First published in 2017 in exit! No. 14.
Business as Usual - On the Ongoing Madness of the Capitalist Mode of Production
by Thomas Meyer[This article posted in 2017 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=aktuelles&index=8&posnr=865.]
It is gratifying when the real madness of capitalism is actually taken note of in the general analysis and specifically with regard to the crisis since 2007/2008, and a critique of the same is formulated based on this. This is attempted by Paul Mattick Jr.1 in his book "Business as Usual - The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism "2 written in 2011 and translated into German in 2012.
In this book, Mattick outlines the history of economic crises and argues for a concrete historical examination of capitalism. As a rule, however, crises are neither really explained nor understood, since one is not able to relate them to the internal history and to the logic of exploitation of capitalism. This is often because capitalism is perceived as natural anyway, 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 actual lack of understanding of capitalism. The economic science mainstream, mostly of neoclassical provenance3 , was rightly accused of neither being able to formulate reasonably reliable forecasts nor having plausible explanations for the current economic situation. Critics of neoliberalism, deregulation, etc. on the other hand, however, were similarly blind to history, as was Keynesian Paul Krugman, since he did not "deal [with] the reasons why Keynesian theory fell into disrepute in the 1970s" (25).
Thomas Meyer: Business as Usual - On the Ongoing Madness of the Capitalist Mode of Production.A fundamental problem, according to Mattick, "[...] lies in the prevailing approach to contemporary economic issues. Part of the problem is what terms are used to try to understand the social system in which we live" (30).
To understand the current crisis, Mattick argues, one must look at the history of capitalism and its historical dynamics. In particular, one should take note of the actual nature of crises under capitalism, as opposed to, say, famine crises of pre-modern societies: "But as the increasingly money-driven economy led to the Industrial Revolution and capitalism spread over such large areas that it became the dominant social system, a new phenomenon emerged: crises of the social system as a whole. Of course, a variety of disruptive factors such as war, plague, and crop failures had affected social production even before that. However, the imposition of capitalism brought something new: despite good harvests and mountains of food, famines occurred [...]. Such collapses now no longer had natural or political causes, but were due to specific economic factors: there was a lack of money to buy the goods needed, profits were too low to make investment in production worthwhile" (35, emphasis in original).
Insofar as these facts are noted at all, it has always been the case that bourgeois economists sought the causes of crises in extra-economic or extra-societal factors, such as William Stanley Jevons, "who since 1875 has persistently endeavored to prove a correlation between economic ups and downs and the sunspot cycle [...]." Marx, on the other hand, was quite different: "Marx argued that the nature of capitalism was a tendency to crisis, which would be realized in consistently recurring depressions and would eventually lead to the downfall of the system. His approach, however, was so fundamentally different from standard economic theories that other theorists who studied the subject-including the majority of those who called themselves Marxists-had difficulty even understanding his thoughts, let alone finding them useful" (38f.).
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: "It is not what a business produces, but what it earns from it, that is its business purpose. [...] The course of business in a money economy is determined by present and prospective profits" (43).
Mattick states that it is quite perplexing that this insight escapes most economists to this day.
Mitchell, however, 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 did not occur to even a historically oriented economist like Mitchell to ask, because to him the existence of money seemed quite self-evident [...]. To ask them of the citizen of a capitalist society is like asking an inhabitant of ancient Egypt why the water level of the Nile and thus the growth and decline of agricultural yields are determined by Osiris. To answer it requires sufficient mental distance from social conventions [...] to understand money, and thus profit, as historically peculiar social institutions that have certain consequences for our way of life" (48f.).
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 way of thinking that, especially in its practice, can recognize all the world only as a substrate for the valorization of value, would have to be added.
Moreover, it is forgotten that most people ,, [...] in large parts of the world even in the very recent pasthave rarely or not at all depended on money [...] that money, while present in many kinds of societies, plays such a central role in production and distribution only in capitalism [...]. In such a system, money has a different social meaning than in earlier societies. [...] Under capitalism, this distribution takes place by figuring out what products are salable and in what quantities - not through a social decision-making process about what should be produced" (50f.)4.
Mattick notes that crises have to do with the exploitation dynamics of capitalism: On the one hand, it is necessary to achieve maximum "profitability"-because making money is the driving moment 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: by reducing the proportion of labor employed relative to the quantities it produces. This generally has the effect of increasing the cost of the means of production relative to that of wages, so that the single good becomes cheaper. It manifests itself in saturated markets, declining investment in means of production, etc., and rising unemployment (59f.). The misery appears as a lack of demand. This is precisely where Keynesianism comes in. The idea was that the state would generate demand through credit (e.g., through large-scale infrastructure projects5) in order to reignite the dynamics of utilization, thereby overcoming the depression and eventually paying off the debt through increased tax revenues. Keynes' model seemed to be successful, the depression was overcome (not least by World War II, 86f.) and parts of humanity were then allowed to be blessed by an economic miracle (the ,,golden age" as Mattick calls it). Nevertheless, Keynesian methods continued after the depression proper. The economic miracle was therefore hardly a self-sustaining one: "In reality, crisis management turned into a permanent state-private 'mixed economic system,' Far from being redemptive, government debt rose from the mid-1970s onward in all capitalist developed countries, both in absolute terms and as a share of GDP [. ...] By the time Reagan left office, the national debt had tripled from $900 billion to $2.8 trillion [...] In 1930, the U.S. government debt was $16 billion; today it is $12.5 trillion and growing" (69, 91-93).6
Mattick also describes the genesis of finance-driven capitalism: "The slackening of productive investment meant that more and more money became available for other purposes. [...] This ,massive shift to a speculative use of liquidity [...] was expressed in a strong push for legal deregulation. Deregulation was thus a reaction to speculative pressures: it facilitated risky trades, but it was not the cause of increased speculation. Similarly, it is doubly silly to explain the increase in credit-financed corporate acquisitions and other forms of speculation as a consequence of greed, as is often done today: Not only does this leave unexplained why greed has suddenly increased in recent decades, it also hides the basic motive of capitalist investment decisions" (75 f.).
Mattick further points out that the financial crisis of 2007/2008 should by no means be viewed in isolation from the crisis since the 1970s and its cause in the logic of valorization; nor should the smaller crises since the 1980s. Rather, today's situation is "an expression of the depression that announced itself in dramatic fashion in the mid-1970s but has been held at bay for more than thirty years by state economic policy - partly by shifting it to poorer regions of the world, but above all by historically unprecedented indebtedness of states, companies and private individuals to the richer part of the world" (82).
But what is now the fundamental difference between the current crisis and the depression of 1929, apart from the sovereign debts that have increased into the infinite?
Unfortunately, Mattick hardly elaborates on this crucial idea. He does mention that government spending "counteracted the previous decline in profit rates, but did not overcome it, [so] it is not surprising that companies used the available funds not so much to build new factories to produce more goods, but above all to squeeze more profit out of existing production: They invested in labor- and energy-saving technologies and lowered labor costs by moving plants from high-wage to low-wage countries [...] The results of this include the permanent rise in unemployment in Western Europe and the Rust Belt in the United States" (73).
The qualitatively new, the crisis of the labor society, the microelectronic revolution and its still not fully exploited rationalization potentials are not really clearly elaborated. However, referring to Marx, Mattick already states that the exploitation dynamics of capitalism must ultimately lead to its downfall (see above), although he does not explicitly refer here to the "machine fragment" from the Grundrisse, but only to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
Another inaccuracy regarding the question why Keynesian methods cannot bear fruit is his statement that "government-financed production does not produce profit. [...] The government, after all, has no money of its own, but pays with tax revenues or borrowed money, which ultimately must also be repaid from tax revenues. [...] Government spending consequently cannot solve the problem of depression [...]. The government can postpone the problem by providing financial and other enterprises with the money necessary to maintain their operations. It can alleviate the distress it has caused, at least temporarily, by employing or alimenting the unemployed, and it can build infrastructure that will benefit future profitable production. [...] The fundamental problem in a period of depression can only be solved by the depression itself [...]. The depression can [...] raise profit rates by lowering the cost of capital goods and labor, by raising productivity through technological innovation, and by concentrating capital ownership in larger more efficient units" (100f.).
It must be countered that Keynesian methods do indeed work, and precisely when they lead to production on an expanded ladder; when there is a greater absorption of living labor through state concentration and mobilization measures, when the cheapening of goods 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 mediated by war or not. This leads to higher tax revenues, so that those loans, which represented an anticipation of the future still to be earned, can then be serviced after all. As is well known, the fact that it worked out to some extent is due to the massive expansion of Fordist industries. Why are Keynesian measures definitely no longer effective today, although they were effective at other times?
As already indicated, these methods were no longer effective in the 1970s, because the subsequent microelectronic revolution did not lead to a renewed increase in the absorption of living labor, and therefore financially driven capitalism and neoliberal ideology represented precisely the historical course through which capitalism, although completely blind to history and increasingly resistant to facts, worked out this contradiction.
