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.).

Literature

Adorno, Theodor W. 2017. “Theses on Need.” Translated by Martin Shuster and Iain Macdonald. https://www.academia.edu/.

Amlinger, Carolin and Oliver Nachtwey. 2022. Gekränkte Freiheit: Aspekte des libertären Autoritarismus. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Böttcher, Herbert. 2016. “‘Wir schaffen das!’ – Mit Ausgrenzungsimperialismus und Ausnahmezustand gegen Flüchtlinge.” exit-online.org.

Böttcher, Herbert. 2023. “Weltvernichtung als Selbstvernichtung: Was im Anschluss an Walter Benjamin ‘zu denken’ gibt.” Exit! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft 20: 159-207.

Daggett, Cara. 2018. “Petro-Masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47 (1): 25–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818775817.

Dreßen, Wolfgang. 1982. Die pädagogische Maschine: Zur Geschichte des industrialisierten Bewußtseins in Preußen/Deutschland. Frankfurt: Ullstein.

Gould, Steven Jay. 1996. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

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

Heller, Agnes. 1976. The Theory of Need in Marx. London: Allison & Busby.

Hentges, Gudrun. 1999. Schattenseite der Aufklärung: Die Darstellung von Juden und “Wilden” in philosophischen Schriften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt: Wochenschau.

Honegger, Claudia. 1991. Die Ordnung der Geschlechter: Die Wissenschaft von Menschen und das Weib, Frankfurt: Campus.

Jappe, Anselm. 2022. “Narcissus or Orpheus? Remarks on Freud, Fromm, Marcuse and Lasch.” Exit! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft 19: 112-146.

Koch, Thomas. 2021 “Zur Aktualität von Robert Kurz’ ‘Freie Fahrt ins Krisenchaos.’” Exit! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft 18, 190-219.

Koester, Elsa. 2019. “Die Allzuvielen: Ökofaschismus – Rechte Ideologen entdecken den Klimaschutz für sich. Das ist keine gute Nachricht.” Freitag 34. https://www.freitag.de/autoren/elsa-koester/die-allzuvielen.

Konicz, Tomasz. 2022. “Rebranding Capitalism.” https://exitinenglish.com/2023/04/02/rebranding-capitalism/.

Konicz, Tomasz. 2022a. “Von Crashpropheten, Preppern und Krisenprofiteuren: Rechte Ideologie in der Krise.” Exit! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft 19: 67-81.

Kurz, Robert. 2004. Blutige Vernunft – Essays zur emanzipatorischen Kritik der kapitalistischen Moderne und ihrer westlichen Werte. Bad Honnef: Horlemann.

Kurz, Robert. 1999. Die Welt als Wille und Design: Postmoderne, Lifestyle-Linke und die Ästhetisierung der Krise. Berlin: Edition TIAMAT.

Kurz, Robert. 2020. “Freie Fahrt ins Krisenchaos – Aufstieg und Grenzen des automobilen Kapitalismus,” Exit! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft 17: 23-44.

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

Thomas Meyer

1. Introduction: The Mediation of Theory and Empiricism as a Concrete Totality

An individual never constitutes themselves directly, but is conditioned by the fetishistic process dynamics of capitalist society, mediated by the fetishistic whole. Immediacy of facts indicates that no critique of them is attempted, but a critique is evaded, for example, to make oneself comfortable in the scientific establishment. Empirical findings cannot be understood without theoretical concepts, and both concepts and empirical facts are in a dialectical relationship to each other. Adorno wrote in his critique of an empirically oriented sociology: “Theoretical reflections upon society as a whole cannot be completely realized by empirical findings […]. Each particular view of society as a whole necessarily transcends its scattered facts. The first condition for construction of the totality is a concept of the object [Sache], around which the disparate data are organized. From the living experience, and not from one already established according to the societally installed control mechanisms, from the memory of what has been conceived in the past, from the unswerving consequence of one’s own reflection, this construction must always bring the concept to bear on the material and reshape it in contact with the latter. But if theory is not to fall prey to the dogmatism over whose discovery skepticism—now elevated to a prohibition on thought—is always ready to rejoice, then theory may not rest here. It must transform the concepts which it brings, as it were, from outside into those which the object has of itself, into what the object, left to itself, seeks to be, and confront it with what it is. It must dissolve the rigidity of the temporally and spatially fixed object into a field of tension of the possible and the real: each one, in order to exist, is dependent upon the other.” (Adorno 1976)

Thus, empirical facts are to be applied to theoretical concepts, which themselves should be sharpened in confrontation with these facts. For every theory has its “time core” and concepts themselves have a history. Not taking note of empirical facts can result in an “anachronistic train of thought,” and theory building is then reduced to nostalgia and the exegesis of “holy writings.” At worst, one then ends up with an ahistorical and existentialist seeming “conceptualism.”[1] On the other hand, empiricism is not to be referenced with an immediacy such that every fact stands for itself as a positively given fact and its historical constitution and mediation with the social process dynamics is left out. For example, there are undoubtedly many studies that clearly describe the insanity of the capitalist mode of production (such as those on plastic production or industrial agriculture), but can only inadequately explain these empirical facts due to a lack of economic and social theoretical grounding; accordingly, the practical conclusions then often turn out to be helpless and abbreviated. If in such studies even the socio-critical impetus is still missing, one ends up “fact hoarding,” only wanting to acknowledge what can be expressed by graphs, statistics and numbers.

In contrast to the fact- and concept-mania, however, there must be an insistence on relating empirical facts to the fetishistic process-dynamics of capital, speaking to the totality; and at the same time the concepts, by which totality is to be expressed, must be related to empirical findings, so that the concepts grasp with sharpness that to which they are to refer, and make it possible to recognize the inner and historical connection of the empirical. The totality is thus to be thought of concretely (Scholz 2009). In this context, it must be noted that the empirical does not merge into the concepts, and in the context of the value-dissociation critique, it must be emphasized in particular that the various subject areas must also be accorded a quality of their own, which cannot be subsumed under a totality; rather, a fractured, historically dynamic totality must be assumed.

In the following, the aim is to outline facets of Big Data, social physics, and the Internet of Things, as well as the subsequent, rather left-wing criticism on a largely phenomenological or empirical level, which is also to be taken note of and not simply incidental. However, it should not stop with this critique; beyond this, the view of the overall social context of form and process should be unfolded.

2. Some Critical Thoughts on the Use of Mathematics in the (Social) Sciences

Mathematics is given the status of objectivity, stringency and freedom from personal values in (developed) modernity. This status is also given to those who express themselves through it. A statement that can be expressed by a number is regarded in our modern world as the epitome of truth. An argument has all the more power of statement and persuasion if it can refer to quantities, i.e. numbers and graphs (Ortlieb 2011). Thus, the sciences that are written mathematically, of which physics is a prototypical example, are considered “exact,” and those that are not are tainted with the stigma of non-exactness, of mere opinion, even of ideology.

Throughout the course of the 19th century and then at the latest in the 20th, various sciences have endeavored to orient themselves on the methodology of physics, on mathematical modeling and experiment, to thereby also attain the status of exactness and objectivity, with the goal of transferring the success of physics to their métier as well. The idea of being able to simply replicate the success of one subject by adopting its methodology to another is not without problems. This is because success (however it may be evaluated) has certain prerequisites that may not exist in another subject area. As a rule, there is no reflection on this either, because this would require dealing with the functional logic of the sciences and their “epistemic interests” (Habermas) or their “epistemic ideals” (K. M. Meyer-Abich). As we will see, an unreflective approach to mathematics is anything but stringent.[2]

A particularly clear case of this is the emergence of neoclassicism since the 1870s. Its goal was to overcome classical bourgeois economics and establish itself as an “exact” university discipline. It took its cue from physics, more specifically from classical mechanics. As the neoclassicist Irving Fisher (1867-1947) pointed out, the aim was to develop a formalism based on Hamiltonian mechanics[3] by establishing certain conceptual analogies (particle = individual, energy = utility, etc.) (Mirowski 1989, 222f.). However, this claim and its realization has already experienced some criticism (even more than 100 years ago, as described by Mirowski).

The impossibility of an experiment that could verify or falsify a mathematically formulated theory or even establish the situation in which the model assumes validity is a decisive argument for why this transfer cannot work in this way. It does not follow from this that mathematics cannot be used in economic theory in a meaningful and insightful way; however, it must be noted that mathematical models in economic theory generally cannot have the same explanatory power and scope as those in physics. However, a serious problem can already be observed at the level of model building itself: If one looks at common textbooks in economics, one sees that the assumptions of a given model are often not accounted for or verified when that model is applied to a new situation. Moreover, model assumptions are always made to fit the concept of market equilibrium: a rigid equilibrium scheme is thus imposed on all conceivable phenomena. The model assumptions are therefore chosen in such a way that we always get an intersection of two opposing tendencies, represented by the so-called Marshall cross[4] (if model assumptions were chosen a little more realistically, we might get no intersection, i.e. no equilibrium, cf. Ortlieb 2004a). Furthermore, these models and their assumptions convey an economic picture that has nothing to do with real capitalism, with industrial mass production, etc. They are little more than “market fairy tales” (Ortlieb 2004b). Therefore, neoclassical economic theory is rightly described as “mathematized charlatanry” (Ortlieb 2006). A possible reason to explain why a whole scientific discipline proceeds in such a methodologically questionable way was provided by Alan Freeman (Freeman 2006). According to him, neoclassicism is not so much a science that investigates and establishes facts of the external world, but rather a quasi-religious doctrine that has the dogma of the theory of harmony of the market equilibrium as its content, and therefore justifies capitalism. According to Freeman, this dogma is comparable to “heaven” in the Middle Ages. But this already indicates that if the aim is to criticize the sciences, it would be insufficient to limit oneself only to an immanent critique, to a critique of only methods and claims.

However, objectivity in the modern sense, as claimed by the natural sciences in particular, is not synonymous with truth, certainty, or fact-orientation. As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have noted, to be objective is to be “intent on knowledge that bears no marks of the knower” (Dasten; Galison 2007, 17). Objectivity, then, is a form of practice designed to eliminate subjectivity from the process of knowing. Objectivity understood in this way is thus an expression of social relations and the cognitive practice of the bourgeois subject form. The appearance of this objectivity consists precisely in the fact that scientific practice apparently has nothing to do with the cognizing subject.

