Essay: False equality
Everyone gets what they deserve? The principle of personal responsibility has always underpinned inequality. In the name of liberalism, coercion and violence can be ramped up at will – all the way to fascism.
By Alex Struwe
[This article posted on 6/5/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.woz.ch/2523/essay/die-falsche-gleichheit/!GVTD35V543Z8.]
As a child and adolescent, I never noticed class differences. In my case, they were also more complicated than simply a matter of being at the top or the bottom. Thanks to my educational background, I am able to participate very well in a liberal society. As a teenager, I was able to read Hermann Hesse, feel Sturm und Drang, and rebel in a controlled way with Tocotronic. I understand high culture and the arts, I am familiar with discourse, and I know what is meant when people warn of social division. And in view of the AfD, Trump, and the threat of authoritarianism, as an educated citizen, I must become a defender of the democratic order to which I belong only in theory. However, I lack the economic foundation to truly be a citizen. For me, as an East German millennial, this stems from the fact that there is nothing to inherit in GDR families.
I remember always being welcome at a school friend’s house, in a family home with a study full of books and a table for cigars, a Nintendo 64 and an Xbox with four controllers, a pool and a housekeeper. We sometimes had conversations in the evenings with his parents, who even took me on vacation with them. From the West German entrepreneurial family, I learned that Ulrich Plenzdorf was an important author, and I was given my first copy of “The New Sufferings of Young W.” Later on, we sometimes discussed how capitalism was obviously bad, how everyone wanted the poor to have a better life, and how crazy the world outside could be. It was, in the best bourgeois sense, an atmosphere of equality.
One day, when we were already adults and rarely saw each other, my good friend said to me that there was a difference between us: “You still want to change the world, I’ve come to terms with it. And that’s why I get along in it.” I was outraged, hurt, and resisted this for a long time. But now I realize that this difference is indeed crucial; strictly speaking, that was what it was all about the whole time: it was precisely this equal treatment in the bourgeois home that made it possible for me to blame myself for everything that separated me from the real world.
This realization has a rather banal level. After all, the idea of being the architect of one’s own fortune in this way is obviously an important part of the story that bourgeois society tells about itself. It is, in a sense, the organic consequence of the central position of the individual as a social subject par excellence. From the Odyssey to the bourgeois novel to the autofictions of the present day, the message is the same: The individual can understand the world through heroic journeys or contemplation; the world revolves around them, and they stand at its center.
These noble narratives reflect the demands of bourgeois society: if you are willing to make enough sacrifices, you can achieve anything through hard work. The truth of this bourgeois individuality lies in the fact that modernity promised a world in which we could actually live freely and equally, self-determined. The untruth of this vision of the free human being is that conditions are simply not like that. The narrative that individuals should be capable of shaping their own circumstances is ideology.
Every grievance is privatized
Ideology, wrote the French Marxist Louis Althusser, is always illusion and allusion, delusion and allusion to the truth. However, it can be identified above all by what can be achieved in society in its name. The ideological content of personal responsibility can be quickly recognized by how it has been used to privatize just about every social grievance: Oil companies have successfully blamed the destructive effects of fossil fuel industrialization on people as their “ecological footprint.” achievement has been repurposed as a socially chauvinistic model, according to which only those who are sufficiently challenged deserve support; and mass unemployment in crises of overaccumulation should be overcome by the people themselves, as entrepreneurs of their own lives and one-person companies, until they are once again disciplined with threats and fear into serving the “business location.”
In this country, we have long since returned to compulsory labor, sorting people according to their usefulness and consistently deporting those who have been declared illegal. All this is not a contradiction of the liberal ideal, as people like to tell themselves at democracy demonstrations and in Green circles, but is only possible against the backdrop of the assumption of personal responsibility, implemented as guilt and punishment.