That the depression could be solved by a market shakeout (which, after all, was averted by loans of unprecedented amounts) is, according to Mattick, definitely false for the present. A further concentration of capital, further rationalization measures, etc., would only increase the difficulty of people to function as exploitable labor containers; likewise the mass of superfluous people, "who gather by the hundreds of millions in huge slums" (81f.). Mattick's partially imprecise definition of the crisis makes him seem a bit ahistorical, although the extent of misery is quite clear to him, citing Mike Davis's Planet of the Slums. Therefore, fortunately, he does not fall into a false optimism that lies its way past reality, as is often the case with the bourgeois lumpen intelligentsia.
Furthermore, Mattick writes, in contrast to the many others, that China and India precisely cannot represent beacons of hope for a restored capitalism, because "China's growth remains [...] closely coupled to that of the developed countries [...]. India, where the majority of the population still consists of poor rural workers7 , is even further from representing an independent economic power. Indeed, much of the foreign trade of both the Indian and Chinese economies continues to consist of the reexport of final or intermediate goods and services produced by multinational companies based in Europe or the United States" (110).
What to do.
What to do in the face of misery by the millions, environmental degradation, and even man-made climate change? What practical conclusions are drawn by Mattick?
According to Mattick, traditional leftists, if they are not marginalized anyway, could hardly be expected to go beyond the horizon of capital. This is because the traditional left (social democracy and real socialism) have definitely had their day historically, since "the traditional labor movement was not a harbinger of the overthrow of capitalism, but an aspect of its development, insofar as it fulfilled the task of normalizing a new mode of social relations through organizations capable of negotiation and willing to compromise" (122f.).
The demise of the traditional left, however, is not an occasion for apathetic acceptance of capitalist madness: for it is precisely in crisis that the difference between material and monetary wealth, as Karl Marx tried to outline it, can become apparent to many, which might motivate people to act. Mattick also sketches this thought: money may be devalued, factories may be closed, but material wealth is still within reach, so to speak: "While they currently await the promised return of prosperity, the millions of newly homeless, much like many of their predecessors in the 1930s, may eventually look at foreclosed vacant homes, unsaleable consumer goods, and government food depots and recognize in them the things they need to live. Simply appropriating housing, food, and other goods, however, breaks with the rules of an economic system based on the exchange of goods for money, and in this way already points to a completely different kind of society" (133).
The independent appropriation of the means of production may be a first step towards getting rid of capitalism and thus finding another form of society, even if humanity will have to struggle with the catastrophic legacies (environmental destruction, etc.) of capitalism for a long time to come: "Whatever it is called, it will have to begin by abolishing the separation between those who exercise control over
production and those who carry it out, and by replacing a social mechanism based on monetary market exchange (including of labor assets) with some kind of social decision-making" (137).
However, Mattick must be contradicted here when he writes that the means of production are under the control of certain subjects. It is true that no other than a capitalist use is intended for the means of production and real estate, etc., and that this will therefore be defended by all means of violence if people would presume to wrest them from the capitalist exploitation movement, as Mattick himself implies: "Not unlike in totalitarian states, direct organs of popular power in democratic states pose a threat to the powerful, however limited their aims.8 Threats to the economic order will undoubtedly bring to the fore a repression that will go even beyond the level of violence with which the military and police have already cracked down in recent years on demonstrators in Athens, striking state workers in South Africa, students in London and other cities [...]" (135).
Nevertheless, this basically traditional Marxist formulation suggests that certain subjects would actually have determinative power over production and its contents. The functional logic of the dynamics of valorization cannot be attributed to the determination of the will of subjects, but this does not mean that no one could be held responsible for anything, for the imperatives of capitalism must be mediated through 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, but this is missing in Mattick (apart from an ideology critique of economics and various views of history).
However, a mere appropriation would not be enough: for it is the productive (or rather destructive) legacies of capitalism and in particular the managerial form of its implementation that are to be criticized and consequently not to be positively occupied per se. It would be a wasted effort to appropriate the capitalist 'productive forces' only in order to then simply continue them on one's own (as can be observed in occupied factories9). If the mode of production is to be transformed, then this also applies to the contents of production, which of course includes that certain contents of production are abolished or cut back, just think of the car industry.
As a basic idea, by the way, this idea is not so new. The anarchist Erich Mühsam, for example, wrote in 1932: The childish idea that with the occupation of the factories by the workers and their simple continuation under their own leadership, the revolution will have already accomplished the transition to socialism, is as nonsensical as it is dangerous. [Under capitalist conditions, factories of every kind are exclusively adapted in their establishment and organization to the profit calculations of the entrepreneurs. Here 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 in literal hunger and which 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 from the respective situation, can also mean that the appropriators see themselves as an ethnic gang, racist human breeding association or religious terror sect, etc., and consequently exclude other people from their means of production (or the remnants thereof) and thereby continue the competition by other means; thus appropriation as a blood-soaked mode of redistribution in a "molecular civil war" (Enzensberger). Mattick's critique of capitalism is, as shown, an almost 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 that they can prove equally capable of racism, sexism, antiSemitism, and anti-gypsyism, not only in the mind but also as a realized act, as a celebrated and applauded pogrom, is not further addressed by him. Here, at the latest, it would take revenge to leave out the level of ideology and subject critique in a critique of capitalism. Unfortunately, Mattick largely leaves it at the practical conclusions quoted above, without giving any further thought to them. An answer to Lenin's question may be more urgent today than ever, but it should not be demanded by shortening or even abandoning theoretical reflection.
Paul Mattick: Business as Usual - Krise und Scheitern des Kapitalismus, Hamburg, Edition Nautilus 2012.
Paul Mattick Jr, born 1944, the son of Paul Mattick (1904-1981), teaches philosophy at Adelphi University in New York.^
See also the interview about the book that Paul Mattick gave to The Brooklyn Rail magazine in 2011. A German translation of the interview can be found at kosmoprolet.org. ^
On the lack of understanding of capitalism 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, this is rather a methodological misuse of mathematics, cf. Herbert Auinger: Mißbrauchte MathematikZur Verwendung mathematischer Methoden in den Sozialwissenschaften, Frankfurt 1995. Cf. also in more detail: Knut Hüller: Kapital als Fiktion - Wie endloser Verteilungskampf die Profitrate senken und ,Finanzkrisen? erzeugt, Hamburg 2015.^
Cf. e.g.: 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.^
Cf. Wolfgang Schivelbusch: Entfernte Verwandtschaft: Faschismus, Nationalsozialismus, New Deal. 19331939, Munich/Vienna 2005.^
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, the everincreasing cost of Social Security is also included, see http://deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de/2013/08/09/studie-deckt-auf-usa-haben-verdeckteschulden-von-70-billionen-dollar/. ^
More precisely, half of the population works in agriculture, 800 million Indians are considered poor, one third of the population is chronically malnourished, 92% of the working population works in the informal sector without all insurances. 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 do try, they are beaten up, and if the food is not enough, they are left to starve (!), cf. Georg Blume/Christoph Hein: Indiens verdrängte Wahrheit - Streitschrift gegen ein unmenschliches System, Hamburg 2014.^
Already self-organized feeding of the homeless is opposed by the state, cf. the material on nationalhomeless.org. ^
When factories were occupied in Argentina, constraints and the expansion of night shifts were also discussed there, cf. , "Occupied Factories in Argentina - Movement Against Capital or Self-Management of Capitalist Misery?" in Wildcat No. 70 (2004). An occupation can precisely mean a continuation of competition by other means!^
Erich Mühsam: Befreiung der Gesellschaft vom Staat, Berlin 1975, 75. ^
History of ideas
Democracy and culture
Rule of law
Cross-regional dialogue
Is Neoliberalism Finally Dead?
By Gabor ScheiringFew concepts have been declared dead and buried more often than neoliberalism. However, it continues to survive. Neoliberal Resilience, Aldo Madariaga’s award-winning book, shows how.
The strange non-death of neoliberalism
Joe Biden’s presidency has begun with a historically unprecedented stimulus package, followed by efforts to tax the rich and transnational corporations. It appears that neoliberalism is about to die once more. Yet, fiscal hawks are out again, capitalizing on inflation fears to bring back austerity. Corporations and countries specialized in beggar-thy-neighbor taxation have allied to stop G8 efforts to institutionalize a global minimum corporate tax. As Colin Crouch has famously argued, the “strange non-death of neoliberalism” depends on the power of corporations over public life. It is simply too early to tell whether this time non-neoliberal actors have enough power to challenge neoliberalism.
Madariaga’s book also starts from the insight that neoliberalism has always sought to alter society’s balance of power in favor of bosses, giving us analytical tools to understand the dynamics of
contemporary power struggles around neoliberalism.
With empirical nuance, Neoliberal Resilience shows how three mechanisms — opposition blockade, support creation, and constitutionalized lock-in — have been instrumental in safeguarding neoliberalism in Estonia and Chile and how the weakness of these mechanisms allowed for a divergence from neoliberalism in Argentina and Poland.
The book is divided into eight chapters. The first introductory chapter sets out the puzzling resilience of neoliberalism. The central thesis is straightforward and provocative: “Neoliberalism survived in its purest form in those countries where it was protected from democracy” (p. 3). Shifting the focus from ideascentered approaches, Madariaga explains neoliberal resilience by focusing on power, social coalitions, and institutions. This is an important analytical move as it allows the author to analyze real-world struggles instead of abstract ideological constructs. Ideas are, of course, central and constitutive of economic processes. However, Madariaga is right to argue that the fate of actually existing neoliberalism is decided at the intersection between economic and political power.