Typically, objectivity and its historical or social genesis is not or is hardly reflected upon in the scientific community, and it is certainly not questioned.[5] The same goes for the term “exactness,” whose meaning is just as infrequently made clear.

According to Herbert Auinger, there is no reason why a non-mathematical language should not be exact, i.e. exact in the sense that the language hits what it refers to with clear words and conceptual sharpness. Ironically, philosophers such as Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) complain about the imperfection or lack of clarity of language with very clear words (Auinger 1995).

When talking about exactness of mathematical language, the focus is on the compactness of the mathematical expression and its convenient handling. A mathematical language is therefore precise and unambiguous and a non-mathematical one is not (necessarily).

However, it must be emphasized that this exactness can only be associated with those phenomena that are accessible to a mathematical description or quantitative approach (cf. the article “Math Delusion” by Claus Peter Ortlieb in this issue).

However, a switch to mathematics and the handling of social science or economic issues through mathematics, even if it is done in a methodologically clean way, is not to be confused with a profound examination of those issues that are to be given a mathematical form: According to Auinger, various social scientists who aspired to mathematization, or tried to justify it, complained that there are too many different theories in the social sciences, a complaint that says nothing against them in terms of content in the first place. Mathematization is thus seen as a way to put a stop to this confusing diversity; mathematics and formal logic then vouch for the truth of the rest. A mathematization can therefore find its reason in the fact that one does not want to (or can no longer) deal with the content of these different theories and their problems. Calculation can therefore possibly also be seen as a substitute for thinking (or thinking is limited to what can be quantified or is to be quantified). Certainly, the application of mathematics is useful in certain areas and appropriate to that corresponding subject area. But the number faith of our time can also lead to overestimating mathematics and its application, labelling everything else that might not be calculated as subjective and dismissing it as mere “speculation.”

The objection that mathematics and the mathematical sciences, quantitative thinking, are not to be overestimated, has been raised before. This was expressed by Hegel[6] himself in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences: “This is followed by the further consideration that, since quantity, without being mediated by thinking, is taken up directly from the imagination, it easily happens that it is overestimated with respect to the extent of its validity, and even increased to an absolute category. This is indeed the case if only those sciences whose objects can be subjected to mathematical calculation are recognized as exact sciences. […] It would indeed be bad for our cognition, if of such objects as freedom, right, morality, even God himself, because they cannot be measured and calculated or expressed in a mathematical formula, we would have to content ourselves with renunciation of an exact cognition, in general merely with an indeterminate idea, and then, as far as the closer or particulars of the same are concerned, it would be left to the discretion of each individual to make of it what he wills.” (HW 8, 210f., here quoted after Auinger 1995, 16)

After Hegel, too, there were critical comments on the overestimation of the quantitative way of thinking, for example, by Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in “The Gay Science”: “So, too it is with the faith with so many materialistic natural scientists rest content: the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and measure in human thought, in human valuations – a ‘world of truth’ that can be grasped entirely with the help of our four-cornered little human reason – What? Do we really want to demote existence in this way to an exercise in arithmetic and an indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one shouldn’t want to strip it of its ambiguous character: that, gentlemen, is what good taste demands – above all, the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon! That the only rightful interpretation of the world should be one to which you have a right […], one that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, grasping, and nothing else – that is a crudity and naiveté, assuming it is not a mental illness, an idiocy. […] Suppose one judged the value of a piece of music according to how much it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas – how absurd such a ’scientific’ evaluation of music would be! What would one have comprehended, understood, recognized? Northing, really nothing of what is ‘music’ in it! (Nietzsche 2001, 238f.)

Hegel and Nietzsche hereby collect points that are mentioned in a critique of an overestimation of mathematical science.[7] However, they argue purely epistemologically, and do not relate to the level of society as a whole, and thus remain on the surface. It is important not only to criticize the unreflective and possibly methodologically impure application of mathematics or quantitative thinking, but also to criticize the social context in which this application takes place.

Claus Peter Ortlieb formulated a critique of the mathematical natural sciences on a socio-theoretical level in his essay “Unconscious Objectivity” (Ortlieb 1998). There it is argued, among other things, with reference to Evelyn Fox Keller, “that for some reason we have forgotten to bring our own survival into the objectives of scientific knowledge.” The basic problem, then, lies not so much in a merely unreflective approach to mathematics and the “hard sciences,” but in a socially produced objectivity, i.e., the fetishistic dynamics of capital, which is indifferent to the vital interests of human beings and nature and sees all the world only as a substrate for its valorizing movement.

A specific form of technological development is associated with the mathematical sciences, and the progress in knowledge that follows from them, which as a rule consists in the application of those structures, principles, or laws of nature that are discovered and investigated by the corresponding sciences. However, this technical development itself stands in a specific social context: This consists, among other things, in the fact that the fetishistic dynamics of capital favors technical developments which lead to a saving of abstract labor, so that their corresponding application results in a cheapening of the products and/or an opening up of new markets (not to be forgotten are the military: war research, etc.).[8] Technical development, together with the associated basic research, takes place in such a way that, for the most part, developments correspond to the valorization imperative of capital, or at least meet it. This also includes the establishment of the dissociated sphere, which forms the mute prerequisite of valorization; Fordism, for example, would hardly have been possible without the corresponding enforcement of a petty-bourgeois family structure.

Thus, with a quite understandable critique of technology, it must be insisted that the causal issue here is not “technology” per se, as alluded to, for example, in the works of Günther Anders (especially in Antiquity of Man I/II), but rather the fetishistic dynamics underlying it. For instance, a rejection of individual transportation does not necessarily mean that the internal combustion engine as such would be abolished. And the fact that the whole world is being filled up with microelectronics does not necessarily follow from the invention of the transistor; rather, the cause and justification lies in the commodity-producing patriarchy itself and its indifference to the material content, the inherent logics of nature and its boundlessness, which finds expression in Marx’s formula M-C-M’ etc. (Cunha 2016, Heintz 1992). This “technological totalitarianism,” as it is called in places in the bourgeois feuilleton, is therefore itself an expression and consequence of the totalitarianism of the value-dissociation relation. This does not mean, however, that technology would only have to be “liberated” from the fetish of capital without undergoing significant changes itself, since its development and realization are already shaped by the valorization requirements of capital. This can be seen in the sometimes-nonsensical business implementation of a so-called utility value: Thus, to increase sales, emphasis is placed on planned wear and tear, or planned obsolescence. For example, tear-resistant pantyhose or long-life light bulbs were withdrawn from circulation when it became clear that the market would otherwise be saturated much too quickly (Reuß & Dannoritzer 2013).

Through the fetishistic dynamics of the value-dissociation relation, a specific purpose is baked into technology, which of course will change or even become obsolete when the social relations and the corresponding subject form of people in capitalism are overcome. For some use values or technologies it may seem difficult to imagine or even absurd that they could find use in a liberated society, be it individual transport or nuclear weapons. For others, however, from our current perspective, it is not necessarily clear. This means that while technologies and their implementation are form poisoned, their potentialities do not necessarily merge in the social form into which they are squeezed. The issue is also complex because the precursor to technology is a socially mediated relationship of engagement with inanimate and/or animate nature that finds expression in contemporary natural sciences and their forms of thought and practice; it is a relationship to an external substrate of nature, but one that must be accorded an autonomy, a non-identicalness that cannot be reduced to discourse, human interpretation, and purpose. Otherwise, there would be claimed a total availability of nature, which, however, expresses nothing else than that nature is to be handed over to the capitalist imperative of valorization. A critique of technology is thus linked to a critique of the natural sciences, and both are to be related to the social context in which they take place. An acknowledgement of an autonomy of nature (which, however, is not to be confused with a “romanticism of nature”), together with a critique of the social form that negates it, leads to a kind of “dialectical realism” (Roswitha Scholz); in contrast to a “new materialism” or a “new realism” that, although it distances itself from poststructuralism and its fixation on discourse, does not take note of the social totality and therefore does not arrive at a critique of the value-dissociation relation (cf. Roswitha Scholz’s article in this issue).

Just as mathematical economic theory has already been criticized, the following will do the same regarding a recent trend in the scientific landscape: Big Data and the social physics based on it. To this end, the claim and the justification of this discipline will first be examined and then subjected to a critique.

3. The Social Physics of Alex Pentland

Alex Pentland is probably one of the best-known and most influential computer scientists currently working on Big Data. Big Data is the collection and analysis of data to an extent that has never been available before in history and is therefore no longer manageable with traditional statistics. In his book “Social Physics – How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter”, Alex Pentland explains in a generally understandable way all the wonderful things that Big Data can do and what can be researched with it.

The use of Big Data aims to understand the social; and the corresponding scientific discipline is called “social physics.” However, as Pentland notes, because it abstracts from the human interior, its statements are fundamentally only probabilistic (Pentland 2015, 16). Nonetheless, the goal is “to build quantitative, predictive models of human behavior in complex, everyday situations” (Pentland 2015, 12).

But how exactly does this work and what promises are made?

It is initially quite simple: Vast amounts of data are gathered “by collecting digital bread crumbs from the sensors of cell phones, postings on social media, purchases with credit cards, and more” (Pentland 2015, 9). To this end, as Pentland repeatedly points out, special programs which record all sorts of things are installed on the “smartphones” of the subjects of the studies conducted. In this way, subjects can be observed in real time over an extended period, producing countless gigabytes of data in the process. This data is then used to help understand how an idea circulates between people and how this flow of ideas (idea flow), along with information, causes human behavior to change (or how it can be changed). To do this, a device was built to bring together the many sources of information: the “socioscope.” According to Pentland, this is expected to revolutionize the study of human behavior in the same way that, say, the microscope revolutionized biology (Pentland 2015, 10).

The crucial difference to conventional statistical sociology is that here, in principle, millions of people can be observed in real time over a longer period.

