The discussion about Corona by Herbert
Böttcher[This article published in early May 2020 is translated from the German on the Internet, EXIT! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft.]
Since our first text on Corona in the crisis of capitalism, some of the fears expressed have already been confirmed. The discussion has continued. New facets are coming to the fore. Some of them are worthy of the following remarks:
In the debate on Corona, Bundestag President Schäuble warns against giving absolute priority to the "protection of life" over other goods1. This cannot be contradicted from a 'heaven of principles' in which supposedly timeless truths are turned back and forth. And so those who are professionally and vocationally entrusted with supra-temporal truths and familiar figures such as philosophers and theologians have also hastened to agree with Schäuble.
In their insistence on general truths, they are all more or less heirs of Kant's ethics. His ethics are based on a purely formal principle: acting out of free will. He is free because he is not bound to any other principle than that of reason and in this he acquires that general validity that is expressed in the categorical imperative. The duties arising from the pure form of the categorical imperative, however, are unfortunately duties that must be fulfilled in the earthly world. They cannot remain 'pure form', but must be connected with material contents, with contents from the sensual-empirical world. Thus, in Kantian terms, a power of judgement is required that subordinates and subordinates the particular of the empirical-sensual world to the general, that is, to the general truths from the timeless heaven of principles.
It is precisely at this point that it becomes clear that the heaven of principles is by no means as timelessly innocent as it may appear at first glance. In the appearance of universally valid truths, that which in historical reality represents the universally binding law of reason, the law of value and the sexual separation associated with it, appears in a highly earthly manner. The historical form of the value-splitting society has always been assumed without reflection when it comes to the ethical weighing up of goods that are in competition with each other.
This insight sheds light on the darkness of enlightened ethics and its reasoning about which of the contingent goods deserve to be given preference. Then Schäuble's sensational statement that there can be no absolute in the realm of contingency - not even the good of life - proves to be as self-evident as it is banal. It becomes problematic, however, because it aims at the crisis of capitalism, which has been further intensified by Corona. Politicians seem to want to protect the lives of their own citizens from Corona with a huge national debt. It is precisely this that shows that the life of the capitalist general public is dependent on the production of goods and the fulfillment of the tasks associated with the reproduction of life. The motor of exploitation as well as the motor of reproduction must therefore be restarted as quickly as possible if capitalism is not to
completely run into the wall. It is precisely this highly earthly purpose that the banal selfevident things from the heaven of principles should pave the way for. For this purpose, not even the platitudinous hint that the inviolability of human dignity does not exclude "that we must die" is too embarrassing.
Under the pressure of the crisis, this also applies more and more clearly to the non-usable in the capitalist centers, in times of corona not least to the sick and old, who represent a burden for the process of exploitation. This is precisely what Schäuble has once again talked about and reminded us of, both banal and cynical. Not 'man as such' is an end in capitalism, but the increase of capital for its own sake. And this is considered 'absolute' despite the contingency of its historical form and thus a fetish that insists on the fulfillment of the corresponding 'moral' duties.
In the context of a return to capitalist normality as quickly as possible, the implemented loosening moves, which are accompanied by ever new demands for loosening. The infection of 300 - one third - of the cheap laborers from Romania employed at Müller Fleisch in Pforzheim shows where they can lead. At the same time it becomes clear how unequally risks and burdens are distributed in this normality - an inequality that is further aggravated by Corona, which is life-threatening.3
In the debates about easing the rules, concerns of virologists are wiped away with hints, since wrong political decisions can be revised. In view of the spread of the virus this would not be so easy. A deceptive certainty seems to suggest that the reproduction rate will fall, so that warnings of a second wave of infection are played down or ignored. The Easter holidays have already shown a slight increase in the reproduction rate4. Above all, in the event of a second wave of infection - because the virus spreads not only in individual hotspots, but throughout the country - it would have much better starting conditions and could have more serious consequences than the first wave.
Political decision-makers are not only under pressure from the economic crisis, but also from those who are pressing for a return to the 'normality' of everyday capitalist life. There is some evidence that under this pressure the political debate - emphasizing the autonomy of political action - is separating from the debate about scientific assessments of the danger of the virus. Political assessments of different virological expertise are being replaced by the discrediting of scientists. In familiar hostility to theory and reflection, rational considerations threaten to disappear behind mixtures of 'gut feeling', 'common sense' and 'popular feeling', accompanied by conspiracy ideological considerations. This does not deny that loosening up is useful and necessary when it comes to meeting people in isolated old people's homes or when it comes to accompanying the sick and especially the dying. However, there is often a lack of appropriate protective measures, including sufficient tests and protective clothing for visitors, nursing staff and doctors, which is not least a consequence of the economic calculations associated with the neoliberal reforms.
In a situation in which 'joining forces' and cooperation would be important, tendencies towards political isolation are becoming apparent. The fact that the USA is stopping
payments to the WHO is just as wrong a sign as the absence of the USA and Russia from the conference to develop a vaccine. Above all, it is an illusion to be able to save oneself from the virus by leaving collapsing countries to their own devices. The fight against the virus will not be won with compartmentalization and nationalist isolation. Those who are rightly concerned about surveillance, authoritarian state and state of emergency should focus their concerns on the period of return to capitalist crisis normality.