My first experience after graduating was that the educated middle class—with a humanitarian education but no share in property—is socially superfluous. The entire structure of an academic career is based on the fact that only those who are on solid ground, with condominiums and inheritance as a “second leg,” can afford the precariousness of an academic career until they reach the only secure position of a professorship. Anyone who plays this “game” with the meritocratic hope of earning their place through performance without already having a place lined up ends up at the job center.
The employment office is the place where the idea and reality of personal responsibility completely fall apart. Even the architecture of these offices is reminiscent of a prison: multi-level corridors with open views and cubicles, dysfunctional differentiation between different application stations, no one understands what happens where. Waiting area 14 in section C, room numbers in a random four-digit range, at some point a door opens and your name is called, your file is looked through, data that you yourself entered into the computer is queried again, agreements on cooperation (personal responsibility!) are extorted.
Sure, there are rights you can claim, loopholes, as philosopher Michel de Certeau unironically described in “The Practice of Everyday Life” as stealing toilet paper at work. But the price of getting through this system is an adjustment in which, as Adorno so poignantly puts it, you necessarily lose what you actually wanted to keep. According to its own description, the employment office is the “mediator” between jobs and people, between social institutions and individuals, between structural constraints and personal initiative. The medium of this mediation is sanctions, whose legitimacy is guilt.
The universal citizen
The social significance of personal responsibility is also evident in the fact that its most direct counterpart is work, linked to the principle of performance. After finishing school, my friend told me about the crappy jobs he had done. Admittedly, I was irritated and always wondered why he attached so much importance to having “really worked,” with the obvious prospect of a career in the family business or at least an inheritance. Couldn’t he have lived the middle-class dream of pursuing a humanistic education for its own sake or any number of goals without economic pressure? Or was it due to the expectation that the middle-class heir must always set himself apart and demonstrate a certain contempt for wealth? Was this his rebellion against his family and his dependence as the designated heir?
In my friend’s interpretations, I continued the equality I had learned at his parents’ kitchen table. I secretly dedicated “The First Time” to him, the song by U2 from the soundtrack to the film “The Million Dollar Hotel,” Wim Wenders’ ode to social misfits. A song about love, friendship, and the rich father who leaves you the golden key, but you have to throw it away. I myself had to turn down my inheritance when my father died because it consisted of incalculably high debts. The song referred to a test of faith in which the doubter acknowledges the rightness of the existing order. Amen. The leap to the universal, which I made for my friend, allowed us to be equal again. I could understand his doubts and conflicts because I shared them as a penniless educated citizen. We were equal in that we had to stand on our own two feet, and thus equal to those we intuitively imagined to be the righteous: workers, the oppressed …
But equality has another function. It wasn’t about my friend and me being alike in the lowly world of wage labor. The real effect was proving that I could have been like him, an entrepreneur, an investor, a gambler, a rich guy, a rentier. It was proof that he had “earned” his position and possessions and that there could be no doubt about it—that’s the message that matters. And this justification is a basic formula that continues to operate even in the obscene wealth of billionaires.
According to the latest Oxfam report, the number of billionaires worldwide is growing, with their wealth increasing by as much as US$100 million per day. Does it really take a special class consciousness to critically notice this enormous inequality in global income distribution? Aren’t the rich actually ashamed? Or more importantly, how can a society allow this to happen? Why aren’t the rich taxed? Why don’t they simply give up their “fair share”?
The answer, and this is the most classic formula of ideology, is that everything is as it should be. They are just like you and me, not in terms of the result, of course, but in that they have earned it. The richest person in the world, with a fortune of over $430 billion, has (with or without the Hitler salute) sided with US President Donald Trump and is merely the fascist version of the bourgeois individual—including the ability to create a world in his own image because he has the means to do so.
In recent years, there has been a whole boom in cultural products in which we educated citizens could rise above the rich. Films such as Saltburn, Triangle of Sadness, and Glass Onion portrayed the crazy and aloof super-rich as repulsive and unrestrained characters, actually pitiful in their excess, which, as we all know, corrupts character and does not make you happy on your own. Everyone can agree with this social critique, regardless of whether they themselves have access to such wealth. But of course, the critique of excess shifts the focus from the fundamental problem of inequality to a question of the right amount, of commitment, of decision-making—of personal responsibility. Here, too, the virtual notion of equality in bourgeois society is reversed into an idea of guilt that ultimately legitimizes concrete inequalities.