Furthermore, social physics should make one understand “how this flow of ideas ends up shaping norms, productivity, and creative output of our companies, cities, and societies. It enables us to predict the productivity of small groups, of departments within companies, and even of entire cities. It also helps us tune communication networks so that we can reliably make better decisions and become more productive” (Pentland 2015, 4).

In social physics based on Big Data, the aim is to filter out correlations from the data and then model them mathematically. In this way, human behavior (or traffic), among other things, can be predicted and optimized. This is accomplished by looking at the data of many individuals and their respective “peer group,” i.e., the immediate social environment, cliques, etc.

Pentland shows unbounded optimism about the expected results of social physics: “For the first time, we will have the data required to really know ourselves and understand how our society evolves. By better understanding ourselves, we can potentially build a world without war or financial crashes (!), in which infectious disease is quickly detected and stopped, in which energy, water, and other resources are no longer wasted, and in which government are part of the solution rather than part of the problem” (Pentland 2015, 18f.).

We will also owe “[a] much better government” to social physics (Pentland 2015, 138), and in doing so, if I understand Pentland correctly, we can dispense with the traditional means of a political discourse. Pentland’s point of view can therefore be seen as an indication that capitalism’s “ability to shape” through political discourse has historically reached its limits, and thus political discourse as such has become irrelevant, since it moves within capitalist real categories that today reach their absolute limit and can therefore mobilize “potential for shaping” only in their wildness. Robert Kurz thus consequently spoke of an “end of politics” (Kurz 1994).

By an “idea,” already mentioned above, Pentland means the following: “An idea is a strategy (an action, outcome, and feature that identify when to apply the action) for instrumental behavior. Compatible, valuable ideas become ‘habits of action’ used in ‘quick thinking’ responses” (Pentland 2015, 20). There is no clearer way to express the instrumental nature of this whole charade. It is also not surprising, as stated in various places in the book, that incentives are meant to get people to change or optimize their behavior. Critics see this as an intentional manipulation of behavior. The intentional manipulation can be seen in the fact that data collection and the study of the dynamics in social networks make it possible to intervene “to change the social network” (Pentland 2015, 5).

It is already easy to see here that social physics, due to the rather narrow horizon of its concepts and methods, will never (be able to) think about emancipation; and even less about a fetishism-critical analysis of society, which would be necessary for an adequate and critical understanding of this society. Only the allegedly objectively directly present individual is considered, who is thereby only seen as an information and stimulus processing system. The approach through which the individual is claimed to be understood is thus a reified one, one that has a tendency toward the totalitarian. It is also assumed that humans, as mere stimulus-processing machines, can be passively manipulated or steered in a desired direction (both by social physics and by some of its critics). But this would mean assuming that domination is only external to the subject, and has nothing to do with an active intrinsic part of himself. By this elision of the socio-psychological level and capering on the individual and his data, the social totality, which for people like Pentland is surely nothing but metaphysical nonsense, is completely lost from view. It is also consistent, as mentioned above, to abstract from the human interior, since this could hardly be modeled or formalized mathematically. It is similar to the behaviorism of earlier days, in which the human being was also regarded only as a collection of flesh to be steered and controlled. It is not by chance that Pentland advocates for conducting corresponding larger field experiments: “We need to construct living laboratories – communities willing to try a new way of doing things or, to put it bluntly, to be guinea pigs (!) – in order to test and prove our ideas” (Pentland 2015, 186). This hubris is not too surprising for a technocratic worldview wherein people are bluntly and openly referred to as guinea pigs! This  is hardly to be understood as a colorful metaphor, but rather much more as a threat. To call humans guinea pigs, to dehumanize them, however, means nothing other than that one claims to also treat them as such. This phenomenon is also known from medical studies in which people who participated in experiments were collectively referred to as “material,” and usually treated accordingly (Pappworth 1967, XI). In particular clarity, this dehumanization of human beings supported by science was evident in psychiatry, where people were (or are[9]) effectively reduced to a vegetable.

Pentland’s social physics, as already indicated, is primarily concerned with productivity and how this can be optimized. Studies have shown that the more people communicate or interact with each other, the better the flow of ideas, which has a positive effect on the productivity of a company (Pentland 2015, 93f.). Who would have thought that? The book also stands out for other groundbreaking findings: For example, a family is more mobile and interacts with a greater variety of people when it has more money (Pentland 2015, 164). These exceedingly profound research findings already seem somewhat ridiculous and trivial in light of the élan and pretension with which Pentland promotes Big Data social physics. This phenomenon is nevertheless striking and in need of explanation, that sciences, when they claim with élan to finally be able to understand humans and society with their technical and mathematical instruments, often end up with rather trivial results, if they do not even produce more or less “mythology,” as it has been noted for instance in the case of neuroscience (Hasler 2012). This was also already noticed by Stanislaw Andreski (1919-2007), who at the time wrote a polemic against the social sciences of the time, specifically against Skinner’s behaviorism, which, in my opinion, could also be used against Pentland’s digital behaviorism: “The problem of how to control the behavior of humans and animals by punishments and rewards has been treated in innumerable treatises on penology, legislation, education, management and animal training, starting from the works of Aristotle and Confucius, not to mention the countless proverbs and wisdoms of the vernacular. It is always possible to say something important and new about this subject, but it is also very difficult. But a bit of pseudoscientific terminology can confuse and intimidate people into thinking a highly simplified and therefore less valid version of ancient folk wisdom is a significant development” (Andreski 1977, 72).

One reason why a high standard ends up in rather trivial results may be that a technocratic and mathematically oriented approach does not do justice to its subject matter. Pentland refuses to look at structural social contexts. He rejects categories such as “market” and “class” because they are too simplistic for him. Of course, the point here is not to demand that categories like class or market be made strong again; at best, that would only result in a social analysis and critique of traditional Marxist provenance. But it is nevertheless important to note that parts of the bourgeois intelligentsia are in the process of saying goodbye to social conceptualizations for good. We thus see that there is a clearly pronounced methodological individualism in Pentland. Through this, the ability to consider social relations as having become historical is reduced, and it becomes impossible to analyze and question social relations and, a fortiori, the fetishistic constitution of them. Consequently, the understanding that  social physics gives access to is a technocratic and domination-affirmative one, since it makes, above all, any historical thinking impossible. Social physics does not allow us to see the historical development of “social facts,” which would be a basic prerequisite for their critique and thus also the possibility of overcoming them in an emancipatory way.

This also strikes some representatives of the bourgeois intelligentsia. The journalist and Internet critic Nicholas Carr, for example, writes about this approach that “[a] statistical model of society that ignores issues of class, that takes pattern of influence as givens rather than as historical contingencies, will tend to perpetuate existing social structures and dynamics. It will encourage us to optimize the status quo rather than challenge it” (Carr 2014).

The left also criticizes the fact that social physics would make “relations of domination invisible” (Wagner 2016, 149).

However, a concept of domination, as it is used by many leftists in particular, which is often understood as an external or personal one, must be rejected. This is also echoed in various left critiques, such as Wagner’s, against Big Data, and so on. However, relations of domination ought to be understood as fetish relations. Thus, in the text “Subjectless Domination,” Robert Kurz writes: “The ‘domination of man by man’ must not, therefore, be understood in the crude external and subjective sense, but as the all-embracing constitution of a compulsive form of human consciousness itself. […]The concept of domination must therefore not be merely rejected so as to raise the concept of the constitution of the fetish in its place, which would reduce the subject and his declarations to a simple marionette. Rather, the concept of domination and its mediating concept “power” must be deduced as concepts from the universal phenomenal form of the constitutions of the fetish, which in turn are manifested both practically and sensibly as the spectrum of repression or self-repression in diverse forms and on various planes. The in-itself unconscious form manifests itself to consciousness as domination on all planes. In the figure of domination, the subject as a being constituted by the fetish makes real contact with himself and with others. The objectivized categories of the constitution thus form the (respective) pattern or matrix of domination. (Kurz 2004, 206f.).

Criticism of domination, whether in the abbreviated sense or as criticism of the fetish constitution, is of no interest to Pentland and other social physicists. However, Pentland at least (!) sees that the data sets could also be abused and used against the people. This also applies to anonymized data, as they can usually be deanonymized relatively easily (Pentland 2015, 228, 204). That is why he, in all seriousness, proposes a “New Deal on Data” (Pentland 2015, 180f.). In other words, a series of measures to ensure that individuals remain sovereign over their data, i.e. that each individual decides what is to be done with their own data. However, he does not mention the possibility of questioning this exorbitant data collection in principle and at least making it conceivable to possibly end it (just as questioning individual transportation makes its abolition conceivable). Instead, one gets the impression that technical and scientific developments are to be accepted as an inevitable fact of nature that could at best be regulated by the state.

In principle, the protection measures outlined by Pentland make sense and a commitment to them should be acknowledged. However, his plea for a defense of privacy (which is eroding anyway due to technological and social developments) is not very credible when one looks at some of the possible applications: In principle, everything can be monitored. These techniques are virtually predestined for such things, and an important motivation for their development is precisely this type of monitoring. In an interview with “Spiegel-Online,” he answers the question of whether he would intervene if, in a family being monitored, the father was drinking too much: “No, never. But we might in the future. The more science is moving forward and the better we understand human behavior, the more you get the obligation to act” (Pentland 2014). This suggests what might be called “digitized paternalism,” a mindset that also plays a large role in so-called “nudging.” I’ll come back to this later.

One thing that could be done with Big Data, which is probably actually meaningful (or rather negatively meaningful), would be to follow the existing material paths of industrial production. Not, however, with the aim of “optimizing” them in a capitalistic way, but rather to determine and denounce their utter madness: The absurd material distribution chains capitalism manages due to its processual dynamics, for example in the cultivation of apples, or the production of yogurt, has already been investigated in some places, such as in a study by Stefanie Böge (Böge 1992, 2001).

As is well known, the goal of the capitalist mode of production is the successful valorization of capital. An individual capital achieves this by trying to attract to itself as large a share as possible of the mass of value produced by society as a whole through competition. The consequence is, as Marx already described it, a growing concentration of capital. He put in a nutshell with “one capitalist always strikes down many others” (Marx 2005, 929). Today, this phenomenon must be seen specifically in the context of the globalization of the past few decades, i.e. unlike in Marx’s time, capital concentrations and mergers are not to be understood as an expression of an expanding total capital, but as a rationalization investment due to a contraction of total capital, as a mode of its crisis course (cf. Kurz 2005, 288f.).

