An emancipatory left response to the authoritarian plague-state has largely failed to materialise. On the contrary - for more than two years now, we have known at least one thing: the politics of the state-antifascist left does not lead to a society of autonomous individuals, but to the educational state that threatens to destroy the remnants of bourgeois civilisation. But one thing after the other:
1.
Left-wing legal nihilism has been refuted by the authoritarian plague-state no less than left-wing legal fetishism. For anyone who has not lost all political judgement, the qualitative civilisational difference between a functioning rule of law and the suspension of law in the state of emergency of the plague-state is evident. Law is nothing more, but also nothing less than the rationalisation and humanisation of relations of domination. The illusions of left-wing legal fetishism, however, are no less obvious. Law is based on political power, whose guarantors are state power and ideological consensus.
If power turns against the law, it is suspended overnight. Fundamental rights, which are unconditional and universal, become negotiable and divisible. The state-antifascist left has proven to be a powerful catalyst for the destruction of law and a cover for the disciplinary state. The unconditionality of law does not apply to it. The Left treats it, practically verifying its own theoretical assumptions, as an expression of political power relations that are not subordinate to any higher norm. Human dignity, which is inscribed at the very top of the German Constitution, is by no means inviolable and indivisible for it. Those who do not submit to the authoritarian directives of the plage-state forfeit it. Dignity, which is intrinsically linked to autonomy, is no longer inherent in every human being qua his or her humanity, but only in those who are “good subjects”, as which the state-antifascist left has particularly distinguished itself. Freedom must be earned, and the dignity that the state is not allowed to take away from an Islamist terrorist, fascist thug, or child murderer now depends on accepting a state-mandated vaccine.
What medically speaks for or against it is indifferent to the fact that it is precisely the state-antifascist left that wants to push it through by all means. The fact that a virus is sufficient for something that not even a war would legitimize is just as instructive as the behaviour of leftists dwelling in the ideological state apparatuses is shuddering. If the Corona virus has made it possible, under the pretext of a health emergency, to suspend the bourgeois constitutional state and to bring about an unprecedented ideologisation of the public, one can be afraid of what the future holds in store.
The fact that the rejection of a state-offered medical intervention is sufficient to justify the deprivation of civil liberties - an offer that cannot be rejected is either incredibly good, or mafia-style blackmail - is not scandalised as a paradigmatic breach of the dam, but to the contrary, welcomed by the state-antifascist left. To it, the human being is no longer an autonomous being with unconditional dignity and inalienable rights, but a health and climate risk. Even the self-evident fact that medical doctors treat everyone equally - the drunk driver who has just dragged a family to its death, as well as the chain smoker or the ascetic health fanatic - is up for grabs. Those who do not get vaccinated are antisocial and have only themselves to blame. If they do need medical treatment, they should at least pay for it themselves, as they are excluded from the national community of those willing to be vaccinated. Where this logic leads should be just as clear to everyone as that of absolute health protection, to which freedom is sacrificed. Anyone who wants this should not be allowed to drive a car, climb a ladder or do anything else that could endanger him or others. If one logic leads to the complete de-solidarisation of society and individualised health mania, the other, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to the demand for collective suicide. Where there are no more living people, they cannot collapse the health system and the world climate.
2.
To no longer have to swim against the tide, but to have the wind at one's back again is a great feeling. The bad news is that it destroys one's ability to think. The argumentative logic of the state-antifascist left is accordingly based on a fundamental and far-reaching fallacy. From the fact of irrational criticism, which one likes to reduce all too cheaply to the general denominator of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, they wrongly infer the rationality of the criticised, i.e. that of the prevailing conditions, current politics, media, science, etc.
Where Horkheimer speaks of a "society dominated by industrial and political leadership cliques" (Traditional and Critical Theory, 1937), he would certainly be accused of structural anti-Semitism today. Horkheimer's theory of rackets shows what distinguishes a materialist theory of abstract domination from an affirmative system-theory of Hegelian character that assumes a domination-free rationality of the existing: it knows as much about the genetic connection between crime and economy as it knows the 'name, address and face' (Bertolt Brecht) of the character masks that constitute the automatic subject of capital. Its regularity requires executors who are not omnipotent string-pullers in the background, but immensely powerful actors pursuing interests, of whom one does not have to paint a worse, but certainly not a better picture than of the rest of humanity dragged through life and disfigured by economic competition.
