01.09.2024
You are speaking out against Jewish capital, gentlemen? Anyone who speaks out against Jew capital, gentlemen, is already a class fighter, even if he doesn’t know it. You are against Jew capital and want to fight the stock market jobbers. That’s right. Kick the Jew capitalists down, hang them from the lamppost, trample them underfoot. But, gentlemen, what do you think of the big capitalists, the Stinnes, Klöckner?Ruth Fischer, Central Committee of the KPD, in front of nationalist students on July 25, 1923
When reflecting on the catastrophe of the German left, it seems counterproductive to point the finger at individual actors who, through their actions, promoted the disintegration that is now openly taking place. If a new beginning based on radical critique is still possible, it would be fundamentally wrong to try to pin the causes of the rise of the Querfront and the corresponding loss of significance of the Left on individual perpetrators – no matter how influential they may have been – because this would ultimately amount to simple personification. It would be the first step in the wrong direction. The causes of the rise of the Querfront, which has been able to develop far greater weight in the current systemic crisis than in the 1920s or 1930s, lie deeper than the striving for power and the megalomania of someone like Sahra Wagenknecht.
Link: https://exitinenglish.com/2024/08/10/the-great-regression/
It seems to make more sense to start with the terms and ideological concepts of the old left, which proved so susceptible to the New Right. These are anachronistic ideas that have fallen out of time and are seeking to catch up with their stock conservative bearers, who literally cannot or do not want to understand the late capitalist world due to their blindness to the crisis. They are feral remnants of the old social-democratic or orthodox communist left, most of whom think in 20th century categories. Social democrats, Leninists, parts of the anti-Germans caught up in a World War II loop – these regressive splinters of a world-historical attempt that failed in 1989 are mutating into carriers of right-wing ideology by means of the Querfront, as their entire political reference system has become increasingly decoupled from the reality of the crisis of late capitalism.
Sahra Wagenknecht, the figurehead of the German Querfront, has coined the oxymoronic term “left-wing conservatism” for this decaying form of the left, which is no longer a left-wing left. The delusion is aptly named: a left that no longer acts progressively, one that is backward-looking, can no longer be called left-wing. In fact, the conservative longing for the past dominates this old (post-)left. They long for the FRG of the economic miracle, for the Soviet Union and/or GDR, for the clearly demarcated power constellation of the Second World War, etc. – while the unreflected, relentlessly advancing socio-ecological crisis process, together with the corresponding process of fascization, promotes a comprehensive regression in the scene.
Regression, the fear-induced relapse into earlier forms of development, here means above all different types of ideological defense against the crisis, as the crisis process threatens to blow up the anachronistic ideological edifice in which the old left has made itself at home – this distinguishes left-wing regression from the usual reactionary tendencies of the right. In concrete terms, regression on the left takes the form of a reactionary struggle against radical crisis theory, against a categorical critique of capitalism. Regression thus ultimately strives to fend off the establishment of a radical crisis consciousness that has reflected on the necessity of overcoming capital as a social totality in order to survive. This would inevitably be tantamount to breaking out of the capitalist thought-prison, which would ultimately also leave behind the forms, institutions and levels of mediation of subjectless capitalist domination. This would be a deep rupture that also affects one’s own identity – an expression of socialization in late capitalism. And this also affects the subject, including the worker, who could only be “revolutionary” if he no longer wanted to be a worker. People no longer have to want to be what they were socialized to be under capitalism.
The old left shies away from this deep, categorical break with its beloved enemy, capital.[1] This hesitancy can be traced back to the ambivalence towards the proletariat in Marx’s work.[2] The widespread repression and marginalization of radical, transformational crisis consciousness that has been pursued by the old left and the Querfront in recent years has not only resulted from ideological blindness and a literal identitarian fear. It has also been promoted by a left-wing crisis opportunism that is still eyeing posts and positions in the late capitalist crisis administration.[3] The modest degree of reflection on the systemic crisis that had already been achieved has largely been lost; the consciously conducted categorical critique of capital in its fetishistic rampage has been replaced by affectless, irrational reactions to the crisis.[4] The rise of the Querfront in the left went hand in hand with the marginalization of radical crisis theory and categorical critique of late capitalism.
What, then, is meant by this old left, most of which absurdly believes in the state? The old left does not necessarily have to be old; there are also an increasing number of young people in orthodox communist or Keynesian groups, networks and associations – precisely as an ideological expression of the increasing tendencies towards state capitalism caused by the crisis. The common denominator of the old left is formed by various rudiments of an anachronistic ideology that is fading into decay, turning brown, and opening itself up to the fascism of the 21st century. What is preached by the old left is a return to the old – social democratic or Leninist – truths, either to the social democratic struggle for redistribution, to the social question, to Keynes, to Lenin or even to Stalin, to truncated class struggle thinking and to the fetishization of labor and the proletariat.
This return to the ideas and concepts of the past was originally intended to bring to light the simple truths that had been lost and to counter the flat out lies and agitation of the right. Right-wing populism was to be countered by left-wing populism. What this great regression, in its blindness to the crisis, actually brought to light when rummaging through old left-wing ideological canned goods were stale, anachronistic terms and concepts that had fallen out of their time. These terms were gutted – stripped of their historical context – and themselves fell victim to regression, seeking connection with or docking onto the Querfront and right-wing delusion. They are ideological splinters in regression, anachronistic decaying forms of old-left ideology on its way to the New Right.
First and foremost is the concept of the proletariat as a revolutionary subject, a concept that is experiencing a regression towards a populist belief in the people and the will of the people. Since the working class, which is also variable capital, has not fulfilled its revolutionary destiny, a regressive substitution began in parts of the left, in which the people were generally imagined to be the new, blurred reference point. The will of the people was to be given populist expression, with the interests of the people being imagined in opposition to the ruling class or – to a lesser extent – to profiteers/the rich. But what happens when the people do not want to take a stand against the “rich profiteers,” but instead take refuge in racism and xenophobia? Doesn’t this popular will also have to express the legitimate interests of the people, doesn’t it also have to be able to be turned in a social direction by linking social demands with stronger border protection?
The cult of the proletariat, which has degenerated into a “popular belief,” is closely linked to the old-left class struggle paradigm. According to this paradigm, capitalism is nothing more than the front line in the battle between two two classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, each of which has its own class interest and is engaged in a permanent – sometimes open, sometimes covert – class struggle, which is imagined as the main contradiction of capitalism. To this class struggle thinking, everything appears in terms of interests. All capitalist phenomena can accordingly be traced back to interests, which the class struggle leftists ask about with the famous Leninist “Cui bono?”(“Who benefits?”). Here, a conflict in the realm of distribution is blown up into the main contradiction of capital, while its inner contradiction is ignored. This inner contradiction tends to melt away the substance of capital – wage labor in commodity production – and capital can only prolong this “moving contradiction” in ever new spurts of expansion.
The current social and ecological world crisis is being fueled precisely by this contradiction-driven compulsion of capital to constantly grow, and this is quite obvious.[5] However, the class struggle left, with its truncated critique of capitalism, can only ask the question: cui bono? This blindness to the crisis, which ignores the fetishism of capital, leads directly to scapegoating and the reactionary belief in conspiracies that characterize right-wing crisis ideology.[6] Even if entire parts of the world threaten to become uninhabitable in the wake of the climate crisis, even if a pandemic rages, the old left, sometimes together with the new right, can only manically search for the influential, shadowy backers who are somehow responsible because they stand to profit from it.
The ideological division of capital into a “good,” nationally creative industrial capital and an “evil,” “globalist” financial capital is also part of the complex of the truncated critique of capitalism. As is well known, the Nazis took this delusion of an all-powerful Jewish banker conspiracy, which was apparently responsible for all kinds of crises and distortions, to an eliminatory extreme by enriching it with fanatical anti-communism in the form of the delusion of the “Jewish-Bolshevik world conspiracy.”
Historically, this anti-Semitic delusion of “destructive Jewish finance capital” was the most important starting point for Querfront efforts, for example those undertaken by the KPD in 1923 as part of the so-called “Schlageter course,” which nevertheless remained merely an episode (see the quote at the beginning of this text).[7] In the current left, the one-sided critique of the financial markets was mainly pursued by Keynesians and by the notorious “financial market critic” Wagenknecht after the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2008. This truncated critique turned the actual nature of the crisis on its head, as the causes of the crisis are, in reality, to be found in the hyper-productivity of commodity production, which must be supplied with credit-financed demand through the formation of bubbles and mountains of debt.[8] Even in her most recent works, Wagenknecht produced variations of this reactionary “financial market critique,” which has an open flank to anti-Semitism.
The decay products of anti-imperialism, which, in the 1980’s, already had to deal with the problem of many of the modernization regimes that emerged from the great wave of decolonization simply failing socio-economically or being arch-reactionary and/or mass murderous – such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – form another old-left transitional milieu to the Querfront. At the time, these regimes were described as “objectively anti-imperialist powers,” seen as progressive simply because of their opposition to the U.S., even if they bloodily persecuted the left (Iran after the revolution) or massacred minorities (Iraq’s poison gas war against the Kurds).
The sympathies of the anti-imps for reactionary regimes or bloody modernization dictatorships in the periphery of the world system, which are usually accompanied by primitive anti-Americanism, found in Vladimir Putin’s Russia the appropriate object to tie in with the emerging New Right, which ideologically docked onto the “Eurasian” Russia because it also sees itself as a culturalist-reactionary counterweight to the West.
The war in Ukraine sparked by the Kremlin also led to a further disintegration of the German left, which on the one hand – in the form of the left-liberal spectrum – uncritically adopted the Western narrative and defected to the NATO camp, while many anti-imps finally degenerated into alternative imperialists, mouths for hire of Russian imperialism. Incidentally, even in May 2024, the Putin-loyal Junge Welt, as the mouthpiece of the anti-imp spectrum, still maintains a benevolent line towards Wagenknecht and the BSW, even though its protagonists now openly spout AfD rhetoric. There are also personal entanglements between Junge Welt and the Querfront organ Telepolis, for example.
Anti-Americanism as a major ideological hinge between the old left and the New Right often corresponds to different types of opposition to Western liberalism. While the left condemns the excesses of privatization and the social dismantling that neoliberalism brought about, New Right thinkers such as Alain de Benoist criticize liberalism for its cosmopolitanism, rootlessness, identity void and lack of values. Here too, transitions are possible, for example by means of a nationally based, truncated critique of globalization. The critique of globalization can certainly degenerate into mere ideology, into an urge for right-wing renationalization. The critique of bourgeois freedom and neoliberal individualization/atomization can consequently turn into a nationalist/fundamentalist community ideology – which, however, would only ideologically legitimize the current post-neoliberal crisis phase, in which state capitalism, nationalism and protectionism are on the rise. Here, too, Wagenknecht has already done the groundwork.
