by Jakob Augstein
Spiegel Online, 29.07.2013
Translated from the German by Paul Carline, Senior Editor for European Affairs
SUGGESTED BY GAITHER STEWART
The world is in crisis: trust in the capitalist system has evaporated. What value still attaches to concepts like justice, responsibility and democracy? Putting a cross on your ballot paper in the elections is just not enough.
You can see the preview of our future on YouTube. August 2011, the riots in London. A student sits on the ground, bleeding. A couple of youths bend over him, help him to stand, slowly open the wounded man’s rucksack – and remove everything from it, then walk away. The young man is unable to stop them. British Prime Minister David Cameron’s comment at the time: “Social problems that have been festering for decades have exploded in our face”. He said that society was “broken”. That was progress. “Society” – that’s a word that doesn’t come easily to the mouth of a British Tory. [Margaret Thatcher had famously said: “There is no such thing as society”]. But when society is broken, then people, too, become broken. That was something the ideologues of Neo-Liberalism refused for a long time to accept.
Suddenly, everyone is aware of it. If someone had stood in the town square a few years ago crying out: “We can’t continue with this kind of capitalism”, the passersby would have shaken their heads and continued on their way – or the police would have turned up to put a stop to it. But today – would anyone say the speaker was wrong?
Suddenly everyone remembers that Marx said long ago that the history of capitalism is the history of its crises. “The contradictory evolution of capitalist society impacts most strikingly on the practical middle class in the ups and downs of the periodic cycle through which modern industry passes, and in its peak – which is the general crisis” (“Das Kapital”). People will have to get used to this fact again. The social self-image of the West has been so badly battered by the financial crisis – as its technological self-image was after the Fukushima nuclear power plant blew up: we are experiencing the “super worst case scenario” of the system: the long predicted, but perhaps not seriously expected catastrophe – moral meltdown.
Denial till the doctor comes – that was yesterday
The criminals in the finance markets threw away the yardsticks of right and wrong. Last summer (2012) the top management of HSBC – the biggest bank in Europe – had to appear before a US Senate commission, because their company had apparently been laundering Mexican drug money for years. The bank put aside $1.7 billion to cover expected fines – while posting profits of $12.7 billion.
Before travelling to Washington, CEO Stuart Gulliver stated: “We accept responsibility for our past mistakes. We have said we are profoundly sorry for them, and we are committed to putting them right”. That’s the professional technique of contemporary crisis management: denial till the doctor comes – that’s yesterday’s game. It’s now much cleverer to admit what is obvious, apologise, promise to do things better in future – and many just carry on as before.
Guilt and responsibility become concepts which no longer mean what they are meant to. Money is a question of trust. But the issue is much bigger than merely restoring the markets’ trust in themselves. In reality, it’s a crisis of trust in the whole system and its concepts: justice, right, responsibility, law, duty, equality, reason, progress, the public sphere, parliament, government, elections, democracy. We are experiencing the erosion – and then the loss – of these concepts.
There are some smart people who believe we no longer have any need for a store of values. They approve of Peter Sloterdijk’s famous definition of cynicism: “Cynicism, as enlightened false consciousness, has become a hard-bitten, seedy cleverness, that has cast off all courage, holds all positivities to be a priori deception, and whose only concern is to muddle through somehow”. These are the contemporaries who think apathy is prudence, fear is sanity and laziness is far-sightedness: we can make it comfortable for ourselves even in surrender. The problem is only: for a democracy worth the name, that isn’t good enough in the long run. There are no democrats in cynical exile.
Just being able to vote in the elections isn’t enough
When we lose our concepts, we also lose the possibility of understanding reality. Financial analyst Emanuel Derman wrote: “The good times are here again for models of the physical world. (…) But the times are bad for models of the social world”. And that’s because the models are no longer any use for predictions. We have a concept of what a Chancellor is [in the German political sense], what a minister is, what a president is, and what a banker is. And we also have such concepts about a parliament, about a public broadcasting company, a court. And we expect a certain behaviour from these people and these institutions. What do we do if the people and the institutions fail to live up to these expectations?
We saw that the Federal Chancellor [Angela Merkel] had to take on board the accusation by the Federal Constitutional Court that she had systematically infringed the rights of the Federal Parliament in the Euro crisis. That is no small matter. When we talk about democracy, we now have to add that we don’t have the same understanding of it as the Chancellor.
The need now is to recover the concepts of justice, law, equality, democracy, freedom – which a morbid capitalism has stolen from us. We have delegated our responsibility – and it has simply disappeared in the undergrowth of timid politicians, greedy bankers and sympathetic journalists. It is just not enough to cast your vote in the elections – and then remain silent.
We cannot avoid the question of actions. On its own, correct awareness does not create correct reality. Author Ingo Schulze has thought about this and come to this conclusion: “We have to go beyond mere gesture and symbolic acts and make known our wishes in a non-violent way – if necessary, against the resistance of the democratically elected representatives”.
It is time to begin wishing again. And acting.
[This is an extract from Jakob Augstein’s book: “Sabotage”, which was published on 29 July by the Hanser Verlag, Munich.
The original German version can be viewed at:
