We frequently use the terms fault lines, ruptures and cracks within our lingo. We refer to the varying degrees of contradictions within capitalism that, when made visible and experienceable, can expand and deepen. To some we refer to as large rupture lines, while other contradictions may start as fault lines or cracks with the potential to grow. They are interconnected and as a whole form a threat to the system that is capitalism.
Even if the power relations here seem relatively stable: The contradictions of capitalism are also at work in the "heart of the beast". Recognizing these cracks and rupture lines to understand their dynamics and deepening them further is the task of a social radical left. Rupture lines become areas of conflict, which then give rise to concrete struggles that we want to advance and develop in such a way that they point beyond the existing conditions. The most important lines of rupture that offer opportunities and necessities for political intervention and further development of our practice are outlined below.
False promises of neoliberalism
For large sections of society, the promises of neoliberalism – freedom, self-realization, prosperity and consumption - are no longer being fulfilled. Social guarantees and infrastructures have been dismantled, Hartz IV (now “Bürgergeld”) has been introduced, trade union organizations weakened and many areas of life are commodified. More and more people have less and less: less pay, less social security, less money for food and housing, less participation in society. Instead of realizing themselves, they experience relegation and devaluation. They struggle from crisis to crisis with insecure jobs in the low-wage sector. Women, inter-, trans- agender and nonbinary persons and migrants in particular are pushed into precariousness.
Social and spatial inequality has increased massively. Expensive cars and luxury districts characterize the inner cities. At the same time, poverty and homelessness are on the rise and entire districts and regions are left behind. The latter are often regions in eastern Germany, but also western German cities and rural areas are characterized by precarity and poor infrastructure. "Blooming landscapes" have remained an empty promise - in eastern Germany, but also elsewhere. Cuts and privatizations destroy public infrastructure. Additionally, individualization, pressure for optimization and the need to adapt to new situations even more quickly lead many people to feel overwhelmed and lonely. More and more people long for an escape from the dynamic of acceleration and more community.
More equality and more personal freedom were the promises of neoliberalism. There have also been steps towards liberalization and the recognition of different ways of life and measures for more gender equality. However, people experience every day that more visibility and diversity may only exist if this fits an economic logic. Neoliberal recognition policies do not eliminate social inequality and oppression. Patriarchal, queer and trans-hostile violence and homicides continue, as do right-wing and racist murders.
Not even with regard to its hard ideological core, the functioning of the economy, the state and public finances, can neoliberalism keep its promises in times of permanent crisis. Whether it is corona aid, the energy crisis or the necessary investments in climate protection: the state requires significantly larger budgetary funds than it is allowed to spend according to the debt brake and the austerity policy that has been preached for decades. This does not only lead to tangible conflicts within the ruling class. When a snap of the fingers is enough to mobilize astronomical sums as "special funds" for armament or economic stabilization as if out of nowhere, it no longer seems credible that there is supposedly no money for social and societal needs.
This undermines consent to neoliberal rule. It offers a variety of points of departure for left-wing class politics that advocates for social solidarity, social security and the actual realization of opportunities to challenge existing relations of power and domination.
Struggles for social reproduction
Social reproduction means all the activities and areas that are necessary to restore human life and human labor power as the basis of capitalist production. The organization of social reproduction is closely intertwined with the hegemonic ways of life and relationships - and thus in particular with the prevailing gender relations. This affects us all fundamentally in our everyday lives: it is about food and drink, housing, illness and recovery, care and support, energy and mobility, education and training. These are questions of life and survival.
Social reproduction is clearly in a crisis since neoliberal policies have been pushing capital valorization in more and more areas of life and public infrastructure. Social institutions, such as daycare centers, hospitals and retirement homes, are increasingly affected by economization and privatization. The rate-per-case system (Fallpauschalensystem) in hospitals is a well-known example. It leads to a deterioration in care and increases the pressure on employees. And there are many such examples: even now almost a sixth of all employees in Germany work in the healthcare sector.
The socially necessary care work remains patriarchally organized. Despite all the feminist struggles of recent decades including their indisputable successes, unpaid care work in everyday life is still predominantly carried out by persons with a female socialization - often as an additional burden to paid work. Those who can afford it, outsource the additional burdens of everyday life to others, often precarious migrants. However, this merely shifts the problems between the classes, because the care workers' own reproductive work in their families and their countries of origin does not disappear.
Resistance to these conditions is growing. The hospital movement of recent years has provided important impulses for unionized labor disputes. The struggle for the working conditions and wages of nursing staff is directed against the capitalist exploitation of care work as well as the massive gaps in the financing of healthcare and nursing. It is also a feminist struggle. The employees have organized themselves, developed new forms of self-empowerment and created perspectives for socialization. Struggles in this field always have the potential to go beyond immediate demands. They show cracks in the system that enable the challenging of not only the working conditions in the health care sector but also of the organization of our society as a whole.
In the strikes on March 8th, these new struggles against the exploitation of care work have been united with the general feminist critique of the heteronormative nuclear family, the gendered division of labor and patriarchal and anti-queer violence. The common denominator is the questioning of male domination as a whole, i.e. the entire patriarchal-capitalist social order. Unfortunately, the feminist strike that has moved and organized millions in Argentina and Spain has had limited success in Germany.
