism. For example, the relationship between the two is clear in their hatred of women and their masculinity mania. The neo-fascist masculinity mania is exemplified in the book “Der Weg der Männer” (The Way of Men) by Jack Donovan, published by the radical right-wing Antaios-Verlag, cf. Weiß 2018, 227ff. Jack Donovan could in principle also join the IS, as Weiß noted in an interview: “Tacheles: Volker Weiß über Akteure, Ideologie und Entwicklung der Neuen Rechten”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xtMdgVayOw, 7:50 min.

[5] In Adorno’s lecture from 1959: What does Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit mean, from about 3 min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioj9UPuP374.

[6] The continuity of both becomes particularly clear in racist exclusionary imperialism and democratic wall-building, cf. Kurz 2003 esp. 190ff. and Trenkle 1993.

[7] It is worth mentioning in this context that Lenin, in his polemic against Karl Kautsky, referred to the mendacity of the bourgeois democracies and addressed what today would be called the ‘state of emergency.’ Thus it says: “Take the fundamental laws of modern states, take the methods by which they are governed, take the freedom of assembly or of the press, the ‘equality of citizens before the law’ – and you will see at every turn the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy, well known to every honest and class-conscious worker. There is not a single state, even the most democratic, where there are not in the constitution back-doors or clauses which secure for the bourgeoisie the possibility ‘in case of violations of peace and order’ – in reality, however, when the exploited class ‘violates’ its being a slave and tries to stop behaving like a slave – to use military force against the workers, to impose a state of siege, and so on. Kautsky shamelessly glosses over bourgeois democracy by concealing how, for example, the most democratic and republican bourgeois in America or Switzerland act against striking labor” (Lenin 1970, 87).

[8] Due to the obvious discrepancy between the ‘claim and reality of democracy,’ naturally, fewer and fewer people believe in the Western democratic propaganda. Thus, in various places, there is talk of ‘post-democracy,’ ‘façade democracy,’ ‘(financial) oligarchy,’ etc.; terms which, according to the claim, are supposed to capture democratic reality. These critiques, however, remain phenomenological, do not go beyond a ‘critique of neoliberalism,’ criticize the lack of ‘representation,’ insufficient ‘direct democracy,’ the ‘deep state’ and call for nonsense like a ‘democratic financial system’ and the like.

[9] In early 2017, the German Foreign Office spoke of concentration camp-like conditions in the camps in Libya. The report states, among other things, that “executions of non-paying migrants, torture, rape, extortion, and abandonment in the desert are the order of the day there.” cf. https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article161611324/Auswaertiges-Amt-kritisiert-KZ-aehnliche-Verhaeltnisse.html.  

[10] So as not to be misunderstood: Of course, democracy and fascism are not simply the same thing, and it is by no means irrelevant whether a corrupt social democrat is at the levers of power or a fascist like Bolsonaro. It would therefore be reactionary indeed to accept, for example, a synchronization or dismantling of bourgeois justice with a shrug of the shoulders or to declare it irrelevant.

[11]Thus, Marx’s article The Future Results of British Rule in India, 8/8/1853, states, “The profound hypocrisy of bourgeois civilization and the barbarism inseparable from it lie unveiled before our eyes as soon as we turn our gaze from their homeland, where they appear under respectable forms, to the colonies, where they show themselves in all their nakedness” in: Marx; Engels 1960, 225. How blatant this barbarism was is shown, for example, by Mike Davis (Davis 2011).

Originally published on Exit! homepage on 03/25/2020