"Democracies against Autocracies" - the New Formula of the Imperialist Claim to Hegemony

by Conrad Schuhler

[This article posted on 1/26/2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.isw-muenchen.de/2023/01/demokratien-gegen-autokratien-die-neue-formel-des-imperialistischen-hegemonieanspruchs/.]

Pre-publication from the author's new book, Germany in Economic Warfare, Papyrossa Verlag, March 2023.



1. the totalitarian claim of the US government

President Biden, in his introduction to the "National Security Strategy," formulates its main points as follows (National Security Strategy. www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/8-November-Combindes-PDF-for-Upload/pdf):

The world is at a turning point. How the United States responds to the enormous challenges and unprecedented opportunities of today will determine the direction of the world and the security and prosperity of the American people for decades to come.

We are in the midst of a strategic struggle over the future of the international order. Working most closely with our partners and all who share our interests, we will fight to ensure that our values prevail - we will not surrender our future to those who do not share our vision of a free, open, and secure world.

This is a fight the United States will lead. "The need for American leadership is as great as it has ever been...No nation is better positioned to lead with strength and clear purpose than the United States of America."

Adversary No. 1 is the People's Republic of China, which "has the intention and, to an increasing degree, the capacity to reshape the international order in such a way as to shape the global playing field in its favor." Opponent No. 2 is Russia, which he said has destroyed peace in Europe with its attack on Ukraine and is spreading instability everywhere. "Autocrats are working overtime to undermine democracy and export a model of government whose hallmarks are repression on the inside and coercion on the outside."

The U.S. has laid around the globe an unprecedented network of alliances and partnerships to win this argument. "Core alliances" listed for Europe are NATO - "is stronger and more united than ever" - and for the Indo-Pacific, AUCUS (Australia, UK, US). Further enumerated are EU, the Indo-Pacific Quad, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, and the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity for Latin America.

Autocrats are mistaken if they believe democracies are weaker than autocracies. Domestic politics is part of this struggle. We will continue to invest in America's global competitiveness and attractiveness and "draw to us the dreamers and the strivers from around the world." And "we will continue to show how America's enduring leadership is rising to the challenges of today and tomorrow. "Biden's introduction concludes, "I am more convinced than ever that the United States has everything it takes to win the 21st century contest.

There is nothing beyond our capabilities."

"Ruin" Russia, then all pipes on China

This megalomaniacal assessment of the "chosen people" that the U.S. political elite has seen Americans as since the founding days runs throughout the document. Interesting and dismaying are the clarifications of the president's solemnly formulated imperatives. For the international system, "countries must freely determine their own foreign policy." Ultimately, it is a matter of "the global economy being on a level playing field and providing opportunities for all." (p.6) States do not have to be or become democratic themselves, but they must be in the camp of "democracies."

That there are other fundamental problems besides bloc rivalry, such as "climate change, food insecurity, infectious diseases, terrorism, energy shortages, or inflation," is readily stated to be immediately embedded in the militant bloc strategy: "We must see clearly that these challenges must be addressed within the international competitive environment." The "geopolitical competition...makes cooperation increasingly difficult and requires us to think and act in new ways." Humanity's problems also place the "security concept" under the goal of "defeating our rivals." Russia, he said, poses "an imminent threat to the free and open international system, as demonstrated by the brutal war of aggression against Ukraine." "By contrast, the People's Republic of China is the only competitor with both the intent to transform the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to move toward that goal." (p. 8) The detailed affirmation of the President's words - that is the mantra of this "security concept": "ruin" Russia, as Ms. Baerbock dutifully parrots, then all the pipes on the People's Republic of China, which has what it takes to break the Western world's dominance of the international system.

The concept expresses sympathy for concerns "in some parts of the world that are uncomfortable with competition between the United States and the world's largest autocracies." The United States also did not want a "world of rigid blocs." It was just a matter of all countries being able to make a free choice in their own interest, he said. A free choice, of course, for a "free world" of which the U.S. sees itself as the leader. "This is the crucial difference between our vision, which aims to preserve the autonomy and rights of the less powerful states, and that of our rivals, which does not." (S.9). This needs to be explained again in more detail to the peoples, those of Cuba, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, Yugoslavia, Aghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen - so that they know how the U.S. bombs on their country were really meant.

"Lines" and "pillars" of the new U.S. strategy.

To achieve this world "free of aggression, coercion and intimidation," the U.S. is pursuing "three lines of effort:

1) invest in the sources and instruments of American power and influence;

2) build the strongest possible coalition of nations that strengthens our collective influence in the global strategic environment and addresses common challenges; and

3) modernize and strengthen our military so that it is equipped for the era of strategic competition with greater powers.

Total mobilization of all forces for global confrontation "builds on several pillars":

1) The U.S. is erasing the dividing line between foreign and domestic policy. Shared prosperity at home must go hand in hand with shaping the international order "in accordance with our interests and values." Private sector innovation must therefore be combined with a modern industrial strategy that places special emphasis on cutting-edge technologies such as "microelectronics, advanced computer technology, biotechnology, clean energy technologies, and state-of-the-art telecommunications" (p.11),

2) Alliances and partnerships around the world "are our most important strategic asset and an indispensable element of the contribution to international peace and stability." Particularly important is the growing cooperation between partners in the Indo-Pacific and Europe. "We recognize that they are mutually reinforcing and that the fates of the two regions are intimately intertwined ... If one region descends into chaos or becomes dominated by a hostile power, it will fundamentally affect our interests in the other." (S. 11)

3) It is emphasized that the People's Republic of China "is America's most consequential geopolitical challenge." Russia is an immediate and ongoing threat to stability, "but it lacks the comprehensive capabilities of the People's Republic of China." There are other "smaller autocratic powers also working toward aggression and destabilization." Iran and North Korea are mentioned. (p.11f.)

4) However, the U.S. does not want to "see the world only through the lens of strategic competition" but also to work for regional zones of peace and prosperity. The Middle East, Africa and Latin America are singled out. Especially in the latter region, the U.S. wants to "advance economic resilience, democratic stability, and citizen security" (p.12).

5) Globalization has brought immense benefits to the U.S. and the world, "but an adjustment is now needed to take on dramatic global changes such as widening inequality within and among countries, the emergence of China as both our logical competitor and one of our largest trading partners, and emerging modern technologies outside the regulatory frameworks now in place." That's why the U.S. wants to form new economic arrangements beyond the traditional free trade agreements, closer links of the respective national economies with the U.S. economy as in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF); a global minimum tax to be established so that all companies pay their fair share of taxes wherever in the world they are based; the Partnership for Global Investment and Infrastructure (PGII-the late and smaller U.S. counterpart to China's Belt & Road Initiative), targeting low- and middle-income countries; modernizing the rules governing advanced technologies, trade, and business in general; and ensuring that "the transition to clean energy opens economic opportunities and creates good jobs around the world" (p. 12)

In conclusion, "The world is at a turning point. This decade will be critical."

