Capitalism – the high -security wing as a general condition

The future looks so bad because our present is already horrible: moral, political, cultural. The background is what is called the “turnaround”. I define “turnarounds” as an expression of a not canceled disappearance of the old world order determined by the western north. We are currently experiencing a historical collapse.

And we experience that, too, I refer to the western north that we have nothing to do of it. A plan B – not to speak of Plan C etc. at all – is missing – and is always blindly excluded. With the failure of real socialism – and in the wake of it: many other smaller attempts – the alterity seems to have been lost, the possible otherness of society, the break with previous hegemonic norms. With its identification of the market economy and “freedom”, the West has made itself stupid and therefore nothing more to tell the world. Especially nothing more.

Because we lack this examination with the other, with the possible impossible, as I have called it, we have been lost a lot and we are stupid under the prevailing criteria of efficiency in the existing social production context. If the impossible is lost and only the possible one remains, everything can only become more spiral reactionary. Capitalism or death – that is precisely what we are held up as a compulsion. So we got into a trap. We don’t even have the fist in our pocket anymore!

Anger for injustice, anger for misery in the world that could have been lifted long ago, if we had finally said goodbye to our disastrous economic system, no longer exists. Or even the courage for the new design of the world. Instead, the new old old, in a way prehistoric guide, here in pure culture for everyone else: Trump, the right counter globalization – a project that is excluded from the law of capitalism! The growth for everyone is over!

Bloch’s optimism as a quote from the peasant wars: “We are dragging home, the grandchildren of Fechten’s better”, has not found any historical confirmation. The grandchildren were and are also subject to. So far, only the journey into fascism and war is recognizable as a concrete future. And that – I mainly refer to Germany – people are frozen and are stunned before the will of political elites, the old, rightly setting system, to make society defendable again. With unbearably stupid slogans like: nation, people or what they call freedom, i.e. the freedom of the market. Who should people and civilization be used for again? For the fatherland of globalized capitalism?

I still come from a time when the outrage and an openly occurring resistance to the unreasonable normal. You just knew: in the other you are also fought and suppressed yourself. Why is that not there today? I can only interpret this in such a way that the world of recycling, which is also a world of comprehensive objects of man and also all social values, determines our livelihood and thus our feeling – or rather: No gesture, no social or political position that is not contaminated: produce, buy and consume and everything faster and without any further thoughts – that is life!

We remember that: the 1960s, it was not only Vietnam as a pars pro toto for the imperial violent attacks of the “freedom west” on the rest of the world. At that time, the freedom of the West in Vietnam was defended, later in Afghanistan and today “to the last Ukrainian”, as an English friend of mine aptly came up with. You are amazed at how the flatiest propaganda paroles remain powerful! We all know the great war screens and the more military crowd, only the others who are supposed to give their lives for keeping this old order.

This process of capitalization of our entire life had made a jump in the 1960s. We are driven by this and we live primarily in a presence of consumption and production. The result is a sophisticated attribution of the subject to a life in which absolutely everything is variable and nothing has its own value, its own undisputed validity.

Why does that work? What remains after the destruction of a collective social as a dominant basis of our life is the interest and that is structurally reactionary in itself and the others. Neither morality nor ideology play a role. This is interesting because even the recessed new old ideological fascists are ridiculous Kasper in the end, but brutally, but ridiculous. The FPÖ members here are also for migration if the Austrian no longer wants to drive the garbage away. Ideology is no longer a conviction, but an instrument behind which, as a rule, petty interests are hidden.

So today we have ideological fascists for which their ideology is determined to interest. Then we have Democrats, for which everything is also determined. We have ideological fascists and we have technical fascists. This is also a result of the all -encompassing occupation of life in capitalism. Everyone adapts.

Where did we end up? I worked at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research many years ago and did research on the late 50s and early 1960s for protest chronicle. One of the finds that I remember: a dispute among communists and anti -fascists, whether you should simply hang up your posters or whether you do not have to ask the police beforehand so that you escape the risk of criminalization. We have long since ended up with these authoritarian structures of the post -fascist era.

The police issue speech and thinking offerings. When I was in prison in my isolation tract, the visitors, who were admitted once a month for an hour of visit, often had to sign a list of 21 points on the one hand behind the cutting disc, recorded by two officials from the State Criminal Police Office on the one hand and by a prison attendant on my side, about which the visit would otherwise be canceled. That would have been something for Kafka. The partially and controlled in society, i.e. separate state of emergency of the high -security tract, which gave the rest of the company its “normal”, has long since become the general condition.

And here we can return to the initial question whether the future is disastrous. I can only say: Yes, it is already the present and the difference between then and now is that there was an outside at the time compared to the prevailing conditions, a long -frozen outside that still came from the October revolution, and an active outside, which was set by the anticolonial struggles and the emancipation movements in the centers themselves through a youth that did not get the possibilities of life through discipline, obedient, obedient, obedient, Fascist use of power, not by submission, exploitation and drill or by holding up the consumer culture, wanted to take the streets up and therefore went on the streets loudly and elsewhere, partly also into the surface.

We lost this outside. That is the disaster and therefore mindless politicians can continue to ride ourselves in order to express it drastically and continue to kill politics, because politics would actually mean to override the things and processes that determine society to regulate them. Instead, in all limited figures have the power of the state in order to follow in the interest of a few mercilessly the given logic of the situation, that is, the logic of capitalism.

That is why the future looks bad, almost catastrophic, because we face it alone today. And we must not make ourselves illusions. When we followed the “concept of city guerrilla”, it came from the realization that there will be “no Prussian marching order”. When the situation is ripe, it said at the time, it will be too late for organizing the fight. We already have to act. That has not lost its truth. The wrong thing about turning it into a strategic concept was wrong, one that is offensive the production of a revolution.

No situation will ever be so total that the self -confidence of freedom is completely lost. Then there would no longer be people. Maybe that’s the only thing that confirms Paul’s sentence: hope without hope. But that means freedom to act.

Karl-Heinz Dellwo, born in 1952, former RAF member, has worked as a documentary filmmaker and publicist since his release from detention; In 2009 he was a co-founder of the Laika publishing house and has been co-operator of the gallery of the aging arts since 2019. This text is a shortened and editorially edited version of his speech as part of the Viennese festival weeks.