A brief background on the aporias of bourgeois crisis politics in the transition of the world economy from pandemic to war-related crisis.

Tomasz Konicz

From pandemic to war – the world economy is obviously not coming to rest. On its website, the Tagesschau sees the world economy threatened by “multiple crises.”[1] But when it comes to the economic fallout of the rapidly advancing erosion of the capitalist world system, the question now arises whether it makes any sense at all to speak of a pandemic or war-related economic crisis, or whether it would not be more consistent to finally understand the successive economic shocks as stages of one and the same systemic crisis process.

In its latest assessment of the global economy, the World Bank had to revise its earlier growth forecast downwards significantly.[2] As of now, the global economy is expected to grow by only 2.9 percent this year, while the World Bank was still forecasting 4.1 percent growth in January. This would almost halve global economic momentum, which reached a whopping 5.7 percent in 2021 due to the gigantic, debt-financed stimulus measures implemented by many countries. For many developing and emerging countries, which can only achieve social stability with high growth rates, this economic slowdown is dangerous – especially against the backdrop of skyrocketing food prices. Moreover, the World Bank has warned of the growing risk of a prolonged period of stagflation, similar to the crisis phase in the 1970s, when economic stagnation was accompanied by double-digit inflation (see also: “Back to Stagflation?”).[3]

The OECD made similar corrections, according to which global economic output is expected to grow by only three percent this year.[4] At the end of 2021, the forecast was still 4.5 percent. For 2023, the association of 38 industrialized countries forecasts economic growth of 2.8 percent instead of the previously assumed 3.2 percent – if there is no new crisis push, of course. According to the OECD, the economic slowdown in the coming year will also be accompanied by an easing of the wave of inflation, which is expected to fall from 8.5 percent this year to 6.0 percent in 2023.

The massive revisions that had to be made by the OECD and the World Bank within half a year not only illustrate the futility of economic forecasts in the manifest systemic crisis into which late capitalism is entering, they also reveal an increasingly clear connection between inflation and economic growth. At the latest since the outbreak of the pandemic, to which politicians reacted with massive money printing, to finance government stimulus measures in the USA and the EU, the dynamic of increasing inflationary has taken root. This is not only due to the war – it is not pure “Putin-flation” – and the disrupted global supply chains, but also to the expansionary monetary policy of central banks.[5]

A Flood of Money and Inflation

This connection between the great pandemic-related flood of money and global inflation was most recently discussed, for example, before the US Senate Finance Committee, which the Biden administration’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen had to face in early June.[6] The accusations of the Republican opposition, according to which the White House triggered inflation and the “overheating” of the economy through its 1.9 trillion dollar stimulus program, are dishonest in several respects: on the one hand, Donald Trump introduced similarly costly support measures, which, however, mainly included tax breaks for the rich and corporations, while with Biden – despite all the cuts – it was possible to push through some relief for the middle class and low-income groups. And it is precisely this circumstance that the White House has now been reproached for, for example by the identification of social subsidies for children as “inflation drivers.”

A look at the past year helps to put things in perspective: Accelerating inflation, which now exceeds eight percentage points, was accompanied by GDP growth of 5.4 percent – the highest level since the 1980s.[7] This expansion, in which the Federal Reserve effectively used freshly printed money to buy up the debt incurred by the US government to stimulate the economy, was in response to the tremendous economic collapse that followed the outbreak of the pandemic, which caused US GDP to contract by 3.4 per cent in 2020. Conversely, one might ask what the US economy would look like now if Washington had foregone these stimulus programs.

US economic policy has effectively averted a depression, albeit only at a price that wage earners must now pay at the supermarket checkout: the price of inflation. Central banks have bought up bonds and debt instruments in previous crises, for example after the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2007/08, but on the one hand the dimensions of this “quantitative easing” are many times greater now than they were back then,[8] and on the other hand, the financialization of capital seems to have reached its limits, as the previous phases of expansionary monetary policy led to an inflation of prices on the already bloated financial markets – and thus contributed to the rise of new speculative bubbles.