Specifically, Madariaga challenges three ideational approaches to neoliberal resilience. First, he argues that accounts that try to explain the resilience of neoliberalism through the malleability and popularity of key neoliberal ideas are self-referential. Other ideologies are equally flexible but have died and been resurrected less frequently. Secondly, proponents of neoliberalism often claim that neoliberalism has not been implemented enough. This argument is based on a misunderstanding that mixes the sphere of abstract ideas about free markets with the messy world of neoliberal institution-building, which has always been about empowering businesses and not necessarily about free competition. No ideology has ever been implemented in its pure form, and neoliberalism has also come in various hybrid forms, always taking on flavors of the domestic polity, flexibly adapting to particular circumstances without changing the core of the neoliberal agenda. The third alternative approach emphasizes neoliberal pressures from international institutions. Notwithstanding their importance, shared global pressures can only go so far in explaining locally varying outcomes. Thus, Madariaga focuses on domestic power struggles without neglecting the context of international economic dependencies.
Market-conforming neoliberal democracies
The book focuses on four cases: Chile and Estonia, representing neoliberal resilience, and Argentina and Poland, representing divergence from neoliberalism. As he also points out in the book, it is rare to see this kind of cross-regional comparison. Most analysts focus on neoliberalism in core, advanced capitalist
countries — yet, most of the world lives in the semi-peripheries of global capitalism. Madariaga is particularly well-equipped to pull off this comparison. He lived in Eastern Europe for a while before finishing his Ph.D. in Germany (Max Planck Institute) and moving back to his home country, Chile. This semi-peripheral focus is a much-needed extension of the contemporary comparative political economy of neoliberalism.
Chapter 2 begins by separating the two parts of neoliberalism. The ‘Chicago’ part covers policies aimed at unlocking the potential of private entrepreneurs. The ‘Virginia’ part consists of rules that protect the property-owning minority against the propertyless majority, determining which policies can and cannot be implemented. The Chicago part refers to the economics department of the University of Chicago, the professional home of Milton Friedman, among others. The Virginia part refers to the Department of Economics at the University of Virginia, where another great theorist of neoliberalism, James Buchanan, worked. These two economists played a leading role in making the writings of the early thinkers of neoliberalism (e.g., Hayek, Von Mises) more politically acceptable in the context of the second half of the 20th century. While the Chicago school developed guidelines for neoliberal economic policy, the Virginia school was concerned with regulating majoritarian democracies in a way that was consistent with neoliberal principles. For Madariaga, the second Virginia component of neoliberalism is particularly important because these solutions transform democracy into a “market neoliberal democracy,” a term Madariaga borrows from Wolfgang Streeck.
The chapter then introduces three mechanisms that contribute to neoliberal resilience. Support creation “consists of using privatization as a way to alienate state assets and empower specific firms, economic groups, or sectors expected to support the continuation of market reforms” (p. 39). Opposition blockade comprises solutions to “exclude the losers of economic reforms from constituting powerful majorities and influencing the policy process” (p. 42). Thirdly, constitutionalized lock-in “acts on the arena of policymaking influence by reducing the possibility of governments and political parties representing alternative policy preferences from altering existing neoliberal policies” (p. 47).
Chapter 3 reviews the actors supporting neoliberalism. Using quantitative data and a simple but convincing regression design, the chapter shows that it was the financial and internationally competitive business sectors, together with right-wing governments, that were the actors most clearly associated with neoliberalism in the field of monetary and industrial policy. The domestically-oriented noncompetitive sector might support neoliberalism, but also might catalyze the divergence from neoliberalism, depending on the domestic institutional configuration and the power of specific business groups and their political allies. My book on the retreat of liberal democracy in Hungary has also shown that finance and competitive business sectors, allied with technocratic managers and liberal politicians, played a central role in the emergence and stability of market-conforming, simulated neoliberal democracy in Hungary. The rest of Madariaga’s book, Chapters 4-7, shows how this causal narrative plays
out in different polities.
Neoliberalism and its challengers
Neoliberal resilience in Chile depended mostly on the power of the internationally-oriented competitive business sector and the financial sector. Rapid trade liberalization boosted firms’ growth in these sectors, forging a compromise with the domestically-oriented non-competitive sector, co-opting it into the neoliberal social bloc. In Argentina, on the contrary, firms in the competitive sector weakened over time, while firms in the non-competitive sector retained their momentum, using their links to the corporatist military to maintain access to policymaking. As a result, neoliberals were unable to dismantle industrial policy despite their efforts. Neoliberal policies increased the vulnerability of Argentina’s economy, and this neoliberal economic debacle made the business community seek a new compromise under democracy with anti-neoliberal, Peronist forces, leading to the election of Néstor Kirchner in 2003. Kirchner’s national-developmentalist strategy relied on a renewed alliance with labor unions and noncompetitive business sectors.
Poland resembles Argentina in many ways. Although Poland started as a neoliberal lead reformer in the early 1990s, continued social protests led to policy concessions that eroded the initial program’s radicalism. The left-leaning SLD/PSL, influenced by Kolodko’s heterodox economic strategy, the nationalpopulist PiS governments, and the centrist-conservative PO government of Donald Tusk all invested massive resources into building up a domestic bourgeoisie, counterbalancing the dominance of foreign investors. As Marek Naczyk has also demonstrated recently, domestic businesses have played a central role in the divergence from neoliberal industrial policy in Poland. Unlike in Poland, the Estonian umbrella shielding against reforms did not fold. Estonia’s remarkable neoliberal experiment relies on the power of exclusionary nationalism. The desire to protect the fledgling Estonian state from potential Russian interference prevented the emergence of protest groups, not only in industry but also in rural areas. The new constitution and citizenship law heavily curtailed the political rights of the Russian-speaking minority, which was harder hit by economic reforms due to its concentration in declining economic sectors. This exclusionary solution also meant that there was no business support for an alternative development project, unlike in Poland or Argentina.
Support creation contributed to the resilience of neoliberalism in Chile and Estonia. Privatization in these two countries empowered business actors in the financial and competitive sectors, which supported neoliberalism. By contrast, in Argentina and Poland, the neoliberal project support-creation mechanisms failed. Poland followed a gradual privatization process, leading to a strong state-owned segment in the economy, and an even stronger domestic bourgeoisie, demanding protection and divergence from hard
neoliberalism. Privatization and liberalization were also crucial in the Argentinian case. They contributed to forming an alternative social bloc centered around domestically-oriented non-competitive sector businesses demanding more progressive policies.
Opposition blockade also played a central role in neoliberal resilience in Chile and Estonia. The Chilean military was capable of binding the democratization process through restrictive political institutions. These authoritarian fixes curtailing democracy and shielding neoliberalism in Chile included gerrymandered electoral districts and an electoral law favoring the political right, with nine unelected senators nominated by the military, Pinochet remaining the head of the military after democratization, a Constitutional Tribunal blocking alternative reforms, and a Council of National Security giving enhanced powers to the military. In contrast, the neoliberal military dictatorship in Argentina led to an economic debacle and a humiliating defeat in the Falklands War. Therefore, the outgoing military was not able to bind future democratic governments significantly. The few instruments to block the opponents of neoliberalism relied on the personalized power of a neoliberal presidency (Carlos Menem), which could be easily reversed once a new president was elected.
Support for neoliberalism in Poland relied on strengthening the president, but this again allowed opponents of neoliberalism to alter policies once electoral fortunes changed. Finally, opposition blockade in Estonia was also crucial and particularly powerful. As Bohle and Greskovits have also shown, the remarkable resilience of painful neoliberalism in Estonia relied on a strategy that superimposed the ethnic cleavage between national Estonians and the Russian minority on the socioeconomic cleavage dividing winners and losers of reform. By blocking the Russian minority, the neoliberal leaders of the new Estonian republic also blocked the most important opponents of neoliberalism.
Finally, Madariaga shows that constitutional lock-in is less effective than efforts to change power resources through support creation and opposition blockade. All four countries enacted reforms ensuring the independence of their central banks, attempting to lock in anti-inflationary neoliberal monetary policy. However, Argentina and Poland both managed later to diverge partially from this blueprint, even without significantly altering the rules of central bank independence. In addition, Chilean and Estonian authorities agreed to a balanced budget fiscal rule early on. Chile was the only country in Latin America in the 1990s to produce a constant fiscal surplus. Estonia adopted a currency board, which bound domestic monetary policy and forced fiscal policy to follow a domestic deflationary strategy (real wage repression, labor market flexibilization) in times of economic distress.
In contrast, in Argentina, although Kirchner did not dismantle central bank independence, in practice he managed to control monetary policy, leading to a divergence from neoliberalism. Similarly, in Poland,
although governments did not alter central bank independence legally, they did so in practice, allowing for more room to maneuver in the sphere of exchange rate and fiscal policy. As Madariaga notes, “the binding character of neoliberal institutions appears to be strongly related to the underlying power equilibrium and the support for alternative development projects” (pp. 245-246).
