by Andreas Exner

This article was originally published in: Streifzuege March 2011 and is translated on the Internet.

deutsche Version / version Française

The shock and horror are unending. Fukushima is the 9/11 of the fossil- nuclear energy system. The horror of a world that knows only profit and capital condensed in a nightmarish way in this nuclear reactor and its invisible deadly radiation. The pictures and news from Japan are like a disaster film. It was as though our ideas of the destructive energy indwelling capital had materialized. We can imagine destruction and mass suffering more than life in a world of sharing, carefulness and community. The world appears as we conceive and imagine it to the end of time because it appears that way.

Capitalism and its countless horrors seem more credible to us than an alternative. We believe in capital, the deadly promise of endless growth. We cynically pay it tribute as though the rule of people over people and nature were something dignified. If we didn’t have capitalism, the productive powers would not have developed so enormously, we hear everywhere. If we didn’t have capitalism, we would still be living in dark stone shacks and slaving away on meager fields. If we didn’t have capitalism, there would be no cell phones and no Internet. If we didn’t have capitalism, we could not treat the cancer caused by the radioactive radiation of its reactors. If we didn’t have capitalism, people infer, everything would be much worse.

A world of sharing, carefulness and community is obviously nonsense. Still this nonsense has a system.

Tasteless Riches

Comparing the supposed achievements of capital with the incredible suffering that it has caused, is causing and will keep causing until it is overcome is tasteless but necessary. The technical possibilities released by the human spirit, exploited by ruthless capital against concrete needs and ecological limitations and brought into play to our harm cannot be ascribed to capital.

Inventors and inventiveness always operate where people team up. The completely senselessend-in-itself and ruthless machine of money-making for the sake of money-making can be ascribed to capital, subordinating everything in its way as soon as money becomes the dominant form of “riches” – a word hardly expressed in this world that models itself according to money. Money together with the market economy becomes the undisputed form of “riches,” the seemingly inescapable way that people organize their life but is really the cause of enormous, unnecessary suffering and the obstacle to an alternative.

That is the reality of capital. Some must sell their labor power because otherwise they would have nothing from which they could live. Others buy their labor power because they own the means of production, the machines, factories, raw materials and the land. Buying and selling, money and market constitute its context. Market and capital are two aspects of a system. The market is the sphere in which capital rakes in its profit through honest sales and can appropriate the objects of its exploitation without revolts through harmless purchases: natural substances, human material, metals, energy, land and labor power.

The state guarantees that nothing changes in this: through so-called social benefits so wage-earners surrender to their fate and find everything all right, through the periodic deployment of the police and army when people rebel, through a growing control to nip unrest, resistance and alternatives in the bud when the state cannot bind them in its machine. The state is not only police, military, administration of justice and government but the whole conglomerate of unions, educational institutions, economic associations, newspapers, television stations, NGOs, parties and all the other organizations of the status quo whose function is to prevent the abolition of capitalism with fear and incentives.

A Tale of Woe

The devastation (named capital) is planted in these social conditions from the very start in the members. Its elements are: the expulsion of farmers from their land in western Europe since the beginning of the modern age; in state-capitalist states of the so-called command socialism into a catch-up modernization that has cost millions of lives; their forcible resettlement and expropriation in former colonies after formal independence; the removal of whole harvests vital for millions for the consumption of the arising working class; the mass enslavement of Africans; the intensified subordination of women through the obliteration of their freedom possibilities, knowledge assets, and power positions taken by men; the ransacking of colonies, racist branding of their inhabitants and their state privatization for the needs of capital; the targeted destruction of the crafts in Europe and the colonies; the forcing of people into the army, workhouses, prisons, psychiatric wards, schools and planned cities and the wiping out of those who absolutely could or would not join, rebelled and began something different, a hu7man society of sharing and community.

The devastation continues wherever capital settles: in its constant crises and phases of prosperity that only increases the force of the next crisis and opens up a deceptive prosperity of goods consumption to some wage-earners that should compensate for the lack in self-determination and pay them for their service to the capitalist system, in the impoverishment of those washed up by capital, in the slums, sweatshops and factories and in the wars and military campaigns of destruction waged by capital and its state. One time this was calculated coolly as in the 1973 neoliberal coup against Allende in Chile and another time at the limit to madness as in Richard Nixon’s madman-tactic toward the end of the Vietnam war or at the front lines of the First World War when masses of people ran into the no man’s land of mines and grenades with the prospect of death and finally in the zone of sheer madness in Nazi Germany toward the end of the Second World War when the murder of Jews was subordinated to the rationality of warfare.

The global catastrophe that capital represents is not yet visible to the whole extent. Much of what most contemporaries impute to capital as “progress’ and “blessing” has a deadly legacy whose true face will first appear in the coming years, decades and centuries: climate change, nuclear waste, poisons, genetically-changed organisms, purged landscapes, dead parts of the ocean and an infrastructure together with the production runs, human passions and institutions that depend on a life-threatening energy system.

This energy system must adjust anyway to pure resource shortage. Nuclear power is part of this system that can make life on earth into an inescapable hell – if we don’t turn it off.

From Hiroshima to Fukushima

Japan relied on development of nuclear power because the land passed through a capitalist modernization and lacks sufficient possibilities of energy production on its territory. At the beginning of the Second World War, boycott by the US threatened Japan. Japan feared above all being cut off from oil deliveries that were the foundation of the expanding system of capital, market and state at that time and responded with a brutal strategy of imperialist expansion. At the end after the unspeakable suffering of the world war, nuclear energy was used by the US for pure annihilation devoid of the abstruse logic of military necessity connected with the names Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was a beginning of the development of a civilian nuclear industry that with great hesitation has been vigorously underway since the 1980s and provided Japanese capital and the lifestyle of wage-earners with more and more energy.

What began with Hiroshima did not inevitably end with Fukushima. While the suffering made intolerable because it was man-made catches one’s eye and makes one speechless, Fukushima will only be a picture for a landscape of horror and devastation that capital prepares for us if we don’t remove it. The Fukushima in northeast Honshu in Japan will be followed by a coal-Fukushima intensifying climate change even more which nevertheless is zealously praised by defenders of the system as a “clear alternative” to nuclear power. This is already accompanied by the bio-fuel-Fukushima which robs a multitude of people of their life foundations in a global conquest and settlement that can hardly be imagined and holds ready “endless green energy” for the defenders of the system. A raw material-Fukushima looms on the horizon that could encourage the development of renewable energy systems which according to the opinion of many supporters should feed the immense energy-hunger of capital: exploitation of the earth to the last gram of metal, destruction of living conditions up to the last sanctuary and destruction of alternatives to complete mental emptiness. The catastrophe that capital represents becomes the media infinite loop. The public is horrified and nods apathetically.

Fukushima is Everywhere. Fukushima is Capitalism

An alternative would end capital, market and the state. This alternative opens up and develops the world of sharing and community – the foundation of human society as long as it will exist. Human society will only be able to exist in the long run when this world of sharing and community gains the upper-hand. This must happen quickly.

Neuer Blog/new blog: Demonetize.it!

English

Zielsetzung

Jede Produktion und jede Lebensweise beruht auf bedingungslosem Geben, der direkten Kommunikation zwischen den Produzierenden, Kooperation und den Reichtümern der Erde. Die Geldwirtschaft hat unsere soziale und natürliche Welt für ihren eigenen, destruktiven Selbstzweck monopolisiert.

Das dynamische Prinzip der Geldwirtschaft ist das Kapital: Geld, das sich vermehrt. Es verwandelt menschliche Wesen in Verkäufer_innen ihrer Arbeitszeit und in Konsument_innen von Waren; es stellt sie gegeneinander; es spaltet die Welt in Wert und Nicht-Wert, es beutet aus, fesselt und defomiert das, was es verwertet und zerstört, was es als wertlos betrachtet; es sortiert Menschen nach ihrer Wettbewerbsfähigkeit und unterwirft das “Weibliche” dem “Männlichen”. Das ist die Wurzel der ökonomischen, sozialen und ökologischen Krise unserer Zeit.

Demonetarisierung, die bewusste Selbstorganisation der Produzierenden, ist der Ausweg. Demonetarisierung ist die erste Voraussetzung einer freien Gesellschaft. Geld ist das Mittel des allgemeinen Tausches von “Wertgleichem” im Sinne des abstrakten ökonomischen Werts. Das Geld zu überwinden bedeutet den Warentausch zu überwinden und beizutragen anstatt zu tauschen.

Damit eine demonetarisierte Gesellschaft frei von Herrschaft ist, müssen neue Produktions- und Lebensweisen entwickelt werden. Demonetarisierung ist in einer breiten Palette von Debatten und Praktiken für eine andere Gesellschaft, die ebenso notwendig wie möglich ist, präsent. Demonetize.it! macht sie sichtbar, bringt sie zusammen und zeigt Unterschiede auf.

Mission statement

All production and all ways of life rely on unconditional giving, the direct communication between producers, cooperation and the riches of the earth. Yet the money economy has monopolized our social and natural world for its own, self-referential and destructive purpose: profit.

The dynamic principle of the money economy is capital: money begetting more money. It turns human beings into sellers of labour time and consumers of commodities; it pits them against each other; it splits the world into value and non-value, enchaining, exploiting and deforming what it valorizes and destroying what it defines as worthless; it sorts people according to competitiveness and subordinates “the female” to “the male”. The economic and socio-ecological crisis of our times is its result.

Demonetization, by fostering conscious self-organization of producers, is the way out of it. Demonetization is the first prerequisite for a free society. Money is the means of generalized exchange of “equivalents” in terms of abstract economic value. To transcend money is to transcend commodity exchange, replacing exchange by contributions.

Yet for a demonetized society to be free from social domination, a new mode of organizing production and new ways of life must be developed. Demonetization is present in a broad range of debates and practices for another society, that is possible and necessary. Demonetize.it! makes them visible, brings them together and explores their differences.

On the underlying causes of the current financial crisis.

Norbert Trenkle, translated by Josh Robinson

Deutsche Version Teil 1, Teil 2; Version española; Version française

[In 2005, Franz Müntefering, at the time chairman of the German Social Democratic Party, made articulated a ‘critique of capitalism’ according to which the blame for the increased economic instability and precarisation of twenty-first-century capitalism lies with ‘greedy speculators’, whom he described as locusts. This prompted a wide-ranging debate on the German left as to the appropriateness of this and other images that replace analysis of the structural logic of capitalism with moral condemnation of individual agents within this logic. In conjunction with hostility towards finance capital, this personification of structural relationships resonates with the long tradition of what August Bebel termed the ‘socialism of fools’, culminating in the ‘critique of capitalism’ advanced by the NSDAP and the contemporary far-right. This essay, written during the early stages of development of the current financial crisis in May 2008, is a contribution to the analysis of the nature of the relationship between the current over-inflation of the financial markets and the dynamics of globalised capitalism, and of its consequences for trade unions and social movements. – JR]

The causes of the current crisis in the international financial markets, which is threatening to develop into a genuine global market crisis, have been attributed by almost all commentators and economic experts to the uninhibited freedom granted to speculation, particularly in the USA. The principal agents of this speculation are generally held to be the banks and investment-funds, but also the governments and central banks (particularly the US government and federal reserve) which have enabled and supported this development. Those who have for years seen the causes of every economic and social fissure – mass unemployment, pressure on wages, increased local competition and the tearing down of social security – in the fact that speculation has been set free and become an end in itself, and who see regulation and control of the financial markets as the key to solving these problems, now feel that their views have been confirmed.

On a superficial level, it could indeed appear that the financial markets constitute the original cause of the increasing economic pressure on society as a whole. Who could deny that the markets have taken on historically unprecedented levels of significance and have a stronger influence than ever on economic development? Does that not itself almost amount to blaming them primarily for social misery? It is not simply because they reflect surface-appearances that polemics against hedge funds, private equity funds and other players of the financial markets (particularly those that use ideologically incendiary images such as ‘locusts’ and ‘blood-suckers’)¹ find such strong resonance in the public sphere. More than that, they can find support in the widespread preconception that finance capital, banks and ‘speculators’ are responsible for most of the evils of capitalism, because they supposedly extract their profit at the expense of ‘honest labour’ and of ‘productive entrepreneurship’, without themselves lifting a finger. Thus the frequent denouncements of the ‘insatiable greed’ of speculators who are supposedly in search of ‘excessive rates of return’, as if capitalist production were not by its very nature based on the maximisation of profit, as if it didn’t already stop at nothing in pursuit of this aim.

This is clearly no critique of capitalism: it is at best a nostalgic look back at the post-war regulation of capitalism by a social state, in a world that was still ‘in order’. Worse still, it opens the door for delusional antisemitic projections, at the core of which is the division of capital into a (concrete) ‘creative capital’ and an (abstract) ‘grasping capital’, in which ‘the speculators’ are identified with ‘the Jews’, who reputedly pull the strings behind the scenes of global economics and politics. This dangerous ideological combination has in recent years been identified and criticised many times – I thus don’t treat it in further detail here.² I shall instead concentrate on evidence for the claim that these one-sided attacks on finance capital also turn the cause-effect relationships of the functional logic of capitalism on their head, which blocks the way not only for an analysis of the ongoing crisis, but also for an adequate opposition to the unreasonable social and political demands that are bound up with it.

The long-term repercussions of the crisis of Fordism

A glance at history shows that the development of large-scale speculative and credit-bubbles has never been the cause of capitalist crises; rather, it has always been simply a consequence and stage in the development of the crisis-process, the causes of which can always be traced back to stagnation in the valorisation of capital in the real economy. This is no less true for the current financial crisis and for the long period of speculation that preceded it, even if there are certain characteristics that distinguish it from previous crises.

It is generally recognised that it was in the mid-1970s that the financial markets first began to grow rapidly and become independent. This was not, as is often asserted now, caused by any deliberate political decision or by the influence of neo-liberal think-tanks and powerful economic interest-groups, but by the fact that the long post-war boom fell into a structural crisis, as Fordism ran up against its limits. The exhaustion of organisational and administrative reserves of productivity of standardised mass-production brought about increased pressure on rates of profit, while at the same time labour had successfully struggled for increases in wages and social services, and the capital-costs of financing general public infrastructure continued to rise. Then, when the OPEC countries raised oil-prices gently – which caused the costs of the excessive exploitation of fossil energy-reserves to rocket – the self-supporting thrust of post-war growth came to an end. There was no increased investment in the means of production, factories, buildings etc., because these could no longer produce sufficient profit; a significant proportion of capital was thus ‘set free’ and found no profitable investment.