Let's summarize the essence of this concept:

The U.S. is the one indispensable nation at the head of the bloc of "democracies." Opposing this are the "autocracies" headed by China, with Russia behind.

In this decade it will be fought out who will determine the international system. There can be only one winner, the USA bloc.

This victory will not be easy to achieve. All forces must be mobilized, economically, politically, militarily. The economy must win in economic competition, it must be set up from the point of view of global rivalry. Alliances must be organized under this very orientation. The military must be expanded, war is by no means excluded, it is part of the planning. Including nuclear war, which the U.S. also has the Bundeswehr practicing in Europe.

The problems of mankind such as global warming, pandemics, nuclear accidents or wars must also be tackled under the condition of the global struggle of the system.

In the final analysis, what matters is not "our values," but whether a country is committed to the West's "rules-based order." If so, it is welcome in the U.S. bloc.

But actually, the U.S. says, it doesn't want a bloc at all. They are forming a system around the globe in which they are the undisputed supreme power in every single regional alliance. The explicit goal is to combine the partial elements into a firmer, unified formation. In truth, the U.S. makes little effort to disguise the fact of forming a bloc of the West of which it is the undisputed supremacy, demanding strict discipline from "partners" and dependents.

2. neoliberal globalization is at an end

The official strategy of the United States is based on the realization that the previous concept of neoliberal globalization has failed. The unipolarity of the world, the dominance of the U.S. would ensure that "free trade" would export "Western values" everywhere and that the lagging emerging economies would take over the labor-intensive production sections complementary to the advanced Western countries, which would concentrate on the most advanced, highly productive parts of the global production chains. As they industrialized, emerging economies would become Western democracies (Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat, New York 2007). Initially, both seemed to work out in the central example of China. Millions of jobs disappeared from the U.S. and were newly created, primarily in lower-cost China. There, the share of private capital became larger and larger. But this changed when the Xi team took over the leadership of the Communist Party and the state. In recent years, the share of state ownership grew again and, above all, the state's grip on capitalist enterprises became tighter. The political system did not develop at all toward "Western values", but quite the opposite, 15 times Marx and only 3 times market, as the attentive observer in the service of German capital could observe during Xi's speech at the last CP Party Congress. But the expectations of Western globalization strategists were not only fulfilled in the political field, but also in the economic field. Indeed, China did not stick to its role as a cheap labor supplier for the less productive parts of production, but quickly became an international competitor even for some of the most modern products. China has more international patent applications than the six largest European countries combined, and its pace of innovation is ten times faster than that of the United States. (Conrad Schuhler, The U.S., China, the EU, and World Peace. How far to war. Cologne 2020, p. 64) Jobs now being relocated by multinationals also include state-of-the-art production processes. Apple, the communications industry giant, has not only its largest market in China, but also its largest production site. (Thomas Fazi, The deglobalization we need. Macroscope Jan. 11, 2023. https://www.makroskop.eu/02-2023) The same is true for Volkswagen, which is more of a Chinese company than a German one in terms of production and sales.

The Biden administration is targeting this shift as it seeks to surpass the protectionist policies of Trump's predecessor.

Today, when many advanced countries are moving toward "place-based economies," toward decoupling from global supply chains, they are doing so not only as a result of international tensions and uncertainties, but also because skill levels between "North" and "South" are converging for some key countries. And because, as a result, the balance of power in the international system has changed and continues to change. The USA and the West can no longer dictate the "terms of trade", the conditions of trade and exchange, they would have to adjust to international cooperation, to multilateralism. Then they would have to accept or even strive for international cooperation, which is about the common advantage for all and not about outdoing and "outmaneuvering" the other.

Yet, at a historic moment that demands a turn toward close and determined cooperation among all nations to jointly address humanity's universal problems, the U.S. wants to use all human and natural resources from the standpoint of antagonistic global competition. They are calculating the possibility of nuclear war; President Biden recently said we are facing Armageddon, the final earthly battle against the forces of evil. Even if nuclear catastrophe did not occur, realizing this concept - directing all forces toward global rivalry - would mean the end of human civilization. "The loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, loss of land cover, dwindling freshwater resources, and chemical and radioactive pollution are examples of processes that have the potential to set in motion an unstoppable chain of events that will radically change the world as we know it." (Anders Sorensen, The Only Answer to Humanity's Crises. Junge Welt, Jan. 14, 2023) Whether it is climate change or successive pandemics, poisoning of the environment or overcoming hunger and poverty, all are problems that can only be solved by humanity cooperatively and not in antagonistic competition. Driving the developed Western countries into high armament and militarization threatens their future, because their policy should be directed towards social balance and fair exchange with others instead of further separation into a few rich and many poor, should aim at transformation into solidary, sustainable, civil science-intensive societies and cooperation in a world to be managed and cared for together. Domestically and internationally, this is the order of the day. The U.S. strategy seeks to force partners and rivals in precisely the opposite direction.

3.The Adoption of the Concept by Germany, the EU and NATO

The Biden administration's strategic concept had already been laid down by Biden and his team before the Ukraine war. The "Guidances," which basically express the same goals, had been published a week before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Already in the 2020 election campaign, Biden had made "democracies versus autocracies" his basic foreign policy formula. It could therefore come as no surprise that the new German government almost assiduously repeated the main lines of the U.S. concept in its coalition agreement. (https://www.spd.de/fileadmin/Dokumente/Koalitonsvertrag/Koalitionsvertrag_2021-2025.pdf)

The central paragraph in the section "Foreign Affairs, Security, Defense, Development, Human Rights" reads: "We want to increase Europe's strategic sovereignty. The goal is multilateral cooperation in the world, especially in close connection with those states that share our democratic values. This also involves system competition with authoritarian-ruled states and strategic solidarity with our democratic partners." (p. 113) The German coalition parties reaffirm the division of the international order into two blocs; by "multinational cooperation" they mean a greater weight for Europe vis-à-vis the U.S. in the "rules-based international order" (p,114). But so that Big Brother USA does not misunderstand, they add: "We are striving for close transatlantic coordination in China policy and are seeking cooperation with like-minded countries in order to reduce strategic dependencies. Indeed, relations with China must be "shaped in the dimensions of partnership, competition and system rivalry" (p,124). Germany warns China that "a change in the status quo in the Taiwan Strait (must) only be peaceful and by mutual agreement." Here Taiwan is interpreted as an equal counterpart of the People's Republic of China, while the "One-China-Policy", which is given by international law, says exactly the opposite: Taipei/Formosa/Taiwan is part of the People's Republic , which autonomously practices the relationship with the breakaway island within the framework of international law. Provocatively, the coalition parties go one better and demand the "participation of democratic Taiwan in international organizations" (p,124). They also want "the principle of 'one country, two systems' to be reasserted in Hong Kong. But this principle has just been abolished by the treaty of Great Britain with China for the transfer of Hong Kong to independence and return to the People's Republic. Hong Kong is now part of this People's Republic of China, where there are not two systems but, to the chagrin of Western observers on the ground, only one, with "more Marx than market" (see Chapter 7).