Lessons
The concluding chapter draws out the broader theoretical insights.
First, Madariaga reiterates the centrality of power resources: if there are powerful actors, they can undo even the best-designed institutions. This insight resonates with the recent disillusionment in political science with the institutionalist approach to democracy. Many proponents of the institutionalist approach have recognized how easily liberal institutions can be undone if powerful actors have the resources and willingness to do so.
The connection between institutional design, power structures, and economic policy is crucial for analysts of contemporary democratic backsliding. From North Macedonia (Gruevski) to Hungary (Orbán), from India (Modi) to Brazil (Bolsonaro), illiberal leaders curtail democratic representation not simply to stay in power but to implement a particular set of economic policies that favor upper-class social coalitions behind illiberalism. Viktor Orbán’s efforts to curtail democracy and divert economic conflicts towards cultural cleavages and political identity clashes serve to entrench the new privileges of the national bourgeoisie. Orbán does not simply want to stay in power. He builds resources for the illiberal social coalition and reduces the opportunities for anti-illiberal forces in the long term.
Democratic backsliding under Orbán did not lead to a divergence from the core of the neoliberal agenda, despite Orbán’s nationalist chest beating. Researchers have indeed shown that finance, retail, and energy have seen a selective economic nationalist turn. However, taxation, fiscal policy, macro-economic prudence, labor market (de)regulation, and social policy have not only remained neoliberal but have become increasingly so under Orbán’s authoritarian capitalism. Hungary’s case fits neatly into the global rise of national-populist neoliberalism or neo-illiberalism. The fate of democracy and neoliberalism are tightly interwoven. Neoliberal resilience depends on the successful curtailment of democratic challenges against neoliberal orthodoxy.
Neoliberalism and democracy are not necessarily enemies, but neither are they friends. They are
“frenemies,” as Madariaga concludes. It depends on the power of social coalitions.
Thus, the relationship between neoliberalism and democracy is more complicated than a simplistic reading would suggest: “the resilience of neoliberalism appears to have shielded the accompanying democracies from the lure of populist movements” (p. 258). Estonia and Chile experienced neoliberal resilience and avoided democratic backsliding. At the same time, neoliberalism was challenged in Poland on multiple occasions, which appears to go together recently with democratic backsliding under the PiS government. Thus, however curtailed, a limited top-down liberal democracy survived in more neoliberal countries.
Should we be content with market-conforming curtailed top-down liberal democracies in order to avoid populist chaos? Not at all. Reflecting on the Argentinian case and the most recent Chilean uprising, Madariaga also highlights non-neoliberal avenues for democracy to survive. In Argentina, neoliberalism was challenged without democratic backsliding. In Chile, the 2019 protest movements have shown that neoliberalism had generated deep fractures in the society, which came to light after several decades of repressed neoliberal democracy. Chile will have a new popular-democratic constitution instead of the curtailed liberal-democratic constitution drafted by the neoliberal military regime. It is too early to tell to where Chiles’ awakening will lead, but it certainly shows alternatives to the curtailed top-down neoliberal democracies.
Thus, populism is not necessarily opposed to democracy, concludes Madariaga in agreement with Mudde and Kaltwasser. It has challenged neoliberalism in Argentina and Chile without leading to democratic collapse. Argentina is not an exemplary liberal democracy, but neither is it a competitive authoritarian country. Again, it all boils down to the underlying power of social coalitions: if the neoliberal social coalition prevails, neoliberalism will survive. However, if democratic anti-neoliberal social coalitions manage to assemble enough resources for a counterhegemonic project, uniting popular masses, trade unions, and segments of the economic elite, the future becomes open to democratic nonneoliberal alternatives.
Madariaga’s Neoliberal Resilience is a deeply insightful, amazingly detailed, theoretically innovative, meticulously researched book. It is no wonder that it was not overlooked by the major book award selection committees. It is a must-read for everyone interested in the past, present, and future of neoliberalism.
Neoliberal Resilience: Lessons in Democracy and Development from Latin America and Eastern Europe,
Princeton University Press, 2020
In collaboration with Oliver Garner
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Surveillance and punishment - On democratic state terror in times of neoliberalism.
by Thomas Meyer[This article posted in 2017 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=aktuelles&index=7&posnr=864.]
The individual is recognized in the commodity-producing patriarchy only insofar as he can prove himself as a productive container of labor power. The rights granted to him by the state power are therefore valid only with reservations. It must squeeze itself into the formal shell of bourgeois subjectivity in order to be able to strive for its "happiness" as an "agent of abstract labor "1 (Robert Kurz); which means nothing other than having to sell itself skin and hair. In this context, the capitalist real categories such as money, commodities and labor are regarded by the bourgeois common sense as ontological determinations of human existence in general. At the latest in a practical questioning of these very categories, the much vaunted bourgeois tolerance and plurality would reach its absolute limit and the subjects would clearly feel the violence of the visible fist of the state (actually already clearly in purely system-immanent social struggles, as history and the present show2).
However, if the sale of one's own labor power does not quite succeed, the resulting social catastrophes are perceived as a "security problem" even by the most liberal constitutional state3. As Robert Kurz noted in the 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 against facts, only the form of a crusade (,,The Last Crusade of Liberalism")4 .
As for the war against social facts, the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant5 in his book Punishment of the Poor - On the Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity has analyzed the changes in penal and prison policies of the last decades, and the causes of the same. These changes are manifested primarily in the ever-increasing prison population6. Although this book was published several years ago and was reviewed at that time, it is still worthwhile to study it, since what Wacquant has compiled is not obsolete in times of the inner barrier and the permanent state of emergency, but continues to be current and effective. Thus, while Wacquant looks primarily at the situation in the United States, he also addresses parallel developments in Europe at the end7.
From Alms State to Prison State
At the beginning of the 21st century, there were about 700 people in prison for every 100,000 inhabitants in the U.S., or about just under 2 million in total. In 1975, the figure was just under 400,0008. "Even in South Africa, at the end of the civil war against apartheid in 1993, there were 369 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, half as many people behind bars as in the prosperous USA under President Clinton" (136, emphasis in original).
In addition, the prison system is now the third (!) largest employer in the country. The neoliberal state also spares no expense when it comes to financing it. In Texas, for example, "the budget for the prison system was six times as high as the budget for universities" (165ff.).
But not only is the prison population exorbitantly high, so are those people under "criminal justice supervision," that is, people "sentenced to parole or released on parole after serving most of their sentence [...] Overall, the number of Americans under criminal justice supervision increased by more than four and a half million in 20 years, rising from 1.84 million in 1980 to [...] 6.47 million in 20009 [...]" (149, emphasis in the org.).
Their situation remains precarious; the probability that they will end up behind bars again is high. Moreover, they are treated as pariahs by imposing on them a rigorous regime of measures and surveillance: "Thus, in addition to the introduction of 'intermediate sanctions' such as house arrest and 'boot camps,' 'intensive surveillance,' daily (!) police reporting, community service, and telephone and electronic monitoring [...] the access of the American justice system has been considerably expanded [...] also thanks to the increasing number of criminal databases [...]. The result is that the country's various police forces [...] now have some 55 million 'crime files? - compared to 35 million ten years ago - on around 30 million people, which corresponds to almost one third of the country's adult male population. Access to these databases is regulated differently. Some may be accessed only by judicial authorities [...]. Others are accessible not only to state bureaucracies [...] and welfare authorities, but also - via the Internet - to private individuals and private organizations. These "criminal records? [...] are routinely used by employers, for example, to screen out those with criminal records among their job applicants. And they care little that the information stored there is often false, outdated, or irrelevant [...] Once in circulation, not only criminals and suspects are targeted by the police, but also their families, friends, neighbors, and neighborhoods." (150ff., emphasis mine).
These measures no longer serve to help these people "resocialize" themselves (itself a thoroughly problematic term). These people are to be kept under control so that as many as possible can be "recaptured" (158).
Moreover, in numerous states, these people are deprived of the right to vote not only during the time they are in prison, but during the time they are under criminal supervision, in 13 states even for life (!), thus "some 4.2 million Americans are barred from exercising so-called universal suffrage, including 1.4 million black men, or 14% of African American voters" (196)10.
As noted at the outset, civil rights apply only with reservation. The development outlined by Wacquant for the U.S. and Europe is a prime example of this11.
But how did it happen historically that the prison population kept increasing, although the rate of violent crime either remained constant or even decreased12? The rapid increase in the "U.S. prisoner population cannot be explained by an increase in violent crime; it is a consequence of the expansion of prison sentences to include a range of street offenses [...] for which prison sentences were not previously imposed, particularly minor drug offenses and behavior labeled as disorderly conduct or public nuisance; and it is a consequence of continued sentencing enhancements13. Beginning in the mid-1970s [...] when the federal government declared its 'war on drugs,' increasingly lengthy prison sentences were imposed across the full range of offenses, whether they were career criminals or occasional offenders, big-time criminals or petty criminals, violent or nonviolent offenders [...]" (142f., emphasis in org.).