But since capital is by its nature self-valorising value – that is, since the only purpose to capitalist production consists in making more money out of money (which is the source of capitalism’s compulsion to perpetual quantitative growth without regard for human needs or natural limits) – such a stagnation in the process of valorisation is synonymous with a crisis. More precisely: with a crisis of over-accumulation, or, to put it in the vocabulary of contemporary macro-economics, with a crisis of over-investment. A proportion of capital becomes excessive (measured according to its own abstract rationality as an end in itself) and is therefore threatened by devalorisation. And when this devalorisation happens, it is not constrained to the collapse of individual companies and banks (as is the case in the normal functioning of capitalism) but reverberates, mediated through and strengthened by negative multiplying effects – through the entire economy and society.

Precisely this danger threatened in the mid-1970s – as was predicted by many (not only left-wing) economists.³ But why didn’t it happen? Why did the great world-economic crisis fail to break through? One fundamental reason was that a substantial proportion of the superfluous capital that could no longer be invested in the real economy was diverted into the financial markets, where it was then invested primarily in government bonds, but also increasingly in stock- and security-speculation. This diversion into the financial sphere, seen on its own, is a perfectly normal stage of progression of every crisis of the valorisation of capital. Marx had already analysed it in relation to the crisis of 1857, and coined for it the term ‘fictitious capital’. Credit and speculation capital is fictitious because it only apparently serves as capital. For it yields high interest-rates and speculative gains it for its owner in the relative absence of real valorisation takes place, which always presupposes that abstract labour is spent on the production of commodities and services and that a proportion of it is siphoned off as surplus value. But the ‘returns’ that fictitious capital ‘yields’ stem from other sources, whether taxes and new credits (in the case of exponentially growing national debt), bets on the future (in the case of speculative gains) or the selling off of social substance (in the case of privatisation).

This is most obvious in the case of increasing national debt: the state borrows money in order to flush it straight back into circulation. From the point of view of the creditor, this money appears as capital, because it ‘yields’ interest. But it fact it is long-since spent, and therefore exists as ‘value’ only in the form of receipts (government bonds). But personal loans and mortgages function according to the same principle: the debtor borrows money to to buy houses, cars or other consumer goods; although the money is long-since spent, it appears to the creditor as capital that has been profitably invested. Admittedly, from the creditors’ perspective, this relationship doesn’t matter at all. Credit and speculation seem to them no less ‘real’ opportunities for investment, as long as the sources of money continue to gush.

However, the growth of fictitious capital not only provides an alternative choice for investors, but also constitutes, when viewed on the macroeconomic level, a deferral of the outbreak of crisis. For the turn to the financial markets prevents the devalorisation of superfluous capital only temporarily, and at the same time also creates increased purchasing power through various mechanisms, which in turn increases the demand for commodities and services and thus keeps the real economy running, or even stimulates it. In the case of increases in public borrowing this mechanism functions immediately, and has become a central instrument of economic policy. Regardless of whether the state spends the borrowed money on building roads, buying fighter planes or social transfer payments, it always flows straight back into consumer circulation and stimulates further economic activity. As the latest property boom in the USA has shown, personal loans and mortgages carry out precisely the same macroeconomic function, the only difference being that the debtors are private individuals. To a certain degree, profits from the financial market also flow back into the real economy, whether through money spent on fixtures and furnishings for banks, funds and other institutional players of the financial markets (from the fleet of company cars, via the computers, to the prestigious office-buildings), or through the fact that employees and investors finance their own consumption through yields from interest and speculation. Fictitious capital is to this extent anything but a dead weight that burdens the real economy and prevents it from functioning properly. Quite the opposite: it enables the temporary prolongation of capitalist business as usual.

In no great capitalist crisis so far has this means of deferring the crisis lasted long. A short period of speculative overheating has been followed by a large crash, in which the built-up potential for crisis discharged with huge impact, destroying in a single stroke a substantial proportion of economic and social structures. The historical particularity of the crises of Fordism consists in the fact that such a huge devalorisation of the speculation and credit amassed in the aftermath of the crisis has not yet taken place. But this should by no means be taken to mean that the principles of the logic of capitalist valorisation and function have been disproved, as has repeatedly been asserted. Only the immensely long duration of the deferral is historically unique: mediated through the mechanisms of fictitious capital, it is structurally no different from previous crises, and must therefore sooner or later discharge into a surge of devalorisation. To this long duration corresponds the correspondingly gigantic inflation of the speculation and credit bubbles. If it is the case that today – as it says in almost every newspaper – about 97% of all international transactions serve purely speculative ends, this is no evidence of economic ‘malfunction’ or even for the ‘greed’ of insatiable speculators, but simply shows the extent to which the deferral of the crisis has grown, and thus also the huge potential for crisis that has been built up.

The particularities of the long deferral of the crisis

Seen politically, it was the growing liberalisation of the transnational financial markets and the final delinking of money from gold (the US dollar leaving the gold standard in 1971 was the beginning of the end of the system of regulated exchange-rates), that made it possible to prolong the deferral of the crisis for such a long time in the first place. For it was only in this way that the global money supply could grow to an extent unimaginable in previous crises, during which the gold standard and nationally regulated financial markets set limits to monetary expansion. The decision to tear down these limits was not a wilful political act that can be attributed to the influence of particular powerful interest groups.⁴ Rather, it was a consequence of economic development in the 1950s and 60s, which dug away little by little at the foundations of the Bretton Woods system. As the undisputed economic supremacy of the USA withered away to the extent that it could only cover the costs of its political and military position of global power through increased public borrowing (the costs of the Vietnam war played a major part in this), fixed exchange-rates and the pegging of western currencies to US gold-reserves could no longer be maintained. This was the point at which the prerequisites for a huge increase in the money supply – with the active participation of governments, central banks and the IMF – were first present. Since the 1970s – and above all since the 1980s – huge amounts of unsecured liquidity have been pumped into the markets, either through the direct route of public borrowing or through ‘cheap money’ policies, which were always introduced whenever the markets looked a little shaky. The USA played a central role in this process, for its global power enabled it to borrow in its own currency without having to fear devaluation, since the dollar functioned as a de facto world currency (a role that is currently being questioned). But the fiscal and monetary policies of other western states have also made a significant contribution to the permanent inflation of the global bubble of fictitious capital in order to defer the onset of the crisis ever further.

There is a further important historical particularity to the long cycle of finance-capital since the 1970s. Namely, that it not only represented a deferral of the crisis of Fordism, but it also interfered with the mighty surge in productive capacity that was the third industrial revolution. Under the conditions of a ‘normal’ crisis of overaccumulation, a fundamental transformation of production towards the foundations of information and communication technologies would only have been able to establish itself, if at all, after a period of deep global depression in which the post-war economic structures had been reduced to rubble and ashes. However, the long postponement of the crisis by means of fictitious capital made it possible to restrict this destructive work primarily to the global south and the former eastern bloc. The structures of Fordism were also ruined in western cities, but this was part of a longer process, during the course of which pressure on the conditions of labour and on social systems was steadily growing, and the structures of production were undergoing fundamental transformation. This process unfolded differently in each country depending on its position on the global market and in competition, but the trend was the same everywhere: industrial sectors were radically rationalised with the help of micro-electronic applications, and slowly reduced to their hyper-productive cores, while each aspect of production that could not (yet) be made economically profitable by automation was outsourced to countries or sectors in which wages are lower.

Since the so-called service sector at once both gained increasing significance and absorbed a substantial proportion of the labour-power that was no longer required by industry, it was possible to interpret the situation, if superficially, as if capitalism had simply gone through a further structural change, a process which could essentially be characterised by the replacement of the dominant industrial sector with that of services and ‘knowledge-production’, and at the same time the globalisation of economic relations. Correspondingly, most observers and economic experts where united in the view that capitalism, at least in the urban west, had managed to overcome the crisis of the 1970s and 80s (keyword: ‘crisis of labour society’), if at the price of increased precarisation of the conditions of life and labour for large sections of the population, which, depending on the commentator’s political position, were either treated as unavoidable or denounced as the unnecessary result of neoliberal policies. But from all positions the diagnosis of a fundamental process of crisis seemed absurd and fallacious. ‘Just look how vivacious capitalism is’ was heard from all quarters – whether rejoicing, critical or resigned – with reference to the gushing profits even during the last few years.
The current crisis of the financial market shows relatively unmistakably that this assessment was fundamentally false. And not because speculation destroys the real, sustainable economic structure (just as in the current controversy the ‘locusts’ are always blamed), but because the structure that has emerged in the last twenty-five to thirty years was never the cause of a self-supporting boom of capital accumulation. Quite the reverse: it was only viable at all because it was (and still is) continually serviced by the flows of fictitious capital. A self-supporting boom would presuppose that whenever growth were checked, more labour-power would be exploited in the production of commodities up to the required level, for this is the only way to ensure that the amount of added value can increase and the cycle ‘money – commodities – more money’ perpetually be preserved. From the perspective of demand, this would mean that at at every stage of development, enough labour-income would have to be generated to sell the commodities produced during the previous stage. Precisely this condition is absent under the conditions of the third industrial revolution. The rationalisation enabled by new information and communication technologies is ploughing up all sectors of the economy with such immense speed that more labour-power is always being rendered superfluous than can be put to use by the ensuing growth. This means that the process of valorisation not only has to cut away at the demand on which it depends in order to liquidate the produced value on the market, but also, more fundamentally, that it permanently undermines its very own foundations.⁵ To this extent the micro-electronic revolution in production is a sort of permanent crisis of over-accumulation: that is, it always produces an excess of capital that can no longer be valorised, which must in turn be diverted into the sphere of fictitious capital, and thus constitutes an essential contribution to the exponential growth of the financial bubble.

Crisis? What crisis?

Against this diagnosis it is often claimed that in the last decades millions of new jobs have been created in countries that were previously peripheral to the world economy, particularly in East and Southeast Asia, and that the basis for the production of value has therefore grown rather than shrunk. But this argument ignores two fundamental factors. Firstly, the great majority of industrial labour in the relevant countries is carried out at a very low level of productivity and thus produces very small amounts of value, measured against the standard of the automated and completely rationalised factories on the global market. For from the standpoint of value-production, it is not so much that the level of value produced is defined by the mere number of hours worked as that the amount of value of a commodity is defined by the relevant level of social productivity.⁶ And since in the core sectors of global production this level has been rising consistently, the value of the unproductive labour in the outsourced elements of production falls just as consistently. This means that outsourcing is only economically profitable as long as yet lower wages and worse working conditions can always be found.⁷ And this in turn is the reason why the current drive towards rationalisation has not led to general reductions in labour-time and a good life for all (indeed, it has not even created the opportunity for a relative improvement of living conditions within capitalist society), but rather to large-scale social impoverishment.

But secondly, the boom in China, India and the other ‘emerging markets’ is by no means sustainable, but is itself thoroughly dependent on the global generation of money by credit and speculation. It is widely recognised that the entire economic structure of these countries is oriented towards mass export, primarily to the USA and EU, which in turn largely finance their imports with income from finance and credit capital. Paradigmatic for such relationships is the Pacific deficit-circulation between the USA and East Asia, which since the Reagan-administration has become the central motor driving world economic activity. Its functional mechanism is fundamentally very simple: a permanently growing trade deficit is covered by (also permanently growing) imports of finance capital, which, partly via the direct route of credit-financed government expenditure (‘twin deficit’), partly via the detour that is the private finance system, is flushed back into consumer circulation. But since most of the money flows from the Asian countries (currently primarily Japan, but increasingly China), which invest their sales revenue in the US finance sector or build up their currency reserves in US dollars, they in fact finance these exports themselves. In the Reagan-era it was burgeoning public borrowing that functioned as a motor for consumption, while share and bond speculation became more significant later – during the so-called ‘new economy’ many private investors financed a proportion of their consumption from the huge price-rises on the ‘new market’. And in the last few years the emphasis has finally moved to property speculation.

However, this cycle can only function as long as the US dollar enjoys the necessary trust to sustain the flow of fresh finance capital necessary to cover the permanent deficit. It is a mark of the current financial crises that this trust is to a great extent crumbling (a sign for this is the falling dollar). Should the US government and the Federal Reserve fail to reverse this trend, the pacific deficit-cycle will come to a halt, which would have approximately the same effect on the world economy as the likely Gulf Stream shutdown on the global climate. It is nothing other than lazy anti-Americanism when more and more voices in Europe respond to the current prognosis by condemning the US with moral outrage for having ‘lived at the expense of the rest of the world’ by financing their ‘unproductive consumption’ on credit,⁸ and also now for tipping the world economy into crisis. This reproduces once more the ideological split between ‘parasitic’ credit capital and honest productive capital – anti-American ideological models are in Europe always at the very least an indication of a dangerous proximity to antisemitic constructs – and what’s more, it turns the actual relationship right on its head. For on the one hand, European countries have profited to a great extent from credit-financed demand from the US: German industry in particular would have been in a sorry state for a long time were it not for the huge volume of exports across the Atlantic. On the other hand, when compared to GDP, national debt in Europe is on a par with that of the US, and it is not as if speculation is unheard of: in recent years there has been a huge speculative property boom, particularly in southern Europe, which is also collapsing right now. And in any case, the global capitalist economy as a whole is surviving on a drip of fictitious capital because it can no longer be sustained by the real economy.

It is thus completely absurd for commentators in every newspaper from left to right to accuse the US central bank of having stimulated property speculation with its policy of low interest rates, and therefore of responsibility for the current financial crisis. The Fed’s actions after the crash of the New Economy were simply to prevent a landslide on the financial markets. The Fed also deferred the onset of the crisis by seven or eight years and then enabled the much talked-of upturn, which all politicians claim as their own. Anyone who insists on using moral categories in this situation ought to be thankful to the Fed and the US government for allowing the world economy such an orderly pause for breath through their expansive monetary policy. But thankfulness is here no more helpful than moral condemnation. It is much more important to understand that the causes of the crisis of the financial markets lie not in speculation, but in a much more fundamental structural crisis of capitalist reproduction. This insight has far-reaching consequences for social conflict in the near future.

Further deferral of the crisis…

It is not possible to offer a definite prognosis as to the future course of the crisis. At the moment it is not clear if the united forces of the central banks and governments would be able once again to defer the megacrash of the financial markets and its destructive consequences for the entire world. Should they succeed, it would only be through the inflation of another financial bubble. That would be in open mockery of those who see the solution to the problem in regulation of the financial markets. For this demand has been taken up from all sides, including by former neoliberal hardliners, who argue along the lines of ‘what do I care about what I said yesterday?’ But in practice, the state’s intervention will result in the exact opposite: it will essentially act to limit the direct damages that result from the collapse of the property bubble. It is significant that even the social-democrat populist Oskar Lafontaine is arguing that the state should prevent failing banks from going under, because he knows that a collapse of the banking system would have disastrous consequences for society as a whole.⁹ Of course, he conscientiously tacks on the demand for better control of the banks and financial markets. But that is a mere rhetorical flourish, for bad credit given now can under current conditions only be repaid – if at all – through future gains on the financial markets. It makes no difference whether the players of the market are states or individuals, for both are equally subject to the requirement to invest ‘their’ capital profitably, and under conditions of over-accumulation that means investing only in the spheres of credit and speculation, because there is only very limited scope for the valorisation of capital within the real economy.¹⁰ It doesn’t matter whether we recognise this fact or not: the point is proved in practice. It is for this reason that governments and central banks have no choice beyond the reopening of the monetary floodgates. The US government and the Fed are already steering this course.¹¹

Of course, political action is always restricted by the fact that it cannot call into question the functional logic of capitalism itself. Politics is by its nature restricted to the administration of public affairs within this logic. However, the available political room for manoeuvre changes over the course of history. It is shaped and restricted by the limits of what is possible at any historically specific moment, which itself depend on the blind dynamic of the development of capitalism. Within these limits, political decisions and courses are not determined, but result from the interplay of different factors, such as relationships of social and international power, or relative strength in competition on the global market; but the frame defined by the limits is beyond the reach of politics. This is just as true for Fordism, today so often romanticised. Despite the relatively high potential for regulation during this period, politics could no more be said to have created the Fordist boom as such, than it could have prevented its end. However, it was able to influence the boom’s internal course to a certain degree, and to use the scope available for distribution to build up an extensive social infrastructure. The period of crisis-capitalist globalisation presents a mirror-image of this. Politics cannot substantively transform fictitious capital into flesh, because the constant inflation of the credit- and speculation-bubble is a precondition for the precarious deferral of the crisis, and thus determines the limits of political action. Politics is to this extent compelled to do everything to guarantee the existence of this precondition for as long as possible, and beyond monetary measures, its recources include increased predation of ‘public goods’, which are thrown into the fire of private valorisation in order to keep the capitalist machine running.¹²

But putting a stop to the crisis-dynamic of capitalism itself would be beyond the possible reach of politics, whose interventions instead contribute to the constant reproduction at an ever higher level of the contradictions that lie at the heart of the crisis-process. While the amount of fictitious capital that must be protected from devalorisation grows exponentially (as a glance at the growth of of the financial markets shows), the pressure on society and the large majority of the population, forced to sell themselves under ever more precarious conditions, grows with every stage of the deferral of the crisis. Correspondingly, the social costs of further postponement of the great crash will be considerable. On the one hand, we can count on a proper economic slump, which in contrast to the current ‘upturn’ will certainly hit rock bottom. On the other hand, increases in the money supply will probably lead to further acceleration of inflation, and with it to further decreases in the already shrinking mass purchasing-power. And finally, the next wave of speculation will likely be in raw materials, food and agrofuels, and will therefore have catastrophic consequences for large sections of the global population. The horrendous rises in food-prices in the last two years can to a great extent be attributed to the fact that more and more institutional investors have placed their capital in commodity futures. If this trend continues, the unavoidable result will be a price-explosion, increasing world hunger many times over.

And even then the increased volume of fictitious capital would not be the direct cause of the catastrophe, but would rather function (as is already is in the current wave of privatisation) as the drive-belt and transmission of the crisis-process and of its inherent tendency toward exclusion and precarisation. There is therefore a considerable danger that the resentment that this causes will be directed only against the imagined enemy of ‘greedy’ finance capital, onto whom the blame for the entire misery will be shifted. It remains all the more important to take a stance against this inverted ‘critique of capitalism’ that leaves a way open for antisemitism. But this presupposes not only the necessary ideology-critique, but also a well-grounded analysis of the crisis that removes the ground from beneath the inverted perception of the capitalist cause-and-effect relationships. This is not to claim that speculation and the financial markets should be placed beyond critique, but to argue that they must always be analysed as aspects of a fundamental crisis of capitalism – and it is this process as a whole that will result in the wide-ranging destruction of the foundations of social and natural life.

This critique must also be directed against the partly nostalgic, partly populist plans for a return to a Keynesian politics of growth and regulation. Even the proponents of these plans know that under the current conditions there is simply no scope for their implementation. Evidence for this is provided whenever ‘left-wing’ parties come to power, and then carry out quite the opposite of their promised programme; this is no less true for the SPD-Left Party coalition in the Berlin city government as it is for the former ‘centre-left coalition’ in Italy or broadly speaking for the Lula-government in Brazil. Insanely enough, it is not the case that the electorate is simply credulous and is ‘deceived’, but rather, that in the absence of any better prospects it wants to believe that a return to the Keynesian post-war social state is still possible, even though it is at another level thoroughly aware that this cannot happen. That is at the heart of the schizophrenic mood in Germany where there is both broad support for classical social-democratic demands (universal minimum wage, no rail-privatisation etc.) and at the same time high levels of affection for the Merkel-government. What is problematic about this mood is that in its oscillation between unrealisable wishes and uncritical acceptance of the structural logic of capitalism it is deeply susceptible to the danger of identifying scapegoats, whether hedge-funds, the US government, large corporations or – in its final delusional ramification – ‘the Jews’.

It might sound paradoxical, but the point at which the last thing one wants to give oneself up to ‘realpolitik’ and its credo of practical constraint is precisely when clearly naming the limits of politics in the current period of crisis becomes more necessary than ever. Not in order to acknowledge the validity of these limits, but as a necessary process of orientation for social movements and the parts of the trade union movement that are opposed to the systematic predation of the social state, the progressive intrusion of monetary value into all aspects of life, increasing precarisation and the state-control and -repression that are associated with them. If they commit themselves to illusory political perspectives and immerse themselves in party politics, the result is nothing other than their neutralisation.¹³ If, on the other hand, they concentrate on uniting their struggles across the divisions between between special-interest campaigns, isolated living-conditions and fragmented identities, they could succeed in reversing the trend away from solidarity that has been driven forward by the pressure of the crisis, and in forming an oppositional social power that stands opposed to the neoliberal politics of demolition and exclusion, and that at the same time brings the defeat of the logic of capital back into the realm of the possible.

… or global economic crisis?

Should attempts once more to defer the crisis fail, there threatens a global economic crisis of formidable proportion, in which the crisis-potential that has been built up over thirty years will be released. The immediate consequences will be the collapse of a great many businesses and banks, probably along with a huge rise in inflation. It doesn’t take much to imagine the destructive consequences of such stagflation on public finances, social services and the living conditions of the great majority of the population. It is highly likely that under these conditions the ideology of a national-populist crisis-administration – as has been advocated for a long time, and not only from the right wing of the political spectrum – will grow in popularity. When the journalist Jürgen Elsässer (currently at Neues Deutschland, the newspaper of the former ruling party of the DDR) calls for a ‘national popular front’ against globalised capital and particularly against finance capital (that he locates, quelle surprise, predominantly in the USA), it still sounds perhaps somewhat overexcited. But it represents a tendency that amounts to an aggressive, nationalist shutting-off from the outside, and authoritarian internal discipline in conjunction with the mobilisation of antisemitic hatred. Given the complex relationships of transnational economic interdependence, it is hardly possible to imagine a return to the largely isolated nation-state, even merely in administration of the crisis. More likely is the disintegration of the world economy into continental blocs, a scenario that is already being played through in think tanks and in the corridors of power. The visible fall of the US dollar and its ensuing loss of its function as a global country could be a strong driving mechanism in this direction.¹⁴

Such a possible scenario does not present any hope for a solution to the crisis, in any genuine sense of the world, but only for a form of administration of the state of emergency. That is to say, any sudden instance of devalorisation would in no way have the character of a ‘purifying crisis’ in which the foundations for a new self-supporting surge of accumulation could be created through the sweeping away of surplus capacity and bad credit. For this would not eliminate the actual cause of the crisis, the displacement of living labour power through the relocation of productive capacity from immediate production onto the level of the general social complex of knowledge, and the ensuing destabilisation of the production of value. Furthermore, all production would have to take place at the level of productivity attained through the new information and communication technologies, or be measured against this level, while the race for increased productivity would continue. At lower levels of value-production, a state of permanent over-accumulation would be immediately re-established, and with it the compulsion for the renewed pumping up of fictitious capital. The contradictions of the current crisis-process would be reproduced under substantially worse economic and social conditions. The decisive question will then be whether a transnational movement of emancipation can succeed in developing out of the resistance against the gravity of the crisis-process, a movement that can take an understanding of the social situation beyond the capitalist logic of valorisation towards a practical programme.

1 On the booklet produced by ver.di mentioned in the introduction, ‘Finanzkapitalismus – Geldgier in Reinkultur’ [‘Finance Capitalism – Unadulterated Greed’] cf. Lothar Galow-Bergemann: ‘Gegen Börsenungeziefer’ [‘Against Vermin of the Stock Exchange’] (Streifzüge 42) and the critique of the Finance Capital Working Group of ver.di Stuttgart, online at http://www.labournet.de/diskussion/gewerkschaft/real/insekten.html.

2 Cf. Norbert Trenkle, ‘Entsorgung nach Art des Hauses’ [‘Waste-Disposal à la maison], Streifzüge 32 (2004), online at http://www.krisis.org/2005/entsorgung-nach-art-des-hauses
3 Cf. the in part very good analyses in Elmar Altvater, Volkhard Brandes and Jochen Reiche, eds, Handbuch 4. Inflation – Akkumulation – Krise II, (Frankfurt/Main 1976).
4 A grotesque caricature of the idea that the abandoning of the gold standard was a wilful decision can be found in Jürgen Elsässer’s work: ‘In 1971 US president Richard Nixon announced the end of the gold standard for the dollar in a hush-hush operation. Since then the economic foundation of capitalism has been in gradual decay’, in Solidarität – Sozialistische Zeitung, Nr. 57 (4.5.2007).
5 From economic statistics it is well-known that much higher rates of growth in GDP are needed to create further jobs today than was the case in the 1970s. However, the statistical overview paints a rosy picture, because it adds all jobs together, without asking whether they contribute to the production of value (of course, economics disqualifies such a question from the start). For the majority of services and for the ‘production of knowledge’, this question must be answered in the negative (c.f. the article by Samol, Lohoff and Meretz in krisis 31). The growth of the service sector cannot therefore compensate for the exceptional melting-away of labour and value.

6 It should be remembered that Marx already points to this relationship in the first volume of Capital: ‘It might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour expended to produce it, it would be the more valuable the more unskilful and lazy the worker who produced it, because he would need more time to complete the article. However, the labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-power. The total labour-power of society, which is manifested in the values of the world of commodities, counts here one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, although composed of innumerable individual units of labour power. [...] The introduction of power-looms into England, for example, probably reduced by a half the labour required to convert a given quantity of yarn into woven fabric. In order to do this, the English hand-loom weaver in fact needed the same amount of labour-time as before; but the product of his individual hour of labour now only represented half an hour of social labour, and consequently fell to one half its former value.’ Capital, transl. Ben Fowkes, vol 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) p. 129.
7 C.f. Norbert Trenkle, ‘Es rettet euch kein Billiglohn’ [‘Low wages won’t save you’], in Kurz, Lohoff, Trenkle, eds, Feierabend! Elf Attacken gegen die Arbeit [Knock off! Eleven Attacks on Work] (Hamburg 1999), online at http://www.krisis.org/1999/es-rettet-euch-kein-billiglohn.
8 Elmar Altvater writes: ‘US citizens can afford a higher level of consumption, ‘the American way of life’, although they are so highly indebted. [...] However, this is only possibly because of high savings-ratios in other regions, which allow the USA and its citizens to get carried away. The financial markets must therefore function in such a way that the world’s savings are flushed into the USA.’ Elmar Altvater, Das Ende des Kapitalismus – so wie wir ihn kennen [The End of Capitalism as We Know It] (Münster 2005), p. 135.

9 Lafontaine ironically offered Josef Ackermann membership of the German Left Party because of his support for government intervention into the banking system because of the finance crisis (Netzeitung, 20.3.2008). This only shows that when it comes to the administration of the crisis, all the political parties are singing from the same hymnsheet.
10 It is thus ridiculous to condemn banks for their losses in property speculation. They have only done what everyone expects of them in a boom: invested ‘their’ money as profitably as possible. If they hadn’t, the same ‘experts’ who are now shouting ‘scandal’ because of the high losses would certinla have criticised them for ‘false excessive caution’.
11 Here, however, there is a conflict of interest between the US and the EU on the horizon, which might well accelerate the crisis-dynamic. Whereas the USA is characteristically beating down interest rates, and has issued with lightning-speed a state-run economic programme worth around $150bn, the European governments and the European Central Bank are focused on combating inflation, and are refusing to cut interest rates further. The in many ways ridiculous claim results that the crisis is basically taking place in the USA, while the European economy is stable, as if they weren’t closely interconnected. It could lead to further falls in the US dollar, at which point the USA would lose its function as consumption-motor of the world economy. The connection that the ECB and EU-governments have tried to repress would then assert itself violently.
12 On the analysis of this mechanism cf. Ernst Lohoff, ‘Out of Area – Out of Control’ Streifzüge 31 and 32 (2004), online at http://www.krisis.org/2004/out-of-area-out-of-control-1.

13 For example, large sections of the Italian anti-globalisation movement and social forums have allowed themselves to be integrated into Rifondazione Comunista and have thus been compelled at least indirectly to support the Prodi-government. This has to a great extent lost them their capacity to mobilise, and they are now standing before a political scrapheap…
14 Economists are even seriously discussing a return to the gold-standard, which would result in the complete devaluation of the dollar-debts that have built up over the last decades: ‘When nothing else works and no one wants weak dollars any more, America takes a step forward and pegs its currency to the gold-reserves in Fort Knox. The rest of the world, which has financed the US debt through the purchase of US-bonds, keeps an eye on the screen.’ Wirtschaftswoche 18.2.2008, p. 134.