Since the Ukraine war, there has been no mention of Europe's timidly put forward "strategic sovereignty" in any of the Western documents. In NATO's new "2022 Strategic Concept," the whole world is declared a potential area of operations. "Strategic competition, persistent instability and recurring shocks define our broader security environment. The threats we face are global and interconnected." (Nato 2022 - Strategic Concept. Nato Summit in Madrid, June 29, 2022. https://nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2022/6/pdf/290622-strategic-concept.pdf, p. 3) The dichotomy of the world as dictated by U.S. strategy is seamlessly adopted. "Authoritarian actors challenge our interests, values, and democratic way of life... These actors are also at the forefront of a deliberate effort to undermine our multilateral norms and institutions and promote authoritarian models of governance." (p. 3) NATO also sees it exactly the same way as the Washington beatmaker when it comes to the main enemy: "The People's Republic of China's stated goals and coercive policies challenge our interests, security, and values. The People's Republic maintains a wide array of political, economic, and military tools to expand its global footprint and extend its power, while its strategy, intentions, and military buildup remain opaque. Its malign hybrid and cyber operations and confrontational rhetoric target allies and violate alliance security...The deepening strategic partnership between the People's Republic of China and the Russian Federation and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undermine the rules-based international order are against our values and interests." (S. 5)

The two "rogue states of the first order" have been named, what is missing is the good in the global contest: "NATO is the unique, essential, and indispensable forum for consulting, coordinating, and acting with one another on all matters related to our individual and collective security." (p. 3) This is the opposite of the "brain death" of NATO, as noted by France's President Macron three years earlier. NATO is more united than ever, with U.S. leadership as unquestioned as in the days of the first Cold War.

Since this new Cold War is being waged at all levels, war and economic war always belong together and interact, Nato has issued a joint declaration with the EU, in which the mantra of the new "security strategies" is retrieved word for word: " Authoritarian actors oppose our interests, values and democratic principles by using different means - political, economic, technological and military. We live in an era of growing strategic competition. China's growing assertiveness and policies present challenges that we must address."

(Joint Declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation, Jan. 10, 2023)

The German government, the EU, NATO have so far followed the broad line set by Washington. How long this allegiance to the U.S. leading power will last will depend on the further costs that wars and economic wars will impose on the people and economies of the "allies and partners" of the U.S.; and on the resistance of those affected - the close connection of the social, the environmental and the peace issue is clearly evident. It is high time that the forces, the movements, which stand up for the humane side in these fields, finally find each other.

Conrad Schuhler

Economist, Author

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The Decline of Civilization

Every human society inevitably perishes - ours is already well on its way.

By Felix Feistel

[This article posted on 1/25/2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/der-untergang-der-zivilisation.]

For several years now, but even more so since the staged Corona crisis, the apocalyptic invocations of the downfall of the world have been getting louder and louder. Whether on the left or the right, everywhere there seems to be a growing unease in the face of today's civilization. The majority think they see the end coming, are still trying to prevent it, or are preparing for the downfall. However, this is not a new phenomenon. In the course of history, there have always been ideas of doom or sudden change. This is hardly surprising, since every civilization has perished at some point, and so will ours.

Wherever one looks, the downfall seems to be omnipresent. Be it the "decline of the Occident," for which the influx of refugees on the one hand and the energy transition on the other are supposedly responsible, or be it the decline due to "climate change," which in turn provides apocalyptic forebodings that encourage radical protest. Here as there, this fear of doom includes one thing above all: the fear of the decline of our civilization and thus the loss of the comfortable prosperity in which we have settled, and ultimately also the fear of our own death.

There have been doomsday visions at all times in history. Every religion, for example, lives from the prophecy of doom, which then leads to a divine redemption in which the unjust are punished and the upright rewarded. Again and again, there have also been prophets who thought that this downfall was near. Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, have predicted the imminent downfall of the world on several occasions, but without this coming to pass. And also now by apocalyptic climatic change theater, stranger fear and prosperity loss a large Weltuntergangsszenario is developed, which prepares many humans, perhaps also only subconsciously, concerns. What they all have in common is a dark sense that we have lived in considerable, unprecedented prosperity in recent decades, and that this cannot be a permanent state. Many instinctively sense that change must and will occur.

The same fate of rise, peak and inevitable demise has befallen every advanced civilization to date. Be it the Roman Empire, ancient Egypt or Greece, they all rose to power and prestige, but then disappeared just as quickly. The testimonies of their greatness can still be found today in many cases integrated into our present civilization as relics of a long forgotten time. Such a demise can also be very costly. In the Bronze Age, for example, there were great cultures in the eastern Mediterranean region from which significant civilizational progress emanated. Their decline was followed by a long period of darkness. Much knowledge was lost in the decline, writing, knowledge of building and other cultural techniques fell into oblivion, and for centuries people were again concerned exclusively with their own survival.

The reasons for the decline are manifold. Historians distinguish between internal and external factors. The external, that is, those that afflict civilization from the outside, include the invasion of an enemy or, as in the Roman Empire, a great migration of peoples that society simply no longer knows how to deal with. Not to mention epidemics or natural disasters. The downfall can be gradual, as in ancient Rome, or sudden. Most of us are familiar with the ancient city of Pompeii, which was destroyed rather abruptly by a volcanic eruption. But strong civilizations can withstand almost all of these catastrophes. They fall victim to them only when their inner strength has already been extinguished by other factors and their resilience has been weakened.

Inner decay

American historian and philosopher Will Durant sums it up this way: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

Historian John Bagot Glubb likened civilizations to biological organisms that have a natural life span with a natural progression from birth, a period of growth to inevitable decay. This pattern repeats itself in all civilizations regardless of factors such as climate, culture, and religion. In this, great civilizations usually begin with a sudden eruption of energy. For example, a time of pioneers discovering new land or building something new. They are often poor and ill-equipped, but determined or simply have no choice. Precisely because of this, however, they manage to overcome every obstacle and overcome every danger and challenge, but this never happens without casualties.