There is a danger that authoritarian measures tested in the Corona crisis will then be imposed in order to get a grip on the reality of the capitalist crisis with its social distortions. There is also a danger that these measures will be approved precisely when they are intended to safeguard capitalist crisis normality, as if they were 'only' intended to contain the corona virus. The normality of the state of emergency for refugees has not yet been disrupted by any liberal party.
There are parallels with 9/11: Even the measures that were adopted head over heels at that time are still being applied today in areas that have nothing to do with terrorism, and they have been retained even though they have proved ineffective as measures to combat terrorism. It is therefore obvious that the technical and repressive possibilities offered by, for example, the 'corona app' or a lifelong (!) existing digital biometric 'vaccination certificate'5 are by no means based on 'corona specificity'.
In essence, the reference to the relativity of life appeals to something familiar to capitalism, the willingness - and if you are not willing, then I need violence - to sacrifice life. Thus - despite all the experiences from the two world wars - the discussion about worldwide German military operations was accompanied by appeals that soldiers must be prepared to give their lives. Solidarity also demands sacrifices. Peter Jungen from Peter Jungen Holding GmbH, a business angel investor in Europe, the USA and China, made it clear what this meant: "Solidarity means keeping rules "2. What is meant is Italy, which should pay back its debts. Crisis and questions about connections or not - debts must be paid. This is all the more true as Italy has refused to implement structural reforms despite its debt. The fact that even greater savings in the health care system would have caused even more people to die is the sacrifice that must be made to the law of values.
Killing in order to fulfill the economic and political obligations that go with it, making people redundant, driving them away and destroying the natural foundations of life globally, all this is an expression of the capitalist obligation to sacrifice - preferably out of insight and free will, if necessary forced - in a system in which it has always been decided, as it were, a priori that the value of life is 'absolutely' nothing to the unworthy. It should raise awareness if some demand that tracking programs should be mandatory6 or that data should also be collected from non-infected persons.7
The extent to which even supposedly critical thinking is integrated into the forms of thought associated with the value-division society is made clear in an interview with Marlehn Thieme, the president of Welthungerhilfe8 . She refers to "the disastrous interplay of the corona pandemic, armed conflicts and climate change", which "leads to a famine catastrophe of the greatest magnitude". And yet everything depends on the
exploitation process: "Even with one percent less economic growth, the number of poor and starving people could increase by 2 percent." Conversely, this means: We need 'growth' - no matter what kind of destruction that entails.9
In the discussion about crisis capitalism in Corona times, the hopeless jumping back and forth between polarities seems to take place ever more quickly and confusingly. Sometimes the state protects life, sometimes it relaxes it in the interest of the functioning of the economy - and that too serves to protect life, because all other values, the entire canon of values in the constitution, depend on the exploitation of capital. On the one hand, there are complaints that digitalization in schools has not progressed far enough. At the same time, there are complaints about the psychological and socio-psychological burdens caused by the lack of face-to-face communication, because they increase the pressure to relax the rules. The political forces are torn between relaxation and state of emergency. It is quickly overlooked that even authoritarian politics has its limits. It has to assert itself in the face of dwindling resources and by means of savage apparatuses, and it also encounters a collapsing functional intelligence, as can be seen in the opening of schools. The tangled back and forth and then again the turning in circles is an expression of the confused and confusing conditions that are fired by Corona but not created with Corona.
Some leftists move close to those who see an opportunity in the crisis. It is said that every crisis is associated with a kairos, a favorable time for a turnaround. With the collapse of Corona - as a perverted Badiou event, so to speak - we make the existential experience that our everyday life can change "from one day to the next". Then something else can change as well: the activities that are invisible beneath the fetish of goods, such as nursing, become visible and appear in the light of systemic relevance. The savings in the health system turn out to be a mistake. Politics rescues companies, why shouldn't it be possible to democratize them? After all, measures that Corona suggests could be made permanent: In other words, "taking the healthcare system away from the market, obliging large companies to orient their economic activities to the common good, would be a step in the direction of infrastructure socialism". If it were that simple: Corona blows away the crisis, including the value-division society, its thinking and socio-psychological conditioning. and all will be well.
It wasn't Corona that blew our minds. That was lost with the collapse of theoretical reflection and the pragmatism associated with it even before Corona. This loss is one of the pre-existing conditions the virus encountered. The effort to become theoretically capable would be an indispensable prerequisite for a process of recovery and change that does not dream and wish for itself, but recognizes and negates what constitutes capitalism and thus creates the conditions for a transformation based on the negation of the valuedivision society. Only then would Corona have become a kairos.
Corona and the collapse of modernisation
by Roswitha Scholz for the editorial office of exit! & Herbert Böttcher for the executive board ofexit! and for the Ecumenical Network at the end of March 2020
[This article published at the end of March 2020 is translated from the German on the Internet, EXIT! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft.]
Corona is the trigger but not the cause of the worsening crisis situation. It will accelerate the disintegration of capitalism. In contrast to the crisis of 2007/8, which came to a head at the 'systemically important' banks, the real economy must now also be given billions in aid. What is needed is once again the (social) state, which in the triumph of neoliberalism was discredited as a social hammock and a ball and chain in the competition between locations. What had puffed up as a successful model of location- and 'financedriven' capitalism was itself nothing more than a strategy for stretching the crisis of capitalism. It is therefore no coincidence that Corona is confronted with a partially privatized health care system that has been damaged by austerity, and in the crisis regions with the in part complete collapse of market and state structures.