Finally, conflict in the Middle East – and since the molecular massacre of Jews by Hamas on October 7, 2023, especially Israel’s war against Hamas – forms a similar starting point for the migration of leftists to the right. On the one hand, there are the usual reflexes of frothing anti-Zionism, which increasingly turns into open anti-Semitism as the protests progress.[9] Criticism of the Israeli army’s actions is increasingly mixed with projections (“genocide”), including genuine anti-Semitic delusions that see the U.S. government or the media as being dominated by a Jewish conspiracy. At the same time, resentment can also appear in the pro-Israeli movement, as right-wingers instrumentalize the mass murder of Jews by Hamas to fuel anti-Muslim resentment, xenophobia, and isolationism. The multiple ways that this crisis constellation is open to slipping into right-wing extremism – a consequence of the crisis-induced advanced brutalization – is reflected in the disputes on the right, where the two possible strategies for instrumentalizing the war are being debated. How the conflict should be exploited, with racism or anti-Semitism? That is what the right is debating.[10]
A truncated critique of Islamism, stuck in bourgeois enlightenment ideology, also formed the most important right-wing tipping point within the anti-German scene. The confrontation with the ideology of Islamism, which – for example in the form of the Islamic State or Hamas – can indeed take on genocidal traits, leads to pure racism when combined with late bourgeois ideology.[11] In the hardcore faction of the anti-Germans, in the Bahamas magazine, anti-Muslim resentment is now openly articulated, for example by calling for a “reversal of the burden of proof” for Muslims.[12] The anti-Germans are also an old-left current, so to speak, which sees the late capitalist world system as trapped in a time warp in which the constellation of the Second World War continues to exist forever: with Islamism occupying the role of the Nazis. Nevertheless, it must be noted here that this small scene, whose significance is often exaggerated by its opponents from the anti-imperialist spectrum, only represents a secondary aspect of the Querfront tendencies.[13]
As outlined above, the Querfront is primarily fed by regressive traditional communist and old social democratic currents. And in the current crisis it has taken on a far greater significance than was the case in the 1920s or 1930s, when such efforts always remained merely episodic. With the BSW, the Querfront has taken on the form of a party, and it could well oust the panicky Left Party, which made it big in the first place, from many of its remaining parliamentary positions. Incidentally, the Left Party’s reaction to the split of the Querfront in the 2024 European election campaign was to adopt the Querfront ideology of focusing on the (German) “social question.” In the midst of the current systemic crisis, the Left Party is focusing on an anachronistic “social policy” that can no longer be realized in the unfolding crisis chaos, instead of arguing about transformative paths out of the permanent capitalist crisis – all while Left Party grandees are sending coalition signals to Wagenknecht.
The depressing final stage of the Left Party thus culminates in taking Wagenknecht’s ideological excuses, with which she legitimized her drift to the right, at face value. This is, in fact, boundless opportunism to the last breath, which aims at being be able to form a coalition with the Querfront – and thus accepts the normalization of fascization. The Querfront is not seeking a confrontation with fascism, but rather an opportunistic adaptation to the right-wing zeitgeist that is emerging as a result of the crisis. This is the common denominator between the left and the old left in the Left Party and the BSW. And it is no coincidence that this is reminiscent of the bourgeois-democratic method of “fighting” right-wing extremism by aligning oneself with it – as was recently the case with refugee policy in the fall of 2023.
But what actually is the Querfront? It is Querfrontler in particular who like to obscure this term by calling all sorts of things a Querfront. Former Left Party MP Dieter Dehm, for example, asked in an interview published in the far-right magazine Compact, whether the anti-Hitler alliance could not also be described as a kind of Querfront.[14] For the Querfront, everything is a Querfront. This allows them to disguise the monstrosity of its pact with the right – especially in view of historical experience. Querfront does not simply refer to cooperation between left-wing and right-wing parties or forces – for example, when the Greens, SPD or CDU enter into a coalition – but to cooperation between forces on the left and right of the political spectrum. Historically, these were the isolated attempts at rapprochement between the KPD and the national right and/or NSDAP, which remained episodes; currently, it is the very real, lasting rapprochement between the Wagenknechtian post-left, which was formerly to the left of the red-green party, and the AfD. It is as if Querfrontler wanted to make the old Cold War theory of totalitarianism, which was circulated by the CIA from the 1950s onwards, come true (Sahra Wagenknecht a CIA agent? Wouldn’t that be a nice conspiracy theory that would surely catch on in this spectrum?).