Thus, contrary to repeated conservative assertions, prisons are not filled with violent criminals, but predominantly with non-violent petty criminals (for drug offenses, for example), most of whom come from the lower strata of society. Wacquant emphasizes several times that this is primarily a matter of keeping "the troublemaking 'street rabble'" under control (148). (148) under control. Moreover, the prison population today14 is predominantly African American (in terms of its share of the total population), whereas in 1950 it was 70% white (207).
The reason for the rapid increase in the prison population, which predominantly affects the poorer15 , is also to be found in the dismantling of the welfare state or, better, the "alms state" since the mid-1970s (68ff.). The resulting social dislocations were countered with a development of the penal state; instead of "welfare," "workfare" and "prisonfare" were now the order of the day-with the explanatory patterns that are still common today, that the poor are only poor or unemployed because of their dependence on social benefits and their "moral depravity" (70). In any case, the numerous reforms led to a new understanding of the state toward the poor: "According to this understanding, the behavior of indigent and dependent citizens must be strictly monitored and, when necessary, punished by means of rigorous control-deterrence-sanction protocols, not unlike those usually applied to criminals who are under criminal surveillance. T[he] envelope[s] ,from carrot to stick? from voluntary programs that provide resources to mandatory programs that use fines, benefit cuts, and benefit withdrawals without regard to need to ensure that these rules of conduct are followed, that is, to programs that culturally treat the poor as criminals, that violate the bourgeois law of wage labor, this[s] envelope[s] thus intended, on the one hand, to discourage the lower factions of the working class from making claims on state resources and, on the other, to forcibly commit their members to conventional morality" (79, emphasis. i. Org.).
A preliminary culmination of such reforms was the one passed under Clinton in 1996: this "reform" did not really offer anything historically new, "but merely a reissue of instruments that date directly from the American colonial period, and this despite the fact that they had already proved ineffective in the past: Namely, the introduction of a sharp division between the "worthy" and the "unworthy" poor. The introduction of a sharp distinction between the 'worthy' and the 'unworthy' poor in order to relegate the latter to the inferior segments of the labor market and to induce them to 'mend' their supposedly deviant and questionable behavior, which was in any case seen as the cause of their persistent poverty" (98).
The criminalization of poverty also took on new dimensions under Clinton: "The transformation of welfare into a punitive program extends even to its material and atmospheric context. Even on the face of it, there is a striking resemblance between a post-reform welfare office16 and a penal institution [...]. The compulsory activities designed to inculcate a work ethic in welfare recipients and the array of incentives [...] and especially punishments (escalating benefit cuts to permanent disqualification) also look suspiciously similar to the intensive supervision programs for parolees or parolees or the other 'intermediate sanctions' - educational camps, community service, etc. - suspiciously similar. And seminars like the "work readiness workshops? [...] or the "life skill trainings? [...] are strongly reminiscent of the empty resocialization courses for prison inmates. [...] Moreover, apart from being locked up, the conditions of employment of prisoners are, on closer examination, not so different from the poor working conditions that unskilled wage earners find on the outside after the 'welfare reform'" (120, 194).
When the poor are treated like criminals, it is an indication that the former are deprived of their bourgeois subject status and reduced to their "bare lives" (Agamben). The state of exception is imposed on them. As the excluded, they are the object of control of the visible fist of the state, armed with truncheons, cannons, and desk thieves. They are thus practically turned into 'Gypsies'; for their treatment is very similar to the treatment of the Sinti and Roma - who for centuries represented the counter-image to the well-behaved and hard-working bourgeois bourgeois - in anti-gypsy racism17.
What remains to be clarified, however, is why there has been a change in penal policy since the mid1970s. Wacquant emphasizes at various points that at that time there was a "fragmentation of wage labor" (291), there is a "dismantling of the labor market" (80), an "advance of desocialized wage labor as a vector of social insecurity" (285, emphasis in org.). Wacquant takes phenomenological note of the precariousness of work, but without any value-theoretical justification.
The consequence of the economic upheavals since the 1970s was that blacks in particular, who had found work in the Fordist industries, became economically superfluous. For many, drug dealing then
became the most important source of income18 , hence the proclaimed war on drugs, as this was a way to make poverty invisible by making the economically superfluous disappear behind bars. Prison is, as Wacquant accurately writes, "[a] repository for unwanted black bodies" (68).
For Wacquant, however, economics is not the only reason for the growth of the prison population, as it still cannot explain the overt racism; after all, blacks are disproportionately affected19. Due to the black civil rights movement, which also received support from parts of the white middle class, the black ghettos in the cities were broken up and social advancement seemed possible. However, when Martin Luther King moved to attack not only civil rights inequality but also social inequality between blacks and whites, white support declined. According to Wacquant, the dismantling of the welfare state (which many blacks embraced) should be understood as an attempt to reestablish exclusionary racism after the success of the civil rights movement (205ff.). The accompanying policy of locking people away made prison a "juridical ghetto" (214).
The perverts in the pillory!
Blacks and the poor, however, are not the only ones who come under the heel of the new criminal justice regime. Another main target group of this regime clearly shows the hysteria and vindictiveness into which the bourgeois addiction to harmony (of the Protestant variety) turns: it is the (alleged!20 ) sex offenders.
Wacquant writes about this: "Persons suspected or convicted of sexual offenses have, of course, long been the object of intense anxiety and harsh sanctions, for in a Puritan culture21 in the stranglehold of taboos that until recently made contraception, adultery, sex games (such as oral and anal intercourse) even between spouses, as well as such banal autoerotic practices as looking at porn magazines [. .] declared a crime, not to mention interracial marriages, they are met with a particularly malignant stigma."
Yet the hysteria surrounding sex offenders is nothing new. Today's has various historical antecedents: for example, in 1890-1914, "sexual 'perverts' were first identified and singled out for eugenic measures22 [...], and in 1936-57, when it was believed that hordes of 'sexual psychopaths' roamed the country in search of innocent victims [and] were ready to strike around every corner," today's culture-industryfueled hysteria was anticipated (219).
Again, the "legislative activities" of the criminal regime have nothing to do with the actual "statistical development of these offenses. Thus, in the 1990s, a whole series of laws were passed that, for simplicity, are summarized as "Megan's Law "23 . These include measures that cannot be called anything other than totalitarian. In Louisiana, for example, an ex-sex offender "is himself responsible, under penalty of one year in prison [...] for providing written notice of his status to his landlord, his neighbors, and the superintendents of neighboring schools and public parks [...] In addition, the law permits ,all forms of public notice? including press releases, signs, flyers, and stickers on the bumper of the sex offender's car. The courts may even require that an (ex)offender convicted of a sex offense wear certain clothing (!) indicating his legal status, much like the star or yellow linen cap (!!) that Jews were required to wear in medieval princely cities" (226).
Of course, ex-sex offenders are recorded in databases that are made publicly available (and available on CD-ROM). It goes without saying that these databases are growing in size; in 1998, for example, one in 150 adult males in California was registered. However, this "data, which no one bothers to check, turns out to be wrong in many cases [...] More to the point, Megan's CD-ROM does not give the dates of the offenses-which may go back as far as 1944-nor the fact that many of these offenses have long since ceased to be criminal offenses [...]" (229).
In addition, numerous states have passed ,,two strikes" laws, under which recidivist sex offenders can be automatically imprisoned for life and forced to undergo chemical castration (!) (225). For sex offenders, the quite effective psychotherapeutic therapy methods were also massively reduced (240). Once a prison sentence has been fully served, it is nevertheless possible to be permanently (!) forcibly committed to a psychiatric ward, which differs in nothing from a high-security ward (solitary confinement, etc.). It is sufficient for this that a corresponding dangerousness is assumed (!) on the basis of a "mental abnormality" (244).
In addition, in the case of sex offenders, the media, through their sensationalism, exaggerate individual events in such a way that the middle-class idiot gets the impression that there is a corresponding 'epidemic'. In this way, a certain image of the sex offender is transported: The sex offender remains deviant and dangerous, no one talks about a possible rehabilitation, and the sentences imposed are too lax anyway (220ff.). A corresponding lynch mob is not far away. But if it then becomes known that a sex offender has moved in, it can happen that he has to be relocated because of the civil-protestant lynch mob, which is why "the California Department of Corrections is considering creating a kind of 'legal reservation? (!) where it could settle paroled sex offenders who are turned away by the population" (232)24 .
It should be emphasized that anyone who has committed or is alleged to have committed a relevant act is placed in the category of ,,sex offender," with all the consequences implied here25.
The treatment of those who have been singled out in the U.S. is a prime example of neoliberalism's war on social facts. Potentially hovering over all is the state of exception. This is increasingly becoming the norm and is extended in principle 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 to earlier times may be that today's criminal law regime with its surveillance measures no longer sets (and probably cannot set) limits for itself. Thus Wacquant writes: "In February 1999, the Virginia legislature was already debating a bill to make freely available on the Internet the complete list of everyone convicted of a criminal offense, adult and minor, and even minor traffic violations and violations of licensing and registration laws. Penal panoptism in the United States is heading toward glorious times." (245, emphasis in org.).