Emancipation under Conditions that the Left Didn’t Want

State of Nature (summer 2008)
Andreas Exner, Christian Lauk & Konstantin Kulterer / Translation: Joe Keady

If there is a lack of appropriate analysis of environmental processes and societal relations to nature because they don’t fit into the wishful thinking of ‘eternal capitalism, ‘ dangerous ways of ideologically processing the crisis can gain momentum.”

Rising prices for food are increasing hunger, a global recession is waiting in the wings, and at the same time, energy is getting more and more expensive. Within only a few years, the terrain has changed dramatically for left movements. Nonetheless, many people are still holding on to well-known formulas. Unfortunately, they don’t fit the new circumstances.

1. The Age of Peaks

Rising oil prices are debated in very contradictory ways. Some claim that OPEC’s market power is the main source of sky-rocketing energy prices; others criticize the role of speculation or blame oil companies, demand in developing countries, or the war in Iraq.

Studies indicating that rising fuel prices could already be a consequence of peak oil, the maximum rate of oil production, go almost unnoticed. The Energy Watch Group dates peak oil back to 2006; others place it in the coming years. In fact, the crisis isn’t going to wait until the last drop of oil is being pumped out of a Saudi oil field, but begins when the rate of oil production starts to decline and neither the existing demand nor, for that matter, a growing one, can be met. After the peak, oil production will be cut back each year at a rate of two or more percent.

The IEA’s message that the global economy is headed for a “supply crunch” has also gone nearly unnoticed. Similar tones are heard from the company Total, which claims that oil production is becoming more difficult all the time. Even EU energy commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, has warned about peak oil. Nothing like this enters the common debate on climate change or registers within mainstream eco-movements. One might wonder about this, since high oil prices were seen as the magic bullet for ecological transformation. Is it possible that even the Greens have secretly based their aspirations on black gold?

Be that as it may, peak oil is only part of the problem. The Energy Watch Group places global peak gas and peak coal in 2025. In Europe, as well as the US, definitive regional peak gas will come earlier. In any case, other fossil fuels will become more expensive when demand is transferred to them, all the more so because the effort necessary to produce gas and coal will increase.

Fossil fuels make up about 80% of worldwide energy use. The lion’s share of renewable resource use is in the traditional use of firewood in the global South. Gas and oil are also the main raw materials for chemical industries. Synthetics, pharmaceuticals, and pesticides are produced from crude oil, and nitrogen-fertilizer manufacturing requires gas (or coal) as well.

Thus we not only have an energy problem, but we also need to reorganize our material flows. Consider the need for synthetic fiber in the textile industry and you can imagine how much of the earth’s surface will be grazed by sheep or covered with cotton or hemp in order to replace oil with biological raw materials. The more surface is needed for material use, the less remains for food production. This dilemma becomes even more dramatic as climate change reduces productivity in agriculture and nutrient fertilizer becomes increasingly scarce after peak gas is reached.

The upshot: as soon as the “underground forests” of fossil materials grow thin, only surface expansion will remain to make up our material and energy needs. But the world is round and expansion of the energy and material consumption of the few will cost the lives of many, especially if fossil fuels are to be replaced by biomass.

2. From Accumulation to Depreciation

Besides oil, the prices of many kinds of metals are also rising, and the renewable energy system needs a lot of them. Small wonder, then, that the number of newly installed wind-power plants in Germany is declining and that increasing raw-material prices are also hampering the expansion of solar power. To understand why so many activists and theoreticians on the left are fixated on growth, consider a simple fact: the ostensible ecological transformation of capitalism is only possible if it includes profit and growth. It is, however, a mistake to assume that capital will switch to renewable resources on its own as soon as fossil fuel prices rise. The reality is not so: with rising fuel prices all prices rise. Renewable resources won’t become attractive by themselves, and in a global recession, the financial means for green investments will disappear as well. Ecological reconstruction will be left in nothing but half-finished ruins.

If we are to proceed in our reality check, we also have to see that the whole system of energy distribution and use is adapted to fossil fuels: pipelines, oil tankers, all possible motor engines, and simple heating installations. Reconstructing energy provision will not be enough. Massive reconstruction of all of our technologies and infrastructure is required. Of course, as long as capitalist relations of production exist, this rebuilding is only possible if there are real and expected profits. This basic fact constrains state budgets and green government policies as well.

Apart from the bottleneck of capitalist valorization, there exists also a material transition problem: if too-small quantities of fossil resources are invested for constructing renewable material and energy systems over too long a time span, they will, at some point, no longer be sufficient to produce materials and energy in amounts comparable to today. By contrast, scarcity will intensify and growth will slow down if too many fossil (and mineral) resources are directed toward ecological restructuring in too short a time.

Fordism has not only shifted its contradictions towards its periphery, but even into the future. In the 20th Century, intense social struggles led to a specific mode of conflict management that consisted of polluting nature in accordance with growth. This productivist social contract between capitalists and the working class came at cost to the natural resources necessary for survival. Now it is coming back to haunt us, in the form of climate change et al. , in the centers of the capitalist world-system as resources become scarce. At this point social struggles rise again.

As a result, the perspectives of those who bet on a new accumulation regime, in the wake of the fossil-fuel regime, will grow scarce. It is not only clear that the internal contradictions of capitalism have no potential for liberation, but it is precisely this contradictory dynamic that resulted in the increased appropriation of nature. Moreover, it is also clear that capitalist-bourgeois society is not suited for its self-transformation in a Hegelian sense of “Selbstaufhebung, ” but for its self-destruction. Accumulation of capital is also the accumulation of waste and the depletion of natural resources. The empirical data are unambiguous in this regard. It has to be just as clear: an absolute reduction of consumption, emissions, and waste production is impossible as long as capital accumulates.

When the value of fossil (and metallic) raw materials increases because the extraction continuously grows more expensive and brings in smaller returns on investments, the value of societal capital is likewise affected. The value of the means of production increases, including equipment for the extremely capital-intensive and increasingly energy-intensive oil sector while the value of labor power increases as long as the commodified standard of living remains fairly constant. Under this assumption, the amount of time expended on social reproduction increases causing unpaid labor time to be reduced. Consequently the rate of surplus value falls, being nothing other than the relationship between unpaid to paid labor time. Likewise, the degree of value composition of capital, i. e. the relation of dead to (paid) living labor – a relation expressed by capital intensity in terms of prices – will probably increase. But even if we suppose the degree of value composition remains stable, the profit rate will inevitably fall.

The only solution would be to extend labor time, to enhance labor intensity and reduce the standard of living considerably in terms of commodities – provided that the surplus value rate then increases faster than the degree of value composition. However, this 19th-Century accumulation strategy risks everything in the face of social upheaval, and, most of all, it cannot valorize the fossil-driven capital at its existing scale.

Unlike previous crises, this ecological crisis of capital is not paving the way for a new phase of accumulation because it is not just destroying abstract economic value as expressed by money, but also the use value of the affected assets in particular. Destruction of value, as is the normal case in a capitalist crisis, leaves use values – infrastructure, machinery, commodities etc. – mostly untouched. Hence it improves the conditions for surviving capitals to accumulate.

Even if there is a new upswing in a particular region or sector, resource peaks will limit it. Any restricted upswing would also occur on a reduced level of output. Instead of a new regime of accumulation, there comes a global regime of depreciation. Seen from the perspective of capital, the best case would be an “accumulation in retreat, ” functionalizing the rest of the world from the metropolitan bastions in order to change the resource basis in the form of oil and biomass imperialism, thus “financing” energetically the resource-intensive transition to renewable resources on an industrial scale in the global North.

3. Fetishizing the Crisis

Because the left is still a modernization movement, it has, if anything, a harder time focusing on the age of peaks than the ruling classes. Capitalist relations of production are essentially secondary for the safeguarding of domination. Only access to resources and to people’s living time must be guaranteed and their exploitation sufficiently legitimized.

So we must avoid watching out for a new regime of accumulation that will never come, because in doing this, we lose precious time to adapt to the new situation while the ruling class will use it for a fundamental restructuring. The other danger is that, in misinterpreting the current developments, the left gives space to ideologies fetishizing the ecological crisis. If there is a lack of appropriate analysis of environmental processes and societal relations to nature because they don’t fit into the wishful thinking of “eternal capitalism, ” dangerous ways of ideologically processing the crisis can gain momentum. Such crisis reactions can easily be used to legitimize repression, resource wars, and annihilation of human life.

We all know that according to the dominant perspective, which is by no means the perspective of the dominant classes alone but also that of the dominated, the level of investment and consumption of the global North can never be the cause of misery. It is much easier to blame the Chinese or even overpopulation. A new fetishism is already visible, one that does not recognize the crisis of societal relationships with nature as such, but declares a part of society as part of the realm of nature. In the age of peaks racism and sexism might overtake anti-Semitism as the classic crisis ideology in the capitalist metropoles.

4. Socio-ecological Condensations

Despite the fact that climate change and peak oil are just two sides of the same mode of consumption and production, those two debates are, for the most part, strictly separated. When they do converge, a rationing discourse emerges. The cap-and-share approach of FEASTA (The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability), for instance, aims at regulation that grants all individuals, without any conditions, the same portion of emission rights (with a declining rate each year). The Irish government is already interested in this approach. David Fleming’s concept of Tradable Energy Quotas has been discussed by British politicians.

FEASTA proposes an egalitarian solution to the problem of energy shortages and the reduction of greenhouse emissions that amounts to a de facto socialization of businesses’ fossil resource inputs. In contrast to FEASTA, David Fleming plans to endow the state apparatus, as well as private business, with a total of 60% of fossil rations and emission rights a priori – a portion that the state and business would, however, have to purchase by auction. Approaches like Richard Heinberg’s Oil Depletion Protocol explicitly propose to ignore issues of social domination in the face of the crisis. The social and ecological questions congeal in the form of a new terrain of social struggles, comprising options for emancipation as well as many traps.

The age of peaks is changing the material-ecological conditions fundamentally, irreversibly and without precedent. The left, which has grown up with fossil resources, must adapt to these conditions as quickly as possible. This must also lead to a reconsideration of perspectives, strategies, and models of emancipation. Do “progress” or “liberation” from a supposed “realm of necessities” still make sense?

It is doubtful. As a left perspective in the age of peaks, reduction is on the agenda instead of growth. Infrastructures and social relations, which expanded during the 20th Century based on continuously expanding fossil resources, are literally made of desert sand. It is time to get rid of this dead weight.

What will sound unreasonably demanding to many is, to the contrary, a historical opportunity. Not only does it force us to do “what we always wanted to do, ” i. e. live better instead of producing more, work less and drastically reduce fossil fuel consumption; but it also creates a real and very rare possibility: The structures of social domination must fundamentally reorganize themselves, and so become vulnerable. From there, they can continue in a new social form with a stationary “economy” on a renewable basis, or we can abolish them altogether.

On Criticism of Modern Masculinity

Norbert Trenkle

Our permanent crisis, the perfect economic storm, calls for radical rethinking, rethinking work, meaning, fulfilment, sexism and cooperation and reducing our footprint. The work religion confuses independence and dependence and distorts the world into a foreign object.

The crisis of work is also a crisis of modern masculinity because the modern middle class man is constituted and structured in his identity in very essential ways as a working man. A working man is goal-directed, rational, efficient and practical and always wants to see a measurable result. This need not always happen “in the sweat of his brow.” In this regard, the modern masculine identity is very flexible. The man of action in management, business consultation and government understands himself as an achiever or as a worker in construction, on the assembly line or driving a truck. The latter have long been outdated as models of male vocational orientation and are reserved to those who don’t leap over the social hurdles on the way to the top floors. Nevertheless they serve as representatives of true masculinity on the symbolic plane. Half-naked musclemen with heavy monkey wrenches or sledge hammers in hand, smeared a little decoratively with oil but otherwise nearly aseptically clear are put on stage before the aestheticized scenery of an auto shop or a big oven are the icons of modern masculinity.

In advertisements for designer suits and men’s cologne, fantasies and identification desires that are firmly anchored in the deep structures of constructed male identity should be awakened. The frail insurance employee or obese short-winded sales manager of a lemonade firm can also identify with the musclemen. Physically they are unattainable dreams that will never be reached. However something else is crucial. The muscle packages and steel bodies shaped like statues represent the claim of exercising power, power over others, over the world and over themselves. This may be a wretched power to control a few employees, prevail on the market against a rival with a new kind of lemonade or gain higher profits compared to the previous year. This power is also extremely precarious because it is constantly threatened and subject to recall. It depends on self-assertiveness in competition which can always fail and on business cycles that cannot be individually influenced. Because of this uncertainty, constant and aggressive self-assurance are necessary.

Thus the muscle-laded physical specimen does not constitute the modern man. Rather this symbolizes a severity that firstly is an inner attitude and mental self-preparation. A “true man” has to be hard on himself and others. Bulging biceps is the symbol for self-control, discipline and the power of will over one’s body. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak – and therefore must be first tamed if man wants to have everything under control. Therein lies the distinction to the ancient notion that a healthy spirit dwells in a healthy body. Although body and spirit are outwardly separate, their balanced connected is still valid. However the domination and subjugation of the body under the spirit is in the limelight in the modern interpretation. The “free will” that imagines itself independent of all sensuousness and must permanently fight lives scared stiff that it could lose this battle. This anxiety constitutes the socio-psychic core of the middle class person.

THE WORK OF CORRUPTION

The modern male identity corresponds to the demanding profile of work in the capitalist society based on general goods production. By its nature, work in capitalism is a corrupted and corrupting activity in many ways. Firstly, its goal is the production of goods as a means for exploiting assets or capital, not the manufacture of concrete useful objects. Thus the produced goods do not count as such in their material reality but only so far as they represent value and contribute to making more money out of money. From this perspective, the material side of a good is a necessary evil from which unfortunately one cannot be free. Otherwise a customer would not be found. Secondly, production of goods as a means goes along with a basic indifference toward the natural foundations of life which ultimately only count as material of exploitation and then are themselves consumed recklessly even if gigantic catastrophes occur threatening the existence of millions upon millions of people. Thirdly, work is a corrupted activity when it takes place in a special sphere separated from all other life contexts subject to the dictates of company efficiency and profitability and simply has no room for the goals, needs and feelings that are not subject to this dictate.

Fourthly and lastly, work in this form defines the whole social contest in a very basic way and is not only a specific historical mode of production. This is not only quantitative in that more and more areas of life are transformed directly into divisions of goods production and spheres of capital investment. Rather work in capitalist society represents the central principle of mediating social relations. By its nature, this mediation has an objectivized, depersonalized and estranged form. People do not consciously produce this connection by agreement or direct communication but relate in the round-about way of work products by either selling themselves as workers or producing goods thrown on the market to realize a profit. In a certain way people communicate with one another through work products according to the objectivized code of exploitation logic. Communication through work means subjection of people under the assumed laws of exploitation that follow an automated momentum of their own. Opposing them is likened to opposing inviolable natural laws although they are a form of social relations.

THE WORLD AS A FOREIGN OBJECT

The largely across-the-board enforcement of this historically unique form of social activity and relations was not possible without the creation of a certain anthropological type corresponding to it and guaranteeing its adequate functioning. An objectivized relational form is not produced independent of social individuals but goes through them and is actively reproduced again and again. This anthropological type is the male subject of work and goods of the modern age. To him, the whole world becomes a foreign object. His relation to his social and natural context, to other persons and even his own body and his own sensuousness is that of a relation to things, things that should be treated, organized and handled functionally as objects of his will. The modern subject only wants to manage his feelings and regulate functional demands correspondingly. Despite an incredible mass of self-help literature, this regularly fails but is not abandoned.

This modern form of world- and self-relations is most obvious where one sells one’s labor power. One loses control over oneself and submits very immediately to the dictates of exploitation logic. Whoever works independently does not escape this logic but also stands under the pressure to abstract himself from his material needs and from the concrete material qualities of the products that are indifferently exchangeable means in earning his livelihood. Modern subjectivity is structured according to this pressure. More occurs than an act of passive submission under a mere external pressure. In this way the obligation to complete functioning objectification and self-objectification can be enforced for the duration of the work process without a slave driver swinging the whip. An internal pressure corresponds to the external pressure. The objectivizing model of action and conduct is not limited only to the spheres of work and economy but influences the whole social relational structure… Because the objectivizing mode is unbearable in the long run, because having to act that way requires constant exertion and effort and threatens to permanently fail, the modern work- and commodity subject hates all those who run aground or refuse these pressures.

MAN MAKES WOMAN

The Protestant work ethic first raised this anthropological type to an objectified ideal of success. When the capitalist mode of production first began to prevail on a few islands in the ocean of feudal society, it anticipated in the history of ideas the social context mediated through work and commodities and contributed to its general enforcement. In real history, it took centuries until the human type was formed corresponding to these demands and became the normal case. The whole history of implementing capitalism is one of forcible preparation of persons into work- and goods- subjects and at the same time one of stubborn resistance against this formation which ultimately could not prevent it.

The type of modern male identity can be explained historically from the long prehistory of patriarchal rule on which capitalist society is based and transformed in its way. The identification of the man with abstract reason and the woman with the sensuousness that is simultaneously devalued, desired and combated. , follows a long tradition that extends to Greek antiquity, was adopted by Christianity and further developed and reinterpreted according to its needs. However this construction gained a new central position in capitalist society when the abstract and objectified relation to the world became the general mode of socialization. This construction is connected in a very essential way with the base social structure. The training of men into actors of objectification can be tied to different elements of the past model of patriarchal masculinity. Besides identification with reason, identification with the warrior, the violent subjugator occurs in male training. However given the objectification of all social relations, these forms are compounded into a largely coherent and self-contained identity of the”man.”

This could not succeed without the creation of a feminine counter-identity uniting all those features that the modern subject cannot endure because they do not fit in the coordinate system of male identity construction and therefore must be split off. The creation of a feminine “other, ” the sensuous, emotional and impulsive woman who cannot think logically or hammer a nail in the wall and therefore has to care for the children, the household and the well-being of “her” man. With the invention of this “other, ” the male subject did not only stabilize his identity. A gender division of labor was installed that is very functional for the capitalist enterprise.

This femininity model is now put in question by the wide-ranging inclusion of women in the capitalist labor process on one hand and by the women’s movement on the other hand. Still this model continues in its core up to today. When women succeed in gaining positions of social power, this always happens at the cost of an adjustment to the demands of the male norms of work, competition and abstract efficiency. At the same time their main responsibility for the household and children remains. Objectification of the feminine body for sexualized men’s phantasies is all-pervasive as a glance at the window display of any magazine kiosk or billboard advertisement proves.

This tenaciousness of polar capitalist gender identities may be surprising at first. However the male subject form will survive as long as the social cohesion is produced through the objectified relations of commodity, money and labor. The current crisis process that hurls thousands of persons from the labor process or forces them into increasingly precarious working conditions in no way suspends the gender identities. This crisis process shakes one of the basic pillars of masculine identity and leads to intensified competition on all planes of everyday life. Nevertheless under these conditions the classical qualities of modern masculinity like hardness, ruggedness and ruthlessness are more desired than ever. Therefore not surprisingly the masculinity cult has a boom season again today – including sexist and racist violence. Under the conditions of the sweeping crisis process, a fundamental critique of the modern male-structured subject is necessary to open a new perspective of social emancipation.

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Alternative “Transposition”: All Partisanship in the Clash of Cultures Should Be Refused

Franz Schandl

[This article published in: Freitag 13, 3/30/2007 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.freitag.de/2007/13/07/30101.php.]

The 20th century was the bloodiest century in the history of humanity. The 21st century could break this record. The arsenals are full or can be full at any time. We live in times of insecurity of the worldwide political system. That is realistic though it may sound cynical. As everybody knows, growth in all areas is a principle of capital accumulation. A black scenario is unfolding today in the Middle East where suffering and brutality constantly increase.

That the West can do anything is not questioned any more. Whether it should do what it can do is discussed. Only the opportuneness of the moment for military interventions (with and without a UN mandate) is usually interesting. That this arrogance hardly attracts attention speaks volumes. The matter-of-factness with which the Occident acts out of human rights- and economic-superiority – literally subverts, intervenes and bombs – shows the overbearing nature of this policy. The error striking with Ahmadinedschad is not striking with local exponents. To Chirac, Teheran’s nuclear bomb direction is not a problem.

The fundamentalism of the white man and his democratic values reaches into the left…

After Saddam Hussein, Mahmud Ahmadinedschad is now unmasked as a national socialist. Instead of thinking in a more complex way, the facts of the case are slandered as trivialization and appeasement, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. The parallels click into place and the tickets are issued. Real dangers are not discussed but rather the wildest threatening scenarios that are often nothing but hallucinated analogies outside all real power relations. Subjunctives are rated highly and easily defeat every indicative. What is reality against a projection? It could be and therefore!

Ahmadinedschad is one who consistently applies a conventional political logic. Ahmadinedschad claims for himself what was self-evident for others for centuries. Nuclear power and nuclear bombs as technologies are important parts of the capitalist system. No fears of cultural contact exist. Who is astonished that times are past when nuclear technology was regarded as un-Islamic?

Caution is commanded regarding nervous headlines. One only needs to remember Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. These weapons could have existed but did not exist. Lies were repeated with full conviction.

The propagandistic pattern recalled the Cold War. After 1945, the Third Reich and the “evil empire, ” the former Soviet Union, were equated by means of the insidious totalitarian formula. Nazi comparisons are again on the agenda. While Israel’s policy is compared with the Nazis in an incredible way, every Muslim is stylized as a Hitler.

An incredible lack of comprehension grows rampantly. This is manifest when one does not know who is a friend or an enemy. The de-historicized and exported Nazis serve as an alibi for diverse madnesses. To avert greater harm, this city has to be bombed, this land boycotted and this system blackmailed. So the argument goes. Reasons are found or invented if necessary. This regressive calculus is in a boom season. What can a prophylactic war against Iran accomplish other than an extensive fire? Is that the goal? Whoever accepts everything as a supposedly lesser evil will justify evil and monstrosities. Partisanship in the announced clash of cultures is practiced capitulation.

The alternative “transposition” means taking a standpoint beyond the planes of conflict amid the amplified dangers. This must not be confused with equidistance or ignorance and does not exclude concrete solidarity with victims. This solidarity is in effect for afflicted individuals, the ones who suffer in conflicts, not nations, collectives or states. Transposition does not mean either party or neutrality. It does not try to settle in the given coordinate system but emphasizes the destructiveness of confrontations. It is the ideal negation of conflict that leads to a real negation. It poses its questions and does not merely reply to questions. It rolls up banners and does not hoist flags. In short, weaken all the fronts! Come out of the trenches!

Whether transposition will prevail can certainly be doubted. If it does not succeed, the left faces an historical disaster. It will marginalize itself because it cannot set anything independent against the global barbarization. In the metropolises where we live, this means: no flank protection for the Occidental powers and no aiding and abetting war-mongerers. The debates finally move from a denunciatory to an argumentative plane. “This is wrong because” replaces “You are a… ”

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Bob Black

zur deutschen Übersetzung

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased coin.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for “reality, ” the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously — or maybe not — all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists — except that I’m not kidding — I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work — and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs — they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don’t care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

You may be wondering if I’m joking or serious. I’m joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn’t have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn’t triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I’d like life to be a game — but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

The alternative to work isn’t just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it’s never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called “leisure”; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is the time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacation so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.

I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means. ) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it’s done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist of “Communist, ” work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.

Usually — and this is even more true in “Communist” than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee — work is employment, i. e. , wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions — Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey — temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millenia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.

But modern work has worse implications. People don’t just work, they have “jobs.” One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don’t) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A “job” that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who — by any rational-technical criteria — should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.

The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as “discipline.” Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace — surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn’t have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

Such is “work.” Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it’s forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the “suspension of consequences.” This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; that’s why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), define it as game-playing or following rules. I respect Huizinga’s erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel — these practices aren’t rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.

Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other’s control techniques. A worker is a par-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called “insubordination, ” just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?

The demeaning system of domination I’ve described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it’s not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or — better still — industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are “free” is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you’ll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they’ll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They’re used to it.

We are so close to the world of work that we can’t see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the “work ethic” would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labeled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed, the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding, until overthrown by industrialism — but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.

Let’s pretend for a moment that work doesn’t turn people into stultified submissives. Let’s pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And let’s pretend that work isn’t as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do we keep looking at out watches. The only thing “free” about so-called free time is that it doesn’t cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don’t do that. Lathes and typewriters don’t do that. But workers do. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, “Work is for saps! ”

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that “whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.” His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed “to regain the lost power and health.” Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to “St. Monday” — thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration — was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancien regime wrested substantial time back from their landlord’s work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants’ calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov’s figures from villages in Czarist Russia — hardly a progressive society — likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants’ days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes’ compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life — in North America, particularly — but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the west. ) The “survival of the fittest” version — the Thomas Huxley version — of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist — a geographer — who’d had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about. ) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled “The Original Affluent Society.” They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that “hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.” They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were “working” at all. Their “labor, ” as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller’s definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full “play” to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: “The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity.” (A modern version — dubiously developmental — is Abraham Maslow’s counterposition of “deficiency” and “growth” motivation. ) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that “the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required.” He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work — it’s rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work — but we can.

The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe, among them M. Dorothy George’s England In Transition and Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also pertinent is Daniel Bell’s essay, “Work and its Discontents, ” the first text, I believe, to refer to the “revolt against work” in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, The End of Ideology. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bell’s end-of-ideology thesis signaled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour Lipset (in Political Man), not Bell, who announced at the same time that “the fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution have been solved, ” only a few years before the post- or meta-industrial discontents of college students drove Lipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary) tranquility of Harvard.

As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smith’s modern epigones. As Smith observed: “The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations… has no occasion to exert his understanding… He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970′s and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEW’s report Work in America, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. That problem is the revolt against work. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist — Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner — because, in their terms, as they used to say on Star Trek, “it does not compute. ”

If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they don’t count the half million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year, a much higher fatality rate than for AIDS, for instance, which gets so much media attention. This reflects the unvoiced assumption that AIDS afflicts perverts who could control their depravity whereas coal-mining is a sacrosanct activity beyond question. What the statistics don’t show is that tens of millions of people have heir lifespans shortened by work — which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their 50′s. Consider all the other workaholics.

Even if you aren’t killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly, or indirectly, to work.

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing — or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.

Bad news for liberals: regulatory tinkering is useless in this life-and-death context. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration was designed to police the core part of the problem, workplace safety. Even before Reagan and the Supreme Court stifled it, OSHA was a farce. At previous and (by current standards) generous Carter-era funding levels, a workplace could expect a random visit from an OSHA inspector once every 46 years.

State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. Stories reverberate about covered-up Soviet nuclear disasters which make Times Beach and Three-Mile Island look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, won’t help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire.

Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively that — as antebellum slavery apologists insisted — factory wage-workers in the Northern American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they don’t even try to crack down on most malefactors.

What I’ve said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves is that work itself is inevitable and necessary.

I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand — and I think this the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure — we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes, except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldn’t make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.

I don’t suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn’t worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done — presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now — would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing, and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkeys and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the “tertiary sector, ” the service sector, is growing while the “secondary sector” (industry) stagnates and the “primary sector” (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That’s why you can’t go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn’t the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the past fifty years?

Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant — and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model-T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we’ve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.

Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork to provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called “schools, ” primarily to keep them out of Mom’s hair but still under control, but incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid “shadow work, ” as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system that makes it necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because they’re better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.

I haven’t as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence would have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly they’ll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps they’ll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldn’t care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I don’t what robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised haven’t saved a moment’s labor. Karl Marx wrote that “it would be possible to write a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class.” The enthusiastic technophiles — Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B. F. Skinner — have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than sceptical about the promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, let’s give them a hearing.

What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a “job” and an “occupation.” Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won’t be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.

The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I don’t want coerced students and I don’t care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure.

Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile, profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although they’d get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when they’re just fueling up human bodies for work.

Third — other things being equal — some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people don’t always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As the saying goes, “anything once.” Fourier was the master at speculating how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post-civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in “Little Hordes” to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we don’t have to take today’s work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed. If technology has a role in all this it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. It’s a sobering thought that the grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in the future, if there is one. The point is that there’s no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything it’s just the opposite. We shouldn’t hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched.

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps. There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people suspect. Besides Fourier and Morris — and even a hint, here and there, in Marx — there are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin). The Goodman brothers’ Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned from the often hazy heralds of alternative/appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationists — as represented by Vaneigem’s Revolution of Daily Life and in the Situationist International Anthology — are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the worker’s councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no workers, and without workers, who would the left have to organize?

So the abolitionists would be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debater’s problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity.

Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not — as it is now – — a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play, The participants potentiate each other’s pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.

No one should ever work. Workers of the world… relax!

new version June 2006

Neil Larsen

On the Historical Immanence of Language in Adorno

I.

“The whole is the untrue. “¹ This phrase, one of the signatures of Adorno’s most unmistakable work, Minima Moralia, points to an irony that perhaps not even its author could have discerned. Notwithstanding the truth of its bitter rebuke to the Hegelian dialectic as apology for capitalist modernity, as a philosophical dictum in its own right it would itself have to be judged false, fatal to any aspiration to dialectical thought. To that much, of course, Adorno testifies, both in practice–for neither Minima Moralia nor any other of his works reflect any doubt that critical theory, as part of its own conceptual movement, must strive for the totalization of its object– but also in theory: one need look no further than to Minima Moralia itself than to have this confirmed: “Dialectical thought opposes reification in the… sense that it refuses to affirm individual things in their isolation and separateness: it designates isolation as precisely a product of the universal. “² A refusal to isolate means a commitment to totalize, albeit a non-Hegelian one. The alternative would be to succumb to the reified consciousness of the object in its sheer immediacy. The “whole” may be the “untrue, ” but that does not make the part the truth. Both become false, at least from the immediate standpoint of “wrong life” reflected, consciously and without apology, by Minima Moralia.

The less conscious, perhaps inadvertent irony in these words, however, is how true they become in relation to Adorno’s own formal mode of self-presentation-that is, as a reflection on the relationship of his thinking to the language and style in which it is conveyed. With only a few exceptions, this is a language that, outwardly at least, resists its own mediation by any formal standard of systematicity or argumentative blueprint. Any reader of Adorno, from the newcomer to the initiate and academic exegete, experiences this, for example, in the great difficulty one has in summarizing-and also at times in retaining-his arguments. As I can confirm from my own experience in teaching Adorno’s works and assigning my students to produce such summaries, this can seem to be a virtually impossible task. The end result is often little more than a list of citations, almost always a sampling of Adorno’s aphoristic and dialectically tensed sentences. Consider for example-taking Horkheimer’s co-authorship as moot in this regard–the chapter on the Culture Industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment. How is one to outline or condense the logic of its argument as a whole? One can attempt a gloss, or look up one of the reasonably good ones already published, but sooner or later, if the text itself is followed closely, the conclusion seems inevitable that this logic, though everywhere in force, does not so much develop by stages as it reiterates itself continuously and in shifting empirical and polemical contexts. From its opening statement-”Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio and magazines form a system. “³ -the “whole” is, in essence, already expounded, and, although someone not immediately persuaded by it might in the end succumb to the sheer thrust-almost a kind of fury-of its will to truth and to its sociological sweep, nothing in Dialectic of Enlightenment that follows can be said to take on the burden of proving it, or any other in the series of emphatic, unrelentingly indicative-mood sentences that follow it and that, in effect, make up the entire text of chapter and work themselves. Here, as, to one degree or another throughout Adorno’s corpus, the “untruth” of the “whole” can only be eluded through constant exertions to wrestle the latter into virtually every lexical predication. That Adorno’s thinking at any given point in its development and formal presentation forms a coherent, exquisitely reflective and mediated whole, supple and adaptive, is in no way contradicted by this. But the movement of thought through language is at the same time an inward, condensing movement of language within itself, a movement toward what is, for the logical organization of Adornian critical prose, a fusion of dialectics and style at the level of such language’s smallest moving part: the sentence or short, aphoristic sequence of sentences. So, for instance, a sentence taken almost at random: “There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh about.” (112) Or another: “What is offered [in photographic images] is not Italy but evidence that it exists.” (119) Or again: “The consumer becomes the ideology of the amusement industry, whose institutions he or she cannot escape.” (128) The last of these sentences, somewhat more theoretically explicit, is probably a better choice than the former for the would-be précis of “The Culture Industry, ” but the essay’s claim to truth, and its corresponding power of conviction, seems to weigh equally in each of them. All such sentences or dicta appear to elaborate, in an iterative or serial structure, on a logic that is virtually identical and whole in each of them.

No one, of course, was more aware of this than Adorno himself, and one can find reflections on this form of presentation throughout his writings⁴. But nowhere is the latter more poignantly evoked than in one of the centerpieces of Notes to Literature, “The Essay as Form. “⁵ What Adorno observes there-essayistically-of the essay, -e. g. , that it “allows for the consciousness of nonidentity, without expressing it directly”; that it “is radical in its non-radicalism, in refraining from any reduction to principle, in its accentuation of the partial against the total, in its fragmentary character” (9)- not only provides the elements for a general theory of the essay-form but is as good an account as any of what Adorno’s readers should, ideally, experience if form remains true to its intention.

But such reflections on what amounts to Adorno’s fundamental formal principle, the node at which style and theoretical aim merge in what we might refer to schematically here as Adorno’s dialectical minimalism, are not the end of the story. Even if Adorno is right about the cognitive and critical powers of the “methodically unmethodical” (“The Esssay as Form, ” 13) -and, as could be argued, his dialectical minimalism has succeeded, probably beyond Adorno’s wildest dreams, in generalizing itself as a kind of (ironically) popular-cultural voice of critical-theoretical authenticity, a voice that no one striving for such authenticity, including the author of these lines, can resist trying to imitate-there remain the questions both of the deeper, historico-genetic origin of such language and of what might be its own ideological limitation, its own possible moment of “untruth.” At the very least we are faced with a theoretical and formal paradox staring back at us from virtually every page of Adorno’s work as a critical theorist: namely, why has the “whole” become the “untrue” for the formal, expressive tendency of a thinking that, in relation to any given object, knows-and ultimately reflects this knowledge in its own content and movement-just the opposite? This is the question I want to discuss, however speculatively, in these pages.

II.

One way to attempt to illuminate this paradox is to consider how Adorno’s dialectical minimalism compares to the inevitable model for all modern, critical-dialectical prose, namely the language of Marx, and above all that of Capital. Even if, philosophically and, in a sense, philologically speaking, the most visible debt of the Adornian dialectic is to Hegel, Adorno’s re-thinking of the form of critical theory in relation to totality and system is unquestionably mediated by Adorno’s own positive theoretical relationship to Marx, however problematic this relationship and however reluctant he seems to have been to address it explicitly. Consider, in this light, one of Marx’s most distinctive and enigmatically dialectical mots from the concluding, fourth section (on the “fetishism of commodities”) of the first chapter of Capital I: “Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead. It rather transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic. “⁶ This two-sentence sequence contains the dialectical chiasmus or inversion typical of Marx as a dialectical stylist: the objective, reified surface of the capitalist social formation appears as something self-evident, as transparent. The value-form is socially tacit, its own logic apparently already given in universal social practice. But it is just this apparent self-evidence, this objective transparency, which conceals the essence, the fundamental synthetic principle of capitalist society. The value-form is a fetish-form, not because it is mysterious (a “hieroglyphic”) per se, but because it exists in a relationship of mutual determination with an objective social nexus that itself turns its products into fetishes and its own social “bearers” into fetish-worshippers. The truth of the value-form is hidden in its own transparent self-evidence, both practically and theoretically. To decipher value one first must understand how value converts the social totality itself into a cipher.

Adorno, more than most Marxists of his day-and thanks, clearly, to being as much the student of Hegel as was Marx himself-knew how to read Capital, and, down to the sentence level, could reproduce the same dialectical, logico-stylistic movement evident there, often in the same inverted or chiasmic form. Thus the Culture Industry, as theorized in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, does not dominate its consumers by hectoring or lulling them into subservience. It dominates them precisely by making them free to consume its products, that is, by virtue of already having taken on a social objectivity existing “behind the backs” of consumers who, say, even when switching off the television, continue to reproduce the essence of its “message” in their own heads. The Culture Industry, like value, represents the outward, objective form of what the subjects of the dominant, reifying social relation already are qua subjects.

But the position of Marx’s dictum within the whole that is Capital is in no way arbitrary. Marx could not have opened the chapter on the commodity with it because the truth that it condenses, here in a quasi-aphoristic style, about the object of Marx’s critique-the value-form-must already have been shown by means of the rigorously theoretical argument that precedes the concluding, fourth section of the chapter on the commodity. The objective transparency of value in its form of appearance has already been proven by Marx to disclose, within its own immanent terms, its mysterious, fetishized essence. That the value-relation self-evidently exists and just as self-evidently rests on an equation of qualitatively different kinds of labor and use-values serves as the unshakeable premise here from which it follows that value must appear as a paradoxically “social substance” residing in commodities as their seemingly material, thing-like property. And that result, judged by the same standard of self-evidence furnished by the value-relation itself, must be deemed false. The classical political-economic theory of Smith and Ricardo succumbs to the commodity-fetish, convicting itself, ultimately, on its own, immanent terms. The incomparable critical force of Marx’s chiasmic dictum on the value-form and of his mode of presentation generally in Capital rests on this proof, and the remainder of Capital proceeds to extrapolate from it and to build a theoretical system on its rigorous foundation.

Not so the dialectical sentences of “The Culture Industry.” In Adorno’s defense, it must doubtless be acknowledged that his own thinking also, even if only implicitly, strives consistently to follow through on this theoretically rigorous point of departure, or at least to keep its radical truth constantly in view. Moreover, insofar as the objects of Adornian critique are cultural or ideological in form, the standards of proof themselves become considerably more difficult to meet, far more complexly mediated. But that should not, in principle, have prevented Adorno-much less prevent his contemporary readers and students-from attempting to hold critical theory and immanent critique to this same, rigorous standard. The abjuring of systems and “false” wholes, whether in the name of the “individual” or the “non-identical, ” may begin to look like little more than theoretical abdications in light of the systematic, logical standard set by Capital. Yet, already in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno appears to require of his readers that they somehow learn to overcome the expectation that the logical articulations and truth-claims of immanent critique could meet such standards of proof. Ironically, given what is on one level its profound philosophical rigor, nothing in Adorno’s thinking is proven-unless, that is, one is willing or able to share Adorno’s evident suspicions that anything not already reified and turned into a piece of “positive” knowledge could be proven, or that proof could count any longer as anything more than the perpetual, emphatic disclosure of the object’s sheer negativity. The movement of what would be the proof for Adorno, if one were (or perhaps when one is) possible, appears to coil itself within the dialectical springs of style and language themselves, in the intuitive hope, if not faith, that the critically-theorized object in its own worldly course will shine through the words themselves when the moment is right. But in the meantime, a possible moment of self-apology has to be acknowledged in Adorno: for surely it is not the essay, as Adorno (self-referentially) describes it in “The Essay as Form, ” that constitutes the “critical form par excellence” (18). The form of Capital-a form regarding which one might indeed speculate (to what genre does Capital belong? ) but which is certainly not that of the essay-sets this standard, and sets aside and humbles any claims lodged on behalf of a “methodically unmethodical” flux of quasi-Nietzschean aphorisms, however dialectically-charged and true such sentences may be, in their particularity, to their Marxian point of origin.

Marx, it will be useful to recall, reflects on the methodological question of the whole in a widely-read section of the introduction to the Grundrisse subtitled “The Method of Political Economy. “⁷ There he acknowledges the seemingly more obvious method of “beginning with the real and concrete”-in economics, population-and then moving “analytically towards ever more simple concepts (e. g. , class, exchange, division of labor) from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until [arriving] at the simplest determinations.” (100) This method he contrasts to the inverse, less spontaneous one of beginning with such simple determinations-with abstract concepts-and ascending from these back to the level of the concrete whole: “Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second the abstract determination leads towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought.” (101) The latter is, according to Marx, “obviously the scientifically correct method.” (ibid. ) Although one should stipulate here that, on this plane of generality, the “scientifically correct method” is still that of the classical political-economic systems (Smith and Ricardo primarily) which Marx takes as his own immanent object of critique, it is also clear that, formally, Capital too adheres to this method too by starting with the commodity, or value-form and deriving from it the structured sequence of theoretical categories (e. g. , exchange, money, capital, surplus-value, etc. ) that lead, theoretically, to the “concrete totality” that is the capitalist mode of production itself. Marx diverges-critically-from classical political economy by insisting on the historical, specifically bourgeois origin of the conceptual abstractions themselves. (Grundrisse, 105) While retaining their abstraction, however, their systematic inter-relation or structure in the methodological context of Capital is itself made possible by a historically evolved whole-a concrete totality-whose own structure and “laws of motion” Capital’s theoretical structure, in a sense, now comes to embody directly, i. e. , to which it now becomes immanent. The simple determinations or conceptual abstractions work as abstractions without succumbing, as they do in classical political-economy, to their own reified, naturalized form because they have become, in Capital, historically-grounded moments of a totality that is not abstract. Thus the proof that value, in its social form of appearance, conceals the social whole that generates it is, on one level, a (theoretically) simple matter of showing that this whole is historical, that it has not always been and will, necessarily, become other than what it is. Capital’s “mode of presentation” (its Darstellungsweise in the terms of Marx’s postface to the second edition of Capital I) does not coincide with its “mode of investigation” (Forschungsweise) because only the former can reflect the immanent motion of the historical whole and set forth the theoretical system within which a rigorous proof of this historicity-a proof that does not revert to the reified, tautological form of classical political economy-is possible. ⁸

Considered from precisely this vantage point, Adorno’s dialectical minimalism, his idiosyncratically dialectical dissidence in relation to the logic of the system and to rigorous theoretical method, at least on the level of his own Darstellungsweise, betrays neither a reversion to the naïve empiricism governed by the “chaotic concrete” nor a Hegelian-idealist equation of the whole with the concept itself. It bespeaks rather an adherence to the method of Capital in which, paradoxically, what should be the concrete, historical whole has itself undergone a kind of collapse back into abstraction. It is as if the “concrete totality” immanent to and thus mediating the theoretical abstraction and systematicity of Capital had inexplicably lost its historical source of motion and come to a halt. Concepts, in Adorno, retain their dialectical, non-reified form-thus evading their “bad” abstraction in, say, the theoretical poverties of positivism-but seem to resist their own methodological deployment on the level of a theoretical system. This is because the only concrete totality that could possibly ground a “totality in thought” already appears, to Adorno, to have falsified its own historical concept. Method itself, without ceasing to be sensed as necessary, grinds to a stop. There is no mediated, logical way to arrive at a whole that no longer, as in Capital, situates itself in thought as both the premise and the result of theoretical reasoning because this whole now confronts theory as a “bad” abstraction, as a given, as soon as its concept is invoked.

Thus the “whole, ‘”in this case, turns out to be “untrue” in still another sense-as the historical totality that, harkening back to but simultaneously annulling its methodological basis in Capital, mediates the conceptual abstractions of theory and method, only here with the apparent risk of stripping them of their truth. Mediation seems to turn back on itself, resulting in the paradoxical need for a dialectical immediacy. Faced, that is, with such a monolithically “false” whole it follows that only a dialectic that never for a moment turned its back on it, that denounced it and its absolute positivity incessantly, a dialectic that had bound itself–like Odysseus before the Sirens–to its own immediate surface as form, could hope to survive.

III.

The problem is that even if the thought positing it could somehow manage to preserve its own dialectical consistency and configuration, such a whole would not itself be dialectical and would work just as incessantly to annul the dialectical movement of its own immanent, critical reflection. This is, in effect, the argument advanced by Moishe Postone in Time, Labor and Social Dominationagainst Horkheimer’s “critical pessimism, ‘ but it would appear to apply with equal force to Adorno⁹. Observing the key influence of Friedrich Pollock’s theory of state capitalism on Horkheimer’s thinking, Postone notes a “theoretical turn taken [by the Frankfurt School] in the 1930s, wherein postliberal capitalism came to be conceived as a completely administered, integrated, one-dimensional society, one that no longer gives rise to any immanent possibility of social emancipation.” (84-85) This is a charge often made by “orthodox” Marxists and “revolutionary” theory generally against Critical Theory, and Adorno in particular-one recalls Lukács’s famous quip about Adorno having taken up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss”-but what lends particular force to Postone’s argument is its careful demonstration that Horkheimer’s was not merely a conjunctural but a “necessary pessimism” concerning the “immanent possibility that capitalism could be superseded. “(86) This paradoxically immanent historical necessity, ascribed by Horkheimer not to historical change and internal crisis but to stagnation and paralysis, is clearly a model for the paradoxically “orthodox” but apocalyptic embrace of the dialectical methodology of Capital evident in Adorno’s thinking. Postone likewise attributes such “critical pessimism” not to a deviation (as per Critical Theory’s “revolutionary” detractors) but to an unquestioned, uncritical adherence to “traditional Marxism” and especially to the latter’s identification of the revolutionary, critical standpoint with that of the proletariat, or ‘labor. ‘ Postone’s general critique of the latter position is too elaborate and far-reaching to summarize here, but its gist is that labor, no less than the commodity or value, is an abstract social form inseparable from capital and hence one whose crisis is subsumed within the crisis of capitalism as a whole. The counter-posing of “labor” to capital as if the former represented a positive, spontaneous, and necessary pathway to social emancipation fails to grasp a theoretical result worked out in Capital: that the abstracting of “labor” from the general form of purposive social activity already conforms to the logic, constitutive of capitalism, that counts as “productive” only activity that produces value. Take away the value-abstraction, however, and the logic of isolating “labor” from social praxis and reproduction falls with it. The concrete labor that produces use-value can, in capitalism, only serve as the vehicle or embodiment of the abstract labor productive of exchange-value – or, simply, of value. Making “labor” the revolutionary subject thus only reproduces the Ricardian standpoint that directly counter-poses the relations of production to those of distribution, reasoning, effectively, as if value, in its subjective, active form could somehow negate itself merely by abolishing its own form as a given, objective result. Thus the danger clearly arises that, in the wake of a conjunctural, political defeat of the proletariat as the representative of “labor, ” a “pessimistic” theory might interpret this crisis as merely the eclipse of the subjective factor, leaving the objective side of “labor”-value-and the neo-Ricardian distortion of Capital firmly in place. This is the apocalyptic, “negative” re-affirmation of “traditional Marxism” that Postone attributes to Horkheimer:

We have seen that Horkheimer’s theory of knowledge had been based upon the assumption that social constitution is a function of “labor, ” which in capitalism is fragmented and hindered from fully unfolding by the relations of production. He now begins to consider the contradictions of capitalism to have been no more than the motor of a repressive development, which he expresses categorially with his statement that “the self-movement of the concept of the commodity leads to the concept of state capitalism just as for Hegel the certainty of sense data leads to absolute knowledge.” Horkheimer has thus come to the conclusion that a Hegelian dialectic, in which the contradictions of the categories lead to the self-unfolded realization of the Subject as totality (rather than to the abolition of the totality), could only result in the affirmation of the existing order. Yet he does not formulate his position in a way that would go beyond the limits of that order, for example, in terms of Marx’s critique of Hegel and of Ricardo. Instead, Horkheimer reverses his earlier position: “labor” and the totality, which earlier had been the standpoint of critique, now become the grounds of oppression and unfreedom. (113-114)

Adorno was, to be sure, a more subtle thinker than Horkheimer, as apt to question the latter’s increasingly liberal positions on late capitalism as he was to share Horkheimer’s generally pessimistic view of the possibility of social emancipation. But the underlying connection between such pessimism and an ironic adherence to a traditional Marxist privileging of “labor” detected in Horkheimer by Postone has the potential to explain certain basic problems in Adorno’s thought as well. That an inverted, apocalyptical, but still implicitly labor-centered Marxism likewise suffuses and delimits the theoretical content of Dialectic of Enlightenment has, in fact, been argued recently and in detail by the German critical theorist Norbert Trenkle¹⁰. While acknowledging the path-breaking contribution of Horkheimer and Adorno to setting in motion a radical critique of Enlightenment, Trenkle-along with Robert Kurz, Ernst Lohoff and Roswitha Scholz one of the leading representatives of the critical school known as Wertkritik in German-speaking, left-wing circles-finds in the text of Dialectic of Enlightenment itself “the document of a critique always partially recanted out of fear of itself. Its argumentative movement is at least in part one that does not base itself in the dialectic of the thing itself but that is derived in opposition to it. “¹¹ This authentic, but, for Adorno and Horkheimer, displaced “dialectic of the thing itself” Trenkle argues to reside in “a fully determinate social relation, constituted by commodity and value-form. “¹² Although Adorno and Horkheimer clearly grasp and allow for this inner, dialectical connection of Enlightenment to value-form (to that extent showing their unmistakable debt, shared by virtually all Frankfurt School Critical Theory, to Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness) they reduce it in turn to a far more generalized, abstract, and anthropologized “abortive separation from Nature” (“misslungene Ablösung von der Natur”, 47) lying, apparently, at the threshold of primordial societalization. But by the very fact of this “reverse-projection” (“Rückprojektion”, 46) of the value-abstraction-an abstraction from all qualitative content, issuing in what for Kant becomes the pure, ahistorical formalism of Reason itself-back to the origins, so to speak, of “species-being, ” Dialectic of Enlightenment reproduces the ideology of bourgeois Enlightenment itself, as the standpoint that (like the classical political-economic systems critiqued in Capital) regards all previous history as merely the incomplete working-out of itself, i. e. , of the value-abstraction and its rationalist, philosophical sublimation. What distinguishes the teleology underlying Dialectic of Enlightenment from its bourgeois Enlightenment variant is not, finally, any substantive critical-theoretical break but the former’s “turn to resignation” (“resignative Wendung”):

What is described is no longer the glorious triumphal march of progress but the gloomy tread of fatality. Liberation from domination is never more than a flickering possibility, rendered groundless and no longer, in any case, the end-point of history. As correct and important as the critique of the idea of progress clearly is [in Dialectic of Enlightenment], it remains caught up in this idea itself. Insofar as it merely rejects the optimism of the idea of progress (the supposed necessity of liberation), it reproduces the historico-philosophical construct that forms its basis. ¹³

Trenkle traces the same “negative” Enlightenment-teleology, the same tendency to recoil from the full, historical implications of a crisis of capitalist modernity only imperfectly glimpsed, to Adorno’s later works as well, specifically to Negative Dialectics. (See Trenkle, pp. 51-65) Here he criticizes Adorno’s attempt to “rescue” Kantian ethics as well as his ambiguous stance vis as vis the exchange abstraction: an abstraction accurately grasped (following Alfred Sohn-Rethel) as the underlying, social-form basis of “identity thinking” but simultaneously and paradoxically posited in a utopianized, purportedly reciprocal and non-capitalist form, freed from the fetters of surplus-value extraction, as if a kind of Kantian “ethics” of exchange could point beyond its own social and historical determination.

But Trenkle’s fundamental critical insight here-in effect, that Adorno can disclose the crisis of capitalist modernity as a crisis of the modern subject-form (and to that extent initiate a fundamental break with a “traditional Marxist” reduction of critical standpoint to class standpoint) only at the cost of a de-historicizing, abstract-universalization of this crisis itself-could, I think, be developed still further and help to unravel the more troubling aspects of Adorno’s aesthetics. This is the subject for a study of its own, exceeding the immediate limits of this essay. But its argument would run as follows: Adornian aesthetic theory can be considered to rest on a paradoxically dual conception of formal abstraction as a negative principle both qua mimesis (i. e. , formal abstraction as the true, negative rendering of the “positive” reifications of late capitalism) and qua emancipation (the modern, abstract work of art as itself the only remaining historical line of flight or negative standpoint from which to oppose or resist said reificaiton). Following Postone, Trenkle and Wertkritik, one might see in this duality yet another working out of the logic of “critical pessimism”: that artistic form is inexorably driven to comprehend the equally inexorable tendency of the value-abstraction to negate, even to the point of self-annihilation, all social content, aesthetic included, follows from the historical specificity of capitalist crisis itself. But that such a mimetic negativity should double as a kind of social transcendental, that the aesthetic should, in some mysterious way, step in to redeem a lost social negativity, removes us once again to a plane of abstraction outside the historical specificity of the crisis of value-form. The abstract work of art suddenly takes up a position with respect to the value-abstraction essentially congruent with that of “labor” in traditional Marxism: as the “subjective” negation of an object that, as part of this same, pseudo-dialectical movement, expels from its own theoretical consciousness any and all principles of immanent negativity or contradiction. That “labor” falls away and the abstract work of art steps in to take its place thereby furnishes the “real abstraction” of value with a kind of historical alibi in the face of its real, and terminal, historical crisis.

IV.

But if, theoretically-that is, on the level of system-Adorno fails to integrate the real, concrete totality and scope of capital’s historical crisis into his thinking, it could, I think, be argued that he anticipates the virtual implications of such a crisis when his thinking takes as its objects the cultural, aesthetic, and ethical particularities of his own historical moment. Might it not be that when Adorno looks back at the “false” whole through its parts-when it is conceptually and formally the parts that mediate the whole-the tendency to historical abstraction in his thinking begins to be reversed? At least, might this not be so when the “parts, ” as they almost invariably do, take on the form of immediacy of culture, the ethical and, especially, the aesthetic itself? Such might be a hypothetical conclusion to the above, sketched here only in rough outline.

This is a possibility intriguingly suggested by, among other things, the fact that Adorno’s least explicitly systematic work, the work that most closely adheres to the Benjaminian organizing principle of constellation-Minima Moralia-is also his most richly historicized. The inward, self-condensing movement of Adorno’s thought-form, at its apogee in Minima Moralia but detectable everywhere in his opus, would thus be provisionally explained by the fact that, when experienced through and at the level of its cultural particularities and immediacies, the fully historical truth of late-capitalist crisis, its reality as an absolute internal limit, no longer appears strictly as something that must (but cannot) be proven theoretically. On the level of culture and “wrong life” it is the objective immediacies of crisis that, so to speak, have already taken upon themselves the “burden of proof, ” and the task of the critic then limits itself to assessing such truth-claims on their own, immanent terms. Adorno’s “minimalist” and stylized dialectic might then be understood as the form that, because it imitates the accidental, fragmentary form of its objects, permits him to render the historical truth of crisis to which such objects point without needing to have already worked out its theoretical critique-in advance, so to speak, of having formulated its concept. The movement towards totality, towards dialectical mediation and synthesis, a movement that takes place for Adorno within sentences as much or more than it does between them, could be seen, in this sense, as a direct way of giving provisionally conceptual shape to the historical mediation of aesthetic, cultural and ethical immediacies that do not yet, for him, add up to a historical whole. Such sentences might thus be said to constitute an idiom of crisis in lieu but also in anticipation of the rigorously theoretical formulation of what would be the latter’s theoretical concept.

But what then, might explain in turn the anticipatory, idiomatic reflection of a terminal crisis of capital that perhaps only now, in the wake of the demise of Fordism and of the advent of capital’s “third” (microelectronic) industrial revolution, becomes a possible object of theorization? From the critical standpoint worked out by contemporary critical theorists such as Postone and Trenkle-from the standpoint of the historical unity-in-crisis of capital and labor-the answer I propose here points us again to the ironic fact that, in the “minimalist” Adorno, it is, above all, the aesthetic object, not the political or economic (or philosophical) one, through and in relation to which his thinking seems to take on its richest, most concrete historical mediacy. Adorno would thus be understood as equipped, in essence, to think the crisis of capital immanently through the form of the aesthetic even while failing, in the end, to do so in the direct, systematic categories of philosophy and theory tout court. But this, surely, would reflect equally what is, for Adorno, the intuitive understanding of the aesthetic as what is directly negated not merely by the “false” whole of the Culture Industry’ or by bourgeois “Enlightenment” but by the value-abstraction itself. The social logic of the value-relation, of the “real, ” fetishized abstraction of the commodity form, is, inexorably, to annihilate all aesthetic content and experience. (The same, perhaps, might be said as well of the negativity of ethical content in relation to the value-abstraction-such at least would appear to be an unspoken but absolute premise of Minima Moralia. ) The more explicitly philosophical categories of Adorno’s thinking-such as “negative dialectics”-remain far more ambiguous and historically impoverished in this sense, erecting themselves in a negative relation not to the value-abstraction itself but to categories-such as “Enlightenment” or “identity”-that eventually, because of their own “bad” abstraction, find their way back, as Trenkle has observed, into Adorno’s philosophical standpoint itself. One should be careful to add here that the more explicitly philosophical claims of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, above all the argument that artistic abstraction (e. g. , “serious music” in the essay on jazz) somehow exempts itself from the reifying, essentially nihilistic logic of the value-abstraction, suffer the same historical impoverishment. But when engaged by and situated within the mediate space of aesthetic, cultural and ethical objects in their particularity, Adorno guides himself unerringly by the historical truth that these objects themselves also, unconsciously, sense: that the terminal crisis of the society governed by the abstract “labor” and the logic of “self-valorizing value”, and the historical possibility of its negation, are all that now warrants their existence.