As early as the first neo-liberal experiments in the 1970s, which Augusto Pinochetsupported by the Chicago boys around Milton Friedman - carried out in Chile under a murderous military dictatorship, critics noted that the motto being followed here was 'enslaving the welfare state'. "Police state makes free. In fact, the further history of neoliberalism was also connected with intensifying repression, especially against people who became superfluous for the exploitation of capital: from the unemployed and precariously employed, to the refugees and the unprofitable sick and old. Exclusion and repression are not simply products of neoliberal capitalism, but are due to the link between capitalism and democracy, between liberalism and repression, which is the basis of the 'state of emergency'. In recent decades, the 'state of emergency' has increasingly become the 'normal state', especially for refugees. Under the pressure of the Corona crisis, there have been collective forced deportations from Greece to Turkey. It is to be feared that the state repressions already practiced at Corona will intensify - combined with an increasing savagery of the police and judiciary (corruption, mafia connections, etc.).
Just like the 2015 'welcome culture', this time the invocations of solidarity cannot be trusted. Nobody in political circles has come up with the idea that the 'income' of the homeless and beggars should be improved in the Corona crisis. Their chances of receiving donations from passers-by and/or collecting bottles are drastically reduced. Nor was any thought of solidarity wasted politically on supporting people who are dependent on Hartz IV and basic security in old age and who are confronted with a worsening food situation through the hoarding of cheap products to the point of the breakdown of tables and soup kitchens. In the best case, political solidarity extends to those who are usable and 'systemically relevant' and, when the chips are down, to the elderly who are to spend their well-earned retirement after a working life.
In this situation women in particular are in demand as 'cleaners' of the crisis. In this role
they are currently receiving a lot of attention. It should be remembered, however, that this recognition comes at a time when the capitalist patriarchy is disintegrating. In this phase, women are more and more involved in the struggle for survival. Their importance and function should therefore be reflected within this context, rather than simply demanding the upgrading of women's work and appropriate remuneration. The entire fundamental crisis process should be the starting point for analysis and also for considerations of intervention.
In the meantime, there are more and more voices demanding liberal freedoms, which at the same time point out that a return to normality must be prepared in the interest of the economy. To this end, they are also prepared to sacrifice people in Social Darwinian madness. It is precisely old people who are denied the right to life.1 Not surprisingly, socalled 'business ethicists', such as Dominik H. Enste in the Tagesspielgel (24.3.2020), also have their say. In utilitarian logic he warns that health should not be too expensive. He refers to the British as an example: They "have clearly defined what the extension of a life may cost: 30,000 pounds, in exceptions up to 70,000 or 80,000 pounds." It doesn't take much imagination to imagine that demands for selection of 'human cost factors' will continue to increase in the future.
We need to prepare for the hour when the supposed normality of capitalism is to be restored and the economy is to be revived. It is to be feared that this will lead to further social restrictions and changes.
It is to be feared that this will lead to further social restrictions and upheavals, which may also lead to unrest and looting, as is already happening in Sicily. In order to cope with this, the police and military are ready for a 'state of emergency'. For their use, there are plans by the US Department of Justice to detain people indefinitely and without trial.2 This would extend Guantanamo to the whole of society. The current discussions in Germany show the tendency that the relaxation of the 'state of emergency' for society as a whole should be accompanied by a 'state of emergency' for the elderly and risk groups, i.e. their isolation.
Isolation and further waves of impoverishment, repression and wildness are exposed to people who have been turned into competitive personal companies in the context of individualization. Medium-sized companies in particular are torn between stress, which has mutated into a status symbol, and the relaxation imperatives of the self-discovery industry, in which relaxation becomes a top performance, without being able to find an intact and healing self. The socio-psychological consequences of isolation are already becoming apparent in the form of depression and escalating violence, especially against women, in the face of situations in which people are completely thrown back on themselves and their immediate environment. The less the usual normality returns and the more impoverishment and social decline spread, the more the subject of competition, which is oriented towards the 'fight of all against all', is in danger of ending up in a Social Darwinist struggle without regard for losses.
What Robert Kurz has described in many of his books, and what we know above all from the global regions of decay, will probably now also be experienced by us in a truly
sensual way. From social movements to the left, positions of crisis and collapse such as the critique of value separation have not been and are not taken seriously, or even ignored completely. However, dubious conspiracy fantasies like Dirk Müller's ("Mr. Dax") and collapse analyses like those of Friedrich/Weik are in circulation, which after the "biggest crash of all times" are striving for a new, now better functioning capitalism. Leftists throw themselves into a hyper-social-democratism with Green New Deal, redistribution, expropriation etc., which remains within the form. Or: all of humanity is declared the working class against the "one percent" of the possessing and all evil is not fixed in capitalism and its "processive contradiction", but above all in neoliberalism.