If the crisis-ridden bourgeois state does not achieve any success with its struggle against reality, with its practice of punishment and surveillance, and if a bourgeois paradise of virtue does not want to materialize, it only reacts with a further intensification of its practice of terror, which increases further and further into paranoid delusion. Thus, the world, which is becoming chaotic, remains misunderstood by the bourgeois penal fanatic, and in his insanity he decrees measures and ordinances, which, although they promise the salvation of "security" and "freedom" as their goal, more and more turn the whole society into a prison and thus make every freedom and security a farce.
Loïc Wacquant: Bestrafen der Armen - Zur neoliberalen Regierung der sozialen Unsicherheit, Opladen/Berlin/Toronto, Verlag Barbara Budrich, 2nd edition, 2013.
Cf. Robert Kurz: Die Substanz des Kapitals - Abstrakte Arbeit als gesellschaftliche Realmetaphysik und die absolute innere Schranke der Verwertung, Zweiter Teil, 210, in EXIT! - Crisis and Critique of Commodity Society, no. 2 (2005), 162-235.^
It is also particularly clear in the reactions to resistance to emergent capitalism in times of primordial accumulation, see e.g. Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker: The Many-Headed Hydra - The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Berlin/Hamburg 2008; see also Silvia Federici: Caliban and the WitchWomen, the Body, and Primordial Accumulation, Vienna 2012.^
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 after 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'.^
Robert Kurz: Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus - Ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft, Frankfurt 1999, 667ff. Online: https://exit-online.org/pdf/schwarzbuch.pdf. ^
Wacquant teaches at the Universitiy of California at Berkeley, see Loïcwacquant.net.^
Wacquant is not the first to present such an analysis: about a decade earlier, Nils Christie's book Crime Control as Industry - Towards Western-style Gulags, 2nd edition, Pfaffenweiler 1995, first Oslo 1993, was published. In the first edition, the subtitle still had a question mark, which was dropped in the subsequent edition, for obvious reasons.^
The experience of recent decades shows that for the core capitalist states it is true that certain developments in the United States are also addressed in Europe with a certain time lag. However, if the connection with capitalism as a whole is not reflected and if they are causally attributed to the USA, this can be a source of anti-Americanism, cf. Barbara Fried: "Anti-Americanism as Culturalization of Difference - An Attempt at an Empirical Critique of Ideology," in Associazione delle Talpe, Rosa Luxemburg Initiative Bremen (eds.): Maulwurfsarbeit II - Kritik in Zeiten zerstörter Illusionen (2012), 7088.^
132ff. More recent figures, which unsurprisingly tend to be higher today, can be found at prisonstudies.org. Moreover, about a quarter of all prisoners worldwide are in U.S. prisons, although it remains unclear how reliable the reported figures actually are. Wacquant notes, for example, that about 726 people were executed in China in 2003. If one were to count executions not ordered by the courts, however, one would arrive at 10,000-15,000, (57). 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 reported here for reasons of space; those interested will also find what they are looking for, for example, at hrw.org.^
More recent figures speak of about 7 million people who are in prison or under criminal surveillance, that is, one in 31 (!) adults.^
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.^
In the wake of the war on terrorism, the surveillance and control mania has intensified once again. The effects on civil rights etc. were already examined years ago in various books, such as Ilija Trojanow, Juli Zeh: Angriff auf die Freiheit - Sicherheitswahn, Überwachungsstaat und der Abbau bürgerlicher Rechte, Munich 2010. By no means is jihadism not to be trivialized here, as is common among some leftists; however, the anti-terrorism measures are hardly ones that are explicitly directed only against Islamism; thus Trojanow and Zeh show that those laws are now also applied in quite other areas: "The mania for control has long since left the sphere of counterterrorism 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 may be littering in the street, not disposing of dog poo properly, or selling pizza illegally [...] Parents are being spied on to find out if they are enrolling their children in a school outside their designated district. In the first half of 2008, 867 terror investigation cases were opened against everyday offenders. 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 educational 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 heading for ruin" (134 f.). In the end, everything is sacrificed for the socalled "security".
Figures from 1960-2014 can be found at http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm.^
Particularly piquant is the so-called "three-strikes law", according to which a life sentence is automatically imposed after a third conviction. In California, this applies to some 500 misdemeanors, including non-violent offenses such as simple shoplifting (!), (85).^
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 as of 07/18/2014.^
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) at prisonpolicy.org.^
Incidentally, the local offices of the Departments of Social Services are called "Job Centers" (!), (p.119). Obviously, the Clinton reforms are equivalent to the later Hartz IV reforms in Germany. ^
Cf. Roswitha Scholz: Homo Sacer und die ,Zigeuner?, Antiziganismus - Überlegungen zu einer wesentlichen und deshalb ,vergessenen? Variant of Modern Racism, in EXIT!- Crisis and Critique of Commodity Society, no. 4 (2007), 177-227, cf. also the two anthologies Antiziganistische Zustände, Münster, edited by Markus End et al. (2009) and (2013).^
Cf. the interview with Curtis Price , "In the ghettos, drugs have become the most important economic factor" in Wildcat - Circular No. 42/43 (1998).^
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 pepole", in: Detroit Metro Times of 28.11.2012. On the racism of the penal system in the U.S. see also the interview with Michelle Alexander in: Junge Welt, 25.08.2012.^
The ,,alleged" is emphasized here because consensual sex between young adults and juveniles is also considered a sex offense. In the USA, this is called statutory rape - i.e. rape under the law. 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. In the German media, corresponding reports are occasionally circulating, such as the 'case' of Kaitlyn Hunt (queer.de). It is therefore hypocritical or bottomlessly ignorant when some complain about homophobic politics in Russia and at the same time remain silent about sexual politics in the USA.
Systematically this topic (and the parallel developments in Europe/Germany) was worked up in the German-speaking countries by Max Roth: Uncle Sams's Sexualhölle erobert die Welt - Die neue
Hexenjagd auf ,Kinderschänder? und die weltweite Enthumanisierung des Sexualstrafrechts unter USDiktat, published by the anti-imperialist Ahriman-Verlag, Freiburg, 2013. Although Roth's antifeminism and crude anti-Americanism are to be criticized, the material compiled on the subject (mostly from US sources) nevertheless speaks for itself.^
Cf. Roth, ,,America's Puritan Heritage," (114-156).^
On eugenics in the U.S., see the chapter, "A Eugenic Civilization," in Jeremy Rifkin: Das biotechnische Zeitalter - Das Geschäft mit der Gentechnik, Munich 1998.^
But it did not stop there. In 2006, the so-called Adam Walsh Act was passed. This provides for the 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 declares a crime, explicitly suffice as grounds for registration. Consensual sexual contact among or with juveniles or even plain nudity in public, e.g., skinny-dipping [...] (Roth 231f.)." Mention should also be made of the current definition of ,,child pornography," which includes homemade nude pictures that under-18-year-olds exchange among themselves, cf. Roth, ,,An Islamoid Definition of Child Pornography," (240-263). This can only be described as a paranoid delusion.^
Such settlements are now a reality.^
In 2015, there were about 750,000 registered "sex-offenders" in the U.S., cf. statisticbrain.com.^
Climate catastrophe and 'freedom of consumption' - On the misery of (late) bourgeois 'discourses on freedom
by Thomas Meyer[This article is translated from the German on the Internet, https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php? tabelle=aktuelles&index=10&posnr=861.]
1.
It is not five to twelve, but five past twelve, as philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes (Žižek 2022, 285). The fact that climate change is a fact (the details may well be debated) and poses a serious threat to humanity is something that the last fool should have realized by now.1 It is also clear that the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases must be radically and rapidly reduced if the climate catastrophe is not to assume even more catastrophic proportions. This implies not only a complete transformation of the infrastructure, but also a complete change or upheaval of the way of production and life. Thus, a program of abolitions and shutdowns would be in the offing. The 'locomotive' of productive force development 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' (cf. Böttcher 2023).
Apart from how one could abolish the capitalist mode of production, how for this purpose a corresponding 'transformation movement' would have to be set up, which 'transitional society' (?) would have to be approached (and be it that 'the train' is only stopped), however, the problem of the affective defense of these facts by many people arises. The knowledge that could really be known and should lead to a rethinking and '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 falls on fertile ground (cf. Quent, Richter, Salheiser 2022).
The critique of one's own identity (work, consumption, home ownership, etc.), which is necessary for a rethinking and a change of action, is avoided by invoking a vulgar bourgeois concept of freedom. Freedom is reduced to the freedom of the consumer, which must not be restricted under any circumstances; just as little as the freedom to produce what is to be consumed. (Bourgeois) freedom, on the other hand (cf. 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.2); it was about shaping and disciplining people so that they could become a 'useful' part of a community or society. 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 Not a few philosophers held the view that man could not be free if he gave himself over to his passions without restriction. 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, guided by 'reason', also prove to be 'useful' for state and economy.
Now 'developed capitalism' (since about the Fordist boom) no longer depended on saving subjects who (had to) practice renunciation of consumption, but on consuming subjects who wanted to buy every bullshit that was produced4 (and even sensible things turn out to be bullshit in capitalism: planned obsolescence and the like - so that money is fed into the exploitation process G-W-G' as soon as possible). As propagandistic 'means of motivation' (so that the now mass-produced goods can also realize themselves as value) for this the spectacle of advertising serves, with which all the world is littered (today above all 'individualized' in the form of 'apps' etc.). 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': cf. Kurz 2020 & Koch 2021). Self-denial and discipline in working life were rewarded or 'compensated' by the fact that through one's own performance one could privately carve out a 'successful life' for oneself, which found its confirmation in being able to afford or buy this and that (vacation, car, home + 'home at the stove'). The ecological costs of Fordist mass consumption were generally not of interest even then (or were dismissed as leftist propaganda, as by Ayn Rand, for example: Rand 2017, 352ff.).
This consumerist self-centeredness was further exacerbated under neoliberalism, in which people were turned back on themselves and urged to permanently optimize themselves in order to submit to the imperatives of the (labor) market 'freely' and 'self-determined' as 'responsible citizens' who do not allow themselves to be 'patronized'. The 'responsible citizen' finds his freedom in submitting himself completely enlightened and self-determined to the capitalist dictates of crisis, 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 hothouse for antisocial affects of all kinds. The narcissistic social character proves here to be the precondition and result of unbridled consumer capitalism (cf. Wissen 2017 & Jappe 2022).
Thus, in developed capitalism, consumption no longer primarily aims at commodity-like satisfaction of needs, but is above all identity-forming. In this regard, Philipp Lepenies writes (referring to Zygmunt Bauman): "The individual no longer pursues his own needs, but satisfies desires that have been awakened in him by the producer side 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 TM). Therefore, nothing enrages the bourgeois reactionary more than 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, poor people cannot: cf. Mayr 2021). It is seen as an attack on one's own identity (what a joke, when these people at the same time shout against the 'identity politics' of the left or left-liberals). The bourgeois reactionary has earned all this himself, has worked hard for everything and therefore it is also his 'natural human right' to buy and consume what he likes. Therefore it does not work at all if the 'high achiever' is 'patronized' by the state or some alleged communists or eco-socialists (and at the same time he claims for himself to patronize the freedom of others with his freedom or to bully them, for example Hartz IV recipients).
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 that its realization had to take place within the framework of the capitalist 'enclosure of bondage' (Max Weber). This will not be elaborated en détail here (see for example: Losurdo 2010, Hentges 1999, Kurz 2004 & Landa 2021). What is decisive here is that invoking one's own so-called freedom has the effect of not wanting or being able to seriously deal 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 being able to engage with problems that require a social perspective, i.e. one where 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 - Cara Dagget coined the appropriate term petro-masculinity (2018)points to an inherent 'possibility' of bourgeois freedom itself, that is, to the possible turning of freedom into unfreedom. As Andrea Maihofer writes, "The common neoliberal rhetoric of the individual selfresponsibility of each person now means that freedom is understood by many to be only individual freedom at all. Currently this becomes clear in the protests against the Corona measures, when for example with the slogan: 'My health! My decision!' the right to individual freedom is claimed, not to wear a mask [...] to generally evade the requirements - no matter what the consequences are for oneself or for others. [...] Thus, freedom is not only understood exclusively as individual freedom, but also explicitly rejects any responsibility related to the social consequences of one's own actions. That is, the concept of freedom is increasingly used explicitly in an anti-emancipatory sense. This is not a new phenomenon, however. 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). No great surprise, then, 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 not understood as something social, as a historical social relation, possibly also not as an idea to 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, without regard to possible consequences (thus this 'freedom' has a 'business' character - consequences are 'externalized' or ignored, cf. on this 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 social- and ecologically-ignorant 'view of life' is already almost a necessary consequence and prerequisite for a successful 'adaptation performance'. This freedom, as it was propagated especially in neoliberalism as a 'leading culture', is thus nothing else than being able to autonomously fit into heteronomous conditions. The 'autonomy' consists in flexibly taking into account the tremendous dynamics of the exploitation 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 in a 'well-deserved' unlimited consumption (certainly limited only by the available money or the amount of credit), but also in the fact that one sees oneself empowered to always see oneself as the actual victim. This is probably the origin of the blatant affectation ('prohibition politics', 'ecodictatorship', etc.) when there is talk of introducing a vegetarian day in the canteen, limiting speed on freeways or abolishing domestic flights. In no case should one's own habits be reflected in any way, certainly not in connection with a certain mode of production that is destroying the planet. Philipp Lepenies once again comments on this: "However, the planned measures that the irritant words 'ban' and 'renunciation' evoke today are - and this must be clearly emphasized - reactions to the decisive fundamental crisis of our time and an increasingly urgent need for action. Not the complete change of behavior according to a certain ideology is the goal; not the equalization and suppression of other life courses. Behind ban and renounce proposals is the attempt to mitigate or reverse negative effects of our consumer behavior, which have also led to the climate catastrophe and continue to exacerbate it. The ideas for prohibition and renunciation do not stem from a perverse and sadistic desire to prohibit and call for renunciation for no reason. They are concrete proposals for saving our climate" (Lepenies 2022, 263f.).
Bans and restrictions can refer to the problem that certain production and consumption are ecologically problematic and should be abolished. It is similar to environmental protection measures: They are immanent stopgap measures that are (or must be) enforced by the state, but they do not penetrate to a radical critique of the commodity form, the self-purpose of capital accumulation. If the ecological crises are not to become further catastrophic, it makes perfect sense to insist that prohibitions and restrictions be enforced politically. 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 (cf. Hartmann 2020). Also,
debates about 'healthy and sustainable nutrition' or the like may contain a paternalistic and puritanical moment (here, some liberal critics of nudging etc. are partly right5). However, consumption cannot really be separated from production, both of which have a specifically capitalist character. Here, Lepenies would have to be criticized when he writes about "consumption behavior" and its critical questioning (and stays with it). With regard to the "already in the simple commodity form inherent disintegration of production and consumption" with the consequence of the degradation of the "consumption competence of people" Robert Kurz writes in his book against postmodern lifestyle leftists (some of whom were so narrow-minded in the 90s to have 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-aesthetized, functionally oriented social space. From the grotesque incomprehensibility of the often real-satirical instructions for use to the perpetual 'uncomfortableness' of public spaces, this disqualifying expropriation of consumption competence is evident at all levels. The professional idiots are always also consumer idiots and vice versa. The universalism of commodities can therefore not correspond to a universality of individuals [...]" (Kurz 1999a, 155ff.).
What is to be consumed is present in a reified form, it is the materialization of the value abstraction; the 'addressee' is the disenfranchised, isolated and alienated subject. 'Use-value', often asserted only as a promise of use-value, is shaped and realized by managerial rationality. Not the common production of use-values, which can be crunched together, is the goal, but that on the managerial level a single capital asserts itself in the competition by the successful sale of the goods and thus books 'profit' for itself, in order to then be able to continue with the production and realization of (sur)value forever (G-W-G'-W'G''...). The goal of production is mediated on the overall social level with the irrational and abstract purpose of the overall capitalist event, to increase capital/money for its own sake. What happens with the goods after the sale, whether the promise of use value is really kept - if this was not only clumsy propaganda anyway -, where the individual parts for the production of this commodity came from and how these were produced again etc., does not interest the individual capital, just as little the disposal of the same and all 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 and to buy what is to be sold. What can be chosen for consumption has already long been 'decided' as a choice 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 about the content of production), they become, even in consumption, objects of managerial rationality, to which nothing is further away
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, but always the other way around. If it were otherwise, then the members of society would have to agree in advance on the satisfaction of their needs and then organize production; in other words, in the social-institutional sense (not directly from the activity of the individuals) there would have to exist an identity of producers and consumers. Then, of course, demand would no longer be a demand for commodities, but 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 did not want to pronounce prohibitions and renunciations alone and appeal to an abstract common responsibility or to a kind of socio-ecological public spirit.
When talking about needs and their realization, this has to be done in the context of the formdeterminacy 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. 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 (1942): "The idea, for instance, that cinema, along with housing and food, is necessary for the reproduction of labor power, is 'true' only in a world that directs people toward the reproduction of labor power and forces their needs into harmony with the profit and domination interests of entrepreneurs" (Adorno 2015, 394) or at the level of the overall social context with the imperatives of capital accumulation. Necessity is thus relative, as it implies a necessity for the bourgeois subject.
On the one hand, needs are compensatory, since their realization promises identity and self-realization through freedom of consumption - and insofar necessary for the readjustment and reproduction of human beings as variable capital -; on the other hand, the realization of truly necessary social and material needs is counteracted by the form determination of capital. Their realization, if 'materially' sufficiently available at all or affordable by the needy, 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 eating are necessary, in contrast to, say, air travel and individual transport, in that they refer to generic properties of human beings. However, 'generic property' is not to be understood in a naturalizing way here. In Agnes Heller's words, "'natural needs' [... ] refer to the simple preservation of human life (self-preservation). They are 'natural necessities' simply because man, without satisfying them, cannot maintain himself as a mere natural being. They are not identical with the animal needs, because man as a natural being needs for self-preservation also such conditions (heating, clothing), for which the animal has no 'need'. Thus, the needs necessary for the preservation of man as a natural being are also social [...]. The manner of satisfaction socializes the need itself" (Heller 2022, 18f.).