However, it also follows from this merging dynamic that the “winner” takes over the market share of the dead beat, which means that the victorious apple producer then supplies the whole world with apples that could just as easily be grown “locally.” This leads to ever greater transport distances, and the corresponding consumption of resources, which are fatalistically accepted with a shrug of the shoulders. This madness exists in material terms, not in economic terms: In terms of the logic of valorization, this absurdity is not absurd at all; it has its origin in economic “reason,” and in accordance with it, this world is being productively disfigured.

In a critique of the material results of capitalism, it is therefore necessary to insist that it is not the material level per se that leads to environmental destruction, waste of resources, etc., but the social form in which the “use values” must move, whereby the material content is adapted to the form. The growing concentration of capital and even more the “contradiction between matter and form” (Ortlieb 2009) do not come into view if only the data scrap of many individuals is analyzed and the whole world has only “optimization” in mind.

As we will see in the following, the function of Big Data and its applications is obviously a socially repressive one (on the part of the state and on the part of individual capital), as Pentland has already openly and bluntly indicated. Big Data has accordingly been used as an instrument of repression for a long time, as the mathematician Cathy O’Neil shows phenomenologically in her book “Weapons of Math Destruction.”[10]

4. Applied Mathematics as A Means of Repression

In our digital brave new world, all kinds of data are collected and stored in huge databases. The data are then evaluated by certain algorithms or mathematical models. In this way, a person’s credit-worthiness, a job applicant’s fitness for hiring, the probability of a criminal recidivating (!) (and court decisions are made accordingly), or the likelihood of crimes occurring in a certain neighborhood (!) can be calculated. Algorithms are also used to make evaluations that determine whether a person will continue to be employed as a teacher. O’Neil brings up all sorts of examples in her book. The perfidious thing about algorithms is that what they do and how they do it usually remains a trade secret. So the algorithm’s judgment is absolute, and no contradiction is possible. This typically remains the case because these algorithms rarely have “error feedback” (O’Neil 2016, 133) (or they just positively feedback on themselves, a “pernicious loop feedback”) that could cross-check whether an algorithm was actually correct. Thus it is clear that these algorithms have extremely repressive consequences for many people, which is why O’Neil calls them “weapons of math destruction” (WMD). These “weapons” are “by design, inscrutable black boxes; they define their own reality and use it to justify their results. This type of model is self-perpetuating, highly destructive – and very common” (O’Neil 2016, 29, 7).

One problem here is that (applied) mathematics is not accessible to many people and they are therefore often helpless in the face of the judgments of such a model. This helplessness is also the result of the contemporary belief in numbers and the uncritical perceptions of the “objective sciences.” But models of this kind are anything but objective: “A model’s blind spots reflect the judgements and priorities of its creators. […] Models are opinions embedded in mathematics. […] these models are constructed not just from data but from the choices we make about which data to pay attention to – and which to leave out” (O’Neil 2016, 21, 218, emphasis TM).

O’Neil writes: “Nevertheless, many of these models encoded human prejudice, misunderstanding […] Like gods, these mathematical models are opaque, their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, are beyond dispute or appeal” (O’Neil 2016, 3).

Moreover, the actual predictive power of some of these models is extremely poor. For example, Andreas von Westphalen points out that: “An elaborate study by ProPublica […] proves that at least one frequently used algorithm discriminates on the basis of skin color. The study also shows that accuracy of the risk calculation leaves much to be desired: Only 20 percent of people predicted to commit a violent crime actually committed a violent crime in the next two years. ProPublica ironically judges that-even if all felonies and misdemeanors were included – the prediction is only marginally more accurate than a coin flip” (von Westphalen 2016, 63f.).[11]

The crucial problem of such algorithms or models is that they are often self-referential. This is the case, for example, in the preventive fight against crime. The databases show that a high number of crimes, especially so-called “drug crimes,” have been detected in black “problem neighborhoods.” The algorithm predicts a high probability of crime in these neighborhoods. The police react with appropriate presence – and lo and behold – numerous crimes are detected and the algorithm is deemed a “success.” So the algorithm creates an interpretation of the world that always confirms itself. It is clear that there is a positive feedback loop here which will lead to even more police presence. In this way, those affected are punished for their very existence, their poverty is criminalized: “In this system, the poor and nonwhite are punished more for being who they are and living where they live. […] The result is that we criminalize poverty, believing all the while that our tools are not only scientific but fair” (O’Neil 2016, 97, 91).

Racist structures and social relations are therefore reproduced and cemented by Big Data and algorithms, although these algorithms claim to be  “objective” or even “fair,” as is strived for above all in the judiciary; an algorithm cannot possibly, for example, “judge” in a racist way. However, what is forgotten here is that it is humans, who may well be racist, that develop them; and even if they are not explicitly so, a racist and socially repressive reality is mathematically modeled through them, and with certain assumptions made, is thereby reproduced (O’Neil 2016, et al. 24-27). For example, risk assessment algorithms calculate the likelihood of a delinquent recidivating using methods such as  questionnaires. However, these questionnaires are constructed in such a way that someone who grew up in a “problem neighborhood” is inevitably calculated to be at higher risk. It may be argued that racist results do not necessarily follow from this methodology; but – and this is crucial – whatever assumptions and questionnaires are used, the goal of these methods is to model a racist reality, with the aim of more efficient and less costly law enforcement.

Thus, I think Big Data and its applications are probably only of secondary importance at this point; for high police presence in black “problem neighborhoods,” a “war on drugs,” mass incarceration of the poor (cf. Wacquant 2013, Meyer 2017), etc., existed before the times of Big Data. O’Neil’s focus is not on a clear analysis of the social causes of racism and crime; she does complain that Big Data and its applications, or some of them, i.e., the “weapons of math destruction,” would endanger democracy; but she does not question whether democracy is itself already a system of domination and to what extent applied algorithms are only the technical means by which a struggling capitalism deals with its delinquents, poor, and fallen out.

The extremely conservative character that data collection assigns to people because of their social behavior is similar. As a result of all their data being collected, people become fixed to their past: “Big Data processes codify the past. They do not invent the future. Doing that requires moral imagination, and that’s something only humans can provide” (O’Neil 2016, 204). This is due to the fact that “mathematical models, by their nature, are based on the past, and on the assumption that patterns will repeat” (O’Neil 2016, 38).

For example, someone could not get a job just because he had a stay in a psychiatric hospital a few years ago. A corresponding algorithm would filter out such candidates. However, it should be noted that such practices were just as common in earlier times and so an algorithm cannot be the primary problem here. Today this may be even more blatant, since much more data from much more people is available much faster. However, according to the logic of valorization, it is quite understandable why people with (formerly) severe emotional problems are rejected as applicants, since they are indeed dysfunctional for the company, or could be. Every single capital has to compete, but this also means that personnel costs, like all others, should be kept as low as possible. The problem, then, is not an algorithm in the causal sense (no matter how accurately it may “judge”), but the requirement to exist as a labor container and to be filtered out or put away (even with “well-meaning” pedagogical and re-socializing goals) if this requirement cannot be met.

This practice of filtering applicants with the use of algorithms is now common: “Such tests now are used on 60 to 70 percent of prospective workers in the United States, up from 30 to 40 percent about five years ago […]” (O’Neil 2016, 108).

Interestingly, however, it is often not at all a matter of finding the best candidate by sorting them out, but of quickly and cheaply getting rid of as many as possible (O’Neil 2016, 109).

The reduction of costs is the driving force behind the application of these algorithms: “For most companies, those WMD’s are designed to cut administrative costs and to reduce the risk of bad hires […]. The objective of the filters, in short, is to save money. […] Replacing a worker earning $50,000 a year costs a company about $10,000, or 20 percent of that worker’s yearly pay, according to the Center for American Progress. Replacing a high-level employee can cost multiples of that – as much as two years of salary” (O’Neil 2016, 118).

However, O’Neil remains at this phenomenological level and does not attempt to explain why job mobilization demands ever-increasing up-front costs, or why a seemingly excessive number of job applications flood companies and prove disruptive.

As explained, O’Neil points out the socially repressive character of Big Data and subsequently writes that Big Data threatens to go the same way as phrenology did a few centuries ago (O’Neil 2016, 121f.), i.e. to develop further into a repressive machine (or, to be more precise: to digitally upgrade the previous repression machine). This is not only because the whole procedure is opaque (trade secrets[12]), but also because many algorithms or models include questionable assumptions or prejudices that ultimately have socially repressive consequences. Big Data can therefore rightly be described, at least in part, as “mathematized charlatanry” (Ortlieb 2006).

Although O’Neil criticizes the questionable applications of Big Data, denounces its repressive consequences, makes the claimed “objectivity” of mathematical modeling highly questionable through her remarks (“Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.”), and suggests the inappropriateness of these models for describing human behavior, she nevertheless does not arrive at a principled questioning of the positivist way of thinking.

Let’s assume that algorithms and models are developed that are actually correct and accurately reflect the behavior of people: What would be gained by this with regard to the critique of social repression? At this point, at the latest, it should be obvious that an immanent critique of science, for all its necessity, has its limits and must be extended by a critique that goes beyond it. This must include a critique of the social subject-object dialectic, which one will look for in vain in such immanent critiques. For example, in a critique of the model of homo economicus, critics argue that people cannot be reduced to this conception of man, and that it is therefore not realistic; on the other hand, it is countered that many people actually behave in many situations exactly as if they acted according to this model (otherwise they would have to accept economic disadvantages) (Baumbach 2015, 297f.). Now how is this “fact” to be understood? The positivist scientific establishment would only feel confirmed, the model assumptions would be true and this external fact would thus be as certain as the former existence of the dinosaurs or the spherical shape of the earth. However, it is a fact, although people are not absorbed in this, which was produced only by the social action of the people themselves, and influences them as a compulsion, i.e. an act-thing which confronts them as objectivity.