The occupation of the poles of market and state, which changes according to the course of the crisis, becomes less and less possible, because in the worsening course of the crisis it also encounters its immanent limits more and more sharply. A return to the nation state would be fatal. The closing of borders testifies to helplessness and is rather a substitute action. Instead, pragmatism and cooperation on an international scale would be called for to contain the current crisis, which is coming to a head on Corona. Research, transfer of goods etc., production of vital things would have to be regulated beyond national borders, unbureaucratically and free of charge, to counteract further barbaric consequences. The forced situation requires mutual assistance and cooperation. Such pragmatism and such cooperation should not, however, be confused with the appearance of another society. It can only come into view when thinking and acting leads to a break with the forms of the value-division-society.
The economy for faith healers
A polemical overview of the adaptation achievements of capitalist ideology in times of the manifest climate crisis.
by Tomasz Konicz"Ideology does not overlap social existence as a removable layer, but dwells within him." Adorno, Negative Dialectic
[This article published in March 2020 is translated from the German on the Internet, EXIT! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft.]
In the face of the climate crisis, humanity's confidence in capitalism as the best of all possible worlds is melting away even faster than the icebergs and glaciers of the Arctic. It is "an alarming result" that a comprehensive global survey of confidence in the capitalist economic order has revealed, a spokeswoman for the "communications company" Edelman declared in January 2020.1
In the annual "Trust Barometer", in which 34,000 people from 28 countries are asked about their trust in the capitalist economy, a majority of respondents2 expressed a predominantly negative opinion on the market economy for the first time. Germany is in line with the global trend critical of capitalism. The system has more disadvantages than
advantages - 55 percent of the survey participants in the Federal Republic of Germany also agree with this opinion. Only 12 percent of Germans said they would benefit from a growing economy.
The survey left it unclear what the German citizens surveyed actually understand by capitalism, as around 75 percent also stated that their own employer was their "most trustworthy partner". For the study's authors, however, this ambivalence was no reason to dispense with the explicit warning of a crisis of legitimacy for capitalism, as people are looking for answers to the "big questions" in the face of the climate crisis and "technological change", according to a company spokeswoman: "However, because the economy has not yet provided sufficient answers, more and more people are questioning the capitalist system itself".
This increasing "search for answers", which is causing alarm bells to ring at the communications company Edelman, is a reaction to the worsening socio-ecological systemic crisis, which is taking place in interaction between the inner3 and outer4 barriers to the developmental capacity of the capitalist world system; in other words, the inability of capital to effectively counter the production of an economically superfluous humanity while at the same time ecologically devastating the planet.
In spite of all the constant ideological propaganda, it is now dawning on the majority of the world's population that the social system in which they are forced to live is the cause of the increasing, simply catastrophic phenomena of crisis5 , which are becoming more intense6 every year.
This looming crisis of legitimacy of the capitalist world system increases the market demand in the media industry for new patterns of legitimacy, for new ideological narratives with which the system could be justified. The manifest climate crisis, in which capital burns entire continents for the sake of boundless self-proliferation7 , is thus also the great time of new ideas and patterns of argumentation with which the wrong whole is to be legitimized in spite of all catastrophes. The present manifest time of crisis is thus also the great time of the faith healers of capitalism.
Dare more capitalism
What can still avert the crash into the climate catastrophe that is threatening to happen as a result of the obligation to exploit capital? The ruling ideology has an answer: more capitalism, of course! The business columnist of the most popular German information portal therefore asked himself8 in mid-January whether capitalism would still "save us".
In view of the obvious connections and facts, there is no longer any attempt to divert attention from the causes of the climate crisis. Of course, "capitalism is to blame", explained columnist Henrik Müller in his article, since without the "unleashing of productivity and the pursuit of profit in ever wider parts of the globe" the "planetary gas shell would probably not have warmed up "to the extent" that it does now. What to do? Logic would dictate that serious thought be given to social alternatives, to ways of
transforming the system.
But a professor of economic journalism is not to be misled by such logic. Müller therefore sees the very system that leads humanity to the edge of the ecological abyss as the panacea for itself. Capitalism, he says, is "the best hope in the fight against climate change. Neither "individual moral behavior" nor politics is capable of saving the world's climate, the professor declared in a self-censorship of thought characteristic of business journalists, who are not allowed to dawn on any alternative courses of action beyond the health food store or the ballot box.
After the options for action were implicitly limited to "morality and altruism", it is now solemnly declared that it is not "morality and altruism" that is called for, but "profitseeking, risk prevention and regulation" in order to turn a "moral problem" (as if Australia's fire disaster, for example, had been caused by a moral deficit) into an "economic problem" (which climate change has been from the beginning and continues to be). The "much-maligned capital markets" in particular would play a central role here, Müller explained in view of the last elite meeting in Davos.
Mr Blackrock, take over!
In the opinion of the professor, the elites would fix it. The head of the world's largest asset manager, Larry Fink, had written a letter. In it, Fink warns that all those "companies and countries" that "neither adapt to the needs of their stakeholders nor address sustainability risks" would be punished by the financial markets with a "growing skepticism" that would manifest itself in "higher capital costs". Companies that would "clean up" would now find it easier to make money, as Mr. Blackrock, who manages seven trillion dollars of investor money, would reward them with a lower cost of capital, while dirty people would face competitive disadvantages. This would lead to the "greening of capitalism" as business with ecologically harmful goods and services would become a risk ("stranded assets"), according to the professor of business journalism in the best of all possible worlds.