¹ My translation. The German original reads: “Das Ganze ist das Unwahre.” (Frankurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969) p. 57. In a foonote to his translation of Minima Moralia (London: NLB, 1974, p. 50) E. F. N. Jephcott notes Adorno’s inversion of Hegel’s dictum from The Phenomenology of Mind, “Das Wahre ist das Ganze, ” but, curiously, opts for the word “false” rather than “untrue. ”

² Minima Moralia, p. 71. These are the opening lines of fragment 45 (“‘How sickly seem all growing things’”), which, together, with 44 (“For Post-Socratics”) and 46 (“On the morality of thinking”) are this work’s most sustained reflection on dialectics. Similar language can be found throughout Adorno’s works, but the following passage from “Why Still Philosophy” (1962)-no less para-logical in its way than the earlier aphorism it qualifies-seems especially pertinent in this regard: Traditional philosophy’s claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics. But this thesis has become absurd. A philosophy that would still set itself up as total, as a system, would become a delusional system. Yet if philosophy renounces the claim to totality and no longer claims to develop out of itself the whole that should be the truth, then it comes into conflict with its entire tradition. (my emphasis; Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 7. ))

³ Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) p. 94.

⁴ See, for example, the concluding paragraph of the “Dedication” in Minima Moralia, p. 18.

⁵ Notes to Literature, Vol. One trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) pp. 3-23.

⁶ Trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990) p. 167.

⁷ Trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguing Books, 1993) pp. 100-108.

⁸ See Capital Vol. One, p. 102.

⁹ Time. Labor, and Social Domination: a Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

¹⁰ See “Gebrochene Negativität: Anmerkungen zu Adornos und Horkheimers Aufklärungskritik, ” Krisis: Beitrage zur Kritik der Warengesellschaft #25 (2002) pp. 39-65.

¹¹ My translation. German original: “das Dokument einer Kritik, die sich immer wieder partiell zurücknimmt, weil sie vor sich selbst erschrickt. Ihre argumentative Bewegung ist wenigstens teilweise eine, die nicht in der Dialektik der Sache liegt, sondern sich dieser entgegenstemmt.” (39)

¹² My translation. German original: “eine ganz bestimmte, von Ware und Werte konstituierte gesellschaftliche Verhältnisse.” (47)

¹³ My translation. German original: Nicht mehr der glorreiche Siegesmarsch des Fortschritts wird beschrieben, sondern der düstere Gang des Verhängnisses. Befreiung von Herrschaft ist allenfalls noch eine aufblitzende Möglichkeit, die nicht mehr begründet werden kann, auf jeden Fall aber nicht mehr notwendiger Endpunkt der Geschichte. So richtig und wichtig die Kritik des Fortschrittsdenkens auch ist, sie bleibt doch in ihm befangen. Indem sie bloss seinen Optimismus (die angebliche Notwendigkeit der Befreiung) verwirft, reproduziert sie negative das ihm Zugrunde liegende geschichtsphilosophische Konstrukt…. (46)

Franz Schandl

[This essay published in: Junge Welt, 2/3/2005 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web]

We live in times of a double trivialization. One is well known; the other will be discussed here. That Auschwitz is relativized in other atrocities is annoying. That Auschwitz relativizes everything else is also unbearable. No conflict will be seen any more as a particular atrocity (in which its special characteristics are analyzed) but will be projected somehow on the Shoah and thus made small. Auschwitz itself is no longer explained from the historical development. Conversely, every current event is immediately connected with Auschwitz.

Before purely hallucinated fascists, one no longer sees the real fascists. Before purely phantasizd anti-Semites, one cannot recognize the real any more. Auschwitz must be prevented in any case, wherever, whenever and however if no other argument occurs. Reference to the Nazis is made almost everywhere and becomes a popular all-purpose weapon that can be inserted and applied at any time. Yesterday’s atrocity serves as justification for today’s atrocity, not as a warning. Auschwitz becomes an alibi.

In this fascinating logic, the holocaust functions as an excuse for diverse crimes, bombardments, invasions, raids and torture. After 1945, exhausting the extravagant Nazi comparisons (supported by the insane totalitarianism theory) was the method of the ideologues of the Cold War. Today these ideologues seem to prevail worldwide. In Auschwitz, the most excellent reason is found for waging wars sought by the centers of power. “Resist the beginnings” becomes a liberal farce. The tragic historical irony is that the mad consequence of middle class rule appears as a justification of the same. This view of things amounts to the sheer affirmation of American foreign policy – whatever its goal.

Thus the great crime against humanity takes the rap and allows or even demands other crimes against humanity. Auschwitz becomes the pretext for diverse atrocities and the incentive for preventing what is worse. Fighting Auschwitz prophylactically is even argued – today in Iraq, tomorrow in Iran and the day after tomorrow in Russia, China or Venezuela. There are enough shooting candidates. Official Germany demonstrated how this functions in Yugoslavia. By means of a new analogy, ruthlessly enforcing its own interests becomes possible. What an achievement! Auschwitz has become an export-hit over which the West in general and Germany in particular can rejoice.

Everything thrives by accusing others of being Nazis. People even casually reflect on whom nuclear bombs cannot be dropped. The all-pervasive propaganda of the culture industry is part of this free enterprise mission for freedom and democracy. The ideological cluster bombs of western values have an effect. In the name of the Enlightenment, they fortify a pro-imperialist consensus that reaches into the left. The civilization mystery play completely darkens the course of the real free enterprise democratic barbarization.

http://www.mbtranslations.com

First installment: Votive Offerings

Neil Larsen

2004

With the bloody debacle in Iraq driving the Bush regime to levels of imperial ruthlessness and corruption worthy of the emperor Nero, the combined sense of outrage, despair, and unreality evoked by political life in the US seems to have reached its limit. But now California takes us well past even this point by electing Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor. The political post-mortems -assuming, that is, we aren’t all already dead or have had our bodies snatched by some cyber-pod electro-genetically hatched in Hollywood or Silicon Valley-continue to toll forth, but this much is known: ‘Arnold’ vanquished his nearest competitor by more than a million votes, and the vote to recall standing governor Gray Davis triumphed by a margin of 10.6%. Voter turnout was high. This means that registered Democrats (a sizeable majority in the state), as well as a traditionally pro-Democratic voting block comprised by women and gays and lesbians, as well as Blacks and Latinos, ‘crossed over’ to vote for Schwarzenegger in huge numbers. Even unionized labor, probably the most organized, traditionally Democratic voting bloc in the state, spurned the instructions of its union bosses and offered up 51% of its votes to Republican gubernatiorial candidates Schwarzenegger and McClintock, who made no secret of their anti-union views.

Last minute revelations about Schwarzenegger’s sexual aggressions and Nazi leanings proved entirely ineffectual and, some have speculated, may even have strengthened his appeal(1) . Evidently, Schwarzenegger’s ‘groping’ harvested the libidinal ‘choice’ of more voters than could be recruited on the basis of moral outrage. Or, more likely still, id simply vanquished superego from within the psyche of the typical, individual voting ego as s/he approached the peepshow-like sanctuary of the voting booth. It was either, at this point in the psycho-drama, grope with or be groped by a humorless post-modern Quijote/Sancho Panza mutant–pale and cadaverous Davis joined at the electoral spine to Cruz Bustamante’s fake-bracero pudginess: think of them groping ‘your’ wife or daughter! –or go with the candidate who, naked in his armor, kept the fantasy free of the incumbency of the real.

Voting, after all, is itself a kind of groping-the kind one does in the dark, here the blind and irrational darkness, officially non-existent, that stretches between the subjective exercise of bourgeois right and the objective will of the ‘people, ‘ embodied in the state. Somewhere deep down, we all sense that once we elect them, our ‘representatives’ obey a will that is neither ours nor theirs, nor even, in the last analysis, the will of those with the money who bought them and presented us with them as ‘choices. ‘ This is the ‘will, ‘ abstract and subject-less, of the market; ‘election’ as a form of buying and selling; the ‘will’ of money itself–not just those who have it–of the money-form as the “power which brings together impossibilities and forces contradictions to embrace”(2); the ‘will’ of capital in its self-reproducing drive to turn labor power into ever more capital. Thus aware, even if only dimly, neither the practical indeterminacy of rational self-interest nor the abstract, disembodied moral imperatives of gender equality are a match for the fantasy body, so certain and palpable in its violent and ‘groping’ connection with others, and which we need only vote for in order to will into political reality.

And so what if Schwarzenegger admired Hitler, or invited the Nazi turned UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to his wedding with the Kennedy gene pool? The fascist horrors of more than half a century ago have, at least in the US, become so abstract; have been so repeatedly re-narrativized in ways that make them historically incomprehensible; are already so devalued semantically(3) when equivalent horrors are routinely visited upon countries such as Iraq in the name of democracy and even ‘anti-fascism’ that they too effectively enter mass consciousness as a kind of cultural free radical, able to bond with almost anything within the ether of mass psychology.

As global capital continues to grind itself into a catastrophic and likely terminal crisis, the skill of living, even in a place like California, with almost daily reports of today’s “world civil wars” and serialized, post-Fordist genocides inexorably breaks the ethical reference of the signifiers of absolute evil. Schwarzenegger might just as well have expressed admiration for Darth Vader or Winston Churchill or Wlad the Impaler and the effect on the salto mortale of voting would have been the same. (Stalin, or the prophet Muhammad would have been another story. ) The Hitler anecdote only proves that ‘Arnold’ is also a fantasist, a chance for real solidarity and commensurate humanity for voters whose fetishized votes have been so completely drained of political content that only a fantasy election itself can drag most of them to the polls.

The very fact of the recall election itself-only the second that has ever unseated a governor and no doubt the first ever in US history to unseat so powerful an executive-has not been given the formal examination it deserves. Amidst all the talk of how ‘Arnold’ will address the state budget deficit or what his election means to the Bush campaign for 2004, only a few have noted that, in principle, the campaign to recall Schwarzenegger could-and likely will- become official the day he takes office. Anyone who, like the car-alarm millionaire, California congressman and Gray Davis recall bankroller Daryl Issa, has the money to hire enough signature gatherers could stage another fantasy-election before the new term is out. All it required to get on the recall ballot itself was a few thousand dollars and the signatures, more or less, of your extended family or client list. In California, that is, we witness the materialization of the unspeakable paradox that lies at the heart of the idea of representative democracy: the fact that terms of office are not themselves democratic, and that, taken to its logical extremes, only the perpetual, electron-stream-like flow of the popular ‘will’ through the electoral calculus and a ballot on which every voter, every atom of civil society, has the right to appear, can make up for the latent tyranny-the real ‘Terminator’– of actually taking office. This already has provoked the concern of some keepers of the electoral cult, one of whom, an assistant professor of political science at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, was heard recently to remind a National Public Radio interviewer that the Madisonian idea of the Founding Fathers would not have approved the California bacchanale and that, not so long ago, the Senate was chosen by the House of Representatives. Imagine the ‘Madisonian’ hue and cry that would have sounded had moderately left-wing Green Party candidate Peter Camejo won on October 7.

But the ‘Madisonians’ and duly elected war-criminals in Washington have nothing to worry about. Permanent ‘direct democracy, ‘ under the sway of a global capital whose severe crisis drives it to explode the sovereign will of entire nations, not to mention the suburban druthers of California parents of school children, does not promise to re-integrate politics with grass-roots daily life, as some imagine. It merely perfects, insofar as this is possible, the complete subordination of what is left of bourgeois right to the ‘privatization’ of all things ‘public. ‘ Not the further development, but the crisis of an over-ripe commodity-form, its degenerating capacity to reproduce itself unless it invades everything, including the ostensibly public, non-commercial sphere of elections, produces the California ‘electoral circus. ‘

The vote-fetish, that is, converges on the master-fetish itself, that of money, the ‘real abstraction’ that must continuously circulate and make more of itself out of labor power for it to remain money. But, unless they are sold outright, votes, as we all know but cannot quite confess, now buy nothing, exchange for no real equivalent quantum of will or power. The exchange only becomes reciprocal on the mass-cultural plane, the plane of narrative and fantasy. In return for our votes, we get to go to the ‘circus’ for free and watch our overlords, at their own expense, add sensual content and real-life action figures to our private, mental fantasies. (Karl Rove and former California governor Pete Wilson–respectively, the orchestrators of the Bush and Schwarzenegger Gesamtkunstwerken–seem to have grasped at least the practical implications of this economy more accurately than their Democratic counterparts. )

If votes continue, on one level, to translate into money-in the form, say, of pork barrel legislation or the brokering of contracts or state-spending initiatives for local business constituencies-the looming financial ‘market correction’ that threatens both to vaporize bank accounts and all other kinds of ‘paper’ as well as to reveal as fact the rapid fictionalization of huge stocks of capital renders even these exchanges increasingly unreal. The fact that the $87 billion that the Bush regime proposes to spend on Iraqi ‘reconstruction’ would, as has been openly remarked upon in the press, nicely take care of a good portion of the state budget deficits in the US, demonstrates this monetary quandary well enough. 87 billion dollars to fight a (real) war on (fictional) ‘terror’ translates-even as the war makes terror a reality-into an 87 billion dollar increase in the money the US already didn’t have, hence into 87 billion reasons more to sell one’s vote for the price of a having a giant Nazi cyborg watch over your sleep. The form of the recall election itself-the staging of the dialectic whereby ‘direct democracy’ becomes real and at the same time the most perfect manifestation of total social alienation and disempowerment(4) -obeys this crisis-logic perfectly.

2 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1992) p. 379.

3 Remember that Saddam Hussein, according to the Nazi’s more legitimate heirs, was ‘worse than Hitler. ‘

4 The Davis recall/Schwarzenegger victory makes for an oddly poignant context in which to review Hegel’s famous remarks on “Absolute Freedom and Terror” in The Phenomenology of Spirit. “Universal freedom, ” writes the ‘Madisonian’ Hegel (thinking of the Jacobin terror in France) “… can produce neither a positive work nor a deed; there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the fury of destruction.” For Hegel, of course, “universal freedom” could pertain only to a society made up of commodity-subjects, even if he put his finger on the latter form’s latent contradictoriness.