However, if one restricts oneself to an immanent critique and concludes from this only that naively or incorrectly applied methods should simply be corrected with better or more stringently applied ones, then this almost inevitably leads to a continued affirmation of existing conditions. Thus, it is known that various critics of neoclassicism ultimately ended up in “post-autistic” or “heterodox” economics, which, according to their claim, want to develop more realistic modeling, but just like neoclassicism do not question the bourgeois forms of circulation, labor, etc., and the usual scientific forms of thought.

The danger of increasing social control emanating from Big Data is also increasingly being discussed in other places. Some time ago, several scientists published the “Digital Manifesto.”[13] This manifesto aims to draw attention to the totalitarian development paths made possible by Big Data. It looks admonishingly at China and Singapore, which give us an idea of where the journey of digitalization could lead: “The concept of a Citizen Score, which is now being implemented in China, gives us an idea of this: By measuring citizens on a one-dimensional ranking scale, the plan is not only comprehensive surveillance. Since the score on the one hand depends on clicks on the Internet and political good behavior, but on the other hand determines credit conditions, possible jobs and travel visas, it is also about the patronization and social control of the population” (Digital Manifesto 17).

Thereby it is noted that if similar things would also come about in the western democracies, it would be irrelevant whether it would come through the state or through private companies (like Google![14]). Unfortunately, these people seem to miss the fact that in the West the things indicated in the quote have been going on for a long time, which Cathy O’Neil was not the first to point out (von Becker 2017). Of course, it is also not taken into account that the so-called democracies have long been “post-democracies” (Colin Crouch), surveillance state-of-emergency regimes in which everyone tends to be given criminal status qua existence, a development that can be seen very clearly in all the manifold measures that have been tackled after 9/11 (cf. Kurz 2003b, Trojanow; Zeh 2010).

Two explosive and extremely clear examples from the wonderful world of democracy should be cited. Since 2009, the EU has been working and researching on a project called INDECT: “The computer-based surveillance system is to automatically detect ‘abnormal behavior’ and identify suspects by facial recognition and database matching. To do this, the Internet and primarily urban space will be seamlessly monitored. Information from social and private networks will be linked with other databases, such as police records, using automated facial recognition through camera surveillance, and biometric data from identity cards and passports, which will be available in digitalized form, and will also be used. […] INDECT is thus another form of artificial intelligence. The concrete networking and evaluation of the data happens – how could it be otherwise – behind closed doors. Those responsible for the project equate ‘abnormal behavior’ with ‘criminal behavior.’“

This consists not only of looking into the camera screaming “Allahu Akbar” shortly before pressing the button, but also, among other things, “walking too fast or too slow, screaming or swearing, moving in the wrong direction, ‘loitering,’ meeting with many people, staying too long in the direct vicinity of a certain object […]. Once a suspect – and who wouldn’t be a suspect given the behaviors labeled ‘abnormal’? – come into the sights of INDECT, the smallest remote-controlled surveillance drones with built-in high-performance cameras are to be used to identify and track the suspect. These drones are networked with each other and are supposed to cooperate with each other ‘intelligently and autonomously,’ thus forming drone swarms” (Jansen 2015, 109f.).

The next logical step would be to arm such drones and continue automated warfare, as is being waged in Afghanistan and elsewhere, in the Golden West itself.

The “world’s most populous democracy” – India – has come up with the following: “The world’s largest biometrics project by a single state is being carried out in India. An estimated 1.2 billion people, one-sixth of the world’s population, are being digitally enrolled on the Asian subcontinent. The project is called ‘Aadhaar’ […]. Specifically, the biometrics project envisions that every Indian, whether pariah or social elite, will have digital scans of their ten fingerprints and both irises, as well as a photo of their face, taken, processed and stored in a digital database. Each Indian is also to be given a twelve-digit ‘Unique Identification Number’. […] Not only biometric, but also demographic information, such as name, age, gender or even caste (!) is linked to the number. This only further cements the still racist separation of Indians into different castes […]” (Jansen 2015, 105f.).

The numerous surveillance possibilities of Big Data in combination with “artificial intelligence” are wonderfully suited for the permanent state of emergency, social control and (preventive) counterinsurgency. The difference between the EU and China, for example, is only a gradual one. However, it does not occur to the authors that digitalized capitalism is virtually predestined for the purposes described above and that a digital capitalism without them would probably not be possible – in view of the real existing social disruptions and the crisis-like conditions in which these technologies and their developments are situated. But none of this is taken into account. It is always the others who are totalitarian! (cf. Kurz 2001, 2002a)

However, the following should be emphasized here: Although these numerous surveillance technologies suggest the realization of a total state à la George Orwell’s 1984, this moment should not be overestimated either. First of all, these technologies are used primarily by private companies, thus also playing a major role at the level of individual capital, and second, state sovereignty itself is in the process of erosion and barbarization. This can be seen, on the one hand, in the fact that the state security apparatus is decaying by aligning itself with private terror gangs, as can be clearly seen, for example,  in the Third World.[15] On the other hand, the apparatus of force is also subject to funding constraints that can hardly leave its ability to function untouched: Thus, the expansion of camera surveillance coincides with constant talk of a lack of personnel, i.e., to some extent the techniques of surveillance, etc., can also be understood as rationalization measures. In the military, this is even clearer: In recent years, for example, “drone warfare” has been pushed because it is cheaper than regular intervention, since “world order wars” are apparently reaching the limits of their financial viability.

If the worst came to the worst, these technologies would be used to put down uprisings and maintain “security,” at least according to the intention; but whether it would really work out that way is more than questionable; after the uprising, the state of emergency would only continue, a civic normality of “law and order” would hardly come about, rather, a molecular civil war, a state of emergency dictatorship, or something similar is to be expected. The omnipotence of Big Brother ends in its inability to be financed.

Furthermore, the Digital Manifesto, like Pentland, criticizes the use or misuse of data against the interests of its owners, as is evident in personalized advertising, nudging and the phenomenon of the “filter bubble.” The latter is about search engines sending the “user” specifically what corresponds to their (supposed) preferences. The consequence is a self-referentiality, “a kind of digital thought prison” (Digital Manifest 15), which consists of someone only being fed the news, films, or books that a corresponding algorithm has determined from their media consumption past; there would then be no more surprises, no things to rub up against and argue about together with others (Simanowski 2014, 78f.); in this way, “personalized information can unintentionally destroy social cohesion” (Digital Manifesto 11).

It is clear, however, even if the authors do not say so, that these “filter bubbles” are very congenial to neoliberalism and its ideology, according to which there is no society anyway, but only individuals who move about consuming on markets. And this technology also offers the narcissistic social character some feel-good advantages; namely, not having to deal with the world outside of the parallel universe knitted together by oneself. It should be emphasized that here, too, technology should not be causally blamed for this effect, it reinforces and continues it; however, people are already narcissistic and incapable of conflict, and it is precisely this that enables them to exist in their virtual world, in their “echo chamber” as “users” without throwing up.[16]

Despite some criticism, the authors of the “Digital Manifesto” do not question digitization in principle (or capitalism); because, as a certain Professor Weikum says in an interview, “digitization itself […] is an evolutionary phenomenon that has been emerging for a long time.” Although others see and criticize totalitarian tendencies above all (!) and therefore advocate a debate for some “regulation,” Weikum speaks out against it: “Science must not be regulated; that would be like censorship in journalism or the prohibition of anatomical studies by the church in the Middle Ages” (Digital Manifesto 49f.).

Evolution and the Middle Ages are exactly the catchwords that are mobilized when the scientific establishment does not know how to justify itself otherwise. Of course, “regulation” is not the answer, but it is clear how quickly the limit of reasonable criticism is reached with some.

However, a fundamental questioning of digitization is not the same as a consistent rejection of digital technology altogether. There may be sensible applications, or they may be able to be developed, but to do so, the corresponding substantively determined criteria for meaning and purpose would first have to be established. But this is only possible in the context of a radical critique of capitalism; because the only standard or criterion that capitalism can think of and implement is the valorization of value and the maximum expansion of markets, etc.; and it is clear that this standard cannot be suitable for judging the meaning and purpose of a (possible) technology, since the material and social levels are fundamentally abstracted from. If they do appear, then they do so as a business cost or disruptive factor. There is no doubt that this is nothing new in principle: If rationalization threatens an older technology due to “moral wear and tear,” it has always been replaced by the more cost-effective and logically more efficient technology, and this has happened wherever a corresponding market has opened up. The resulting social and ecological catastrophes were then accepted and played down as alleged necessities of “progress.”

Thus, digitization de facto means the implementation of digital technology on all levels of society (subject to financial feasibility). This “technological totalitarianism” fueled by the fetishistic dynamics of capitalism must be fundamentally questioned and rejected!

5. The Internet of Things and The Idiocy of The Abstract Individual

Another field of activity for Big Data is the so-called “Internet of Things,” which includes all kinds of devices that are characterized by their “smartness.” Due to the enormous reduction in the cost of sensors, it is now possible to equip all conceivable devices in industry and private life with sensors (billions of them!). These sensors scout out the status of the device and its environment and record everything that can be detected by them (or by cameras). A corresponding connection to the Internet results in the “Internet of Things.”

This results in smart watches, smart trash cans and smart kettles, smart refrigerators, etc. Indeed, the development of such devices serves to make consumption as “sustainable” as possible, at least according to their manufacturers. For example, Evgeny Morozov writes about smart trash cans in his book Smart New World: “BinCam, a new project by British and German researchers, aims to modernize the way we deal with trash by making our trash cans smarter and – you guessed it – more socially conscious. Here’s how it works: A small smartphone is attached to the inside of a trash can lid that snaps a photo every time someone closes the lid – to document what was just thrown away, of course. A group of poorly paid people recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website then evaluates each photo. How many things are on it? How many of them can be recycled? How much food was thrown away? Along with this information, the photo is uploaded to the Facebook page of the person who owns the garbage can. There, other users can view it. The creators of BinCam hope that when there are smart trash cans in many households, with the help of Facebook, recycling could be turned into a fun competition. Weekly results are calculated, and when the amounts of food and recyclable material decrease, the owners receive (symbolic) leaves and gold bars. Whoever collects the most leaves and bars is the winner. Mission accomplished, planet saved!” (Morozov 2013, 20)

Not only is everyone’s every expression of life documented, but everyone is also required to optimize themselves and their own consumption in terms of sustainability (and health). Because that is not enough, an infantile little game is made of it. Morozov calls the latter phenomenon “gamification.” What should actually be the subject of critical discourse is translated into an infantile game, for example, by encouraging people to save electricity through a “’dialogue without words’ […] cast in technology. One of these is the Caterpillar – an extension cord (in the shape of a small caterpillar) designed to make its user think about how much energy is wasted by appliances in stand-by mode. The caterpillar has three modes of operation: When the plugged-in device […] is turned on, the caterpillar breathes slowly and steadily; when it is turned off, it does nothing; but when it is in stand-by mode, the caterpillar begins to writhe and twitch as if in pain. Will the owners meet the caterpillar’s needs as if it were a living being?” (Morozov 2013, 539)

Morozov brings up even more examples. Like smart kettles that light up red when they shouldn’t be used because the load on the power grid would otherwise be too great at that moment. So smart things help us save electricity and, on top of that, do something good for the environment! Thank goodness!