Central bank money printing thus represents – along with collapsing globalization and the full-blown climate crisis – one of the three most important factors contributing to the current wave of inflation (see also “Triple-Threat Inflation”).[9] In the meantime, the Fed has raised key interest rates to between 0.75 and one percent in order to get this inflation under control – despite a 1.5 percent contraction of the US GDP in the first quarter of this year.[10]

In the US, the right-wing opposition blames the Biden administration and its already stunted approach to social policy for inflation.[11] In Europe, the ECB is at the center of criticism, mainly from Germany. In the EU, the disputes over the course of monetary policy are overshadowed by the divergent interests of the southern periphery and the German center.[12] In Berlin, resentment of the ECB’s ultra-loose monetary policy is growing, while the south of the eurozone, which has suffered from Germany’s trade surpluses since the introduction of the euro, relies on zero interest rates and ECB bond purchases to finance stimulus measures and keep its high debt burden sustainable. In Italy, government debt now exceeds 130 percent of GDP. There is a good indicator of the potential for crisis in the eurozone: it is the so-called “spread,” the interest rate difference between German and Italian government bonds,[13] which rises with every impending crisis in the EU, as capital flees to “safe havens” such as the FRG or the US. This spread has just climbed to its highest level since the outbreak of the pandemic.

That is why the European central bank is much more hesitant than the Fed in raising key interest rates – a new euro crisis, in which rising interest rates could cause the mountains of debt in the south of the currency union to collapse, must be avoided at all costs.[14] In “German Europe,”[15] two decades after its founding and a decade after the first euro crisis, the monetary impasse that threatens to blow up the currency area is once again emerging: the ECB should actually raise interest rates quickly and significantly in order to curb inflation, which now stands at more than eight percent.[16] But at the same time the “guardians of the currency” would have to keep interest rates low to prevent a new debt crisis in the south. Italy, whose public debt ratio is 134 percent of GDP, is the third-largest economy in the eurozone.

The Crisis Trap of Monetary Policy

Again, the European Central Bank could, on the one hand, fight inflation by raising interest rates rapidly and significantly, but in doing so it would risk a debt crisis in southern Europe and, in effect, the disintegration of its currency area. On the other hand, the ECB could continue to give priority to economic policy and keep interest rates low in order to prevent a new euro crisis. But this would give inflation a further boost, so that there would be a danger of the Eurozone following Turkey’s example,[17] where “interest rate critic” Erdogan has repeatedly lowered key interest rates despite the rapid rise in prices in the country – which has now driven inflation in Turkey to an impressive 73 percent.

The political class can either choose the option of further indebtedness up to hyperinflation or take the path of harsh austerity programs that lead to recession with the onset of a deflationary spiral, as exemplified by Schäuble’s austerity sadism during the euro crisis in Greece. In the permanent capitalist crisis, bourgeois monetary policy would in fact have to lower and raise interest rates at the same time, which is only an expression of the aporia of capitalist crisis policy, an impasse in which the capitalist “administration” of the systemic crisis finds itself at the end of the neoliberal age.[18]

This crisis trap[19] does not only apply to the euro area, it is effective in all capitalist core countries, which have so far been able to postpone its snapping shut by the expansion of the financial sphere, by permanently rising mountains of debt and ever new financial market bubbles.[20] A look at the long-term development of key interest rates shows this self-contradiction of monetary policy, which has unfolded further and further with each push of the historical crisis process.[21] Both the ECB[22] as well as the Fed[23] have historically tended to continuously lower their policy rates since the 1980s, with the major financial crisis episodes of the 21st century acting as the triggering moments of each low or zero interest rate phase. Key interest rates in the euro area, sometimes in negative territory, were more than three percent when the euro was introduced. After the bursting of the dot-com bubble (2000), the housing bubble (2007) and the outbreak of the euro crisis, they have gotten lower and lower. Since 2014, the eurozone has had a de facto zero interest rate policy, accompanied by ever more money printing.