The objective function of the Querfront, however, is that of an ideological transmission belt that, on the one hand, carries right-wing ideas into left-wing and progressive milieus and, on the other hand, constantly feeds the New Right with new, blinded human material. For many left-wingers, the Querfront thus functions as a kind of “gateway drug” to the delusional world of the New Right. Its success is based on packaging right-wing ideology in left-wing rhetoric. The development of the Querfront over the last ten years is impressive proof that all the hopes of being able to “pick up” the blinded angry citizens by opening up to the right have failed miserably – they were either illusions or mere excuses to somehow legitimize the intended move to the right. The Querfront is ultimately the result of the crisis blindness of an opportunistic left that shies away from radical critique and the thematization of the system transformation necessary for survival. The Querfront – this is the left’s path to extremism of the center, which is spreading in the current systemic crisis as soon as the systemic question is not posed offensively and accompanied by a transformative practice.
The texts collected here provide a historical overview of the genesis, formation and advance of the Querfront over the past ten years. It is a history of this literally “national-social” movement, written in the present tense. The account begins with the outbreak of the civil war in Ukraine and the “vigils for peace,” it presents the disputes within the left during the refugee crisis and concludes this overview with the lateral thinking mania and the first positions taken by the BSW after its foundation. Many of the collected texts not only trace the contemporary historical development of the Querfront, but also outline its ideological formation, which interacts closely with the capitalist crisis process and the corresponding rise of the New Right.
Due to thematic overlaps, three texts and one interview have been taken from the e-book Fascism in the 21st Century, which deal with the lateral thinking mania that was essential for the extensive entanglement of the New Right and the Querfront.
[1] This also includes, for example, the eroding state as an “ideal capitalist” and the devaluing money as a general value equivalent.
[2] On the one hand, Marx defined the worker in the production process as variable capital; he defined wage labor as the substance of capital. At the same time, however, he assumed – in line with the belief in progress at the time – that the proletarians had a historical mission to fulfill as a revolutionary subject. However, Marx also severely criticized the labour movement in his critique of the Gotha Programme of 1875, which is still worth reading today.
[3] https://www.konicz.info/2020/12/09/der-linke-bloedheitskoeffizient/
[4] Scapegoating for crisis surges, greedflation, “critiquing financial markets,” etc.
[5] https://www.mandelbaum.at/buecher/tomasz-konicz/klimakiller-kapital/
[6] https://exitinenglish.com/2023/01/23/the-subjectless-rule-of-capital/
[7] https://www.rote-ruhr-uni.com/cms/texte-und-vortrage/Die-KPD-und-der-Nationalismus
[8] https://www.labournet.de/politik/wipo/wipo-deb/kapitalismuskritik/buch-kapitalkollaps-die-finale-krise-der-weltwirtschaft/
[9] See, for example, the junge Welt of October 10, 2023, in which the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians was described as an “offensive against Israel” and spokespersons for Palestinian groups were able to describe the mass murder as a “hope for Palestine.” junge Welt, 10.10.2023, “Hope for Palestine, Lebanon: Left-wing groups support offensive against Israel.”
[10] https://blog.campact.de/2023/10/angriff-israel-rechte-reaktionen/
[11] https://www.kritiknetz.de/religionskritik/1259-globalisierte-barbarei
[12] https://www.redaktion-bahamas.org/hefte/93/Es-geht-um-Israel.html
[13] For a discussion of the anti-Germans, see: Robert Kurz, Die antideutsche Ideologie, Vom Antifaschismus zum Krisenimperialismus: Kritik des neuesten linksdeutschen Sektenwesens in seinen theoretischen Propheten, 2003 Münster.
[14] https://www.compact-online.de/diether-dehm-ueber-querfront-in-compact-3-2023/ (Dehm denies that he gave his consent for this interview to be printed in Compact)
Originally published as the introduction for Deutschlands Querfront: Altlinke auf dem Weg zur Neuen Rechten by Tomasz Konicz.