Morozov called such a technology-reductionist and at the same time socially and historically ignorant view, as it shines through in what is mentioned here, “solutionism”: The narrow-mindedness of the solutionist makes itself clear by the fact that he only knows his hammer and sees only nails everywhere (Morozov 2013, 25f.).

Similarly, people optimize their consumption through “self-tracking,” i.e., recording personal data, life functions, such as sleep, etc., which should then allow us to monitor our personal “carbon footprint and minimize our own carbon dioxide emissions by buying more efficient products and using greener transportation” (Morozov 2013, 546).[17]

That consumption is not “optimal,” not necessarily healthy, is well known. However, it is no longer left up to the individual to decide what and how much to consume; there is a tendency, which has long since taken the form of political action or agitation, to “nudge” people in the supposedly “right direction” (for example, by making “unhealthy” candy bars difficult to reach on the shelves, as opposed to “healthy” lettuce, so that the former is presumably bought less) by “subtle manipulation” (nudging). Its supporters justify it by asserting that humans typically make the “wrong” decisions and because they are mere fools, who are meant to be guided in order to be protected from themselves! The justifications could be summarized so openly and bluntly at any rate. In this way, as critics complain, a new “gentle” or “libertarian” paternalism emerges, which “incapacitates” the citizen and imposes a neo-Protestant asceticism on them (with savings on health insurance, if it is proven by self-tracking that one lives healthily and walks at least 1000 steps every day). A paternalism which wants to make people reject everything that is allegedly or actually unhealthy (such as fatty currywurst or cigarettes). So-called “public health” is therefore only a matter of individual consumption, not of production and certainly not of the conditions and social relations in the world of work and reproduction!

This directly abstract-individual perspective, as it shines through in nudging, is not only found in social physics or in behavioral economics, but also in the critiques of nudging, which are often liberal. Thus, to summarize, they usually insist on the “maturity” of the individual, on the “freedom of choice”; instead of “manipulation” they call for “political discourse” and “enlightenment”: the individual would then be fully aware of what is best for him.[18] But even these positions usually suffer from the fact that consumption and its contents are broken down to the supposed freedom of choice of the individual, the “responsible consumer,” i.e. to the idiocy of the abstract individual. Unfortunately, what liberals do not see is that this wonderful bourgeois “maturity” also consists precisely in internalizing the coercive relations of capitalism and acting according to their imperatives, without the need for a state apparatus of force. The freedom of choice of the “responsible consumer” is ultimately the freedom of the enslaved.

This upheld bourgeois freedom is on the one hand arbitrary in content and at the same time profoundly one-dimensional: “The freedom of thinking, producing and consuming contains […] on the one hand an absolute arbitrariness […]. Once again, the content does not matter at all. In this respect, freedom, thinking, opinion and criticism are always already qualitatively empty; or their content is accidental, external and, in the truest sense of the word, unessential. On the other hand, however, the same abstract freedom contains a merciless limitation and exclusion. Its social form is in no way arbitrary, but completely one-dimensionally fixed; it defines all relations, for it is, as Marx just rightly said, at once the form of existence and the form of thought in this mode of production and life. Not even the slightest criticism of it is permitted. Whoever violates it is imprisoned; whoever questions it is declared insane. One is only allowed to do almost everything because one is not allowed to do precisely one thing, namely to break open this ‘cage of bondage’ (Max Weber), the iron form of being allowed. The arbitrariness of the content of commodity and money relations forms a coercive relationship without parallel. This is the secret of all democracy and freedom in modernity.” (Kurz 2017, 78)

The form and content of consumption, energy usage, transportation, etc. should indeed be the subject of critical discourse. With smart technology and the accompanying nudging, however, these problems are shifted to the level of the individual and individual consumption, thus removed from any critique; no other level comes into view for these highly unsmart people. A critique of consumption or, more precisely, a critique of the material results of capitalism can, however, only be meaningfully developed by including the level of society as a whole, in which the determination of form and the arrangement of content by the capital relation, by the valorization of value and by the gender dissociation, must be taken into account.

A critique of the consumption of the individual leads nowhere if one does not even look at how production actually takes place. For example, the technical progress in agriculture in the United States, more precisely in the corn industry, since the 1970’s, not only led to a cheapening of corn, but also resulted in “mountains of corn” which “had” to find a market somehow. So, from then on, a sugar concentrate was produced from corn and added to a vast amount of food. This is said to be responsible for the high level of obesity and diabetes in the US population. As Tomasz Konicz writes, “Productivity increases in capitalist agribusiness thus lead not to conservation of limited natural resources, but to efforts to create, by hook or by crook, new fields of demand to sustain the valorization process – even if this means using the human body as a fructose dump” (Konicz 2013, 19).

The southwestern United States has been suffering from water shortages for years. However, agriculture continues to grow the very crops (such as almonds) that require a lot of water. Instead of reducing the production of these crops due to the drought and switching to other, less water-intensive crops, they are still grown because they are the most profitable! (cf. Konicz 2014)

Therefore, it is obvious that it is completely pointless, in the pursuit of sustainability, health, etc., to look only at the consuming individual or the end product to be purchased, without including the societal level. An orientation towards the individual, the “consumer,” misses the point.

In her critique of the anthropology of the bourgeois individual, Franziska Baumbach, referring to Marx, writes the following: “To understand society as a stringing together of individuals overlooks the fact that social structure is determined precisely by the form of intercourse in which people deal with one another. In a society of free competition, in which the isolated private producers encounter one another socially through the exchange of their commodities, the person appears as a completely independent individual. This result of the capitalist mode of production, isolated individuals, leads to a worldview that, misjudging cause and effect, seeks to form a picture of the individual human being without taking social circumstances into account” (Baumbach 2015, 160, emphasis TM).

Beyond Baumbach’s remarks, Robert Kurz notes that: “If, however, this whole or the ‘total process’ as capital fetish or ‘automatic subject’ [is] the real precondition and thus forms the determination of the essence of their relations made is independent of its own actors and has slipped away from them, then the apparently ‘independent from each other’ private producers or individual capitals are in reality already socialized ‘behind their backs’ before they empirically enter into a relationship on the market. As the real actors, they can only accomplish afterwards through the market what exists objectively in advance, namely the all-round mediation, mutual dependence and deeply stratified division of the functions of social reproduction. It is a comprehensive concatenation of multiply structured, interlocking partial productions, supply relations and infrastructures, which has emerged through capital as an a priori total complex. […] For on the level of individual capital, it still seems to be a matter of an event that can be grasped in terms of action theory and is to some extent absorbed in subjective calculation, in which actors of interest directly confront each other. That which constitutes these actors themselves and which does not appear as a distinct object in their narrow-minded perception, namely the presupposed entity of the ‘total process,’ disappears in an immediate factual world. […] What transcends the acting subjects and constitutes the real valorizing movement, however, is the whole of the ‘automatic subject,’ the constitutive and transcendental a priori, which only appears in individual capital, but is not categorical” (Kurz 2012, 173, 177f.).

The sociality of the individual and its determination of form by the fetishistic whole must be insisted on, especially when every responsibility is given to the individual as an individual and the social totality is dropped under the table, as is so obvious in the debates about nudging, sustainability, etc.

The potential uses of smart products seem inexhaustible, Morozov goes on to write: “Nowadays, sensors alone, without a connection to social networks or data storage, can do quite a lot. For the elderly, for example, smart carpets and smart doorbells that detect and report when a person has fallen can be a great help” (Morozov 2013, 23).

This also indicates another area for the use of digital and smart technology: the care and reproductive sector. As Gisela Notz puts it: “Nursing robots developed by Japanese companies with strong arms and big googly eyes that can lift elderly people out of bed and put them in wheelchairs are already in use. There are teddy bears with electronic cores that dementia patients can cuddle, humanoid dolls equipped with artificial intelligence and voice recognition technology, and stuffed animals that can sing, stroke and speak which, according to reports from interested parties, are loved by the elderly. If there are problems, the nursing robot can inform the nursing staff” (Cf. the article by Andreas Urban in this issue.). There is also talk of smart kitchens “for the cook(!).” However, this does not dismantle “stereotypical gender images […] but modernizes and fixes them anew” (Notz 2016, 31).

Of course, industry in particular is also interested in equipping as many devices as possible with sensors. Once again, the point is to cut costs, because real-time monitoring of equipment allows companies to “squeeze their assets harder. Secondly, there is […] the possibility to predict the future reliability of machines and components and thus better ensure their maintenance” (Woudhuysen; Birbeck 2016).

Morozov also notes that cutting costs is a primary motivation for the introduction of smart products: “A start-up company with the pretty name BigBelly Solar wants to revolutionize garbage disposal with trash cans that use solar energy and built-in sensors to inform disposal companies how full they are and when they need to be emptied. This will allow garbage trucks to optimize their routes, saving gasoline. The city of Philadelphia has been experimenting with such trash cans since 2009. It has since reduced the number of garbage pickups from 17 to 2.5 per week and the number of employees from 33 to just 17. In a single year, this yielded savings of $900,000” (Morozov 2013, 23f.).

However, it should not stop at such specific points. The vision is that we will all live in “smart cities” at some point (Alex Pentland also raves about “data-rich cities”). However, as Rainer Fischbach points out, it is very questionable whether a society equipped with smart devices would actually reduce energy consumption, because their production and the corresponding infrastructure would also have to be included in the calculation. Apart from that, a smart world would be vulnerable to attacks from hackers, and the corresponding protection, which does not yet exist, would be very costly (cf. Fischbach 2015).

However, parts of the infrastructure are already “smart,” as Morozov also points out: “Cars that no longer start when the driver is drunk; closed-off communities that do not tolerate intruders; bridges from which one cannot jump; exact fare systems in public buses, thanks to which the driver no longer needs change and is therefore less likely to be robbed […]” (Morozov 2013, 320f.). Or the full body barriers in the subway system of New York that deny access to anyone without a ticket; fare evasion thus becomes impossible (Morozov 2013, 319f.). Ultimately, the goal of smarting up cities lies primarily in “situational crime prevention.” Thanks to smart technology, crime and deviant behavior are supposed to be abolished once and for all, although of course nothing is supposed to change in the social conditions that may underlie them. From this, one can see with clarity that Big Data technologies arise in the context of a security discourse and its corresponding bludgeoning practice. The consequences of a smart infrastructure, as Morozov emphasizes with clarity, would simply be that deviant behavior and thus lawbreaking would become ever-more structurally impossible. This, according to Morozov, would severely limit the possibility for a human being to act morally (compare the following excursus on ethics or morality in social criticism). The possibility for lawbreaking and deviant behavior are, however, on the other hand, as Morozov points out, necessary, as they can stimulate discourse and political change, as history shows, many changes have been made possible by civil disobedience and resistance[19]: in a smart city, for example, there could not have been a Rosa Parks,[20] as Morozov notes (Morozov 2013, 342f.).

Of course, it is not enough to counter the smarting of the infrastructure and the accompanying restriction of human possibilities for action by referring to a morally free or autonomous subject, as Morozov suggests. The smarting of infrastructure, the Internet of Things, and the digitalization of politics are rather to be seen in terms of their functions in crisis-ridden capitalism. Smarting has a lot to do with cost savings and the famous “security.” Without digitalization, given the crisis, there would be nothing but police truncheons without acceleration sensors, which would hardly improve the overall situation.[21]

The situation is similar with the envisaged “automation of politics.” The fact that political decisions are to be passed on to Big Data and corresponding computer simulations has to do primarily with the fact that the political sphere as a capitalist regulatory entity has long since reached its limits in the crisis and has lost its effective impact. As already mentioned, we must therefore speak of an “end of politics” (Robert Kurz).

Big Data also seems to be associated with the hope that the “sciences” would provide politicians with recipes that may have been overlooked thus far, and/or test these recipes for effectiveness through computer simulations (whether anything useful comes out of this, however, is another matter). This approach is also somewhat reminiscent of the ideology of transhumanists, who, in order to solve the world’s problems, are calling for the development of artificial intelligence to surpass humans and seriously replace them as a species at some point (cf. Meyer 2016).

A critique of the delegation of “social responsibility” to Big Data, as formulated by Westphalen (von Westphalen 2016), is understandable, but will lead nowhere if in the end only an old-fashioned (left-wing) Keynesianism is demanded. The Keynesianism is then expected to have a certain “ability to shape policy.” Apart from the fact that Keynesianism, too, only served to regulate and maintain the capitalist machinery, this perspective has long been obsolete and has nothing to do with meaningful social responsibility and planning. This is shown especially well by the absurd economic policy in China, which wanted to deal with the crisis in “political responsibility” by an investment policy in infrastructure which consumed more concrete in a few years than did the USA in the whole 20th century! (cf. Konicz 2015)

Ultimately, however, such a development as we can observe is only consistent for a fetishistic society that is all too blind to itself and that does not know how to justify and substantiate itself (and no longer even tries). The smart new world is, in the final analysis, nothing more than a digitalized state of emergency, a smart emergency order that wants to deal with every problem or pseudo-problem[22] with even more security, surveillance and digital technology. Digitization is little more than the reproduction of capitalist madness on a higher rung of the ladder.

6 Excursus: On the Problem of Ethics or Morality in Social Criticism

Even if the problem of morality during the smarting of infrastructure resonates with Morozov, he can nevertheless hardly be said to have a moralizing point of view, since he is quite aware of the complexity of social problems in his confrontation with “solutionism” (even if not in the sense of a radical questioning of capitalism in general).

Nevertheless, on this basis, we can also point to a fundamentally problematic mode of argumentation, namely the appeal to ethics or morality.

This appeal can be seen, for example, in the debates about “business ethics”, can be found again in all kinds of “ethics committees” (cf. von Bosse 2010) and culminates in absurd plans to program morality into an “artificial intelligence.”[23]

Ethics debates should always be treated with skepticism. In these debates, “responsibility” is transferred to the individual or an institution and ethically correct actions are suggested, while the constraints and comprehensive impositions of capitalism are completely dropped under the table. Ethics thus functions, as it were, as an “indispensable lubricant” (Scholz 2013, 30) for the preservation of commodified patriarchy and has the consequence of concealing or repressing relations of domination and their fetishistic constitution: For ethics, in the sense of propagating moral maxims of action, scandalizes the badness of certain human actions or certain technical developments or applications of the same, without, however, speaking out about the social relations on which these are based. However, this does not necessarily exclude that ethical discourses and what they intend to aim at in terms of content could show moments of correctness.

Ethics committees, however, usually assess the results of technical development and propose regulations or restrictions, provided they do not have a legitimizing, if not trivializing function from the outset. This confirms and reinforces the idea that research and development should first be regarded as neutral, that ethical concerns are only external to them and that they have no place there.

The situation is similar with debates or discourses that deal with justice or the lack of its implementation. There, too, a critique of capitalism and its real basic categories is left out, and a critique is usually limited to lamenting the lack of participation of certain social strata, neither taking note of the crisis of the labor society nor questioning in principle and content that which the disadvantaged intend to participate in.

Robert Kurz formulates the following in his critique of such a “democratic ethics”: “The call for justice derives in its very name from the concept of a functioning legal subjectivity. A ‘right’ to life, food, housing, etc., however, is absurd in itself; it only makes sense in a social frame of reference which, according to its tendency, does not take all these elementary foundations of human reproduction for granted, but, on the contrary, constantly and objectively calls them into question. The legal form and the rights of the democratic subject are only the complementary other side of the ‘wolfish’ economic subject with its interest in money, which is barred from every other human movement. To the same extent, however, as more and more people cease to be economic subjects of this system with the totalization of the commodity form and its simultaneously manifesting functional reproductive incapacity, they also cease to be legal subjects and thus to be people at all qua system definition. It is true that in the relative winner economies the appearance of legal states may still be maintained for a while; but this appearance is bound to the functioning of social redistribution networks and thus to the ‘successful’ competing down of other world market economies. Substantively, every person who can no longer constitute a market economic subject in the long run is just a dead man on leave. Conditions in loser and collapsing economies confirm this barbaric logic on a daily basis and in ever more brutal forms” (Kurz 2013, 18).

Ethical or moral debates, discourses on justice, etc., can thus be understood as helpless attempts to come to terms with barbarities that have not been conceptualized and are thus not understood precisely because such debates displace the social causes of those barbarities.

The schizoid character of ethical debates occasionally becomes very clear: On the one hand, neoliberal self-entrepreneurship is always propagated, the work on the project “I,” the permanent self-optimization in order to perhaps be able to prove oneself better in competition, and on the other hand, there is moral criticism that people are extremely self-centered, narcissistic and always completely indifferent to the other. In this society, the other person is not a fellow human being, not a friend whom one does not yet know, but just another competitor on the journey to Jerusalem. But hardly anyone dares to say this: everyone is supposed to always be “nice” to each other.

However, a “pre-theoretical apriori” (Robert Kurz) precedes the theoretical understanding and radical questioning of capitalism.[24] This apriori consists of a disagreement with the conditions, with the suffering and the comprehensive impositions that capitalism brings with it. However, the development of a radical critique does not necessarily follow from this disagreement. It is to be criticized, for example, if this disagreement itself takes the form of an ethical or moral claim. If, however, an ethical claim were to be formulated, then in my opinion the sting of critique, while not necessarily completely withdrawn, would be quite blunted; an ethical claim would capriciously focus on the individual and his or her actions (or on institutions and their members), thus considerably narrowing the horizon of critique; ultimately, one would arrive at, among other things, “ethically correct nutrition,” “politically correct language,” local communes and contexts, “lifestyle anarchism,”[25] etc., in which supposed alternatives are allegedly “lived free of domination.”

To sharpen the thought: Even to ethically underpin a disagreement with Auschwitz is nothing other than a perversion. It is true that a certain practice follows from Auschwitz, as Adorno explained, i.e. to arrange thinking and acting in such a way that Auschwitz or something similar does not repeat itself, but this is not an ethical claim (Adorno 2014, 358). Ethical claims are typically addressed to people as individuals, presupposing the social forms of intercourse and relations by which they are compelled to move within according to their form; the failure to come to terms with these, however, demands their radical critique and practical overcoming. Adorno’s “categorical imperative” should be understood in this way.

As Marx already formulated, all relations in which man is a subjugated and humiliated being are to be overturned. For in radical critique, it is not the individual or an institution that is the main concern, ignoring all social relations, but rather the current actions of people, i.e. their practice, is seen in the context of a destructive social objectivity, which is (re)produced precisely by this practice, and it is the claim of this critique that precisely this objectivity, i.e. the fetishistic dynamics of capitalism together with the subject form on which it is based, must be abolished. Only then could the idea of a “peaceful coexistence” of man and nature be realized.

7. Big Data and the “End of Theory”

With “Big Data,” some have already proclaimed the “end of theory,” and thus the highest and last stage of positivism has presumably dawned: Due to the incredible amounts of data made possible by Big Data and the smart new world, correlations will be sufficient; in the future, the numbers could speak for themselves; theory and model building could thus be disposed of. This is the viewpoint of Chris Anderson, the former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine (cf. Anderson 2013). Of course, there was opposition from the scientific establishment: As in physics, it makes no sense to just “go ahead and measure”; there must already be some theoretical thinking that determines what should be measured and with what goal (cf. e.g. Mazzocchi 2015, Boyd; Crawford 2012). In addition, Gerhard Lauer (a representative of the “Digital Humanities”) also argues that the more data are available, the more theory is needed (Lauer 2013).

