Given the escalating reality of the deadly crisis, nothing is more unrealistic than the supposed “pragmatism without illusions” (Robert Kurz) to which so-called realpolitik has committed itself. The less people are disturbed by the suffering of others caused by the totality of capitalist socialization in its crisis processes, the more rapidly the catastrophe gains momentum.
Right-wing extremism in Germany: The problem is not simply the AfD
by Herbert Böttcher
[This article posted on 2/10/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.exit-online.org/rechtsextremismus-in-deutschland-das-problem-ist-nicht-einfach-die-afd/.]
First published on February 7, 2025, on http://www.oekumenisches-netz.de
Campaigning for support from the ‘right’
Friedrich Merz’s broken promise not to seek a majority with the help of the AfD was a further step towards making the AfD socially acceptable. The SPD and the Greens reacted with outrage. Criticism was expressed in nationwide protests. While the protests also included criticism of migration policy, the outrage among the rest of the traffic light coalition was limited to the procedure and the voting behavior of the CDU and CSU. This was consistent insofar as – apart from the Left Party – the parties represented in parliament are very close on the issue of defending against refugees. Seehofer’s “diagnosis” from 2018 that migration is “the mother of all problems” is – judging by their actions – the consensus. The supposed center is on the right. What was only ‘sayable’ on the right-wing fringes a few years ago can now also be said in the “center.” Accordingly, authoritarian-repressive policies have also become “feasible.”
The Union’s immediate response in the Bundestag was a staged performance that had nothing to do with finding and implementing ‘solutions to specific problems’ – as the common parlance would have it. Above all, the solutions that were thrown into the ring had nothing to do with the occasion for the performance, the deadly attacks on helpless people in Aschaffenburg. The perpetrator was a mentally ill man who had been denied help and who could even have been deported under current law. Mentally ill perpetrators who kill people and are often denied mental health treatment as a result of cuts to support programs are, like rampage killers, not a problem that can be solved with repressive migration policies. Merz’s claim of “daily gang rapes in the asylum seeker community” is in direct contradiction to the truth. Such untrue claims turn into open incitement. At this point, at the latest, it becomes clear that the grief over those killed in Aschaffenburg, especially the murdered child, is being exploited to enforce blanket repression against refugees. This is also being sold as a fight against the AfD. The aim of this fight was already formulated by Julia Klöckner, CDU member of parliament for Bad Kreuznach, in a post published in January: “You don’t have to vote for the AfD to get what you want. There is a democratic alternative: the CDU.”
Other democratic parties do not want to be outdone. “We must finally start deporting people on a large scale,” Chancellor Scholz emphasized in Der Spiegel in the fall of 2023. People were even deported to countries such as Afghanistan. Under the traffic light coalition government, a payment card for asylum seekers was also introduced. It is intended to prevent them from transferring money abroad that could be used for the purpose of irregular migration. The Greens have no problem concluding agreements with terrorist regimes on the return of refugees. The FDP proposes reducing the provisions for refugees who are required to leave the country to “bed, bread, and soap.” Democrats pretend to want to combat the AfD by agreeing with it—quite literally. With regard to Austria, theologian Regina Polak notes, based on a sociological study of religion in the context of migration: “The decisive factor in the increase in rejection of migration is not the number of migrants or the size of right-wing populist parties, but the fact that conservative parties are adopting the arguments of right-wing populists.”1
“Raw bourgeoisie” as social consensus
The right-wing orientation of democratic politics has by no means been imposed ‘from above’ on a society with a different orientation. On the contrary, it is in line with social developments. It can therefore legitimize itself by arguing that politics must be about listening to the concerns and needs of citizens. The 2018 study “Authoritarian Temptations”2 already revealed what this means in more detail. It found “that authoritarian attitudes are hidden beneath a thin layer of civilized, refined (‘bourgeois’) manners…”3. These attitudes manifest themselves in contempt for vulnerable groups, demands for privileges for the established, and an orientation toward “competition and personal responsibility.”4 “Authoritarian temptations are … primarily to be interpreted as reactions to a loss of individual or social control. They create a demand for political offerings that aim to restore control through the exercise of power and domination, as well as through exclusion and discrimination or group-focused hostility”5..
In the morass of “crude bourgeoisie,” democratic parties are engaged in a competition to outbid each other for the national championship in deporting refugees. They are praised by the AfD for finally doing what the AfD has always demanded. According to the study, right-wing populism goes hand in hand with authoritarian nationalism. This corresponds to the image of a national “community that gains its identity through exclusion and discrimination.”6 It suggests security and serves “the longing for a crisis-proof anchor of identity,” which is linked to the idea that “at least no one can take away my German identity.”7 The associated “group-focused enmity” can affect groups that do not share this identity and appear threatening, such as “Jews, refugees, Black people, Muslims…”8.