This is followed by a phase of construction, extraction of natural resources, production and trade. This is the phase of commerce, in which the centers of civilization expand and prosperity increases. Infrastructure is built and art and culture flourish. This is what Glubb calls the peak of a civilization's prosperity. But it also lays the foundations for collapse. Because shortly after reaching the peak, a phase of egoism, greed and vanity begins. Civilization, or rather people, especially those in power, become corrupt. Money is no longer a by-product of virtuous action, but is elevated to an end in itself and seen as a ticket to salvation.

What follows is a period of decay of morality, of cynicism and pessimism. Money thus destroys the moral sense of a civilization. A spoiled society, writes American political scientist and ecologist William Ophuls, rots from within.

This is compounded by rising costs for social welfare. The state increasingly makes use of its monopoly on the use of force and takes some of the people's money in order to ensure their own health care, but also the social welfare of another part. A sense of entitlement emerges, along with the feeling that no one should be left behind. At the same time, the sense of personal responsibility and independence is lost. This, as Glubb writes, is not the cause of the demise, but it is a way marker. A phase of intellect dawns, leading to a one-sided, rational view of the world. Nietzsche writes about this that rationality turns into a tyrant. Thus, the entire life is organized according to rational criteria. The irrational truths of religion and mythology are discarded, although they are the basis of a civilization and provide a certain cohesion. Thus civilization loses a foundation on which it was built. Without myth, Nietzsche argues, any civilization loses its healthy, natural creative energy.

This leads to moral relativism, which replaces all meaning with existential nihilism. Thus, more and more people begin to believe that there is no objective truth and that culture, and even life, have no meaning. Society loses its values and no longer believes in anything or constantly exchanges its values and morals. It no longer really takes anything seriously.

This is where the age of civilization's decline begins. This last stage of development inevitably leads to its end. Without a superior ideal or goal, disorientation, confusion and moral decay take hold. Most people live empty, meaningless lives and must distract and numb themselves to endure. Mental illness becomes the norm. At this stage, a civilization can no longer withstand external dangers. Be it invasion by an enemy, ecological problems, or a natural disaster. What civilization could have overcome at its peak now causes it to collapse.

Corruption and mismanagement of a ruling class, in concert with inflation, also play a major role in the decline of civilizations. Inflation, the inflation of the money supply, benefits those closest to the state or central bank. Even before inflation is reflected in the market, this group can use the newly created money supply for investment, repayment of debt, or purchase of goods and land at terms that do not adequately reflect the real value of money. This is what happened in ancient Rome, where Emperor Nero had the silver content of the denarius reduced in order to be able to mint more money. The result was inflation, which eventually led in the third century to the denarius losing its value completely and taxes now being levied in the form of goods. This meant that the state could no longer pay its soldiers. As a result, they deserted and plundered their own population. Thus, those peoples, also called "barbarians", were able to invade the territory of the empire, plunder and pillage. Civil wars were almost the order of the day and no ruler lasted long. Finally, hyperinflation occurred. Every attempt to restore the denarius to its value failed. The great Roman Empire was heading towards its demise.

Thus, the downfall of any civilization is preordained, as it is impossible to escape these stages. If we look at today's civilization, whether it is called capitalist or Western, we must conclude that it has long passed its peak. Greatness and strength have long since given way to a widespread decline in morality, myth and religion have given way to cold rationality, and many people live in existential nihilism, focusing on the purely material, elevating money to the absolute purpose of life.

Disorientation, confusion and mental illness are on the rise in the so-called "value West". Nowadays, this is joined by economic decline, rising inflation, ecological catastrophes and large-scale immigration into Western societies, starting from the countries that the West has previously plundered, overrun with war and sent into poverty.

Thus, one can sum up: Our society is in the phase of decline. And indeed, as early as the 1960s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) predicted the demise of our civilization for the year 2040 in a model study. The scientists took into account a whole range of factors, such as economic growth and industrial capacity, population growth and the use of natural resources. They also included the interrelationship of these various factors and fed it all together into a computer model - the first of its kind. One result of this study was the Club of Rome's report, The Limits to Growth.

Transience

Although one must be cautious with computer models, they do illustrate one truth: Our civilization will inevitably perish in one way or another. This thought frightens many people, since the fear of one's own death is linked to the thought of the demise of the civilization in which one lives. Thus, people try to deal with this constant feeling of threat and possible death at any time. This is exemplified in the literature of the Baroque period. Against the background of the Thirty Years' War, which affected large parts of Europe, poets found two opposing concepts. On the one hand, there is the memento mori, the "remembrance of death," which exhorted virtuous and godly behavior in this world, in anticipation of the transition to the divine paradise at any time. On the other hand, there was "Carpe Diem," which called for living in the moment and indulging in pleasure and hedonism. However, "vanitas," the transience from which one or the other behavior emerges, hovered over both lifestyles.

Something similar can be observed today. Thus, many try to resist this doom by falling for radical ideas and trying to redeem themselves through special moralism, health fanaticism or spirituality. Others call for collectivism, in which the individual must make sacrifices for the benefit of the collective. But historians have also described the period of decline as a time when people abandon their personal individuation in favor of mass conformity. Collectivism is nothing else. Into such collectivism, in turn, we have been thrust by the Corona narrative. Nietzsche, too, saw in moralism and collectivism the real decadence and despised both equally. On the other side is hedonism, which can be found in the form of rampant consumerism, especially in the Western world. Netflix or Amazon series, alcohol and drug excesses, addictions, shopping sprees and pleasure addiction are supposed to liberate us from the idea of mortality and make us believe that we are living a fulfilled life. Behind it, however, lies emptiness and dejection.

Thus the time of decadence, i.e. the creeping decay of civilization, in which we find ourselves again today, is characterized by fear, nihilism, radicalism and depression. The decline is seen as the unalterable end of a nostalgically transfigured past, with the passing of which life loses all meaning. But art has also understood decadence in a completely different way. It was captured as the last rebellion of pleasures and intoxication, as the stylish staging of an unleashed freedom, whereby death is not denied and thus intoxication is misused as a distraction from mortality, as escapism, but is celebrated as a boundless celebration of life whose end is immovably fixed. Thus, one can also reinterpret these times of demise into true artistic and philosophical upliftment and come to deep spiritual insights.

That being said, one need not face decay at the mercy of it. Instead, one can begin to free oneself from the prevailing paradigms of intellectualism, nihilism, and materialism, and create one's own islands that pursue a radically different way of life.

This does not stop the decline on a large scale, but it preserves cultural techniques and lays the foundations for a new civilization. One can be a pioneer within the collapsing civilization, who creates the new one with.