The situation is similar with the Fed, which pursued a very expansive monetary policy after the outbreak of the real estate crisis in 2007 and thereby contributed significantly to the formation of the gigantic liquidity bubble, which had to be laboriously stabilized with further injections of trillions of dollars throughout the course of the pandemic.[24] The distortions on the inflated financial markets, which began even before the outbreak of war, indicate that this financialization of capitalism can hardly be maintained. The increasingly massive global financial house of cards is threatening to collapse. At its core, this was a debt dynamic that raised the debt burden of the world system currently choking on its own productivity to 351 percent of global economic output.[25]

Should the capitalist crisis management no longer succeed in initiating a new bubble formation on the world financial markets in reaction to the “multiple crises” – a phrase used by leading German media to describe the capitalist systemic crisis – currently being faced, then a gigantic devaluation push is inevitable. Not only would many “financial market goods,” which circulate in the financial sphere in the most diverse forms – as shares or derivatives – be devalued, but also the financial market junk, which has been accumulated in the balance sheets of the central banks (mostly government securities and mortgage or loan securitizations).

The collapse of the financial markets, for example in the form of a European debt crisis, would spill over into the “real” economy, which is highly dependent on lending and the credit-financed demand generated in the financial sphere. This would lead to the devaluation of production capacities in the form of company bankruptcies, of resources that can no longer be sold, and of the commodity of labor, which would suddenly become superfluous. And only here is there still “room for maneuver” for bourgeois crisis policy: as described above, it can determine the form that this devaluation process will take. Either monetary policy can follow Erdogan’s example and march in the direction of hyperinflation, or it can follow Schäuble’s example and take the path of deflation through austerity.

For a progressive, emancipatory left, however, there is only one perspective left if it still wants to act in the crisis according to its concept: the perspective of categorical critique. Instead of concentrating opportunistically on immanent pseudo-alternatives or bourgeois trivialities[26] it would rather be a matter of denouncing as such the monstrous end in itself of capital. This remains the fundamental prerequisite for making an alternative to capitalism and thus a system transformation conceivable at all.

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[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/weltwirtschaft/iwf-weltbank-fruehjahrstagung-konjunkturprognose-101.html

[2] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/konjunktur/weltbank-konjunktur-103.html

[3] https://www.konicz.info/?p=4616

[4] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/weltwirtschaft-oecd-senkt-wachstumsprognose-deutlich-sieht-begrenztes-stagflationsrisiko-a-1cc0db29-8efa-451b-86ca-82bf9db06355

[5] http://www.konicz.info/?p=4389

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/us/politics/inflation-yellen.html

[7] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/full-year-gdp-growth

[8] https://lowerclassmag.com/2021/04/13/oekonomie-im-zuckerrausch-weltfinanzsystem-in-einer-gigantischen-liquiditaetsblase/

[9] http://www.konicz.info/?p=4389

[10] https://www.handelsblatt.com/finanzen/geldpolitik/beige-book-fed-us-wirtschaft-moderat-gewachsen-inflation-und-zinsen-machen-sich-aber-bemerkbar/28393622.html

[11] http://www.konicz.info/?p=4591

[12] https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Der-Aufstieg-des-deutschen-Europa-3370752.html

[13] https://www.ft.com/content/2869a8f3-bf59-437f-a795-4a3fbdc35cd4

[14] https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2022-06/ezb-leitzins-inflation-notenbank-wende

[15] https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Der-Zerfall-des-deutschen-Europa-3370918.html

[16] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/statistisches-bundesamt-inflation-im-mai-erreicht-7-9-prozent-a-1ee957d1-5a15-463e-a58c-a6f423225cc5

[17] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/weltwirtschaft/tuerkei-leitzins-erdogan-101.html

[18] http://www.konicz.info/?p=4892

[19] https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Politik-in-der-Krisenfalle-3390890.html

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

[21] https://lowerclassmag.com/2020/04/27/corona-krisengespenster-kehren-zurueck/

[22] https://www.ft.com/content/2869a8f3-bf59-437f-a795-4a3fbdc35cd4

[23] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate

[24] https://lowerclassmag.com/2021/04/13/oekonomie-im-zuckerrausch-weltfinanzsystem-in-einer-gigantischen-liquiditaetsblase/