The climate problem is "at the heart of capitalism", the system is "mobilizing its defenses". Investors and financial market regulators are now exerting pressure because the climate crisis is not only affecting people and nature, but also - what a horror!threaten financial stability. Capitalism is good at adapting, Müller said. Since capitalists prefer to invest their "money" where it yields "the safest possible returns", they would now "defend themselves" against climate change, as it creates "fundamental uncertainty". Hooray, everything will be fine. Why demonstrate, organize? Mr. Blackrock, who loves to write, will fix it.
These remarks make it clear how ideology works. They are not flat lies, but half-truths or distortions of social reality, which are spread - often unconsciously - for the purpose of legitimacy. Of course, capitalists want to invest their money "safely", but at the same time they must achieve the highest possible returns if they do not want to be lost in competition with other capitalists. This market-mediated compulsion to make more money out of money constitutes the capitalist system's compulsion to grow. And it is
precisely to this that capital cannot adapt itself, because it cannot adapt itself to itself.
Capital as a social production relationship is precisely money, which must become more money through investment.
Müller thus presents only those aspects of the financial sphere that fit into his argumentation, but in his apologetics of capitalism he ignores the compulsion for growth and exploitation as the essence of capital. And it is precisely to this, the compulsion of exploitation, that capital cannot adapt itself, that is, overcome it without negating itself.
This can also be illustrated concretely: The investments made by the financial sector are ultimately linked to the production of goods, where added value is generated through the exploitation of wage labor. For this reason, the actions of many powerful financial players, whom German business journalism stylizes as salvationists in the climate crisis, are characterized by blatant schizophrenia, as the example of JP Morgan9 shows. In internal assessments, the economists of the major bank now warn that climate change poses an existential threat to humanity. So how does JP Morgan actually adapt to this "fundamental uncertainty" (Müller)? Is the "much scolded" financial industry really pushing the economy towards an ecological turnaround?
At the same time the bank is the world's largest financier of fossil energy projects, according to the British Guardian. Since the conclusion of the Paris Climate Agreement alone, JP Morgan has provided oil and gas companies with around 75 billion euros to promote fossil fuels. While the economists of the major bank literally warn of the end of humanity, more money must be made from money by means of financial investmentswhich blatantly illustrates the destructive, fetishistic momentum of capital.
The mad idea ventilated by Müller, according to which parts of capital could somehow cancel or revise the self-destructive tendencies of capital, is not new. For a time, the insurance industry was considered a natural ally of the ecological movement, as it was particularly hard hit by the destruction caused by increasing extreme weather events, as Spiegel-Online reported in an article published in 200710 , quoting top managers in the insurance industry who wanted to put climate change "at the top of the agenda" and advocated a "reduction in carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions".
The results of these public demands by the insurance industry for consistent climate protection are well known. Not only have CO2 emissions continued to rise briskly worldwide since 2007, but the industry itself continues to participate in climate-damaging projects - precisely because more money has to be made from money. Allianz, for example, supports coal production11 in Poland, a country that is one of Europe's biggest climate sinners alongside the Federal Republic of Germany.
In general, the idea that a high-ranking economic functionary could, by means of a letter or an expression of opinion, order a fundamental reorientation of the exploitation dynamics of the entire capitalist world system, as it were, by way of a Uka, is based on an absurd overestimation of the power resources of the upper management caste, whose subjectively existing subtlety of action consists only in the optimization of the objectively
given dynamics of accumulation - with which Müller unintentionally promotes a personification of the subjectless rule of capital, which is in vogue in many acute crisis ideologies (if at all, then the bourgeois state in its role as "ideal total capitalist" would have the function of enforcing the ecological turnaround in order to preserve the system).
Müller thus shares the apologetic belief in the omnipotence of the capitalist with the abridged or supposed criticism of capitalism, which the late capitalist world can only understand as an eternal world conspiracy. Thus, German economic journalism seems to have a tendency towards a certain shortened apologetics of capitalism, which reproduces the widespread, often drifting into conspiracy fears, shortened criticism of capitalism in a mirror image.
Reformist Projections
The idea that powerful actors from the financial sphere will be able to bring the "dirty" fossil economy to its senses was expanded by the daily newspaper12 (taz), close to the Greens, during the disputes over Siemens' business with the operators of Australian coal mines by a further variant, according to which there were climate-friendly "institutional investors" such as "pension funds, church funds or insurance companies" who thought in the long term, demanded a gradual ecological change and which even Siemens boss Joe Kaeser could no longer ignore.
According to the report, "such as Axa, Union Investment, the pension fund of the Church of England or Caritas" had joined forces to form the alliance "Climate Action 100", for example, which now manages a total of 35 trillion dollars and holds "shares in Siemens, BASF, Heidelberg Cement, Daimler, BMW, Eon, RWE, VW and Thyssenkrupp". A withdrawal of the capital of these institutional investors would be "a clear public signal, also to other companies that have climate walls in their portfolio", according to the taz. But at the same time, the taz had to admit that these institutional investors could hardly withdraw their capital, since "the idea of such investors" was precisely to "stay in the company in order to have a say".
