by Achim Szepanski

​In his current essay “Europa Fata Morgana” Georg Seeßlen speaks of post-democracy as a permanent state of emergency, in which the multiple crises (war against terror, financial crisis, Greek crisis, refugee crisis, etc.) fulfilled the function of maintaining it. Seeßlen writes: “The state of emergency can only be maintained if a problem is not solved but set into serial oscillations. Here and as long as we find ourselves in a permanent state of emergency, in a kind of crisis management as entertainment (in a double sense), the great projects of dwindling modernity: democracy, enlightenment, humanism, are suspended.” This is largely consistent with Jean Baudrillard’s diagnosis in his book “The Spirit of Terrorism” that today the universal is absorbed by the global. (Baudrillard 2011: 50f.) Baudrillard first states a “deceptive analogy” between the concepts of the universal and the global. While human rights, freedom and democracy can be attributed to the universal values of Western Enlightenment, globalisation is characterised by “techniques, market, tourism, finance, information”. Like Seeßlen, Baudrillard sees Western universality dwindling, while globalization is apparently irreversible. Every culture that tries to universalize itself loses its singularity and must inevitably die off, Baudrillard diagnoses. He states that universalization, which in the Enlightenment still presented itself as a discourse on progress, today takes place as an endless proliferation of values, including their neutralization. He writes: “The same happens, among other things, to human rights and democracy; their expansion corresponds to their weakest definition, their maximum entropy. (ibid.: 51). Human rights, democracy and freedom today circulate globally in an entropic mode. Baudrillard seems to be torn back and forth; on the one hand, like Seeßlen, he notes the suspension of Western guiding values or even their demise in globalization, which in turn has only universalized exchange; on the other hand, he speaks of the entropic and at the same time endless circulation of universal values in the capitalist mode. Baudrillard writes: “First of all, the market, the promiscuity of all exchanges and products, the continued flow of money, is globalizing. In cultural terms this means the promiscuity of all signs, of all values, that is pornography … At the end of this process there is no longer any difference between the global and the universal, the universal itself becomes globalized, democracy and human rights circulate just like any other global product, such as oil or capital” (ibid.: 51). That Baudrillard seems undecided and does not consistently take the second position may be due to the fact that he subliminally equates modernity, technoculture and capital/capitalism. Following this equation, postmodernism must then be regarded as a special cultural formation or as a phase of capitalism, which is optionally described as information capitalism, consumer society, cognitive or simulative or cybernetic capitalism. It should not be denied that in such a philosophically overdetermined representation of capitalism the naturalization of capitalism, as noted by Ellen Meiksins Woods, takes place. She writes: “The specificity of capitalism is lost again in the continuities of history, and the capitalist system is naturalized in the inevitable process of the eternally rising bourgeoisie. (Meiksins Wood 2015: 220) But Woods also remains imprecise at this point because it does not distinguish between capital and capitalism.
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Capitalism is to be understood as a thoroughly heterogeneous historical formation – from an economic, political and cultural point of view – but one that is essentially determined by the production and circulation logics of capital. Besides the dominant mode of production of capital, capitalism also has non-capital-determined modes of production, be they neofeudal, slum-like, corrupt and criminal economies, but also cooperative economies, which are only partially coupled to capital or not at all tied to it (only about 40-50% of all work done worldwide is directly subject to capital relations). Capital, on the other hand, should be understood as a conceptual and semiotic “model” or as a differential system whose production and circulation cycles follow a specific immanent legality that keeps it in equilibrium as it makes it crisis-like. Capital and its as the motor (which cannot be separated from a relation) of the formation “capitalism”, in which the economy in the last instance determines all other areas such as politics, culture, art, science, etc.. This can be understood as “capitalocentric”, and this concept is also directed against the fashionable concept of the “anthropocene”. (Cf. Moore 2015) Louis Althusser speaks at this point of the capitalist mode of production, which he understands as a conceptual object or object that implies the relation between productive forces and relations of production. (Althusser/Balibar 1972) According to Althusser, the capitalist mode of production is the determinant, complex “core form” of an even more complex capitalist social formation that is pervaded by several modes of production. The theoretical analysis of the historically existing capital that articulates itself today as globalization requires the inclusion of as many empirical facts as possible. Within globalization, there are a number of unequal links, be it the nationally operating individual capitals, the multinational corporations, the respective national total capital, or the states. Yet these entities have a single common interest, namely the maintenance of the capital system. The globally networked context, also called the imperialist chain by some Marxist authors, must – come what may – be reproduced. Globalization is not simply to be understood as the sum of the actions of agents, but as the locationless site of the expanded reproduction of capital. The digital information and communication technologies and the corresponding discourse on global networks provide the material-discursive infrastructures for this purpose.