Those who denounce the question of responsible actors and the cui bono as structurally anti-Semitic are not engaging in scientific enlightenment, but in ruling class-propaganda. This move not only identifies critical analysis with resentment, but also trivialises and instrumentalises anti-Semitism in a highly historical revisionist manner. Like fascism in the past, “anti-Semitism” becomes an arbitrary political slogan that deliberately lacks any conceptual differentiation, which is what scientific work should do in the first place. Those who think they can denounce the critique of the existing order as anti-Semitic, provide a fatal apology for the existing order, which is after all the basic social reason for anti-Semitism: it is not the existing that is irrational and structurally anti-Semitic, but any unwelcome critique that one wants to silence in this way.
3.
With this tactic, the Left has successfully undermined rational social critique.
On the one hand, it is employed at the universities to destroy scientific criticism. In place of arguments and rational discussion, it puts an authoritarian ban on speech, misconceived as “ethical”, which replaces enlightenment with denunciation. On the other hand, it indulges in a completely unenlightened scientism. Both are not a contradiction, but the result of a political theory whose justification is not an appeal to reason, and whose goal is not a classless society of autonomous individuals, but the struggle for intellectual hegemony and “discourse sovereignty”, which are delusionally hypostasised as the basis of society.
The state-antifascist left is not concerned with truth. What counts is power. Not only are dissenting opinions even of celebrities so unbearable that they simply must be flattened by the media. Science is also used selectively and manipulatively. Unpopular things are excluded or suppressed. The state-antifascist left represents the epistemologically naïve idea of objective knowledge in the sense of the mere reproduction of the factual, as well as the postmodern hubris that identifies science with power and constructivism in order to sacrifice the objectivity of truth to political power. Between these two supposedly opposing false extremes, authoritarian presumption is the connecting link. The denial of the nature of our bodies and «genders», which one can, Pippi Longstocking-like, supposedly freely choose, corresponds to the inverted enthronement of nature (in the form of the virus or the climate) as an imperious authority to which people must submit. Infantile fantasies of omnipotence and authoritarian subjugation supplement each other. In contrast, it should be remembered that the figures from the Robert-Koch-Institute (the German CDC) do not represent reality - and not only because they are completely inadequately recorded, but because the figures themselves are not brutum factum. Rather, they are theoretically mediated, as is the case in any positive science, and thoroughly politicised.
The conflation of science and politics, pursued by both the state and the state-antifascist left, destroys the (possible) rationality of both. It equally depoliticises a politics that feigns to act scientifically, as it places scientific research and knowledge under political reservation. Those who remain silent about this fundamental scandal of authoritarian plague politics, and on top of everything only accept what official statistics know to report, while categorically ignoring unpleasant facts that are more difficult to put into figures, are to be denied any interest in enlightenment and granted any interest in power.
A society of “experts”, such as Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, who brutely ignores every self-contradiction and smooths it out via state media violence, has obviously taken refuge in the delusion of wanting to believe one's own lie at all costs. Those who do not join in and do not allow their own thinking to be driven out of them are perceived as a danger to their own faith, which is quite suitable for reality; and they must be persecuted and denounced accordingly.
Suppressing their own lie, a physical projection mechanism sets in, which passes off their own radicalisation as that of the critics of the Covid measures, against which the population is preventively warned so that they do not get the wrong idea. How long this will last remains to be seen. In Germany, this may be the case for a particularly long time, but the contradictions of the epidemic policy cannot be completely eliminated here either. There are also at least some signs of hope that, as is known from dictatorships, there is now an official and an unofficial public opinion that are by no means identical.
The former is forcefully advocated by the state and the subservient media, which, as in echo chambers, reinforce themselves and have hegemonic power on their side. However, this self-confirming official opinion based on exclusion is only conditionally suitable for reality. It should increasingly dawn on the gullibly vaccinated, who put their trust in the promises of the plague-state, and even more on those who have been indirectly compulsorily vaccinated since August 2021, what a general compulsory vaccination actually means: the vaccinated has long since become the unvaccinated of tomorrow, today's boostered is already breathing down the neck of the double boostered of the day after tomorrow, who himself is being driven on by Omicron or whatever new variant of viruses.