Being part of it is everything! One must therefore participate in order to be able to intervene in a creative way, according to the logic of the taz. It almost seems as if the billion-dollar pension funds are taking a walk through the capitalist institutions of transnational corporations in order to transform them all the more thoroughly from the inside, ecologically, by insisting that "companies like Siemens are gradually changing".
This argumentation in the daily newspaper thus resembles a reformist projection. The reformist walk through the institutions, through which the Federal Republic was to undergo a fundamental ecological transformation, forms the core of the political project of the Greens. The naive idea of a transformation of capitalism through industrious - and lucrative - participation, which already embarrassed itself to the bone in the red-green Schröder-Fischer government era with its war of aggression against Yugoslavia in violation of international law and Agenda 2010, is here simply projected onto the
economic sphere. The powerful players in the economy thus appear to the green middleclass journalist as potential partners who actually wanted the same thing.
Such views in the Greens' house paper ultimately offer a depressing view of the impending misery of opportunistic climate policy by a future government led by the Greens, where people obviously still believe in the powerful good will of the very big players on the markets, which a government would really only have to help to break through. Ultimately, an opportunistic ideology shines through here, which, by fading out concrete contradictions and conflicts, hallucinates a common interest, a "common good", in which any progress in climate policy would be sacrificed to a desired consensus - in stark contrast to the confrontational policy of Bernie Sanders and the American Left, who intend to enforce their Green New Deal, which could also be just the first step of a system transformation, in an explicit fight against powerful capital interests (whereby it must be emphasized that the Green New Deal cannot form a "new accumulation model")
But what about the powerful, billion-dollar pension funds which, according to the taz, were thinking long-term and were now trying to bring top managers like Joe Kaeser to ecological sanity? These institutional investors are in a serious crisis13 as they are barely able to meet their obligations to their clients. This is a consequence of the historically unprecedented low interest rate policy that was imposed as a support for the economy in response to the last surge in the crisis - the bursting of the transatlantic real estate bubble in 2008. Cheap money may have stimulated the economy, but it has put insurance companies and pension funds in an increasingly precarious position, as they are no longer able to generate the corresponding long-term contractually agreed returns on the capital markets. Billions of holes are already gaping here.14
Pension funds are therefore forced to take greater risks and become more involved in the stock markets in order to generate the necessary returns. As an example, the Handelsblatt cites Japan's largest fund, the Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), which with "assets of around 1.2 trillion euros ... is one of the largest pension funds in the world". Because of the ongoing phase of low interest rates, this fund has "reduced its government bond quota from around 60 percent to 35 percent and increased its equity quota from 24 to 50 percent". More money has to be made from money, millions of pension claims depend on it - it is income for broad sections of the population that depend on it, not just the profits of a small clique of super rich and managers.
It therefore takes a great deal of imagination to declare these ailing "institutional investors", who by hook or by crook must increase their returns, to be the pioneers of ecological capitalism, who would, for example, reject lucrative Siemens deals with Australian coal mines in favor of ecological sustainability. But this example also illustrates the interaction between the internal and external barriers of capital, between economic and ecological crisis: The increasing social and ecological contradictions, the resulting sharpening of "constraints" - they continue to narrow the maneuvering space in climate protection.
Good things take time!
Apart from the hallucination of some powerful capital market players - from Blackrock to the insurance industry to pension fund managers - who, as a kind of privatized substitute state, would now let capitalism "green" out of a well-understood strategic interest, the time factor is playing an increasing role in the legitimization of late capitalism. Through a selective perception of the climate crisis in terms of time, certain short-term tendencies can be isolated, absolutized or reinterpreted in order to be able to construct corresponding apologetic narratives.
As a commentator for the Süddeutsche Zeitung15 (SZ), for example, what do you do when the kids start to whine because they see no progress in combating the climate crisis and absolutely do not want to die in the impending apocalypse? One urges the young, impetuous blood to be patient. Good things take time, after all. In response to complaints by prominent climate activist Greta Thunberg at the last elite meeting in Davos that "practically nothing" has happened in the climate issue in recent months because global emissions of greenhouse gases have continued to rise, the Süddeutsche Zeitung finally wanted to see "initial progress".
It was clear that the window of opportunity for realizing ambitious climate protection was closing, and this could be "particularly frustrating" for the kids, especially when you consider "how much has been achieved in this time since the Fridays for Future demonstrations on climate protection began." After all, Greta could not complain about "not being heard", the SZ schoolmaster said, even if this listening was "not acting".
Nevertheless, one could not claim that "practically nothing" had happened, this was a "very pessimistic view" that ignored all the "remarkable things" that had happened in the past years, "especially considering how little had been done in the three decades before". Admittedly, the recent commitments by states and the EU to stricter climate targets have saved "not one gram of CO2", the renowned newspaper admitted, but on the other hand one must bear in mind that "climate protection does not fall from the sky either". This must first be "painstakingly negotiated".
The call for patience is based on the simple narrowing of the time horizon - and it contradicts itself. On the one hand, the SZ acts as if the problem of climate protection had only been on the political agenda since the climate protests of the Fridays for Future movement began. It simply speculates on the lack of history of the late-capitalist public, whose time horizon is now only a few weeks due to culture-industrial continuous sound reinforcement and unceasing spectacle production. Nothing is duller than the news of the day before yesterday. With regard to the young climate protection movement, it can be argued that its object only becomes an object of politics with its emergence - and consequently one must be patient with the political process, the climate polkit "painstakingly negotiated".