Projection and lack of reflection
In current debates, people’s fears and social problems are projected onto refugees. In the projective processing of crises—as Horkheimer and Adorno pointed out in “Dialectic of Enlightenment” with regard to anti-Semitism—critical reflection is absent. This absence gives rise to the “blinding power of false immediacy.” Only critical reflection opens our eyes to the perception of social problem contexts. Then it would become apparent that migration points to social crisis contexts. People flee when their livelihoods are destroyed. Democratic societies play a not insignificant role in this. At the same time as Germany is engaged in a competition to see who can come up with the most repressive measures to deter refugees, hundreds of thousands of people in and around the Democratic Republic of Congo are fleeing – in addition to the more than 6 million people who are counted as displaced persons in the region. Following the collapse of catch-up modernization, gangs and militias of different ethnicities are fighting each other in the disintegrating state due to historically determined constellations (a multi-ethnic state founded during colonial times and the resettlement of Rwandan genocidal perpetrators after the 1994 genocide, who are currently fighting alongside Congolese government troops). The lack of economic foundations, the search for scapegoats for political and economic misery, and access to raw materials are likely to play an important role in this, including access to the ore coltan, which is important for cell phones, electric cars, and computers. Environmental destruction, not least as a result of global warming, has been known for decades as a cause of flight. Anyone who is not only concerned about children, whose deaths can be exploited for populist purposes, should take note that children are also among the primary victims of global warming. However, this issue plays no role in the election campaign and, measured against the significance of the problem for the lives and survival of many people now and in view of future generations, plays only a marginal role.
Democratic politics also demonstrates its ‘closeness to the people’ in its ignorance of this issue, which is crucial for the present and the future. According to a depth psychological election study by the Cologne-based ‘rheingold Institute’10, the issue of migration overshadows all other issues, followed by concerns about inflation, weakening purchasing power, and desolate infrastructure. The retreat into private life diagnosed a few years ago no longer works. The problems interfere too much with everyday life. A “feeling of hopelessness” is spreading and is linked to the “desired profile of a caring, assertive crisis manager” and the longing for a “down-to-earth, assertive doer with an eye for German interests.”
The current political escalation did not come out of the blue…
In contrast to the asylum debates in the 1980s and 1990s, there is currently no longer even any talk of the causes of flight that need to be combated. Even back then, this was pure rhetoric, aimed at suggesting that the right to asylum was not a suitable means to this end and could therefore be called into question. In the meantime, perceptions have become so narrow that such connections are no longer even brought into play as justification for turning away refugees. What remains is what the critical social analyst Robert Kurz noted about the debate at the time: “The Democrats only want to ‘let in’ those who ‘are useful to us’…”11 In other words: “Refugees and migrants are openly subjected to what is the innermost logic of capitalism: reducing people to their ‘economic usefulness’ as units of expenditure of ‘profitable labor’ and ‘performance’. What is not yet possible with our own citizens… is revealed in all its brutality in the treatment of migrants.”12. On the other hand, those who are ‘useful’ to us are welcome, especially as skilled workers for the economy and the care sector. At the time, “the German mob”13, with its undifferentiated racism, had not yet understood that openness to immigrants is “useful.” That is why the red-green federal government helped it along in the 2002 election campaign as a justification for the so-called immigration law. It was courted with a combination of welcoming useful immigrants and repressing the others. A leaflet from the federal government explained: “For first-class products, innovative technologies, and highly developed research, you need the best minds in the world. We have many of them in our own country. But we also need specialists from other parts of the world…” The ‘mob’ was reassured with the promise of deportations: “The law will significantly reduce the number of immigrants. Only people who have prospects in Germany and opportunities as skilled workers will come as immigrants… A variety of measures will make it more effective and quicker to end the stay of foreigners who are required to leave the country…”14. Soon, however, “our own citizens” were also under pressure. Hartz IV combined support with demands. This went hand in hand with the general suspicion that anyone receiving Hartz IV wanted to shirk work and live off the state. In today’s debate, those who are dependent on citizen’s income are under pressure. They are suspected of refusing to work and thus exploiting the leadership and the state. So they are to be forced to work. Those who are too quick to “fall ill” are also under general suspicion of refusing to work and of abuse. Their continued payment of wages for the first day is to be canceled. Those who have fallen out of society or are threatened with decline should not rejoice too quickly when it comes to migrants. They are the first to be punished for what also threatens their own citizens if their labor cannot be exploited.