[25] https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/emerging-markets-drive-global-debt-record-303-trillion-iif-2022-02-23/

[26] https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=autoren&index=46&posnr=613&backtext1=text1.php

Originally published on konicz.info on 06/11/2022

The Rupture in German-Russian Relations and The Return of War as A Continuation of Imperialist Geopolitics in Europe

Tomasz Konicz

Shock and awe – that’s the denominator of the massive Russian attack on Ukraine, in which dozens of targets have been shelled in a very short time to paralyze Ukrainian forces and prevent coordinated resistance to the Russian army’s advance in the east of the country (so far, Russian ground forces have been active only east of the Dnieper River). The large-scale nationwide attack, which targeted and partially destroyed Ukraine’s command structures, depots, and air force, is similar to the U.S. approach in the last Iraq war, when the U.S. Air Force also relied on an overwhelming assault against the ailing Iraqi regime’s military infrastructure.

The start of the war over Ukraine should teach the U.S. and the EU a lesson. By emulating the American attack on Iraq, the Kremlin wants to prove that Russia is militarily on the same imperialist level as the West, a fact that Washington, Berlin, and Brussels want to deny Moscow geopolitically. The imperial Russian sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space, which the economically declining Moscow was no longer willing to concede – is now literally being bombed back into existence by the nuclear power Russia, while the West has to watch impotently if it does not want to risk a nuclear doomsday. The Kremlin thus makes it clear that it will defend to the utmost its imperial position as a great power that wants to dispose of its “spheres of influence” just like the USA and Germany.

Germany and Russia: Close Economic Relations

The political and economic fallout from the war will be massive, especially for Berlin, as the Federal Republic continues to maintain close economic ties with Russia – even though these peaked after the pro-Western overthrow in Kiev in 2014 and the subsequent Ukrainian civil war. The German-Russian trade balance peaked at a volume of 80 billion euros in 2012, only to fall to 48 billion euros in 2016 in the wake of the sanctions. Last year saw a slight recovery to just under 60 billion. Germany mainly exports high-tech products such as machinery and cars, while Russia exports raw materials and in particular fossil fuels with a slight trade surplus. Around 55 percent of the natural gas imported into Germany comes from Russian deposits. Germany is still Russia’s most important European trading partner – globally, the FRG was overtaken by China as a trading partner only a few years ago.

A major setback for Berlin’s energy policy ambitions is the cancellation of the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the commissioning of which would have made Germany a central European energy hub. Instead, Germany’s consumers and industry must prepare for rapidly rising energy prices. According to former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, they are likely to reach $2,000 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas soon. This economic fallout, which is now imminent, may have been the most important reason for Berlin’s hesitant attitude toward Moscow. In Washington, in the U.S. press, Berlin’s refusal to supply weapons to Ukraine or to abandon the pipeline project in the North Sea was sharply criticized for weeks.

Now that even the Tagesschau considers the course of German Russia policy, characterized by “dialogue,” to have “failed,” a fundamental reorientation of Berlin is likely to take place. Thus, for the time being, Berlin’s strategy of a mainly economic penetration of the post-Soviet space has failed because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, ultimately because of Moscow’s military means. German think tanks like to substantiate this German path to geopolitical power development with the term geoeconomics as a complex strategy in which “trade, technology, finance or energy policy are instrumentalized as means to achieve strategic goals.” Greece had to experience how such a geoeconomic conflict is played out in the course of the debt crisis in the summer of 2015, when the country, mistreated by the then German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, was driven to the brink of economic collapse.

German Geopolitics and Inner-Western Differences

But in reality there is no uniform German policy toward Russia; it has always been an expression of the shifting power constellation between Western-oriented forces within the German functional elites (often derided as Atlanticists) and the forces teased as “Putin whisperers,” who advocated a Eurasian orientation toward Russia, China, and so on.

