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Self-reference in capital and in ourselves

by Herbert Bottcher
"Lateral thinkers" defend their freedom. Capital serves no other purpose than the irrational end in itself of the multiplication of itself.
Self-reference...
... as in capital so also in ourselves
by Herbert Böttcher

[This article published in Dec 2020 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=aktuelles&index=0&posnr=755.]

"For a week, the federal and state governments sat together on a train headed straight for a loss of control of the pandemic," was how the Kölner-Stadt-Anzeiger1 commented on the struggle, or rather wrangling, over measures to combat the epidemic, which has already reached the record number of well over 400 deaths in two consecutive days in Germany. There is no mention of the misery in the intensive care units, the overload of staff, and certainly not of what the virus is doing in the rest of the world.

Undisturbed by this, 'lateral thinkers' defend their freedom, and the FDP stands shoulder to shoulder with the AfD in defending democracy. The FDP, of all people, even discovers social discrimination and educational injustice when it comes to keeping daycare centers and schools running in order to relieve the burden on the world of work and business. Industries defend the freedom to produce. Retail chains and individual chains want the shopping experience, including its sense-making, to remain possible - all the more so before Christmas. It may no longer be possible to trace chains of infection, but soccer officials know that Bundesliga operations are so sanitized that they could continue to run even with spectators. And firecrackers on New Year's Eve are probably also a right of freedom, if not a human right. And what will happen to the firecracker industry if there is no firecracker? It would be as miserable as the armaments industry if no more weapons were sold and no more wars were fought. In the event and culture industry, which is trimmed to experience and entertainment, it is discovered that culture is 'more' and 'higher' than entertainment, has, so to speak, a meaningful added value...

Some individual demands are justified. The economic and social need, which is expressed in the various statements, is not to be denied. But what is striking and connects many statements and political positions is their 'self-reference'. They remain with 'themselves' and reflect neither in a relationship to those who fight for their lives in the hospitals, nor to those who try to care for them - beyond their strength - in an overtaxed economized medical business. Implicitly, such self-referentiality threatens to amount to what was formulated in hate mail to Karl Lauterbach: "You can't paralyze the entire economy and stop public life just because the elderly don't want to die. Those who think the virus is dangerous can stay at home. "2 In Germany, there are now about 18 million people over the age of 65. If they stayed at home, this would not be a negligible figure, even in purely economic terms.

Now it would be far from the mark to brand such self-references from a high moralizing horse as egoism and to preach a return to solidarity. This would be as illusionary and obscuring as Kant's purely formal morality and its content-empty categorical imperative - illusionary, because it is about social problems that cannot be solved with individual morality, obscuring, because moral 'solutions' shift the problem of self-reference from the social to the individual level and withdraw its social character from reflection.

It would also be far wrong to misunderstand the critique of self-reference as a simple apology of government policy. It stands neither for the protection of the sick and the elderly, i.e. those 'superfluous' to capitalist normality, nor for a social 'general interest'. The functioning of the health care system as well as the majority of the economy is to be maintained so that work and consumption can or should continue, while the restrictions in private areas as well as in gastronomy, in the event and culture business are to slow down the virus and protect the health care system from overload. The fact that the 'superfluous' are protected more than with a social Darwinian strategy of herd immunity is a welcome side effect that should not be underestimated. However, the referentiality of the state to an overall capitalist interest does not break with self-referentiality, but provides it with the space it needs to act.

'Self-referentiality' is the 'character' of social relations as a whole, including the state. This is to be understood quite literally; for 'character' in the Greek origin of the word means: imprint or also stamp. The imprint or the stamp of self-referentiality is imposed on those who are obliged to assert themselves in the capitalist crisis conditions as an "ego corporation" in the competition. There is also a characteristic moral term for this: 'self-responsibility! As 'self-responsible ego-agents' and completely on the level of what counselors, therapy and spirituality experts recommend, the individuals are programmed to care for themselves and are trained in it. It is not at all to be denied that concern for oneself can be useful as a contextually corrective objection to external determination through overtaxing. Socially, however, it is not formulated contextually, but generally. This is precisely where the boom of self-reference converges with the intensifying capitalist crisis conditions. The motto is: save yourself if you can. Before you are thrown out of the race, let the others fall by the wayside.