Although nature and thus 'natural needs' cannot be absorbed into 'discourse' or conceived only as something 'socially constructed', both are always already mediated by society and history. In Adorno's words: "Every drive is so socially mediated that its naturalness never appears directly, but always only as produced by society. The appeal to nature in the face of a need is always merely the mask of denial and domination" (ibid., 392). Naturalizations usually had to do with the legitimation of domination. Whereas in the Middle Ages, for example, domination and hierarchy were justified with 'God', in bourgeois 'enlightened' society this was done with 'nature' (or with what one thought to have grasped of it). In this way, racism, sexism, eugenics, and others were 'scientifically' justified (see, for example, Reimann 2017, Gould 2016, Weingart et al. 1992, Honegger 1991).
It is precisely the specifically capitalist socialization of needs and their realization that must come into the focus of critique if certain consumptions and productions are to be restricted or banned. These alone may fizzle out as ineffectively as state environmental protection laws; but it does not change the fact that the corresponding discourses as to why such abolitions and shutdowns would have to be addressed are related to the climate catastrophe and the urgent need for action - and it is precisely this insight that is a priori affectively repelled. But an abolition of the capitalist mode of production, of the self-purpose of capital accumulations (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 compartmentalization and violence: Koester 2019).
3. The realization of needs that are not offered by the market and/or are not profitable, the planning and
discussion of production contents that are not determined by the exploitation movement of capital, are not a component of bourgeois freedom: "the claim to conscious social sociality is considered a sin against the holy spirit of an asocial, blind social machine that has been declared again and again to be natural law" (Kurz 1999b, 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 to be 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 (this is how simply Hayek's redundant works can be summarized). The framework in which bourgeois freedoms are realized is the exploitation movement of capital: "Nothing may be thought, written, done, or made that would go beyond this society [...]" (Adorno 2015, 395). One gets recognition (and even this has to be fought for and is by no means selfevident - 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 to be an agent of abstract labor. The civil liberties and thus also the human rights are thus valid only under reservation (if they are valid at all - as is well known, capitalism also runs without them). Their validity and enforcement is dependent on a successful accumulation of capital and thus on a financing state, by which people are previously incorporated as variable capital and by which they are administered as subjects of the state. In the crisis, this caveat becomes particularly evident if people's existence is to be profitable. Bourgeois recognition thus presupposes a fundamental non-recognition of people as corporeal beings. This is very clearly shown (besides the situation of refugees and the "punishment of the poor": Böttcher 2016 & Wacquant 2004) by euthanasia debates. 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, choosing euthanasia is by no means 'only' for the terminally ill, but also for people who are lonely or poor, who do not want to be a burden on their family, or who simply no longer see any sense.6 Economists rejoice that the costs of the health care system are thereby reduced!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. Therefore, she has now applied for active euthanasia. The reason she gives is that her savings would only last for five months. She does not really want to die, but the hopelessness of her situation and the lack of financial support have led her to do so. "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 does not provide safeguards. Nor are relatives allowed to be informed. Instead, health personnel are urged to suggest assisted killing even to those who have not considered the procedure on their own. Not surprisingly, people who need costly treatment but do not receive adequate state support are targeted here. "9 So-called bioethicists and pediatricians (!) also called for the expansion of euthanasia: "Some Canadian pediatricians and bioethicists argue in an essay published in the Journal of Medical Ethics (!)10 , for example, that killing on demand should be classified as a palliative end-of-life treatment and thus be part of health care. Consequently, the 'treatment' would also not have to be preceded by any special information or forceful determination of the ability to form a
will. If euthanasia is now considered to be 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 required to make patients aware of all the options available to them as part of health care - thus including active euthanasia. The authors further argue that minors capable of giving consent should be allowed to make decisions without parental consent, if necessary. "11 The 'self-determined' liquidation of people as "part of health care"! Orwellian neo-speak really cannot be any more perfidious than this!!!
The euthanasia discourse in Canada thus had a similar course as that in the Netherlands (van Loenen 2009). However, this was "more ruthlessly and rapidly pursued" in Canada (Yuill 2022) than elsewhere. In the Netherlands, the legalization of so-called euthanasia did not lead to an end to 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 old people, why not to young people? If it is granted to the terminally ill, why not to depressives or simply to people who no longer see any meaning in their lives because they are lonely? Or because they are poor. Or threatened by homelessness (!!)!12 It is not chronic pain, disability or illness that drive some people to 'euthanasia', but poverty and lack of perspective. Not because they want to die, but because they see no way out.13
Those who are superfluous for capitalism and those who are not (more) exploitable are denied all right to exist; above all - and this is particularly disgusting - legitimized by bioethics or similar. How disgusting that euthanasia henchmen even dare to publish a propaganda brochure for children!14 So that children learn to regard it as 'normal' that grandpa or the disabled brother are murdered for reasons of cost? In the end, the 'superfluous' and 'human cost factors' are to be 'disposed of' just like unsold tomatoes. Freedom in capitalism is in the last instance nothing else than the freedom to die!
So one still dares to talk about freedom and self-determination without realizing and radically criticizing the logic of the capitalist social system at all, which always objectively calls both into question and makes the submission and internalization of the exploitation imperatives of capital the precondition of all freedom and self-determination! This all the more, if the speech of freedom and self-determination is in the sense of consumption 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 1999b, 648) of capital accumulation. For the bourgeois philistine, everything should remain as usual (although it is more and more 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 called into question. In order to stop or at least (!) mitigate the climate collapse, all kinds of things have to be questioned...
If, on the other hand, there should be talk of freedom, then in a completely different sense. In the words
of Robert Kurz: "Freedom would consist solely in the fact that the people who come together for the reproduction of their life do this not only voluntarily, but also consult and decide together about the content as well as about the procedure. [...] Such freedom, which would be the exact opposite of liberal universal servitude under the dictates of labor markets, is in principle practically possible at all levels and aggregations of social reproduction-from the household to the transcontinental networking of 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 realized by now (e.g. the Taz editor Ulrike Herrmann, who in her new book advocates a war economy, as it existed in the UK during World War II, as an alleged means to overcome capitalism and its destructive exploitation dynamics; for a critique see Konicz 2022a). The fact that people 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-utilization; also to self-blasphemy and finally - as the euthanasia debates show with clarity - the freedom to death.
To evade the radical critique of the existing and the crises and catastrophes that go along with it through affectation and freedom mumbo-jumbo in order to hold on to a historical model that is being phased out is indeed somewhat suicidal 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. Ultimately, death is unconsciously sought as a way out of the increasing social contradictions that, after all, pervade every individual. The nothingness of death thus becomes the last rest in the face of the escalating contradictions of the late capitalist permanent crisis and the accompanying abyss between increasing renunciation of drives and social requirements that can hardly be fulfilled anymore. [...] The death drive latently inherent in capital, manifest in its lethal 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 equal to the black eye 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 the commodity form and exploited by sale on the market will be consigned to destruction in times of crisis rather than loosening the grip of the world exploitation machine on man and nature. The destruction of unsaleable goods in times of crisis, which in the meantime are also increasingly withdrawn from the access of impoverished people by corresponding legal regulations (for example, by laws against 'containerizing'), forms only the obvious outflow of this urge for selfdestruction" (Konicz 2022b, 79f.).
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https://www.deutsches-klima-konsortium.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdfs/Publikationen_DKK/ basisfakten-klimawandel.pdf ^
For a historical overview (focusing on Germany), cf. Richter, Siebold, Weeber 2016.^.
On the other hand, on the disciplinary history of modernity, cf. e.g.: Dreßen 1982, Pfeisinger 2006, van Ussel 1970 & Rutschky 1977.^
Cf. for example the Chinese fast fashion company Shein. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shein_(company) ^
Cf: Consumer Issues in Focus - A Special Issue of Novo Arguments for Progress, 2016, https://www.novoargumente.com/images/uploads/pdf/novo_plus_1_inhaltsverzeichnis.pdf ^
https://www.imabe.org/bioethikaktuell/einzelansicht/kanada-sinnloses-leben-und-einsamkeit-sindgruende-fuer-aktive-sterbehilfe ^
https://www.imabe.org/bioethikaktuell/einzelansicht/sterbehilfe-spart-kosten-kanadas-oekonomenfavorisieren-sterbehilfe-ausweitung ^
https://www.imabe.org/bioethikaktuell/einzelansicht/kanada-euthanasie-auch-fuer-long-covidpatienten ^
https://www.stern.de/gesundheit/-haben-sie-schon-mal-ueber-sterbehilfe-nachgedacht--teurepatienten-offenbar-zum-assistierten-suizid-ueberredet-32628792.html ^
https://jme.bmj.com/content/45/1/60?papetoc= ^
https://www.ief.at/kanada-ueberlegt-sterbehilfe-fuer-minderjaehrige/ ^
https://ottawa.citynews.ca/local-news/ontario-man-applying-for-medically-assisted-death-asalternative-to-being-homeless-5953116 ^
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.^
https://www.virtualhospice.ca/maid/media/3bdlkrve/maid-activity-book.pdf ^