Around the mountain
Capitalism has reached its natural limits and is now beginning to collapse under its own weight.

While the super-rich, corporations, financial monopolies and stock exchanges have long since freed themselves from the straitjacket of the state, the European elections have made it clear that there is a cross-party consensus in favor of capitalism and the certainty that the era of nation states is over. In the European Union (EU), the course has been set for a bipolar order of a feudal character, which is also gaining ground worldwide. But this is not the end of history, but rather a part of the beginning.
by Gunther Sosna

[This article posted on 6/29/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/um-den-berg-herum.]

Financial capital is beyond control and social responsibility. It has no enemies to fear, it operates globally, marauding around the globe and leaving scorched earth in its wake. In Germany, too, no political force is blocking its path. Parties, people and nation are united under the banner of capital with its pharmaceutical-ecological purity and an overwhelming virtue that can be used to justify even the most obvious social injustices and wars.

Roadmap
In the face of the outsourcing, downsizing and dissolution of the remaining industry, the overproduction driven by automation, robotics and competition at the international level, and the artificial intelligence (AI) that is penetrating the service sector, a debate on the future of gainful employment and the distribution of the wealth created by machines is overdue. A political left would have to push it. But it has reconciled itself with capital.

The total collapse of the capitalist opponent at the beginning of the 1990s has prevented a fundamental discussion about the future viability of the economic system, which in its global form has led to an astronomical level of debt for states, an unprecedented concentration of capital power in private hands and, as a result, to an already unprecedented pauperization in the global south and parts of the north. It will be massively accelerated by digitization, which is destroying entire industries.

In Germany, compulsory military service would be just the thing to collect young people — before they come up with socially revolutionary ideas — who face a lack of career prospects in a world of work that is becoming increasingly specialized.
The portrayal of capitalism as the best and therefore only economic solution, which has been haunting Europe since the post-war period, has become the general party doctrine — with all the social consequences that entails. This includes the centralization of power. In the EU, the nation states have surrendered their decision-making sovereignty. The relevant political decisions have long since been taken in Brussels and are only implemented at the national level. At the same time, the old state is working to transfer the illusion of an individualized national community, which is cobbled together from competing classes, to a no less artificial European "we".

In order to secure the capital caravan that is transforming the EU into an ecologically pure, socially deprived and militarily aggressive USA 2.0, the state, with the help of media corporations and the broadcasting organizations it controls, is pursuing its destiny as an organ of repression. Protest is modeled in the interests of capital, social counter-models are discredited, resistance is neutralized, the classes are incited against each other as needed, and systemic responsibility for social upheavals is airbrushed out. A parliamentary opposition exists only on paper: everyone represents the shrinking middle class and no one the growing underclass. The latter is only good as a scapegoat for "necessary" labor market reforms, based on the malicious insinuations of a political caste that is disconnected from the realities of life, feeds itself from the state treasury and recommends to the people that they turn off the heating as costs rise.
Right and left

Right-wing ideologies, which are supposedly being opposed, are part of the national and European DNA. Let us not forget: the French Revolution of 1789 gave rise to the division of political camps into "left" and "right". The seating arrangement in the National Assembly determined that the aristocratic and conservative citizens sat on the right and the revolutionary and progressive deputies on the left. This arrangement became the standard for categorizing political differences in Europe. Such differences are no longer recognizable today. There is no system conflict in the parliaments. The left flank has been swept clean and everything has shifted to the right. Capitalism is revered like a sacred cow, which prepares the destruction of the welfare state and opens the door to fascism.

Its ramifications are intertwined with Germany and the European idea from a national perspective, including the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) into the West, the toleration of National Socialists in the organizational superstructure of the FRG's brand-new representative democracy, the post-war anti-communism, the satisfaction of industrial interests through the supran supranational European Coal and Steel Community, known as the Montanunion, the unquestioning allegiance to the USA, which was geared towards greed for profit and maximum exploitation, and the successful endeavor to make fascism in the Bonn Republic touchable — are intertwined with Germany and the European idea.

In West Germany, the revolutionary left, which manifested itself as a student movement with its anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist positions, was fought at all levels, its breeding ground was integrated into the nation at the end of the 1970s, and the critical reappraisal of National Socialism that was demanded was shelved. In the right-wing-leaning social center, political neutralization took place; in green capitalism, which was inflated into a moralizing substitute religion with its wind turbines, digital wonder bags and biological apocalyptic fantasies, it has been dissolved. At most, contradiction is heard behind closed doors.

After the German Democratic Republic (GDR) joined the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the identity of the "Ossis" was eroded and their historically significant role as a bulwark against imperialism was obliterated. The country and its people were left to the ravenous financial locusts from the West and politically to the new right. The latter, for lack of answers to questions about the future, is fleeing into the past, which is infinitely more appealing to capital than any Marxist-tinged utopia. The remnants of the left were ground between the parliamentary millstones of compromise in Berlin in their quest for governability.
The anti-capitalist roots have been forgotten. The rank and file have largely come to terms with the logic of exploitation, the cadres have been assimilated – and everyone is green. They march hand in hand with nation and capital towards Brussels, waving lobster and sickle at the economically marginalized classes left behind in the deindustrialized regions and the oppressed in the rest of the world, whom they wanted to liberate from misery and exploitation. And these are just fragments of the recent German past, whose anti-fascist narrative is peppered with contradictions, as the example of Hanns Martin Schleyer shows.
Germany in autumn
It is hardly surprising that fascism can be reanimated at any time. It does not suddenly rise from the dead at parties on the island of Sylt or in a certain party. And just because a few dummies are put in place to absorb the supposed surprise effect, no mask will fall at a European election.
Fascism is inherent in the system – and Germany is particularly susceptible to it due to its historical preconceptions and its dealings with the Nazi era.

The invocations of cross-class unity in response to the rise of a right-wing party with an extremist nationalist wing that threatens representative democracy in Germany – while the established and capital-oriented parties defend it and the EU develops new methods to repel refugees at the external borders or to lock them up in camps, and the chorus calls for more security – make the general culture of remembrance appear variable.

Since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, fascism has been prancing through parliaments, institutions and organizations in banker's outfits. In the "hot autumn" of 1977, the Bonn Republic took a very clear position on how to deal with the legacy of fascism in connection with the kidnapping and murder of the former SS officer and ideological warrior of National Socialism, the President of the Employers' Association Hanns Martin Schleyer, by the Red Army Faction (RAF) (1).

The RAF, a revolutionary force in the armed struggle against imperialism, wanted to force the release of the RAF members Andreas Bader, Irmgard Möller, Jan-Carl Raspe and Gudrun Ensslin, who were imprisoned in Stammheim prison. It kidnapped Schleyer on September 5, 1977, in order to exchange him for the prisoners. On October 13, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked the Landshut airplane, an action that was primarily seen as support for the RAF (2).
The plane was stormed by the GSG9 on October 18, 1977 and the hostages were freed. On the same day, the prisoners are said to have learned of the release of the Landshut hostages and, according to official reports, committed collective suicide. Doubts about the exact course of events on the so-called "Night of Death at Stammheim" remain to this day. Baader, Raspe and Ensslin were dead, Möller had several stab wounds in the upper body, near the heart. She was seriously injured and survived.

The aftermath
The prisoners' liberation had failed. Schleyer was shot by the RAF – a completely senseless act of violence, morally reprehensible and politically disastrous. The German left, significantly socialized in the student movement and inspired by Marxist ideas, turned away from the RAF and its goals. They now stood by the nation, which mourned Schleyer, who had dug forced laborers for tank construction in Czechoslovakia, the former Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, for the Third Reich and had helped to make the University of Innsbruck "Jew-free" at the beginning of his career as head of the student union. (3, 4) After the war and three years of internment, he had left National Socialism and the Order of the Skull behind him and had arrived in democracy. In 1951, he started a new career with an automotive company.

In public, the Nazi past was ignored and the memory of the business leader and RAF victim Hanns Martin Schleyer was installed. The abbreviated vita was well received. The nation was reborn in the form of the Federal Republic of Germany and the new reality was complete: capitalism and fascism were tangible even for the anti-capitalist left. In 1983, the SS man Schleyer was named after a multipurpose hall in Stuttgart. Despite the current closing of ranks of democratic forces, who are united against fascism, and their outcry before the European elections, when a right-wing politician did not condemn the members of the SS as criminals, the name of the Stuttgart hall was retained.