In whatever way this situation develops, it will not happen without a massive division and rift in society that will probably go to the heart of the matter, which will by no means only affect a negligible minority of antisocial intransigents. What follows from this is another question. In any case, the state's loss of legitimacy is likely to be greater than it wants to make itself and its citizens, who have been demoted to subjects, believe. If, according to Max Weber, the state relies on the monopoly of the legitimate exercise of physical force on the one hand, and on the belief in its legitimacy on the other, its escalation strategy is likely to inflict damage on the latter to an unforeseeable extent. This will not be limited to "Reichsbürger" or AfD circles, but will also affect millions of people who have so far hardly seen themselves as enemies of the state. The threatening arrogance of state power therefore also appears decidedly unsovereign. It seems to be firmly built on the assumption that lies and contradictions will be swallowed forever by the silent masses. In the short term, this calculation will probably work out, unfortunately. The next few years will show how this will play out in the long term.
IV. Historical-philosophical Epilogue
The truth about the authoritarian plague state is that it is truth itself. It represents Hegel's final victory, the identity of reason and reality - also over Kant and the Enlightenment maxim of using one's own intellect without the guidance of others, which under the current expertocracy already sounds dangerously like Third Positionism. State-financed fact-checker positivism is accordingly also a flawless Hegelianism, whose secret "false positivism" (MEW 40, 581) was already criticised by Marx.
It is not the truth of statements that is examined, but their degree of conformity with the official government pronouncements, which are set as identical with reason. A public sphere shaped in this way by the state was previously only known from those dictatorships that thought they had to fulfil their historical mission as the world spirit of the proletariat. Today, on the other hand, the identification of truth and state has become the self-image of the mainstream media themselves.
The way it had to materialise in the logic of the system, it also had to materialise in reality. In the end, the world spirit reincarnated in the schoolmaster of German philosophical history speaks up in person, namely Jürgen Habermas. What escaped from his head is the - hopefully final – lowest blow in the long history of the decay of Frankfurt School Critical Theory: “The measures justified in this way for the period of the pandemic could probably only be demonised by Corona deniers as an outgrowth of biopolitics.” (Habermas: Corona and the Protection of Life. In: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, September 2021). Well-informed by the Verfassungsschutz, Habermas naturally also knows that the criticism of the authoritarian plague-state has a "radical right-wing core" and springs from a threatening "extremism of the centre appearing in libertarian forms". For Habermas, the policy of the authoritarian plague-state, sold to its recipients as "warfare of species against species", is without alternative.
The "natural event" of the pandemic not only justifies the state of emergency but is also constitutional, according to the philosopher. Human dignity, as enshrined in the Constitution, can only be protected if the physical bearer of it is to be preserved. The prevention of excess mortality by means of the abolition of fundamental rights and the establishment of a governmental junta called the Bund-Länderkonferenz (which is not provided for anywhere in the constitution) are therefore not the negation, but basically the consistent realisation of the Constitution.
The infinitely expandable, arch-authoritarian, and patronising mandate of the state to preserve the physical bearer of dignity does not seem to be even remotely a problem for Habermas. In essence, the gobbledygook presented in Habermas' typical jargon amounts to the legal-philosophical justification of a medical educational state, to which the public health blank cheque is issued for the suspension of civil liberties. The rule of law only applies with the proviso that the health measure-state does not raise a higher objection. To crown the infamy, the whole construct is of course sold as democratic in the end, because it is the citizens themselves who, as sovereigns, impose their own final maturity on themselves in the interest of their collective self-preservation.
Those who currently feel fear have understood what the truth of the epidemic state and the epidemic state as truth really mean. We have reached the end of an epoch in which freedom was always an ideology, but never a mere illusion, and in which it was possible for thinking beings to anticipate real and universal freedom, at least in thought. A left that can think of nothing to say about the current destruction of (residual) freedom, that depoliticises it as a “natural event” or even acts as its executor, should finally be disposed of on the rubbish heap of history that stinks to high heaven.
***
This text was previously published in Der Erreger #2. A longer version can be found at https://www.kritiknetz.de/sozialarbeitsozialpolitik/1516-habermas-und-die-apologeten-des-seuchenstaats
Hendrik Wallat lives in Hannover, Germany, and is interested in political philosophy and materialist social theory.
Cover: Video still from David Bowie’s Let’s Dance (1983).