There is no complete overlap between the political spectrum and the respective geopolitical preference, as Eurasians and Atlantists are found in varying proportions in almost all Bundestag parties – even if the SPD, Die Linke and, above all, the AfD have a particularly high proportion of “Putin whisperers.” Atlantists, on the other hand, are mainly to be found among the Greens. It is simply a question of the geopolitical orientation of the FRG as the dominant European superpower, within the framework of which its own global ambitions are to be realized: for example, the expansion of the German sphere of influence in eastern and southeastern Europe, which in the course of EU enlargement has long since been transformed into the extended workbench of the German export industry.

Against the background of this loose and changing faction formation within German functional elites, a double strategy emerged vis-à-vis Russia, which the German geostrategist Wolfgang Ischinger described as “congagement,” a portmanteau created from the words containment and engagement. Economic cooperation, in which Russia in fact assumes the peripheral position of a supplier of energy and raw materials, was accompanied, with varying emphases, by German efforts to minimize Russia’s geopolitical influence in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space. The phase of tumultuous economic and political expansion in the 1990s – when Berlin supported the breakup of Czechoslovakia, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the eastward expansion of the EU and NATO – was followed by the phase of cooperation with Putin’s rise to power, which ended only in 2014 with the crisis in Ukraine.

In the wake of the pro-Western upheaval in Kiev, however, it also became clear that Berlin operates as an independent geopolitical actor and does not allow Washington to dictate its policy. In 2013, there was still agreement on the effort to remove Ukraine from the planned Russian economic union. At the time, Germany, through the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, built up the Klitschko party UDAR, which was aiming for a change of power through new elections and quickly came into conflict with more radical, U.S.-sponsored forces during the fighting around the Maidan. U.S. diplomat Victoria Nuland’s famous “Fuck the EU,” published as a recording of a telephone conversation at the height of the crisis, reflects precisely these intra-Western differences, which also explain Germany’s current reticence.

Oceania vs. Eurasia

Washington has since sought to drive a wedge between Berlin and Moscow through additional escalation in order to prevent the formation of a grand Eurasian alliance, while Berlin has rather wanted to embrace Moscow to death and turn it into a periphery as part of a strategy of change through economic rapprochement. The declining empire in Washington sees China, together with a Eurasian alliance (keyword: New Silk Road), as the central threat to its eroding hegemony. The U.S. intervention in Kiev is therefore aimed at consolidating its own “oceanic” alliance, which extends as far as possible across the Atlantic and the Pacific and is ultimately directed against China.

Oceania vs. Eurasia – this is the denominator of the current global hegemonic struggle, with the imperialist camps striving to expand the boundaries of their spheres of influence. The U.S., for example, is trying to re-establish the German-dominated EU, which since the Trump era has increasingly wanted to act as an independent actor, firmly in its sphere of influence.

The increasing autonomy of action of the late capitalist states also comes to bear in the Eastern European countries, which, although economically dependent on the Federal Republic, at the same time tended to pact with the USA (above all Poland and the Baltic countries) when it came to torpedoing further rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow. The old Central Eastern European fear of a renewed division of the region between Berlin and Moscow, revived by the Nord Stream pipeline, provided the U.S. with a good lever of power in the economic “backyard” of the FRG to push this agenda.

Ultimately, the increasing military conflicts in the semi-periphery of the world system, including Turkey’s imperial ambitions, are due precisely to the imperial decline of the USA. Washington can no longer maintain the claim it made in the 1990s to be the “world’s policeman,” largely monopolizing the use of military means globally in bloody world-order wars. Regional powers are pushing into the emerging power vacuum to enforce their imperialist ambitions by military means if necessary.

Shaky World Order and The Crisis of Capital

This is, in a nutshell, the much-invoked “multipolar world order” in the socio-ecological crisis of capital. The decline of the USA has in fact resulted in the emergence of a number of small “baby USAs” that want to project the increasing social (and, in the long term, ecological) distortions caused by the crisis outward by military means: from the Turkish war adventures in Syria, the South Caucasus and Libya, to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to the possible showdown between Beijing and Washington over Taiwan.

Similar to the 1930s, the economic crisis is breathing down the necks of the shattered state apparatuses. The need to pass on the consequences of the crisis to others is growing steadily. In the course of its economic expansion, the Federal Republic literally managed to export the consequences of the crisis, such as debt or unemployment, by means of high trade surpluses – at the expense of the deficits of the importing countries of the German export offensives. The eurozone sovereign debt crisis of the last decade is a case in point.