As commendable as such objections against the alleged end of theory may be, generally speaking, methodological individualism, modern objectivity, alleged neutrality and freedom from ideology remain unquestioned. To be sure, there are niches, individuals, and small groups that do this to some extent, but it certainly does not happen in large-scale scientific projects. For example, billions are invested in neuroscience to research mental disorders that are supposedly only caused by the brain of the individual and have nothing to do with structural conditions in society (Schleim 2016). It would therefore not be surprising if, in the course of the digitalization of thinking, the science enterprise or the entrepreneurial university (and, of course, all private companies that research and develop) were to fall prey to a bottomless ignorance and thus say goodbye once and for all to any critical reflection, or even the mere possibility of it. However, critical reflection has never been hegemonic in the scientific landscape anyway.

Critical objections, which do exist against Big Data and its applications (see the Digital Manifesto), are consequently easily concealed when the prospect of how many oh-so-great new jobs will become possible as a result is held out (e.g., Helbing; Pournaras 2015). Critical reflection and a fundamental questioning of social relations are unfortunately not self-evident and do not automatically result from methodologically clean applied mathematics or from formal, logically flawless manipulations of strings. That theoretical (immanent) reflection is disappearing at all suggests the suspicion, as Robert Kurz once wrote, “that theoretical reflection falls silent because the social dynamics underlying it disappear” (Kurz 2002b).[26] This would make it understandable why the various prophets of science and technology evangelism have abandoned the possibility of a discourse on the meaning and content of technology and think that everything can be dealt with by technology and a quantitative way of thinking alone.

The proclamation of the end of theory is fatally reminiscent of the end of history proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama. After postmodernism, late bourgeois society seems to have entered a new stage of organized stultification with Big Data. However, in my opinion, this is not surprising: For in postmodernism, the possibility of critical reflection had already evaporated to such an extent that it was largely limited to the linguistic level, and “grand theories” were refused because of alleged totalitarianism. Postmodern arbitrary thinking, the switch to culturalist modes of argumentation, the hypostasizing of differences, etc. were little more than the expression of intellectual capitulation to the misunderstood social conditions.

The basic problem with the forced digitalization of science, the presumed “end of theory,” is therefore not so much a naïve belief in mathematics, technology and the abundance of data that can supposedly solve all problems, but rather the fact that critical reflection is in bad shape anyway due to the crisis-ridden conditions. Even in places where socially critical Marxist theory has become fashionable again, because of the precarious conditions that have long since prevailed, the university refrains from a radical questioning of social conditions in accordance with the flowery saying “publish or perish,” so as not to ruin a possible academic career. In this way, a science that has become thoroughly economized and devoid of reflection is also well qualified for digital foolishness: It is important, however, not to confuse cause and effect here, but rather, to emphasize it once again, to criticize Big Data, the smart new world, not only on a level intrinsic to science, but also, as was the case here, in relation to society as a whole. The critique would then point beyond the scientific community and its limitations.

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[1] Cf. Robert Kurz’s discussion of the anti-Germans: Kurz 2003.

[2] A reflective approach to mathematics would involve acknowledging its limitations and engaging with it epistemologically and in the history of philosophy, but usually these approaches are marginalized in contemporary scholarship, see, for example, Rießinger 2010; in detail, Bedürftig; Murawski 2015, and Heintz 2000.

[3] In Hamiltonian mechanics, named after William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865), a mechanical system is defined by the Hamiltonian function, which in a sense represents the total energy of the system, expressed in generalized position and generalized momentum, cf. Penrose 2007, 471f.

[4] Named after the economist Alfred Marshall (1842-1924).

[5] This point could be elaborated further. For reasons of space and because it would become a separate text, it cannot be done here. To justify the elimination of the subjective factor, personal prejudice is usually brought up, but in fact it goes far beyond that: among other things, the externalization of ethical concerns; a (Cartesian) subject-object split, the dissociation of the “feminine” (feelings, body), and so on. Cf. Ortlieb 1998, as well as, for example: List 2008, Braun; Kremer 1987 and Pernkopf 2006.

[6] Cf. on Hegel: Späth 2013 and 2014.

[7] The Nietzsche quote is also used by Evgeny Morozov in his book “Smart New World”, which will be discussed in more detail later.

[8] There are other objectives that arise from the imperative of capital valorization but cannot simply be subsumed under the aspect of saving abstract labor, cf. Becker 2017.

[9] It may be that, due to reforms, the conditions in psychiatric wards are no longer as they were depicted in the film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975). Nevertheless, psychiatry is still an instrument of repression today: for example, when psychiatric reports are drawn up against Hartz IV recipients who are not “employable,” see Allex 2015.

[10] It should be mentioned and criticized that O’Neil is (was) an activist of Occupy Wall Street. Nevertheless, I take note of her critical remarks on Big Data here.    

[11] See also the radio interview: http://www.freie-radios.net/79689.

[12] Of course, the criticism is not about demanding that people should have free access to the programming code itself, which non-experts cannot comprehend anyway. However, O’Neil’s point is to criticize the fact that it is usually not clear according to which criteria and standards an algorithm sorts and judges in the first place.

[13] http://www.spektrum.de/pdf/digital-manifest/1376682.

[14] On the criticism of Google, see Edel 2016.

[15] Cf. Konicz 2016, esp. 51-80: “The Collapse of the Periphery,” and data in footnote 21.

[16] On narcissistic social character, see Wissen 2017.

[17] For more on self-tracking, life-logging, and the quantified self movement, see, for example: Selke 2014, Lupton 2016, and Schaupp 2016, all of which remain on a more empirical level, but Schaupp also analyzes the gendered connotations of self-tracking.

[18] Cf. various texts at: http://www.novo-argumente.com/thema/nudging. Cf. also the “12 Theses for the Responsible Consumer,” http://www.novo-argumente.com/unser_leben_gehoert_uns/manifest_fuer_den_muendigen_verbraucher.

[19] To prevent misunderstandings, it should be emphasized here explicitly once again: Morozov is not concerned here with illegal acts which aim at bringing about social change! It is about the fact that a smart or automated infrastructure restricts the human possibilities of action to the effect that certain “everyday sins” become impossible; or violations of the “racial order” or the like. Such violations could enable a discourse on whether certain laws could not be meaningfully changed after all. For example, poverty-related fare evasion could lead to tax subsidies for public transport or the like, or illegal alcohol or cannabis consumption led or could lead to a change in a prohibition policy.

That does not mean, however, that this is to be understood as a call to criminal behavior, although it was or would be quite reasonable to question or abolish the criminal nature of certain acts; as was (or is, depending on where) the case with homosexuality, for example; until 1994, as is well known, §175 StGB applied in this country.

Critical objections to the existing (criminal) law should, however, be linked with a fundamental critique of this society, especially if the aim is to counter a “populist criminology” (Cremer-Schäfer; Steinert 2014) on the one hand and, at the same time, the social conditions and the social identities ofcriminals on the other, with criticism. Criminal behavior (such as property crimes, fare evasion) are anything but “subversive,” but rather are nothing more than the continuation of competition by other means.

[20] Rosa Parks (1913-2005) was arrested on 12.1.1955, because she did not want to leave her seat, which was reserved for white people, in a bus. If the bus had been “smart” at that time, she might not have been able to sit down in a “white seat,” because such a thing would be technically impossible, e.g. by the seat recognizing the skin color of the person who intends to sit down with appropriate sensors. Direct violations of the “racial order” (and the infrastructure that was designed around it) were an important practical component of the civil rights movement.

[21] A tendency toward a state of emergency has already been established through the designation of a “danger area,” cf. http://www.cilip.de/2014/10/05/gemeingefaehrlich-gefahrengebiete-bescheren-der-polizei-sonderbefugnisse, cf. also Montseny 2016. As is well known, something like this also works without smart technology. Smart technology in the police sector should be seen as a technical rationalization measure to support, speed up and cheapen “law and order.” Without these techniques, however, the police state and the state of emergency would not disappear, because the “security problem” is an expression of the crisis of capital. This can be seen in the formation of gangs and rackets in problem neighborhoods of the socially superfluous, all the way to the “failed state,” etc., cf. Pohrt 1997, as well as Bedszent 2014.

[22] Morozov also gives examples of pseudo-problems, i.e. problems that exist only in the minds of the “solutionists.” For example, self-tracking, Big Data, etc. make it possible in principle to record almost every detail of a life. In this way, suddenly the possibility of forgetting at all (!) is seen as a problem that should be abolished! Here the authoritarian claim of a totalitarian and androcentric will of availability over everything becomes clear. It is therefore also no coincidence that the agitators of the “life-logging movement,” like Garry Wolf, Steve Mann or Gordon Bell, are men.

[23] Reification cannot be clearer than when human qualities are attributed to a machine. However, this also has to do with the fact that the scientific view of humans is in any case extremely reductionist, see Bächle 2014.

[24] Cf. the lecture by Robert Kurz and the discussion “The History of the Critique of Value – On the Historical Conditional Context of Theory Formation” (2010).

[25] However, this was sharply criticized by the wiser of the anarchists: Thus, by Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) in: Bookchin 1995. Bookchin also criticized, among other things, the hostility to theory of large parts of the anarchist scene, the kitschification of supposedly pristine and domination-free “primitive peoples,” and an ahistorical “critique of technology,” such as John Zerzan’s, which rejects technology as such andseriously wants to go back to the Neolithic Revolution (!).

[26] The fact that critical (immanent) reflection is disappearing, however, does not mean that the same is happening to ideology production: on the contrary, it can be observed that the scientific establishment itself is becoming increasingly ideologically neglected or wild. This assertion can be seen, for example, in the case of such people as Franz Hörmann, an economist who is now the financial policy spokesman for the “Deutsche Mitte” party (as of summer 2017). A party, by the way, with ethical claims (!).

Originally published in Exit! no. 15 on 04/01/2018