In this context, Baudrillard’s statement must be understood that the absorption of the universal by the global involves homogenization on the one hand, and fragmentation and discrimination on the other, which are characterized by growing exclusion, one thinks of the useless share of humanity, of the nomads of labor and migrants. Seeßlen writes about the exclusion: “One excludes from the market those who do not make a profit (namely the right people), one excludes from work those who do not bring enough “performance” and will to exploitation and self-exploitation, one excludes from education those who do not join the elite formation, one excludes from supply those who cause too much costs, and so on. Neo-liberalism excludes not only people, but also economic dreams, cultures, views, and finally entire continents”.

As long as the universal values still had a certain legitimacy, the singularities could be integrated into a system as differences. Baudrillard discovered the mantra of the philosophy of difference in consumption even before Laruelle launched his comprehensive attack on it. Baudrillard writes in this regard: “However, this compulsion to relativity is decisive insofar as it forms the frame of reference for a never-ending differential positioning”. (Baudrillard 2015: 90) Now, however, in the course of globalization, it is over: “…but now they (the values) no longer succeed, since the triumphant gloabalization makes tabula rasa with all differences and values by introducing a completely indifferent culture or unculture.”. (Baudrillard 2011: 53). Here, too, Baudrillard remains conceptually imprecise, but does recognize a tendency. Randy Martin has shown in his book “Empire of Indifference” that indifference and endless circulation belong together and that even today the asymmetrical, small wars circulate in the global network. (Martin 2007) What’s more, the corresponding interventions revolve around the possibility of circulating, in contrast to the possibility of proclaiming sovereignty. For Martin, this is a shift similar to that of a shareholder holding the shares of a company to that of a derivatives trader generating wealth by managing risks. The unintended consequence of this risk management, which Martin sees at work both in global financialization and in the U.S. Empire, is the mere intensification of the volatility of what it involves. This results in a vicious cycle of destabilization and derivative wars, a characterization that Martin calls the “empire of indifference. This empire no longer distinguishes itself through progress or development, but promises its occupants only the management of a perpetual presence of risk possibilities. In the totalitarian, i.e. indifferent view of neoliberalism, there is ultimately only capital, including human capital. Consequently, current neoliberal policies intend and multiply the constant modulation of the economic risk for the individual and the statistical sorting of the population, namely into those who are successful in view of the risk and those who are definitely not – and nothing else means simply being “at-risk”. And accordingly, neoliberal governance tends to move from the closed institution to the digital network, from the institution to the process, from the command to the (repressive) self-organization. Although it contains a political program, neoliberalism is anti-social, even more so the anti-social is the modus operandi of the neoliberal state, and this at the same time means indifference as part of its public grimace. Risk-polituations include governance as the governmentality of indifference. However, governance does not simply overlook the hedging of interests against interests, but tests the population’s ability to produce interests in the name of speculative capital accumulation. This kind of risk management implies the universal circulation of monetary capital and with it the circulation of values, human rights and democracy. Circulation in turn corresponds to digital networking or the screen of the global as a one-dimensional universe.

Baudrillard here again states a tendency: capitalization and the digital networks that correspond to it emerge a gentle destruction, a communicative and genetic violence that is virally processed and seeks totalitarian consensus. Whether Baudrillard’s theory of the viral is appropriate here or not, it is true that this kind of violence attempts to exclude all negativity and singularity. What is more, and this in turn calls into question the concept of homogenization and indifference: today, comprehensive inclusion can also take place via divergence or disjunction. Disjunction is a pure relation, a movement of reciprocal and at the same time asymmetrical implications that express difference as such. And difference is communication, infection or virulence through heterogeneities, whereby networking here consists in the fact that different sides communicate with each other in such a way that no unity, fusion or synthesis comes about. Inclusive disjunction means to put foreign elements into communication without a uniform logic being required. Today we have to think pessimistically about connectivity. Deleuze speaks of communication as a commercial professional training, of marketing and the transformation of philosophy into advertising slogans. He counters this with the voids of non-communication that can escape both the circle of communication and control as well as the diffusion of differences through inclusion. Within the system of inclusion, difference is a means by which power and capital perpetuate their domination. The effects of this temporal modulation are events, a set of unverifiable stories, unverifiable statistics and untenable justifications. The accelerating speed makes network media like the Internet a bubbling soup for conspiracies and insinuations, inasmuch as the sheer volume of participants and the incredible speed of information accumulation leads to new material for many other conspiracy theories already circulating in the time when a conspiratorial theory is buried. Everything is circulating. The panoptic view of the sovereign is today supplemented and expanded by the calculation and management of risk, with the agents circulating as information shadows. Total control of information shadows is achieved by algorithmic containment. Risk management is a constitutive part of the circulation of money capital and with its global circulation everything else begins to circulate, including democracy and human rights.