The perfect ideology
Just as my friend justifies his wealthy existence with the idea that he has earned everything, so the society of the unequal needs the idea that its members are at least abstractly equal, equal in terms of opportunity. And the concrete ideological function of equal opportunity is to be able to portray inequality as a personal failing. You get what you deserve: whether as a sanction for the unemployed, as deportation for refugees, as self-help advice for the structurally overburdened, or as an inheritance and share in the family business.
Personal responsibility is thus an almost perfect ideology. It has the aura of democracy and freedom, of progress and modernity, of historical awareness and self-realization. It sounds so much like the real thing that any reference to structural constraints, or even to social contexts, sounds wrong. And this is precisely what makes it a sure guarantee that dependencies will remain in place—and that coercion and violence can be ramped up at will in the name of freedom.
This is currently being demonstrated dramatically in the US, where social mobility from dishwasher to millionaire is, in a sense, part of the founding myth. The authoritarian restructuring of a state in which billionaires call the shots is happening at breakneck speed, from the dismantling of the welfare state under the guise of efficiency to the immediate deportation of “illegals.” All of this works by referring to the idea of false equality, which shows that it plays a part in this very development.
Liberalism can tip over into fascism without any major rupture. Even Frederick the Great’s Prussian edict of religious freedom, “everyone should be allowed to be saved in their own way,” once gave way to the Nazi slogan “to each his own.” Even today, personal responsibility and the idea that everyone is the architect of their own fortune not only exist alongside austerity policies, social cuts, chauvinistic devaluation, and the order that gives all this violence and revenge against freedom its legitimacy—all of these things are mutually dependent.
Comfort in destruction
The idea of personal responsibility offers comfort even in the face of obvious doom, in the belief that ultimately allows the fascistization of social life to happen: the belief that one could not be affected, that there could be self-preservation beyond civilization and its promises of freedom, against which one has always had to harbor resentment and grievances because one sensed that they remained unfulfilled. The retreat into the private sphere, the normality with which the catastrophe occurs: these are the educated middle-class equivalents of Elon Musk’s Mars colonization madness, with which the propertied bourgeoisie has already slipped into fascism in order to enforce by decree the brutal inequality that has always been allowed to ferment under the guise of abstract equality.
Even in the face of all the destruction, it is not easy to lift the veil from one’s eyes, as ideology is commonly imagined. For this text, in which I wanted to get to the bottom of this ideology, I delved into the anecdotes of my own bourgeois development. This has become a common format: explaining the shift to the right in society through one’s own parents (Didier Eribon), recognizing the privileges of others from one’s own lack of possessions (Anke Stelling), telling one’s own story as universal history.
But this form of self-theory is itself part of the ideology of personal responsibility. For it reveals the idea that social context is directly accessible through one’s own experience: I myself can show how the world works by reflecting on my life. And conversely, if the contradictions of the world cannot be experienced in my life, then I am somehow too stupid or too blind to recognize the truths.
So what would it mean to come to terms with such a world in order to get along in it? Wouldn’t it mean facing the downfall, the end of the equality that made real inequality possible for so long, until it is now being enforced with all force? As educated citizens, socially superfluous and predictably free of all liberal rights, we seem to be facing an old crossroads: radicalization to the left, toward equality, or pandering to fascism in the hope that the order of violent inequality will be negotiated to our advantage. This social alternative was called class struggle.
Alex Struwe, born in 1987, is a science editor at nd.DieWoche. His book Totalität. Marx, Adorno und das Problem kritischer Gesellschaftstheorie (Totality: Marx, Adorno, and the Problem of Critical Social Theory) will be published soon by Verbrecher Verlag.