Work, projective hatred, and illusory agency
Hatred of non-working migrants, as of all “work refusers,” is an expression of the fetishization of work in capitalism. Work is not a contradiction to capital, but rather its substance as an indispensable source of value and surplus value. Hatred of ‘foreign’ migrants and ‘parasitic’ citizens converges in the need to irrationally pinpoint crises on individuals and groups and their exclusion, as well as in the illusion that authoritarian measures and orders can compensate for political and economic losses of control and regain opportunities for action. What remains hidden is critical reflection on social conditions, or more precisely, the dramatically escalating crisis of capitalism. The flip side of its productivity, which makes it possible to produce more and more goods in ever shorter periods of time, is the compulsion to replace labor as a source of value and surplus value with technology. In doing so, capitalism necessarily undermines the foundations of its own existence, economically, socially, politically, culturally… It is precisely this connection that is obscured by the false immediacy of concrete measures. Moreover, the touted ‘solutions’ are only seemingly concrete because they ignore the whole of social conditions as the context of the crisis and will sooner or later reveal themselves to be sham solutions. The fact that reflective engagement with the entirety of social relations, and thus reflection on real social contradictions, is banished from thinking is proving to be momentous and fatal. The “pragmatism without illusions”15 that should be revered has paved the way for illusory delusion. On the left, the regressive return to classes, along with the associated ontologization of work and the personalization of social contradictions onto oppressors and oppressed, is celebrating a “happy revival.” On the right, the fetishization of work is combined with resentment against refugees, non-whites, and the socially disadvantaged as non-workers.
“Under the spell of the tenacious irrationality of the whole, the irrationality of human beings is also normal.” It is always on the verge of “flooding purposeful rationality in political behavior.”16 In times of escalating crises, the temptation is then obvious to cling to the normality of the irrational social whole and to defend it by repelling and destroying what supposedly threatens it—be it refugees, foreigners, alleged “work-shy” people, or Jews. The “irrationality of the whole” is the irrational end in itself of the accumulation of capital. The more drastically this end in itself encounters its inherent limits, the more the “internal rationality” of this “objectified delusional system” collapses. The more the capitalist end in itself runs into a void due to the disappearance of labor as a substance for the production of value and surplus value, the less it can be regulated internally and the greater the loss of control. Competition that can no longer be controlled turns into social Darwinist savagery and destruction.
Which should give us pause for thought…
The motion against unwanted migration, supported by the AfD, was passed by the Union immediately after the Bundestag’s commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz. It is important to fill “remembrance with more content,” says historian Andrea Löw on the occasion of the presentation of her book “Deported. Always with one foot in the grave. Experiences of German Jews” in Cologne. Then as now, she misses empathy – then towards the deported Jews, today towards the deportation of refugees. She adds: “The situation of minorities says a lot about the state of a democracy.” Democratic formalism functions independently of content. The question of minorities—in the language of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the least among us—would be an essential criterion by which democracy should be measured. Social security for the poor only applies as long as democracy, as a form of government tied to capitalism, can afford it economically. In other parts of the world, it has always been achieved over dead bodies18. The economist and theologian Franz J. Hinkelammert commented on the repressive nature of democracy in light of the democratic West’s celebration of the elimination of democracy and its neoliberal replacement by a military dictatorship in Chile (1973) that treated people with contempt, saying: “The welfare state enslaves. The police state liberates.” In the escalating crisis of capitalism, it is also seeking salvation in social cuts and repressive authoritarianism in the collapsing countries of the centers.
“Memory and insight” is what the KAB Engers-Mülhofen had inscribed on a memorial stone commemorating the deportation of Jews from Engers, a district of Neuwied a.R. Empathy, sensitivity to what people have to suffer, must be combined with insight. “Suffering gives pause for thought,” according to a dictum by Adorno. This path does not lead to immediate concretization, but only to critical reflection on the entirety of capitalist conditions and their constitution. Democracy does not stand above these conditions, but is part of them and thus part of the problem. It must be defended against right-wing attempts to undermine it by disregarding its formal procedures and its institutions that divide power. However, this must not obscure the fact that it must be about more than just securing the democracy associated with the capitalist constitution. With the crisis advancing, it is increasingly unable to set limits on the destructive potential of the irrational capitalist end in itself. That is why we must aim for more than democracy: nothing less than liberation from subjugation to the deadly and irrational end in itself of capitalist socialization, which is to increase capital for its own sake, dragging both reproduction, which is separated from production, and the natural foundations into the abyss of destruction. Then it would be a matter of gaining control over the reproduction of life within the framework of an “association of free people” (Karl Marx) instead of living or dying as appendages of the exploitation machine. “Under the spell of the tenacious irrationality of the whole,” this may seem illusory. However, given the escalating reality of the deadly crisis, nothing is more unrealistic than the supposed “pragmatism without illusions”21 to which so-called realpolitik has committed itself. The less people are disturbed by the suffering of others caused by the totality of capitalist socialization in its crisis processes, the more rapidly the catastrophe gains momentum. Freedom should “consist in the fact that people who come together to reproduce their lives not only do so voluntarily, but also discuss and decide together on the content as well as the procedure.” Such freedom would be “the exact opposite of liberal universal servitude under the dictates of labor markets.”22