François Laruelle speaks here of “universal capital” instead of “capital”, not in the sense of a historical-social formation, but of a universal “logic” to which all economic, social and political phenomena are assigned and subordinated. The monetary profit production of capital today encompasses a general surplus production that extracts the added value of money not only from labor, but from communication, from the speed and urgency of change. And capital even generates the surplus through the production of knowledge, images, marketing and slogans. (Laruelle 2012: 16f.) It may extract it from democracy and human rights. This “universal capital” works more stubbornly than any other historical formation to seize the surplus. It is more active and persecutes, sorts and guides people more intensively than any previous form of control, it acts softer and at the same time more deceitful than all previous forms of frontal attack, but remains perverse like any form of espionage and accusation and at the same time appears less brutal than open annihilation, less ritualized than the Inquisition – or to put it briefly: The “universal capital” proceeds softly and dispersively, instantaneously and maliciously. It is pure harassment. (ibid.)

We can conclude from this that capital always also needs its philosophical and political legitimation. And so it allows not only money, credit and itself to circulate as capital, but also its legitimatory discourses, up to the most general values, human rights and democracy. As such circulating signs, however, the universal values, in which Baudrillard is to be agreed, neutralized and differentiated at the same time, are emptied of meaning. Indeed: “Their expansion corresponds to the weakest definition, their maximum entropy.”

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by Achim Szepanski

​Frederic Jameson is quite right when he writes that the substitution of economics by politics is the usual means of all attacks on Marxism, i.e. the liquidation of Marxist critique and analysis of the capital economy and the consequent concentration on the discourses of freedom, equality and political representation. Marxism itself was partly not very vigilant against such attacks; on the contrary, in the course of a discursive figure of the transformation of politics into the political, it joyfully accepted the invitation of the ruling classes to ultimately pursue exclusively representative politics.

In his essay “Lenin and Revisionism”, Frederic Jameson defines the primacy of economics as determining in the final instance, which ultimately gives Marxism its strength and originality. Jameson insists that Marxism, in the unity of theory and practice, holds a completely different system of thought (beyond the theories of power and the political), whose reasonableness and radical critical faculty only come fully to bear today when capitalization tends to encompass everything, at least in the capitalist core countries. After all, every arbitrary monetary stream of expected profits is now regarded as a parameter of capitalization that potentially permeates every singular aspect of social fields – the dominant corporations constantly capitalize human life, social networks, social habits, bodies and genetic codes, affects, wars, and much more, when they can generate income and returns with it. Jameson writes: “At the moment it is clear that everything is economic again, even in the vulgar Marxist sense”. It turns out that constellations that seem to be purely political questions or questions of power have become transparent enough to recognize the economic constellations in them. If both private debtors and states have to follow the demands of financial creditors without ifs and buts, then one can confidently assume that the strategies of neoliberal governments are less based on political decisions than on “necessary” monetary-oriented solutions that are prescribed by financial institutions when they can determine the prices of government bonds in the secondary markets.1

Zizek’s accusation that Laclau/Mouffe and Badiou reduce the economy to the ontable and thus ignore the “ontological dignity” of the economy does not go far enough here, and much more, politicist philosophy and left-wing populism deprive the left of its (last) theoretical weapons.2

Zizek asserts that populism, no matter what kind of playwork is meant, concerns Lacan’s objet a of politics, a special figure that stands for the universal dimension of the political. Populism is not a specific political movement, but the political in its pure form, the “inflection” of the social fabric, which in principle can dispose of any political content. Thus its elements are initially purely formal.

Populism functions as a collecting movement constituted by the absorption of special “democratic” demands (for a better social policy, better education, tax cuts, against war and for the environment, etc.), whereby these demands should be lined up in a series of equivalences in such a way that with this kind of concatenation the “people” can emerge as the universal political subject. Populism is not only interested in the empirical content of these demands, but it is particularly pushing for the formal fact that the “people” can emerge as a political subject through the kind of concatenation and that consequently the struggles and antagonisms appear as parts of an antagonistic struggle between “us” (the people) and “them”. Hegemony is entirely aimed at the appropriation of this antagonism, which is why a number of resentments such as racism and anti-Semitism can occur in a populist series of equivalences.

For Laclau, populism indicates the transcendental matrix of an unfinishable struggle, the contents of which are ultimately determined by the contingent struggle for hegemony, while the “class struggle” uses a particular social group (the working class) as the privileged political actor. This privilege is not based on the hegemonic struggle, but on the objective social position of this group, which, according to Laclau, reduces the political struggle to an epiphenomenon of objective processes.

However, this is far too brief. It is precisely in this context that the authors of operaism distinguish between technical and political elements in the composition of the working class. While the technical composition is related to the organization of the class by capital (division of labor, management practices and the standardized use of machines, but also family and communal relations), the political composition affects the capacity of the working class, more precisely the proletariat, which is always related to the struggle for desires, inclinations and interests – collective actions of refusal, resistance and the partial appropriation of surplus value. According to the Italian theorist Panzieri, the increase in the organic composition of capital is not only based on the process of technological progress, but is also always to be understood as the result of a shock offensive of capital, in order finally to decompose the composition of the proletariat in terms of its political power. Just think of how the resistance of the qualified mass workers was broken by Taylorism and the assembly lines in Fordism, but also led again to a new technical composition of the class, with the possibility of stopping the assembly lines; there is also a relationship between the cycles of struggle and the circulation of capital, one thinks of interruptions of transport, logistics and infrastructure, of disturbances that, according to the operaists, extend beyond production to the entire social factory of life. With regard to the critique of operaism, the group Theory Communist (TC) has discussed the mistakes of the proletariat in the context of the reciprocal relationship between capital and the proletariat, a relationship that is not only to be understood as antagonistic, but in which the two poles are integrated within a single system. And this integration has intensified in the history of capitalism, through the politics of trade unions, social democratic and communist parties, and the politics of the welfare state, but also through the various self-government projects, state planning, and class self-management.

For Laclau, the fact that a particular struggle is elevated to a “universal equivalent” of all struggles is never determined, but is itself the result of the contingent political struggle for hegemony. In one historical situation this struggle can be the struggle of the workers, in another the patriotic struggle of the underdogs or the anti-racist struggle for cultural tolerance. No essential quality can lead to a singular struggle assuming a hegemonic role of the “general equivalent” of all struggles. The struggle for hegemony presupposes not only an irreducible gap between the universal form and the diversity of particular contents, but the contingent process through which one of these contents is transferred into the direct embodiment of this universal dimension in a specific situation. Laclau draws on linguistics and constructs the field of politics within the framework of an irreducible tension between “empty” and “floating” signifiers. Zizek writes: “Some certain signifiers begin to act as “empty”, as embodiments of the universal dimension, and include a large number of “floating” signifiers in the chain of equivalences they totalize. The elegance of this solution lies in the fact that it dispenses us from the boring subject of the alleged “deeper (totalitarian, natural) solidarity” between the extreme right and the “extreme” left. The first concerns his actual definition of populism: the series of formal conditions he enumerates are not sufficient justification for calling a phenomenon “populist”. The way in which populist discourse shifts antagonism and constructs the enemy must be added. In populism, the enemy is externalized or objectified into a positive ontological entity (even if that entity is spectral), the annihilation of which restores balance and justice. In mirror image, our own identity – that of the populist political actor – is also perceived as existing before the enemy attack”. The following conclusion can easily be drawn from this: The left-wing populists are not looking for structural causes in the capitalist system for the struggles, but for the corrupt intruder who has toxicly infiltrated it (for example, the greedy financial speculator); the cause is not inscribed in the structure as such, but is an element that overrides its role within this structure so to speak and draws parasitic profits from it. Here, too, Zizek can be agreed: “For a Marxist, on the other hand (as for a Freudian), the pathological (deviant misconduct of some elements) is a symptom of the normal, an indicator of what is normal in this structure, which is threatened by “pathological” outbreaks, is wrong. For Marx, economic crises are the key to understanding the “normal” functioning of capitalism; for Freud, pathological phenomena, such as hysterical outbursts, are the key to the constitution (and the hidden antagonisms that maintain functioning) of a “normal” subject. Therefore, fascism is definitely populism. Its image of the Jew is the equivalent of a series of (heterogeneous and even inconsistent) threats experienced by individuals: The Jew is too intellectual, dirty, sexually insatiable, hard working, financially exploitative, etc…”

The left-wing populists try to change the feeling as it is staged by the right-wing populists when they turn against the establishment. They assume that the election of right-wing populist politicians is by no means the result of deep-seated racism, but that the sections of the population that are so obsessively engaged in the question of borders and refugees have a deep powerlessness that has to be turned into anger and projected onto the global financial elite instead of onto refugees. One should therefore not lose sight of these rightly angry but misguided masses. The left-wing populists logically try to channel anger into a “healthy revolt” against the global financial elite.