In this context, it is not least the mercilessly over-indebted United States that is de facto forced to fight for the hegemonic position, since it must hold the dollar as the world currency. Without the greenback as the measure of value of all commodity things, which Washington until recently could print at will to finance the extreme U.S. budget deficit, the U.S. would degenerate into a gigantic, nuclear-armed debt state. Because of the social disruption at home, the U.S. elites have therefore long since developed a paranoia of Russian influence, similar to that which prevails in the Kremlin with regard to Western-financed “color revolutions.”

But in the end it is precisely the socio-ecological world crisis of capital, concretely in the form of increasing inflation, which prevents Washington itself from using “deficit spending” to whitewash the internal contradictions.

Danger of a Major War

War as a means of politics will thus gain in attractiveness for the late capitalist functional elites. It forms a catalyst of the economic and, in perspective, ecological crisis process: The resulting social distortions find in it a violent medium of external discharge, which ultimately executes the self-destructive tendency of capital – up to the threat of large-scale nuclear war. In the case of Ukraine, one can still hope that the nuclear power plants in the country constitute the only nuclear danger: NATO intervention seems unlikely so far, after U.S. President Biden ruled out direct military intervention even in the run-up to the war.

Nevertheless, a further escalation of the war cannot be ruled out. The powerless left currently has only the option of peace struggle and educational work: the emphasis on the survival necessity of a post-capitalist system transformation in order to prevent the barbaric collapse by means of a repeated large-scale war.

Originally published in analyse & kritik on 02/24/2022

The Centers of The World System Discover Islamofascism As a Repressive Instrument of Crisis Management in The Periphery

Tomasz Konicz

Talk to the Taliban? Mrs. Merkel can’t do that quickly enough. While panicked people clinging to planes taking off plunge to their deaths at Kabul airport, while IS Islamists blow up dozens of fleeing people in suicide attacks, the chancellor declared Taliban rule in Afghanistan to be a new reality that was “bitter,” but one that had to be “dealt with.” This means, above all, holding talks with the stone-age Islamists “in order to be able to preserve something of what has benefited the people of Afghanistan over the past 20 years” (one can only hope that the Chancellor is not referring to the mass-murderous German air strikes, which, for example, provided one Colonel Klein with a career path to General).[1] According to Merkel, the German government is already providing 500 million euros for humanitarian purposes. Through this, the hope is to “continue to protect people” in Afghanistan after the evacuation, which will be completed in “a few days.”[2]

In plain language: Berlin wants to hold talks with the Taliban on how the Afghans can continue to be kept – pardon, “protected” – in Afghanistan despite the Islamist reign of terror. Because that was the central German concern during the collapse of the Afghan state dummy in recent weeks: The fear of new flight movements from the collapsed Afghanistan, which could give the New Right in the FRG additional impetus, manifested itself precisely in the slogan, “2015 must not be repeated.” And anyway: The New York Times knew to report after a first interview that the new Taliban could hardly be compared with the old stone-age Islamists.[3] At least that’s what the Taliban said. Their spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, even stressed that, “in the long term,” women under the Taliban could well “resume their routines.”

After all, it seems that the Taliban’s public relations have indeed been modernized, as Mr Mujahid seemed to know exactly what his Western interviewees wanted to hear. Despite the “tense situation” at the airport, the Taliban hoped to establish good relations with the “international community.” The Taliban spokesman named the fight against terror (Al Qaeda is now being replaced by the Islamic State), the eradication of opium production in Afghanistan, which is one of the Taliban’s most important sources of income, and the “reduction of refugees” who wanted to go to the West as potential areas of cooperation. The Taliban are thus in effect offering themselves to the West as a source of “law and order,” as jailers of a region of socio-economic collapse which, like the post-state region of Libya, is really only called Afghanistan out of habit. The Taliban spokesman was at pains to paint the picture of a rather “tolerant” Islamist movement that had broken with its past, according to the New York Times. For that to happen, the West would still have to tolerate the idiosyncrasies of Taliban extremism, such as the ban on music, which Mr. Mujahid explicitly acknowledged – and the reported burning alive of women by Taliban who didn’t like their food.[4]