All civilizations have perished sooner or later. However, none was as global as ours today. Therefore, the downfall of this civilization is probably more devastating than any before. Especially in the western world, people have lost many skills of survival. Hardly anyone is still familiar with nature, can grow crops naturally, hunt, gather and fish, build houses and huts or make tools. We have become dependent on an industry that takes care of everything for us, and have built an illusory reality consisting of glass facades, concrete and digital surfaces. However, this will not ensure our survival once its foundations disappear. Then we will be on our own again, without all these tools. This lack of capabilities will have devastating consequences for the vast majority of people in the West. It could be that a decline of today's civilization means a similar regression as the decline of the Mediterranean cultures in the Bronze Age. A dark age could follow in which much of the knowledge, techniques and skills would simply be irretrievably lost, if only because much of it is stored on digital data carriers that do not reveal their secrets without electricity.

It seems all the more imperative to lay the foundations for the beginning of a new civilization, in addition to the exhilarating experience of the demise and one's own vitality, instead of merely indulging in fatalistic symbolic acts such as buying valuable paintings or protesting against the influx of foreigners. Because none of this will stop the downfall, but we can shape the time after.

Felix Feistel, born in 1992, writes in many ways about the idiocy of this world and also against it. In a world reduced to numbers and data, which has always been alien to him, he searches for humanity and the meaning of life. He tries to use his powers and talents to create a world worth living in by opposing injustice and destruction. Despite the madness that is rampant everywhere, he is not ready to give up his belief in the goodness of man and his potential to transform the planet into a paradise. He is a member of the Rubicon Youth Editorial Board and writes for the Young Feathers column.

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Threatened thinking



Corona as a moment of the new

by Christian Kleinschmidt

[This article posted on 1/23/2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.streifzuege.org/2023/corona-als-ein-moment-des-neuen/.]

Short overview of some literature that helps to understand what doom we are actually in - and why the Covid-consensus of the left prevents this realization

The Covid consensus in the German-speaking world continues to be oppressive. It is based on unquestioned beliefs. Those who defend it do so by intellectually unsophisticated means. Every analogy, every crooked metaphor - whether of airplane crashes or the "wall" of infections - spreads in the shortest time and is prayed after everywhere. Just like the "hostage-taking" or "tyranny of the unvaccinated" - in the future, a memorial day should be dedicated to it, on which all vaccinated people are banned from entering public places, and in addition they are maltreated with Steinmeier and Gauck speeches for 24 hours, so that it is never forgotten what the unvaccinated have done to the vaccinated. Joking aside. Dangerous thoughtlessness and stupid parroting show in any case that a free and critical exchange about the social coercion called society was neither considered necessary nor desirable - and the left led the way. Never at a loss to find an ideological excuse for every mess, they excelled in grandiloquent moralism whose relationship to reality could be left unexamined. Their agreement was of a deeper nature; the reasons were rationalized in retrospect; after all, they had studied, for example, to rid the concept of solidarity of meaning in elaborate turns of phrase in such a way that it was also suitable for the opposite of what was once meant. Thus one made one's peace with the new regime and saved oneself not only the trouble of criticism but also the bad conscience that might still have been attainable for criticism. With unbounded furor, the "persecuting innocence" was now able to take on the deviants, the swindlers, fascists and social chauvinists. But what was one actually oneself? The answer was always already given, the solidarians no longer even had to measure themselves by whether they really acted that way, they were now. Conformity looked for a label like the bird looked for a cage in Kafka.

No one represents the radical left covid consensus better than Thomas Ebermann. He is the radical leftist fairy tale uncle par excellence, who tells the youth about the wild times back then with the Communist League or the Greens. The author of "konkret" has published "Störung im Betriebsablauf. System Irrelevant Observations on the Pandemic", the author of "konkret" has written an astonishing book. It is astonishing because, according to his own statement, it is supposed to be about a "pandemic," but that is not what it is about at all. Instead, it is a wild mix of Adorno and Marcuse quotations, which are probably intended to make sense of something that the author simply cannot produce in his text. Instead of an analysis of the political situation, one witnesses the convulsive self-assurance of a leftist who celebrates his leftism as a collection of calendar sayings, as a self-image that is increasingly difficult to construct - while at the same time completely losing touch with reality. In this respect, of course, Ebermann is representative of the "konkret" and "Jungle World" milieu. But what does Ebermann have to say about what we have experienced over the past two years? This crisis came unexpectedly for the ruling class, too, he lets us know, for example. And all the disaster plans, the exercise scenarios? The rulers - or let's say the rulers - have been struggling for some time with the big problem that their world and their rulership are unstable and vulnerable. They are considering how to stabilize and immunize it. They themselves can do little about the fundamental dynamics of the mode of production; in it they act only as driven "character masks," but even they will be replaced if they fail to fulfill their historical task. And that task is to navigate through a crisis of unimagined dimensions - and to devise hitherto unimagined means to do so. Ebermann, on the other hand, wants to persuade us that the government was caught off guard and then - in the face of the killer virus - did what was good and necessary to protect us. Only it was too little protection, because the rulers also had to consider capital, but the thrust was the right one. The measures were "intentionally temporary" and whoever claimed that these were the signs of a new form of state coercion would, according to Ebermann, have to be assigned to the "milieu of madness", which urgently needs to be watched closely. In general, it is a matter of normal capitalism, the normal crisis. So what's the fuss about.

"Bravery that, let's say, advises a waitress to be indignant that she is not allowed to wait tables, instead of standing up for tolerable alimentation, attacks what should actually characterize the thinking of leftists" and then follows another Adorno quote without sense or context. Let's take this at its word: The problem for Ebermann is the indignation of the waitress (which she obviously doesn't feel on her own, but which one would still have to advise her to feel), which of course seems deeply silly to him - the confessed critic of capitalist labor coercion. Only he undercuts the point that this waitress has very good reason to be outraged, when to the capitalist compulsion to work is now added being locked away, patronized and blackmailed. The seemingly harmless talk of "alimentation" hides the fact that the loss of the moments of freedom and dignity, however limited, that lie in work and circulation even for those whose labor power is exploited in it, is recommended with reference to higher insights critical of the state. Loss of autonomy is recast as gain without asking what state dirigisme means over people's lives in the name of protecting them. Nor did Adorno mean by "sur l'eau" a ban on contact and a curfew. For Ebermann, that seems to be more a kind of recreational vacation anyway. And the impositions of the lockdown? A few associated and unspecified, but also "undeniable abominations" would mostly be instrumentalized, if they were not pure invention. Ebermann praises every left-wing center that "closed its doors a few days before the state orders," saying that was "right and caring." The self-abolition of the left is then, after all, an act of caring. Consequently, for Ebermann, all those who do not participate in it are "truly nuts." Whoever does the math on excess mortality is a right-wing radical, to the protests against the measures he can only think of NSDAP. Klaus Stöhr, Hendrik Streeck and Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit, bourgeois scientists who partially contradict the Covid consensus or point out a few contradictions in it, would, like those doctors who contradict the government, reveal their "fascist mindset." Ferguson, Brockmann, Meyer-Hermann, Brinkmann, all lockdown apologists who have eagerly assisted the governments, are brought into the field not only uncritically but even approvingly. Ebermann has nothing to say about Merkel and Spahn, nor about the WHO, GAVI or Pfizer, nor about biopolitics or authoritarian state restructuring. The interest lies rather in the scene gossip.