By simply narrowing the time horizon, the disastrous long-term result of capitalist climate policy, which has been unable to prevent the extreme rise in global CO2 concentration and has thus literally achieved "less than nothing", can be made to
disappear. But at the same time, the SZ itself reminds us how "little had happened in the three decades before" in terms of climate policy. For thirty years, the capitalist political caste has been trying to find effective climate protection measures in an almost unmanageable summit and negotiation marathon - and yet no climate protection has yet fallen from the "sky" of the political Olympics. Their call for patience is led ad absurdum by the SZ itself with reference to the evident ineffectiveness of capitalist climate policy for decades. One could rather ask now, what should we wait for? Or are three decades of patient waiting not long enough?
Everything is fine
In the end, the SZ tells the Klimakids that there has been no successful capitalist climate policy in the past 30 years, and that this is not the case at the moment either - but one just has to be patient, because soon everything will be much better. Scout's honor! Whereby the self-doubt and scruples, the bad conscience, so to speak, with which this transparent and actually listlessly written apologetics should be noted. The right margin of the published opinion of the Federal Republic of Germany, however, is unaware of such scruples.
In the AfD-related press, at Springer-Verlag, the sledgehammer has always been a popular argument. Facts and contexts can finally be worked on until the desired, alternative "truth" is constructed. In the case of the climate crisis, the answer, according to the newspaper Die Welt16 , can simply be that everything is under control. According to a commentary published in early January, Germany has achieved a "climate success" that has dealt a "low blow" to Green "attitude politics". The "first significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in Germany" was not due to small-scale "state regimentation" or "left-wing politics", but to a "cold, economic concept".
Dare more capitalism - with this, business journalism believes that Springer has found the patent remedy to the climate crisis. What had happened? Last year, emissions of greenhouse gases in the Federal Republic of Germany fell significantly for the first time in a long time17 , which prompted the world's online presence to virtually proclaim the end of the climate crisis, with European emissions trading being named as the marketdriven patent remedy for overcoming the climate crisis.
This jubilant report from the climate front not only narrows the time horizon to one year in order to ignore the miserable climate policy record of the Federal Republic of Germany in recent decades, which acted as a climate policy brake on the EU18 , it also conceals the "business model" of the world champion exporter Germany, which literally consists of exporting high-powered combustion engines of fossil fuels all over the world. Time is running out - thus, building on the ideological groundwork of the culture industry, it is necessary to completely reify time, to take away its processual character, to break it down into isolated, small particles, in order to eradicate any historical consciousness that would provide an overview of the unfolding disaster of capitalist "climate policy".
The Süddeutsche Zeitung could not shake three decades of failed climate policy in its belief in capitalism as the best of all possible worlds; the world needs only one year of regionally limited reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to proclaim the victory of capital over the climate crisis. This temporal "snapshot", which the world isolates here in order to spin the narrative of a capitalist overcoming of the climate crisis, is thus accompanied by a geographical narrowing. Global emissions are continuing to rise - and the fight against the climate crisis must be conducted globally, which is precisely what a crisis-ridden, late-capitalist world of increasingly competing nation states is not capable of doing.
A clear empirical indication that the climate catastrophe could be averted or at least mitigated would simply be the rapid decline in global emissions of greenhouse gases. Since capitalism, with its compulsion for growth and exploitation, is fundamentally incapable of doing this, the "Journaille" (Karl Kraus) is moving towards chronological and geographical cherry-picking in order to be able to construct the corresponding "narratives".
This selective perception on the part of the Springerzeitung, which ignores lines of development and removes isolated events from their context, clearly shows that ideology is a necessarily false consciousness inherent in social conditions. In capitalism, politics can ultimately only be formulated on a national level, as the national conflicts within the EU since the outbreak of the euro crisis, for example, make clear. Yet it is precisely the socio-economic crisis spurts of recent decades that have driven the pressure of competition between state subjects to extremes, thus undermining a globally coordinated fight against the ecological crisis. What is needed, however, is the promotion of global, closely coordinated projects in the climate struggle, which can only be fully realized beyond the realm of capital and nation, within the framework of a post-capitalist transformation.
If the climate crisis is too hard, you are too soft!
Instead of searching for system alternatives against the capitalist climate crisis, however, the published opinion contains voices that preach a hardening, so to speak. This narrative is not meant to be like that, but rather to point out the hardships that people on the periphery and semi-periphery of the capitalist world system have to endure.
Climate change is a "luxury problem", Spiegel-Online19 , for example, informed its readers in an article quoting people from the periphery who, in view of the most serious social and economic distortions in their countries, paid little attention to the accelerating climate change and sometimes made it appear as a whim of spoiled Western youthsdissenting voices that would certainly be found in the regions concerned were not taken into account. Young people in Europe would diligently demonstrate for the climate, but this was hardly the case in countries such as "Ghana, South Korea, Indonesia and Nepal", where the Western protests were hardly known or were seen "rather critically", declared SPON.
The argumentation that shines through here, which is also found in many variations in
Netz, thus plays off capitalist misery - for example in West Africa, where climate change ranks "rather tenth" - against the capitalist climate crisis. The consequences of the economic crisis, the global production of an economically superfluous humanity, must be used as justification for ignoring the climate crisis. In view of the abundance of crises and catastrophes of capitalist socialization, one could surely not also take care of the "luxury problem" of climate - so the implicit argumentation, which always assumes a naturalization of capitalism. The kids in the West are simply too spoiled, not hardened enough, so that they get ideas in their heads because they no longer know the true hardship of life - according to the reactionary, culturally pessimistic complaint, which always includes a threat.
It is a kind of education in hardship that is preached here, whereby this increasing hardening against the evident climatic upheavals is accompanied by a desensitization that makes it difficult for the subjects concerned to recognize social and ecological crisis tendencies in time.
It was precisely this education for hardship - with reference to the hardships of the struggle for survival on the periphery of the late capitalist world system - that Adorno identified in his famous essay "Education after Auschwitz" as a central element of fascist achievement. The harder survival becomes in large parts of the crisis-ridden capitalist One World, the more strongly this logic of hardening is imposed, which then leads to corresponding crisis ideologies of the New Right.
The brutal form of this argumentation, which in a bourgeois-domesticated form is supposed to cause resentment and access in SPON, is based on blatant falsifications and manipulations that can be found on the net and that circulate above all in the environment of the New Right. Often simply photomontages are used, in which a Greta Thunberg having breakfast is contrasted with starving African children20 , in order to stylize climate protection as a "luxury problem" of spoiled middle-class brats and to construct a causal link between climate policy and capitalist misery.
The implicit impression is thus created that it is climate protection itself that prevents capitalism from having its blessing effect in Africa. The ideological subtext that exculpates the capitalist misery in the periphery by accusing the climate movement can be summed up roughly as follows: If only it weren't for these effeminate climate kids, the economy would also be buzzing heavily south of the Sahara and the children in Africa would not have to starve.
Learn to live with fire!
The appeal to just pull yourself together and not to complain, because the children in Africa would have it much worse for the time being, often merges into the whole adaptation discourse, in which the climate crisis is defined as a kind of Darwinian challenge to the adaptation performance of market subjects. One simply has to learn to live with the changing climate, so the argument, which can tie in with the whole neoliberal discourse of the last decades, when the crisis-induced increasing social demands of late capitalism were declared to be unalterable laws of nature, to which the whole miserable strategies of self-optimization, self-marketing, self-exploitation etc. have
to be adapted as a fiddly self-company.
Social fetishism, being at the mercy of the autonomous social dynamics of capital, which creates the omnipresent feeling of heteronomy and produces precisely those neoliberal adaptation strategies of the self-direction of the "commodity labor", it forms the social foundation of this eco-darwinist ideology of adaptation, in which the market subjects want to adapt to a dynamic of climate change, which is actually the consequence of the fetishistic compulsion of capital to grow. Without overcoming the latter, however, the former cannot be kept in check.
In response to the forest fires, which are raging with ever increasing intensity, it is argued that we must adapt to them, learn to live with fire21 , which is also sensible from a local, short-term perspective, for example to take precautions against fire, thus minimizing risks, etc. This pragmatic, locally or regionally meaningful approach becomes problematic if it is applied to the global, erratic process of climate change.
Now it is simply a question of adapting to capitalist climate change, mostly with reference to the great adaptability of capital - which corresponds to a monstrous misjudgement of the dynamics of climate change. Climate change is something to which human society is ultimately unable to adapt - the adaptability propagated in the neoliberal decades is becoming the fate of late capitalist man.
Climate change is not gradual, but rather in leaps and bounds, which would be triggered if climatic tipping points were exceeded - and which would have disastrous consequences for entire regions. The illusion of adapting to gradual, quantitative changes would be bloodily disgraced if the climate system were to undergo a full "qualitative" transformation. It is not just about disasters such as the rapid rise in sea level, the devastation of entire continents, the threat of famine or the uninhabitability of large regions22 in the global south, all of which are terrible enough. Ultimately, it is a question of the bare survival of man as a species, of the flora and fauna as we know them today, as the famous essay23
"The uninhabitable Earth", referring to the acidification of the oceans caused by the increasing CO2 concentration, which would ultimately destroy much of the life in the world's oceans, releasing gigantic, all-deadening amounts of hydrogen sulphide.
Such a catastrophe occurred about 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Earth Age, when about 97 of all living things were destroyed, as the above-mentioned essay stated:
"Hydrogen sulfide is also what finally cost us 97 percent of all life on Earth during that time [Permian mass extinction 252 million years ago, T.K.], after all the feedback loops were triggered and the circulating currents of a warmed ocean floor came to a halt - it is the planet's preferred gas for a natural holocaust. Gradually, the dead zones spread into the oceans, killing marine animals that had ruled the oceans for hundreds of millions of years, and the gas that the water released into the atmosphere poisoned everything on land. Even the plants. It took millions of years for the oceans to recover. "
Due to the constantly sharpening contradictions of late capitalist socialization, it is not reason that is advancing in the overall historical movement, as once postulated by Hegel, but rather
barbarism, which would have its end point in this gigantic fart that extinguished almost all life. Only the overcoming of this false whole, which is decaying openly, would offer mankind a chance of survival.