The idea of allowing Islamic extremism to play a leading role in the defense against refugees, of allowing the corresponding dictatorships, militias and rackets to play the role of concentration camp wardens on economically scorched earth and turning them into open-air prisons, so to speak, is not entirely new. In Berlin this has been the maxim of policy towards Erdogan’s Turkey since the refugee crisis of 2015, which must not be repeated at all costs. Berlin keeps paying billions to the Erdogan regime so that calm prevails at the EU’s borders. Turkish Islamofascism – already under increased socio-economic pressure due to the crisis – expanded in the collapsing, war-torn areas of northern Syria, where Turkish-funded Islamist militias were able to establish a gang rule marked by permanent clashes. Syrian civil war refugees, who increasingly face pogroms in Turkey, are to be shipped there for some perspective (Al Qaeda in Turkish-controlled Idlib celebrated the Taliban’s victory with a motorcade).[5]

The war of Islamism, which in fact represents a postmodern crisis ideology,[6] is directed first and foremost against progressive counter-models. The aggressions of the Turkish-Islamist soldiery against Rojava, against the self-administration in northern Syria, not only served the ethnic cleansing of this region bordering on Turkey from Kurds; this also attempted to smash a competing, emancipatory counter-model to Turkish-sponsored Islamofascism in the region. Berlin has flanked these Turkish aggressions financially and politically – the repressive suppression of refugee movements with the help of Islamism seems to have become a raison d’état in Berlin, while an emancipatory alternative is being fought by the German state apparatus with passion.

Islamofascism now appears to be on the rise throughout the region. Coinciding with the fall of the Western-funded puppet government in the “failed state” of Afghanistan, Turkey has expanded its attacks on the Kurdish movement in Syria and Iraq. In the slipstream of the disaster in Afghanistan, the emancipatory awakening in Rojava is to be finally put to death.[7] The Islamists in Ankara, at least, are well aware that there is no alternative to their rise in the wake of the globally unfolding crisis process – as the civil war in Syria illustrates.

The collapse of Syria – similar to the even more dramatic situation in Afghanistan – had socio-economic and ecological causes. The civil war broke out due to the advanced impoverishment of a largely economically superfluous population, as well as a prolonged drought in the agrarian northeast of the country. In the course of the civil war, in which the Syrian state, which had degenerated into a self-service shop of the Assad clan, could only be saved from implosion by massive Russian intervention, not only the genocidal Islamic State emerged as a formative force, but also the self-government in northern Syria, which was largely supported by the Kurdish freedom movement.

The Rojava model, which attempts to realize an emancipatory claim, constitutes – as long as it exists – a threat to Islamism in the region, since it shows alternatives to the terror regime of these clerical-fascist crisis ideologies. The Islamism of the Islamic State, the Taliban and Al Qaeda represents, as it were, a fascist extremism of the center,[8] which uses religion, the central religious identity of the Islamic cultural sphere, as a sounding board in order to drive it to the ideological, sometimes genocidal extreme in interaction with crisis shocks – this crisis ideology thus has little to do with the pre-modern agrarian societies of Islam to which the Islamist ideologists refer.

The crisis of the capitalist world system produces economically scorched earth in its periphery, i.e. regions in which hardly any capital valorization takes place and thus economically superfluous population strata emerge, which leads to increasing political instability, which can ultimately lead to state collapse. This is the deeper cause of the rapid collapse of the state in Afghanistan,[9] as well as similar processes in Libya, and the civil wars in Iraq and Syria.

Syria, however, represents an anomaly, since here, with Rojava, there is indeed a progressive, emancipatory alternative to the crisis-induced drift into Islamist barbarism. In Syria, at the latest in the fight against the genocidal militia of the “Islamic State” supported by Turkey, the West had the option of supporting an alternative. It is significant that – after the official victory over the IS – both the US and Russia proceeded to sell off Rojava piecemeal to Erdogan’s Turkey, which managed to play both major powers off against each other. The Islamists in Ankara and Idlib were ultimately more important to Washington and Moscow than the emancipatory awakening in northern Syria, due to Turkey’s greater geopolitical weight.