The need for demarcation runs through the entire book; he calls for a "consistent break" even with those leftists like Peter Nowak who at least tentatively question the Covid consensus. This need for demarcation results from the narrow-minded unwillingness to think about world events with even a few critical thoughts that go beyond the already rehearsed beliefs - capitalist normality is capitalist normality is capitalist normality ... -. Ebermann shows us that it is possible to believe in capitalism even while posing as its greatest critic. He, who has seen through the religion of capitalism, i.e. its ideology, has made a religion of it himself - like most leftists. Nothing can shake it anymore, no thought can get through the fine-meshed net of anti-capitalist phrases, it is ultimately there for their defense. It is absolutely clear that this ideology should be smashed - just as Ebermann should be retired, to which he has long since gone with his old drivel.

Just as elaborate and intellectually modest is the approach of Uli Krug in "Krankheit als Kränkung. Narcissism and Ignorance in Pandemic Times". Krug has written for the ideology-critical journal "Bahamas" and was part of its editorial board, but he does not mention the disruption of his own scene. After a popular-scientific introduction about the epidemics in late modernity since AIDS, according to Krug a result of capitalist impoverishment and backward eating habits, the book goes mainly into psychology. There, quite plausible psychoanalytical thoughts about projection and defense are formulated, but all of them have the weakness that they apparently only occur in one social group, while all others are spared from such quirks by miraculous insights into the principle of reality. According to Krug and Adorno, who is used here again, "anti-vaccination and criticism of measures would show 'glaringly irrational traits'", which could be said, to put it mildly, for supporters of vaccination and measures as well. What is reasonable and rational, is determined by Krug from the beginning and unquestioned, now with ideology-critical vocabulary the deviants are only attested that it is a historical and psychological flaw. About sense and nonsense of measures or mass vaccinations with experimental technology must not be discussed then even more, that falls everything into the area of the conspiracy theory, instead one can speculate about people psychology and put the thesis into the area that in particular in the German alpine area and East Germany the irrationalism shows for different reasons particularly glaring features, where "vaccination deniers and epidemic trivializers" romp. Strangely enough, the vaccination rates that Krug cites as evidence are also above the European average there. Or is that already the success of the rationality-reinforcing coercive measures? A look at Malte Thiessen's "Immunized Society," a critical history of vaccination in Germany, could have helped the author further had he been interested in his subject. Another nice punch line is that the planners, steersmen and enforcers of the prevailing absurdity are not subjected to Krug's psychology test, but only those who are exposed to it. Politics, the state, Big Pharma are underestimated by Krug, as is the share of failed mass vaccinations in the spread of AIDS. Because Krug in his booklet, as well as Ebermann in his, often refers to Adorno and the Critical Theory, at the end a quotation from the "Jargon of Actuality" - against such ideology-critical blindness: "With chaste emotion, man can be invoked in man without it costing anyone anything; but whoever resists the appeal surrenders himself to the administrators of the jargon as an inhuman being and, if need be, can be thrown to their victims as prey; he, not power, be the arrogant one who drags their human dignity into the mud. Any selfish practice can masquerade with the help of jargon as common good, as service to mankind, without anything being done in earnest against the need and neediness of mankind." So much for the stewards of ideology-critical jargon.

But there were also scattered objections to the Covid consensus. Sebastian Lotzer, out of good old anarchist aversion to the state, has at least occasionally found such clear words that "rumlotzern" was used for a while quasi synonymously with "schwurbeln," until he shut down his account, annoyed by the leftist Twitter mob. The "Zündlumpen", who railed against obedience to the state and submission to vaccination, even had the state's power sent after him and into his house by the left-wingers on the block. Achim Szepanski has contributed on his blog "NON" mainly to the dissemination of texts from Germany and abroad - as well as "Sunzi Bingfa" - he has long drawn attention to the state fascization in the financial capitalism of the 21st century. Capulcu opposes the technological and digital assault that is underway on our lives and has experienced a previously unimagined intensification in the past two years. The blog of the Halcyon Association for Radical Philosophy has published posts against the biopolitical management of life, and the blog of artist and author Olaf Arndt has consistently featured resistant texts and reports. The collective Feminist Lookdown addressed the public in the spring of 2020, lamenting the loss of critical faculties as the left row after row called on the state to solve a health crisis of its own making. Tove Soiland's collective criticized the "zero covid" cult and participated in demonstrations against covid certification in Switzerland. A few upright members of the Interventionist Left (IL), which had joined "Zero Covid" as an overall organization, met last year and discussed the crisis of the radical left; a documentation of the meeting has been published under the title "The IL is in danger of having become history." The contributions on neoliberal subjectivation, reformist campaign politics with radical rhetoric, and the new accumulation regime of capitalism, it should be noted, were prompted by the Covid consensus to take a closer look at the crisis of the radical left and the disappearance of an antagonistic desire. The friends of the classless society and others now also comment in "Kosmoprolet #6" on what will happen from March 2020. The coercive measures against the unvaccinated are at least seen as motivated by the state's intention to pass on health policy to the individual and to take them quasi into liability for it. In other respects, too, there is at least a hint of honesty about the situation in which we now find ourselves: "The measures against the pandemic have brought class struggles to a standstill on such a broad front that intuitively one could almost agree with the left-wing gimps who think the whole thing is an evil hoax."