The proximity to business management is not coincidental. Ich-AGs are business units that have to hold their own against the competition in order not to get caught in a downward elevator where there is no emergency brake. The blind law is: Keep it up! Keep it up! The relentless and deadly 'Keep it up!' is served by permanent change, which in social terms is called reform. As paradoxical as it may seem: Such changes are demanded so that everything can continue as usual, at least until one gets caught or until the operating system crashes. The changes demanded are ultimately nothing other than ever new adaptations to be made to the point of exhaustion - accompanied by a spirituality that exaggerates and appeases the crashing self and by churches that offer their competencies for dying and new beginnings, blind to what is obvious: that for more and more individuals, countries and regions there is only dying and demise without an immanent new beginning.

So slowly we are approaching the "verborgnen Stätte "3 where self-reference is produced in its core. It is that place where "one produces it oneself, capital. "4 It is produced in strict self-reference; it refers to nothing but itself. Capital expresses itself in the production of commodities, but only in order to return to itself - mediated by their circulation, their purchase and sale - and to begin anew the cycle of its own self-reference, until it perishes from its own exhaustion, the dwindling of its substance, labor.

The self-referentiality of capital can place itself in no other relation than that to itself. The commodities it produces count not in their material content, but as the quantitative objectification of value and surplus value. Capital serves no other purpose than the irrational end in itself of the multiplication of itself. This could be obfuscated in the ascendant and high phase of capitalism by social prosperity, by partial 'prosperity' and the mythologies of a steady progress "in knowledge and in the consciousness of freedom" (Hegel). In the crisis, the deadly irrationality of capitalist self-reference, of capitalist normality, becomes 'apparent': capital "must empty itself into all the things of this world in order to be able to present itself as real: from the toothbrush to the subtlest mental emotion, from the simplest object of use to philosophical reflection or the transformation of entire landscapes and continents. . "5 It must thus divest itself in order to return to itself and its irrational end in itself of multiplication for its own sake and to be able to begin anew with it.

Those who find this too theoretical may recall how this irrational self-reference works in capitalist normality6:

"For decades we have known that the oceans are overfished. ... Yet there is now a sushi restaurant in every village. In the last five 5 years there is so-called fresh fish from Aldi - in every branch, every Netto, every Lidl, every xyz. ... To offer that is one thing - but the other is that the sales figures are so terrific good, that entrepreneurially everything was done right."

"So that ... Trump doesn't impose higher import duties on our honestly produced cars, the EU, at Germany's instigation, has committed itself to importing a considerable amount of beef. This meat comes from animals that have been fed not even corn but popcorn for several years now. ... The processed corn in the form of popped corn kernels ensures that the entire digestive tract of the poor cattle is destroyed. And so, the poor cattle put on fat much faster, reach their fattening weight in half the time and can be slaughtered even earlier for our benefit. Is anyone interested in the nutritional content of the meat? So, times completely independently of the well-being of the animal? Slaughter cattle fattened in this way have absolutely nothing left of the nutrients, trace elements and 'healthy' fats - that's just garbage in terms of nutrition!"

"SUVs, cruises and domestic flights ... already have ... almost basic rights character. Capitalist solutions in times of crisis are often only more or less well disguised substitution solutions. Batteries instead of combustion engines, diesel instead of heavy oil, veggie sausage instead of beef."

The examples of insanity can be multiplied to exhaustion. No individual morality can help against this - not even the universality of the categorical imperative mediated by self-reference. Morality or ethics are not tangential to the self-reference of capital and its insane end in itself, but presuppose it. Nothing seems to be more eagerly desired in Corona times, and even more so at Christmas, than a return to capitalist normality and the normality of its self-referential insanity.

No 'higher being', no state, and no morality can save us from this... That which could most likely provide salvation is actually the most tabooed: socio-critical reflection that reaches out to 'the whole', the 'concrete totality' of relations, and thereby reaches into the "hidden site of production". It can make the self-referentiality of capital as a destructive dynamic, which mediates itself in different areas and on different levels, the object of analysis and critique - as a precondition of its overcoming. Not even more self-referential and 'business as usual' - even under intensifying crisis conditions - but interruptive reflection accompanied by solidary action, "dialectics at a standstill" - as Walter Benjamin called and described it7 - would be the order of the day.
Eva Quadbeck, Das Vertrauen ist geschrumpft, editorial in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 26.11.2020. ^
This is how it was formulated - as reported in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger of 21/22/11/2020 - in hate mail to Karl Lauterbach, health expert of the SPD. ^
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