For Mouffe, the dominance of financial capitalism over liberal democracies has reduced the scope and use of political debate to nothing more than competition between like-minded groups that proclaim themselves to be more efficient in attracting investors. This has shifted the focus from social inequality or the social question to the suppression of state sovereignty by the financial elites, to which the right-wing populists refer in a more or less demagogic way. Consequently, according to Mouffe, the left would now also have to shift its priorities in order to be able to oppose the right-wing populists more decisively by again demanding the sovereign power of the state over the elites.

The future belongs to those who take up democratic demands that have perished in the consensus of the political organizations of the mainstream, which reads “There is no alternative”. To prevent the right-wing populists from benefiting from resistance to the dictates of the financial elites, the fixation on the outdated left-right axis must be overcome and, much like the right-wing populists, the priority of vertical division between underdogs and those in power must be recognized. At the same time, in order to reduce the electoral success of the right-wing populists, anti-fascist alliances must also be forged with those forces that are in favor of maintaining the status quo. A progressive policy must also integrate those who vote for the right, because they are misguided democrats whose legitimate feelings of dependence could be diverted.

The movement from a horizontal to a vertical axis of political polarization is not the only common feature of the two populist movements with which they mirror each other. To the extent that both movements put a policy that remains focused on elections first, both left-wing populists and right-wing populists seek to construct a “people” that wins hegemony over neoliberal elites through parliamentary struggle. It is necessary to combat the complicity of governments with those who exert direct influence on the state through the trading of government bonds and transform this condition into the antagonism between “those up there” and “us”.

However, not only important transformations that have taken place in the state apparatuses are misjudged (loss of significance of parliament vis-à-vis the executive branch, deep state, etc.). The “we” that the right-wing populists construct along ethnic lines of descent and through the condensation of xenophobic affects is hardly compatible with a leftist policy that refers to the coalition of democratic demands fed by discriminated minorities, exploited wage earners, and downgraded middle classes. What is more, if one examines the mode of construction of the people, there are undeniable similarities between right-wing and left-wing populism: not only can all populist movements refer to the rejection of illegitimate elites, they also share the view that it is only possible to create this common “we” if credible authority figures articulate a new policy in public (which ones?), summarize affects, and thus attack their opponents.

The fact that liberal institutions have not prevented capital markets from infiltrating democratic areas is undeniable. It is precisely at this point that a comprehensive policy of counter-speculation would have to be set in motion, which, among other things, would specifically target the lobbying of financial capital in the state apparatuses and not simply fuel resentment against the establishment. A discursive strategy that concentrates on “us against those up there”, which Carl Schmitt has already brought into play, is a much more suitable condition for a policy of reactionary movements. For both right-wing and left-wing populism, the free flow of goods and capital is merely a means by which the elites enforce rules and power against “us”, while the free flow of populations remains controversial, and this in turn enables a policy that sets in motion the patriotism of the “we” and the people, a racism from below, which the right-wing populists can serve much more effectively than the left-wing populists.

When the propagandists of left-wing populism then seek a new politics of affect, they deliberately overlook the difference between active and reactive affects, or worse, they deliberately mix them. Thus, in right-wing populism, resentment is an affective substance of antagonistic politics that is not about inequality, but about the feeling that others enjoy what dejure belongs to me and that the wrong people are “up there” in power. A policy that does not distinguish between active and reactive affects is no less toxic in the democratic factory than the anti-populist establishment that tries to deprive people of power, especially by positioning the patriotism of the popular classes against the alleged cosmopolitanism of elites. The “we” that is always imagined is a political calculation that the right-wing populists can serve much better than the left-wing populists.

Therefore, it is also quite absurd to suspect even communist potentials in left-wing populism. Mark Fisher writes: “Communist potentials are only realised once a movement has ceased to be populist, since populism is that which, by definition, is always satisfied with making demands of the Master. That is because populism isn’t proto-fascistic; rather – and this, surely, is the implicit element in Zizek’s argument that needs to be drawn out in order to make it work – it always takes the form of a hystericized liberalism.” The wide range of left-wing authors continues to focus clearly on the analysis of semiologies of signification as regards the problems of the financial functioning of capital, machine/technology and subjectivation. And this is all the more astonishing because today a myriad of machines, which can certainly be described as constant social capital, have long since occupied our everyday lives by more than just assisting our modes of perception and affects, our cognition, even by increasingly controlling and regulating them.

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