Turkey’s current airstrikes and artillery strikes in northern Syria[10] and Iraq[11] would also not be possible without the USA’s clearance of the airspace, and without Moscow’s consent in its northern Syrian zone of influence. The West is currently capitulating to Islamofascism, which – historically and socio-economically speaking – it promoted in two ways. On the one hand, it was the many billions of Western and Saudi US dollars that flowed to the Taliban’s predecessors, the Afghan Mujahideen fighting Soviet troops, in the final phase of the Cold War that gave militant Islamism an enormous boost (Osama Bin Laden famously fought in Afghanistan). The Taliban specifically formed in refugee camps and madrasas that sprang up – funded by the Saudis – in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area during the war against the Soviets to indoctrinate children in the emerging Islamist ideology.

At the same time, the world crisis of capital choking on its productivity – which, precisely because of the increasing capital intensiveness of commodity production in the centers, first hit the capital-weak, peripheral regions of the world market in full – creates the socio-economic foundations for the rise of extremist movements in the collapsing periphery. Islamism thus represents – similar to the nationally and racially based European fascism – a terrorist crisis form of capitalist rule, which gains momentum wherever the course of the crisis has progressed far enough and the corresponding cultural foundations are in place.

The twenty-year struggle of U.S. troops and NATO against the Taliban thus resembled a senseless windmill fight in which the West fought against the ghosts of crisis that it itself directly and indirectly produced. The sophisticated late capitalist military machine fought – with barbaric methods – on economically scorched earth against the barbaric end products of the crisis of capital. The U.S. and its NATO allies wanted to finance and literally bomb the superstructure of a capitalist state with billions in subsidies, without realizing that there was no economic basis for it.

For the time being, Afghanistan will probably remain the last futile attempt at “nation building” by Western crisis imperialism. The new aspect of the current escalation in Afghanistan is that not only Berlin, but the West as a whole is coming to accept this religiously based crisis ideology, this Islamic fascism, as a factor of order in the periphery that is supposed to keep the superfluous masses of the global South in check, in order to prevent them from fleeing to the centers – all the more important in view of the full-blown climate crisis. The Taliban are also aware of this, as the interview with the New York Times makes clear. The repressive model of crisis management established by Berlin, in which Islamist regimes or rackets are literally paid to stop emigration, threatens to become a new, dystopian reality in the current crisis imperialism.

The transition from neoliberal, formally democratic capitalism, where rule unfolds without a subject, through the mediating levels of the market and the judicial apparatus, to openly authoritarian crisis management now seems to be taking place. Even the facade of Freedom and Democracy is being dropped, with Biden again merely continuing the policies of his right-wing populist predecessor in office. This authoritarian turn is first taking hold in the periphery – but, as illustrated by the militarization of the US police apparatus, it will soon rebound on the centers as well.

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1. https://www.deutschlandradio.de/oberst-klein-wird-general.331.de.html?dram:article_id=217621

2. https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2021-08/angela-merkel-afghanistan-regierungserklaerung-evakuierung-bundeswehr-kritik-bundesregierung

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/world/asia/taliban-spokesman-interview.html

4. https://www.businessinsider.com/afghanistan-taliban-set-a-woman-on-fire-for-bad-cooking-2021-8?IR=T

5. https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-africa-afghanistan-taliban-islamic-state-group-8b54562a8676906d497952c9e3f0cfda

6. http://www.konicz.info/?p=4430

7. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/569838-as-afghanistan-crumbles-turkeys-airstrikes-set-up-the-next-disaster

8. http://www.konicz.info/?p=4430

9. http://www.konicz.info/?p=4343

10. https://anfdeutsch.com/rojava-syrien/kobane-kriegsversehrte-protestieren-gegen-turkische-angriffe-28065

11. https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210817-3-dead-as-turkey-raids-north-iraq-clinic-security-medics

Originally published on 09/10/2021