This will certainly change, because in the capitalist and staunchly anti-fascist nation that apparently wants to bless the whole world with its triad of democracy, freedom and the market economy and pumps billions into armament while poverty increases, Schleyer is no longer needed as a victim of the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle of the RAF. The torch of symbolism was passed on like a chalice of absolution – always consistently bypassing the victims of the system, who are also accumulating in the urban centers of Europe like slag in a blast furnace.

A perspective
In societies where material things are valued more highly than substance, an evolutionary change in civilization that encompasses all subjects and removes the ground from under the feet of the driving forces of exploitation, greed and fascism is completely out of the question. The goals of society as a whole are of no significance here, except when the top of the economic pyramid benefits disproportionately. Parliamentary activism therefore makes no sense, because the desired change must be comprehensive.

To eliminate the breeding ground of fascism means to cut off the concentration of power like weeds close to the ground and to dig out the roots. This means to disempower capital, to abolish its hierarchies and the power of disposal over people realized by economic dependence and to replace it by a culture of contradiction, by systems of solution-oriented cooperation on the basis of common agreement, arrangement and mutual empowerment and free decisions.

The basis for this is an equal distribution of the surplus value generated by society in order to fulfill the basic needs of all subjects and to increase prosperity in general, while limiting the accumulation of material wealth.
This approach is becoming inevitable due to the dynamically advancing automation of production, which will eliminate the dual function of man as producer and consumer, making him superfluous from a capitalist point of view.

To implement it, it requires an inner conviction and the willingness to roll the stone around the mountain, which will move when it collapses under its own weight.
Financial capitalism, which tries to escape into regionally limited wars, digital currencies, armament, the trade in greenhouse gases and organs, and into space, has reached its qualitative and quantitative limits of growth. Capital can no longer function according to its own logic because it can no longer achieve anything meaningful or urgently necessary. It has to appropriate all existing values such as real estate, farmland, water, etc., but it still gets stuck because the ongoing pressure to grow strangles it.

Due to the global network of stock markets and banks and the mutual penetration of capital in all countries, there is no realistic option to escape a final breakdown. The domino effect exists at all levels. If only one of the world's stock markets falls, all the others will follow suit and the world economy will collapse. Any major war would automatically mean the end of the known world.

The chances of the economically marginalized and oppressed, whose numbers are growing, are unfavorable because capital keeps them in check with all its might. However, the starting situation can improve if, for example, anarchism, which was involved in all the major revolutions, is restored and fills the gap left by the political left with its wealth of ideas. Once the void is filled, social power can emerge. The challenge is to expose the cultural differences of the urban underclasses as factually irrelevant and to agree on a common set of values, in order to then organize, build structures such as labor exchanges, supply centers and coupon systems, and unite the superfluous productive forces, which are increasingly marginalized, under a common social minimum goal: the radical elimination of poverty.

Sources and notes:
(1) Straight Line Political Analysis: The RAF - #05 The Pawns Buback, Ponto, Schleyer. On https://www.youtube.com/@StraightLinePoliticalAnalysis (accessed on June 16, 2024).
(2) SWR2 Archivradio: Aircraft hijacking is linked to Schleyer kidnapping, October 14, 1977.
(3) Kontext Wochenzeitung (18.10.2017): Der halbe Schleyer. On https://www.kontextwochenzeitung.de/zeitgeschehen/342/der-halbe-schleyer-4658.html (accessed on 16.6.2024).
(4) DISSkursiv Weblog of the Duisburg Institute for Language and Social Research (2010): "I am an old National Socialist and SS leader..." – Hanns Martin Schleyer's Prague years; after: Erich Später – Villa Waigner. Hanns Martin Schleyer and the German extermination elite in Prague 1939-45 (Konkret Verlag, Hamburg 2009). At http://www.disskursiv.de/2010/09/30/ich-bin-alter-nationalsozialist-und-ss-fuhrer-hanns-martin-schleyers-prager-jahre/ (accessed on 16.6.2024).

Gunther Sosna studied psychology, sociology and sports science and has worked in advertising, communications and as a journalist, among other things. He is interested in the possibilities and limits of grassroots and informal organization. He is the initiator of Neue Debatte – Magazin für Journalismus und Wissenschaft von unten.
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