Wolfgang fritz haug biography of barack

On the Dialectics of Anti-Capitalism1

Staring at evil contains an element of fascination. Therein, however, also an element of consent.

Horkheimer/Adorno, Dialectics of Enlightenment

The thought baffled me. Was that my thought? That was the thought of the enemy. Was I my own enemy? I distanced myself from myself, that means, I imagined a man who looked at me from outside.

Volker Braun, The Iron Car

The first massive appearance of a plural movement of globalisation critics in Seattle , greeted as the “New Aurora” (Ramonet ), may not have rung in a revolutionary turn in the world, but inasmuch as it turned against the rulers of world capitalism, it has brought about a turn of the globalisation critics towards the world. A memorable dialectics converted them into the pioneers of a different kind of globalisation. With a term borrowed from French, we call them “Alterglobalists” (altermondialistes). Their world-wide movement has conjured from the paralysing trauma of state socialism the new dream of a world that would no longer be capitalist and yet would not fall prey to the almightiness of a state apparatus. Since then, not only slogans critical of capitalism, but also anti-capitalist slogans increasingly find an echo. Therewith arises the need for clarification.2

1) Dialectics or crisis of anti-capitalism

The words are close together. What they designate differs: critique of capitalism names what is bad in capitalism in order to regulate it; anti-capitalism wants to overcome capitalism. Critique of capitalism has a second meaning, belonging to a different level than the first, namely the Critique of Political Economy, the over-reaching title of the Marxian theory of capital. In turn, there are also many forms of anti-capitalism; roughly speaking, you may distinguish regressive from progressive ones. The following attempt at clarification aims at progressive anti-capitalism. Who has lear

If socialism and liberalism have both been central to modern political and social thought, during the 20th century it was socialism, in a loose ecumenical sense, that was the most successful of the two in terms of intellectual attraction and public te Socialism was emblazoned on the banners of mass parties in Brazil, Britain, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa—in fact, virtually every major country of the globe, with the exception of Nigeria and the us. It was embraced as a rhetorical goal, at least, by a range of locally powerful parties from Arctic Social Democrats to African nationalists. Socialism and Communism exercised a powerful attraction over some of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century: Einstein was a socialist, writing a founding manifesto for the American Marxist journal Monthly Review; Picasso was a Communist, who designed the logo of post-World War ii Communist-led peace movements. In spite of its conservatively defined original task and its own staunchly conservative traditions, the Swedish Academy has allotted the Nobel Prize for literature to a series of left-wing writers, from Romain Rolland to Elfriede Jelinek.

Following two springtides in the aftermaths of the 20th century’s world wars, varieties of socialism reached their maximum influence and transformational ambition in the s and s, as did its central, if not its sole, theoretical canon: Marxism. Geopolitically, the Soviet Union attained parity with the usa, which was defeated by the Vietnamese Communists. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was the largest-scale attempt at radical social change ever carried out, and was seen as a dazzling red beacon by many people all over the world. Africa north of the Limpopo was swept by decolonization and embarked upon projects of socialist nation-building. In Latin America the Cuban Revolution inspired a hemispheric surge of revolutionary socialist politics, followed by another

A ‘ “message in the bottle” for a different future’, Fredric Jameson wrote 25 years ago, after the first four volumes of the (German-language) Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (HKWM) – Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HCDM) – had been published. Admittedly, the Preface to the first volume may have approached the matter somewhat less modestly, stating that it was the HKWM’s task, ‘as if on Noah’s Ark’, to carry ‘humankind’s treasure trove of enlightening knowledge and social imagination […] into a new era’, so as to salvage it from ‘an enormous mountain of historical debris, one which threatens to indiscriminately bury both that system’s rational elements and seeds for the future, along with those elements which are irrational and hostile’ to life (, III).

The time in which these lines were written – and, indeed, understood as a historic mission – was shaped by the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In December of , Heiner Müller captured the situation in the following verses: ‘From my cell before the blank page / In my head a drama for an empty auditorium / Deaf are the victors, and the vanquished mute’.

We announced the first volume under the title ‘Abbau des Staates bis Dummheit’ (Dismantling of the State to Stupidity). To the news magazine Der Spiegel this sounded so absurd that it printed our announcement in its Hohlspiegel column, which features involuntarily comical quotes. Of course, this brought us attention. However, the first volume had become considerably too long and had to be divided up. The new, rather sober title was Abbau des Staates bis Avantgarde (Dismantling of the State to Vanguard). The second volume, titled Bank bis Dummheit in der Musik (Bank to Stupidity in Music), was published the following year and earned an appreciative review from the centre-left daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau, which we used for its cove