The crisis of social reproduction is also evident in other areas of social infrastructure, such as the increasing capitalist pressure to exploit housing, food, water and energy supplies. We all feel this in the form of exploding rents, increased costs of energy or food and increasing displacement from city centers. As a result, participation in rent policy struggles has grown, especially in Berlin and other large cities. The demand for public ownership and grassroots democratic management of housing, i.e. for expropriation and socialization, has gained broad support and even the ability to achieve political majorities. We aim to transfer this concrete anti-capitalist perspective of socialization to disputes over energy and water supply.
Struggles in the climate crisis
The climate crisis is no longer abstract, no longer limited to the Global South, but can also be felt right here. In the hot summers, access to cool living spaces becomes an existential question, especially for the elderly. Periods of drought make energy and water scarce. The number of victims of extreme weather events and floods has increased drastically. The risk of pandemics and new pathogens increases. By now, the climate crisis is at the center of social debate. This applies to the incipient distribution struggles of climate adaptation, but even more so to the struggle for the necessary and radical restructuring of the economy and infrastructure. This will be a central battlefield in the coming years and decades.
Society, and even individuals, are divided. A large part of society is fundamentally in favor of taking serious action against the climate crisis, as the mass demonstrations by Fridays for Future have shown. Under the current social conditions, however, this position enters into competition with social interests and calls into question the continuation of the established way of life. Who will bear the costs of insulating buildings or replacing gas and oil heating systems with heat pumps or district heating? Can buses and trains ensure our mobility if the private car has to disappear? Can the gain in time and quality of life outweigh the loss of consumer goods? These questions are even more pressing for employees in the fossil fuel industries, such as in automobile production and their supplier industries. Many of their jobs will inevitably disappear in an ecological structural change. Precisely because these jobs have been secure and above-average paid up to now, the fears of social relegation by the employees have a real basis.
A mass social movement against capitalist climate destruction is nevertheless possible. This requires a class struggle escalation attacking those responsible for the climate crisis. Instead of denying the necessary ecological conversion and job losses in the industrial sector, we must demand and enforce that the costs of this are borne by fossil fuel capital and the rich.
There are not only fears of decline and change, but also a desire for a different way of life. Many people want streets and cities that are not clogged by cars nor polluted by their exhaust fumes. They want to reduce their working hours, to be able to carry out self-determined care work, to experience a sense of community and to slow down their lives. From here, an alternative idea of the good life can be developed. Such a radical socio-ecological transformation is tied to the long-term interests of the majority of people. Yet this social alternative is not a feel-good program: given the climate crisis, its implementation needs the antagonistic intensification of the struggle against fossil capital and its political allies. We will not just be given a future worth living.
Migration, border regimes and (anti-)racism
For centuries, global capitalism and its imperial world order were based on the exploitation and subjugation of people in the Global South. Their livelihoods have been systematically undermined and destroyed in the process. The permanent crises of the present - above all the climate crisis, but also the increase in geopolitical conflicts and wars - are exacerbating this situation even further. Millions are on the run, global and regional migration is on the rise. However, the people who cross borders on often life-threatening routes are not just victims: by fighting for their share of global social wealth and their right to a safe life, migration movements practically challenge the existing order.
The escalating, often deadly violence at Europe's borders is intended to defend this order and the unequal distribution of wealth. Yet the capitalist economy of the countries of the North is always dependent on new workers. The result is a complex and contradictory system of closed borders, disenfranchisement, control and exploitation that is largely organized along racist lines. At the same time, migration is the "mother of all societies" and the immigration society is a reality in Germany that can no longer be denied. This has given rise to at least two areas of conflict in this country, where cracks and fault lines of domination are becoming visible.
First, the expansion of "Fortress Europe" - from Frontex to deportation prisons on our own doorstep - leads to a reorganization of the political spectrum. Leftist-liberal and supposedly progressive parties and actors are increasingly adopting right-wing positions and putting them into practice. Here, in particular, there is a huge contradiction between the humanist rhetoric and the reality of dehumanization at the borders. This policy is based on an alliance of fear with large sections of the population. Many people mistakenly believe that fending off migration can mitigate the threat of restrictions to their own standard of living - and accept violence against the "others" and their deaths in exchange for an illusion of their own security and prosperity. In contrast, the advocates of the universal validity of human rights and the right to global freedom of movement often seem to be in the minority. But this division is neither clear nor stable. There are opportunities for new alliances and new struggles. We want to lead them offensively - together with all those who have become alienated from the double standards of "Western", "European" or "green" values, who are campaigning locally against deportation and disenfranchisement or who have organized themselves as affected refugees. They are all ready for the conflict against Fortress Europe.
Second, it is social racism itself that constantly gives rise to new contradictions, areas of conflict and struggles. Whether it is institutional racism on the job and housing market, racist police violence, right-wing agitation in the media, attacks and assaults or everyday racism: attributions, discrimination, exclusion, threats and violence remain part of everyday life for many people in this country. The public dismay following the deadly attacks in Hanau has done nothing to change this. The white-dominant society and its parties blame immigrants, residents of migrant neighborhoods in large cities and Muslims for social problems.
At the same time, social production and reproduction in this country would collapse without the work of migrant workers. Whether in care, agriculture, logistics or the emerging platform economy, the proportion of migrant workers is particularly high in these areas with high workloads and precarious employment. It is no coincidence that it is precisely in these areas of the economy that new forms of strike and protest have emerged and an increasing collective political self-awareness has developed among employees. Class struggles and anti-racist struggles overlap in these disputes. Here, just as in the struggles against everyday racism and racist violence, we see a further rupture line that needs to be deepened by fighting confidently and uncompromisingly against racism, exploitation and for a migration society based on solidarity.