The majority of left-wing newspapers and magazines - from "konkret" and "ak" to "nd" and "Jungle World" to "Freitag" and "junge Welt" - found it difficult to say anything at all about what was happening, let alone to come up with their own assessment of the situation. Mostly, they hid behind reports about "those affected," in search of the magical figure of the most disadvantaged of all the disadvantaged. Occasionally, one could find the odd thoughtful essay, a cautious book review or a not uninteresting interview, mostly hidden in the culture section; in political reporting, the left-wing press failed all along the line. It seems as if they didn't want to know any better, as if they didn't want to question, investigate, uncover - as if the critical impulse had been smothered in poses of know-it-allism. Those who still wanted to inform themselves did so elsewhere. Thus, in 2020, Gerald Grüneklee, Clemens Heni and Peter Nowak published a booklet on "Corona and Democracy - a Left Critique", which at least tried to classify a few of the most obvious events and thus did not submit to the leftist cartel of silence. (Grüneklee followed up again with "Corona - Present and Future under the Virus" and the booklet "Wider den Impfzwang"). For this they were viciously and untruthfully denigrated by Ebermann in "konkret", for example, but the magazine refused to print even one line in reply. This can be read in the volume "Corona und die linke Kritik(un)fähigkeit," edited by Gerhard Hanloser, Peter Nowak and Anne Seek. The anthology emerged from a series of lectures and discussions that took refuge in the digital after the cancellation of an event by the Berlin Regenbogenfabrik. Despite the fact that it was stated there that capitalism is currently changing in such a way that it may no longer be possible to speak of it in the same way, and that an academic-conformist middle-class left in particular has little to offer in the way of a counter to this, one does not seek a break with the left. One appeals to them, even lets Christian Zeller, one of the most important representatives of "Zero Covid" and loudest lockdown advocates, publish, a keyword giver of the "Keep your distance!" and "We'll vaccinate all of you!" left, which one had still lashed out at a few pages earlier. Felix Klopotek notes in his article that there are "four aspects of the crisis that demand social and political resistance: the passing on of the costs and (health) risks of the crisis to the weak, the precarious and the proles (of course: Not identical groups); the imposition of authoritarian forms of statehood under the pretext of fighting the crisis; the establishment of a cultural and lifeworld pattern of fear, social distrust, and mutually isolating panic; finally, the transformation of the crisis into a business model - for my sake: a productive force for cutting-edge capital, Big Pharma, and the Amazon-Google-Facebook complex."

Many contributions in the volume are rather reports on experiences and small interventions, which ultimately appeal mainly to the good left conscience. As if that would do any good and would not be part of the problem. Theoretical large-scale analyses are most likely to be found in an interview with Detlef Hartmann, a militant leftist of the older generation, who describes the entire spectacle as a shock strategy and innovation offensive of capital, a "creative destruction" of the digital economy through "expertocratic political permanent show." Ultimately, he said, the left has been haphazard and confused since the crisis of 2007/08 in the face of the inner-capitalist upheaval that has been taking place before everyone's eyes ever since. Michael Kronawitter, part of the Kreuzbergers Praxiskollektiv, which among other things turned against the fear and panic mongering with the text "Against the dictate of fear" in the spring of 2020 and since then has been doing some counter-publicity on its own website, takes a closer look at PCR tests and modeling and shows that even on this level there can really only be talk of organized disinformation. These texts go for objectivity and thus stand out from a volume that otherwise remains too attached to "left-wing melancholy". While the shock at the failure of the left wants to be articulated, it is far more important to understand and critique domination and its legitimation.

With higher analytical aspirations comes "Dark Winter. Analyses of Corona Capitalism," from the Free Left environment. The title refers to a catastrophe simulation from 2001 in which terrorists attack the USA with smallpox pathogens. Horror scenarios, falling profit rates, aggressive expansionism of U.S. capital, the ideology of the elites, and the coming climate shockdown are a few of the themes of the volume. Roughly speaking, most authors also assume a shock strategy that has become necessary for capital in the face of the crisis of its own reproduction - collapse of profit rates. The crisis has been ongoing since 2007, hysteria and fear campaigns are on the rise, the middle classes are being crushed, corporations and finance capital are behaving dictatorially, and Europe is being drawn more and more into the confrontation between U.S. and Chinese spheres of interest. In 2019 came the downturn in the repo market - that is, in government bonds. Blackrock, the world's largest asset manager, concluded that only "extraordinary responses" could help; Corona is the blank slate. Profits with the health, armament and social dismantling are quite desired side effects. Who helped prepare this? From Hopkins University and Imperial College, the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust to the WHO, GAVI, WEF, RKI and Big Pharma, they are all in on it, meeting, for example, at the infamous Event 201. Such crises are necessary for the rulers to push through their program - from global digital identity to global governance. Here, too, we encounter the argument that this has less and less to do with capitalism as we have known it up to now; we are talking here about digital neo-Eudalism. And with the climate hysteria, the next scenario is already on the horizon. Among the elites, a new version of Malthusianism can be observed in the form of transhumanism, and ideas of population reduction are being revived. The fact that imperialism in crisis even makes a scenario like nuclear war conceivable, as Jan Müller argues, can hardly be denied in the meantime. Müller also presents an extremely readable sketch of the left in the Federal Republic - with the leading question of why it has been able to fail so badly in the past two years. The ideology of post-materialism, which has become predominant in the meantime, is said to be extremely compatible with the neo-liberal offensive. In any case, "Dark Winter" shows that this society has a few far more serious problems in its social reproduction than a respiratory virus, but to inflate this to an apocalyptic threat benefits above all the rulers of Western imperialism.

Karl Heinz Roth, an old leftist and doctor, has expressed his views in "Stowaways. Die Coronakrise und die Folgen" (Stowaways. The Corona Crisis and its Consequences), a remarkable volume of almost 500 pages. However, one can safely skim over a third of it; it contains only recounts of when and where a person was first tested as corona positive, how the curves then went, and so on. Roth has little doubt that a virus has spread across the world here, but he considers bird and swine flu to be fake pandemics and the laboratory thesis with regard to corona to be certainly debatable. More politically interesting is what Roth writes about the development of the global health care system. The idea of public health care has been displaced by vaccination campaigns in recent decades, and national pandemic plans have also been rewritten in this respect, with classical infection hygiene appearing less and less in them. This was possible because the pharmaceutical industry and its stakeholders, such as the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, have gradually hijacked public health organizations and are now firmly in the "grip of the pharmaceutical companies." This in turn only succeeded by outlining ever more drastic scenarios in pandemic exercises, the focus on worst-case scenarios made the old pandemic plans seem inadequate, and the suspension of basic rights was planned along with them. These scenarios, unrealistic and irresponsible according to Roth, such as Clade X or Event 201, which were based on Spanish flu and nuclear war, were also pushed by the biosecurity complex with its numerous universities, institutes, foundations, and government agencies. Roth's thesis is that this caused a loss of reality among the actors. So there was no other way to react than the way they had prepared themselves under the pressure of Big Pharma and the NGOs; there was no other horizon of thinking left. And there could not be, because after the end of public health in the 1970s and a rapid economization of health care, especially again starting in the 1990s, health became a battleground of rival capital groups trying to bring this lucrative investment area under their control. So much for the premise.

