Summer Story: Capitalism is a monster of the sea

Southern France 1930: Bertolt Brecht traveled to the coastal town of Le Lavandou with the composer Kurt Weill to prepare the film adaptation of the “Threepenny Opera”. During breaks from work we go to the beach. “I can still see Brecht,” Weill’s wife Lotte Lenya looks back, “wading through the water, his hat on his head, his trousers rolled up, the Virginia in his mouth. I can’t remember ever seeing Brecht completely in hiding. He must have been a bit afraid of water.” However, the communist playwright did not fundamentally object to the wet element; after all, he dedicated a cheerful poem to “swimming in lakes and rivers.” But salt water waves didn’t attract him.

Could this have ideological reasons? At least spontaneously, you can hardly think of any leftists who have made an epoch-making mark in seafaring or oceanography. Apart from the adventurer writer Jack London, there appears to be no natural love affair between the sea and Marxism. Why this is so is explained by someone who writes from the politically opposite shore.

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In 1942 Carl Schmitt published the booklet “Land and Sea”. The constitutional lawyer, who was close to the Nazi regime, begins the text as a paternally told bedtime story for his daughter Anima. Despite the modest framework, the “world historical view,” as the subtitle says, presents a geopolitical theory of large areas, some of which is still valid today. The starting point is an “eternal enmity”: the conflict between land and sea nations. Since the ancient Sparta-Athens conflict, the opposing forms of state spatial thinking have repeatedly clashed.

Schmitt primarily sees Nazi Germany as a land power, as it explicitly propagates a ethnic blood-and-soil doctrine. The maritime form of rule, in turn, is ideally embodied in England, the enemy at the time. What is interesting is how, according to Schmitt, the British have developed into the leading maritime nation. According to the author, their rise began in the 16th century with the state-tolerated privateering trips of Francis Drake and Henry Morgan. At this point it becomes understandable why leftists are also paying close attention to the right-wing intellectuals from Sauerland. For Schmitt, what is now referred to by the pretty word economic liberalism is rooted in piracy.

The etymology alone gives a clue. “Privateer” is an English word for privateer ship, the Elizabethan pirate the original model of private entrepreneurship. Robbery for one’s own account becomes, with Her Majesty’s tolerance, a business model. Disguised in civilian clothes, the brutal methods of “corsair capitalism” continued with the British East India Company. Like the privateers before them, the private trading company receives various privileges from the crown. In addition to the monopoly on violence, there was also the possibility of the colonies having their own legislature. This made the dream of every modern corporation to make its own laws come true.

Schmitt assigns other pairs of opposites to the counterpoint of continental and maritime nations: the territorial is traditional, the maritime is progress-oriented. One leans towards Catholic, the other towards Protestant. Just as the Protestant renounces the Pope, the corsair business operates in a wave that is difficult to regulate legally. Lots of water, little government.

It’s not just literature and cinema that have glorified individualistic adventurism under the skull and crossbones flag. Contemporary big capitalists flirt quite blatantly with the cutlass mentality of the golden pirate age. Whether they, like Apple or Elon Musk, brazenly circumvent tax laws or present themselves as wolfish “anarcho-capitalists” like Argentine President Javier Milei. This would even explain the desire of some billionaires to militarily upgrade their ocean-going yachts with missile systems and mini-submarines.

It is obvious that a high priest of the firm state fist like Schmitt is uncomfortable with liquids. With his anarchic understanding of the offshore regions, the lawyer updates people’s millennia-old discomfort with aquatic endlessness. It is not for nothing that popular beliefs and popular culture attribute all sorts of nasty animals to the marine ecosystem. From the leviathan to the giant squid to the great white shark.

A primal fear that was even reflected in the color adjectives. As the literary scholar Dieter Richter explains, Homer’s watery part of the world was preferably gray, black or dark brown. Blue that tempts you to jump in spontaneously only became established in the Romantic era. The English one! Caspar David Friedrich’s “Monk by the Sea,” on the other hand, still stares into the distance over an oily broth. As if the monastery’s painter had already suspected what was lurking out there – the deep-sea monster of Anglo-Saxon capitalism that had been let off the leash.

Nevertheless, Schmitt does not write from a fundamentally anti-capitalist impulse. In the middle of the Second World War, it was specifically directed against the Anglo-American economic order. At the same time, he expressed his secret displeasure at Germany’s breach of the non-aggression pact with Stalin. In Schmitt’s eyes, the Soviet Union shared the political values ​​of a territorial power. The Sauerlander would have liked to see a symbiotic coexistence between the two dictatorships. In this respect, it is not surprising that Putin’s ultranationalist court philosopher Alexander Dugin also explicitly refers to Schmitt. In the interpretation translated to Russian interests, the attack on Ukraine is only a proactive “defense” of the “Eurasian” land against the transatlantic sea power.

Although a powerful “Left-Schmittianism” has now emerged, it is impossible to misappropriate Schmitt as a disguised socialism. The ideological toxins that lie dormant in the steel-clear sentences are far from being eliminated. Those who read his work “from the right” use the reservation against everything that comes by sea as an argument for a rigid anti-migration policy. The fact that people from Syria are often cited as examples fits into Schmitt’s image of the enemy. The Phoenician seafaring society once settled in today’s Assad state.

So anyone planning to pack “Land and Sea” for their beach chair should also take the neo-fascist drift of the younger reception into account. That’s why it’s best not to swim too far out into the Carl Schmitt Sea, but do it like Brecht did in Le Lavandou: just wade through the water!