Obituary: Achim Szepanski – Techno and criticism of power

It was an early summer Saturday evening in Berlin-Kreuzberg when Achim Szepanski was supposed to talk about his new book. What was missing was the speaker who apologized. Health reasons prevented the journey from Frankfurt am Main. The audience joked that the lecture turned into a non-lecture.

Szepanski had adopted the prefix Non: his blog was simply called “Non,” and he wrote books about non-economics and non-Marxism. The theory circle “Endnotes” spoke of non-movements: a movement without characteristics, not represented and managed by a party or scene, solely committed to negativity against what exists. This was Szepanski’s world.

Szepanski, born in Karlsruhe in 1957, ended up as a young man in Frankfurt am Main, where post-autonomists and post-modernists danced to techno and house beneath the skyscrapers of finance capital. Not only Marx was read, but also the latest theory from France: Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard. For Szepanski, this was not a ticket to an academic career, but rather a tool for criticizing power. This also applies to electronic music, which has been aesthetically anesthetized by its increasing commercial use. In contrast, Szepaniski first founded the label Force Inc. Music Works, then in 1994 the more famous Mille Plateaux, whose title alluded to the philosophical hit of system criticism by Deleuze and Guattari.

Szepanski later reflected on the “hostile takeover” of music in his book “Ultrablack of Music,” written with Andrzej Steinbach. For him, music was able to establish social relationships beyond property. But in the service of property, it is also able to cement the property order. This was a front on which the revolutionary Szepanski fought his entire life, against the love-paradising and Verbiedermeierization of beats and patterns.

After various bankruptcies, he re-founded “Mille Plateaux” in 2018, now primarily as a digital label and still with major electronic music artists. Szepanski was like a remnant of a time when club music was not yet one of the “soft location advantages” in city marketing.

Over the past ten years, Szepanski has plunged into theory, writing one book after another, most recently “Capital and Power in the 21st Century,” “Imperialism, State Fascization, and the War Machines of Capital,” and “The Ecstasy of Speculation.” Szepanski closely followed what was happening and being discussed in radical circles outside of Germany. Numerous translations of texts from abroad appeared on his blog »Non«. And he himself was received abroad as a far-sighted theorist. In China, where a translation of his was published like a state act, his analyzes were highly praised. Only in Germany, where social theory was desolate and dumbed down by state-supporting left-wing liberalism, did Szepanski receive little attention.

The ignorance of Szepanski’s writings is all the more astonishing because his two major themes – the excesses of financial capitalism and state fascisation – should be under the radar of all intelligent leftists and revolutionaries. For Szepanski, state fascistation was demonstrated precisely by “reinterpreting the population as a potential source of danger” and subjecting it to new types of control.

He always remained critical of mass psychotic sentiments, be it in the war against viruses or the enemy in the East. On the contrary, for Szepanski it became clear that capitalism in its current stage is tipping over into the state of emergency that it always drags along with it. The “structural state fascization” was Szepanski’s addition to Baudrillard’s theory of the “structural law of value,” which has freed itself from fixed signs and, for that very reason, always prevails.

The non-lecture in Berlin also became a lecture; a video connection to Frankfurt that was set up at short notice made this possible. Most of the time you only saw Szepanski in the picture wearing his black Nike cap, but his voice was the deciding factor. With his well-considered remarks, he led the audience into the realms of post-Baudrillard Marxism so that they didn’t get lost – a great achievement. Now the last revolutionary Marxist is like his friend Sebastian Lotzer in his obituary writes, died. Achim Szepanski was found dead on September 24th.