Now, when there was talk of a new corona virus in late 2019, it was no wonder that the entire apparatus reacted as it had been "preset." Finally, the chance had come to make the scenario a reality. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College immediately came around the corner with "social distancing," a manager named Tomas Pueyo came up with "hammer and dance," professor of economic geography Christian Zeller propagated "complete lockdown" and became one of the co-founders of "Zero Covid." Panic reactions led to emergency decrees, supported by the media, the left and the unions, as Roth states. The basic rules of epidemiological statistics were disregarded, task forces poked around in the fog, no one was interested in classical infection hygiene, all the more so in restrictions on freedom, the negative consequences of the lockdowns - health, social, ... - were systematically ignored, epidemiologically they achieved practically nothing, and there was never any alternative. Despite strong risks and side effects, the new vaccines with mRNA technology were tested carelessly, because the pharmaceutical companies were given a free hand. (Whereby Roth has little objection to mRNA technology in principle elsewhere). Fear and panic prevailed instead of rationality, and according to Roth one should not be surprised about preppers and QAnon. Roth does not go into detail about everything that goes hand in hand with this - surveillance, digitalization, authoritarian state, uniformization, enterotization of social relationships through a ban on contact and the severe economic crisis - but at least he does not leave it unmentioned. The extent to which all of this intervenes in social life and readjusts it becomes quite comprehensible in Roth's work. Ultimately, he sees it as a "systemic crisis. Although this has meanwhile degenerated into a commonplace phrase, Roth can help us to understand this system of pharmaceutical corporations, NGOs, the biosecurity state, and the destruction of the health care system and epidemiological rationality through economization.

With British economic historian Adam Tooze and his book "World in Lockdown. The Global Crisis and Its Aftermath," one can follow the question of systemic crisis a bit further. Tooze's premise is this: even before the virus, it was clear that 2020 and the following years would be tumultuous. A global recession of unimagined proportions was looming, and alarm bells were ringing for the ruling class, who for years have taken a burning interest in the risks posed by their unstable system. Tooze is not particularly interested in epidemics, nor in Corona; what is historically new for him is the reaction to them alone. In 2020, after the shocks in the repo market at the end of 2019, the securities market almost completely collapsed. The world financial system was saved only by previously unknown central bank interventions that far surpassed those of 2007/08. Central banks continue to expand their power - and their main enemy is "democratic money" - thus also expanding the power of the global dollar-based financial system, from which tech companies and big business benefit the most. Central banks, investment funds, ratings agencies, driven by "a group of large corporations, financial firms, and a handful of extremely wealthy individuals" seek to stabilize the "dollar-based Wall Street system" - especially to the detriment of poorer countries. Whoever can issue loans has the political-economic power, more and more countries are realizing, and this is forcing them to adopt kamikaze policies. The greatest competition for this system lies in the rise of China; the People's Republic is replacing the institutions of the West as the world's largest lender, and is demonstrating along the way that, as a new player, it is willing to interpret the rules somewhat less strictly. So how to undermine China's legitimacy?

"Wall Street learned to love green capitalism," Tooze writes, "It was thought that it could use it to back China into a corner. That came back as a boomerang, according to Tooze, when Xi Jinping announced at the 2021 UN General Assembly that China would meet climate targets before the West. Even at Corona, the West was still rejoicing that China would now face a dire crisis, even one that threatened its very existence, before things turned out differently. For Tooze, it is quite clear that the West is in crisis, even losing it, even if the abundance of dollars is helping to delay it for the moment - which is why, as can be said with regard to the texts of Fabio Vighi, for example, the West also needs ever new and more dramatic occasions to continue this policy, because finance capital can no longer reproduce itself in any other way. But the means by which debt-driven capitalism of the Western type still buys itself time, which it is hoped might tip the balance against its competitors, are becoming ever more drastic and fatalistic, while the internal contradictions are becoming ever greater. While in 2020 the rich in the U.S. are still skimming off the largest profits in history, at the same time the largest program against hunger in the history of the country is being launched, political polarization and constitutional crisis give a foretaste of civil war. Tooze offers a few glimpses of the economic, financial-institutional and geopolitical dimensions that, for example, are rather only hinted at in "Dark Winter" or are only briefly referred to as the "dictatorship of finance capital." Conversely, Tooze lacks a crisis theory, such as the Marxist thesis of the tendential fall of profit rates.

As far as the spiritual constitution of the West is concerned, as well as the mentioned ideology of its elites, Philipp von Becker - who has also attracted attention by a few clever texts on the viral exceptionalism - gives in his book "Immortality. Transhumanism, Bioengineering, and Digital Capitalism" some useful hints explaining to what extent the notion of technically overcoming the deficient human being actually amounts to a technical-digital dystopia, and also extinction fantasies do not arise entirely by chance. As von Becker can show, some discursive confusions are indeed already inherent in this mindset, for example that the reference to the necessary mortality of man is denounced as chauvinism by the transhumanists. The calculable, quantifiable human being, life understood as an information process to be thoroughly controlled, this is the latest edition of the ideology of the bourgeois subject, which has always tended towards its real abolition, supported by large industries from Silicon Valley to the neophilanthropes to Big Pharma. Still another question that keeps coming up: What are we talking about at the very most general level? Is this still capitalism? Or already neo-feudalism? McKenzie Wark provides a few useful clues in her book "Capital is Dead," published in the original already in 2019. Wark describes the rise of a new ruling class, the vectoralists, that is, the class that rules over information and wants to subjugate life under that rule. "The capitalist class owns the means of production, that is, the means of organizing labor. The vectoralist class owns the means of organizing the means of production." This power is based on information, which is closely linked to digitalization and financialization - Blackrock is a prime example of this development, as are the numerous tech corporations of Silicon Valley. Companies are organizing themselves more and more in terms of ownership and control of information. In contrast, labor was still something external that the capitalist class wanted to dispose of. Should we get used to the idea that the moment of individual freedom associated with it is still being definitively confiscated? According to Wark, one should conversely make this thought the impetus of every criticism: "The West is now the former West. Its economic system has changed. It is no longer capitalism - it is something worse. It's taking even more control over work and everyday life." The leftist Covid consensus is not just a block to this insight, it is the ideological prop of this new regime that comes with the slogan "We care for you!" and whose outlines we are just beginning to grasp. The crucial thing may be to recognize this newness of capitalism, which explodes its previous forms - and also requires new forms of resistance. Corona is only one moment of this tendency, but one that must be penetrated if the overall doom is to be understood and overcome.