Translated from GegenStandpunkt 2-20

The lockdown drags on: Pandemic VIII

Class consciousness on the right

The longer the coronavirus crisis continues, the louder the criticisms of the government measures becomes.

1.

Amid all the moaning about the shutdown of social, economic, cultural, and family life, the criticism of two German opposition parties stands out: Of all things, Lindner’s liberals, who decided to raise their profile as the party of the upper income taxpayers, and the AfD, which otherwise finds a disenfranchised Volksgenossen [people’s comrade] in every proletarian, are using the occasion to point out in an oppositional and militant way that the prescribed pandemic safeguards are by no means economically affecting everyone equally. Rather, it is mainly affecting the “ordinary people” who can’t afford to miss work for even a single day – if they are lucky enough to even have a job. It is affecting those who are dependent on working every day as wage earners for the business interests of their employers or as “independent contractors” – a modern term for a modern version of the proud day laborer – for the business interests of their clients. The shutdown is not affecting people as “the citizens” or as “the people” – so contends, ironically, the liberal advocates of the citizens and the illiberal champions of the people; it is affecting a class society and damaging its members appropriately differently.

Now that’s an interesting contribution to public health!

2.

With this criticism, Germany’s right-wing opposition takes the President of the United States for its great role model. He does not have to limit himself to bashing the government’s efforts, but rather calls from his official seat on his impoverished white workers in Michigan and elsewhere to rise up in a revolution for freedom against the curfews imposed on the people by him and his kind. So Mr. Trump helps clarify not only that he too governs a class society, large sections of which stand not just now, but now especially with one foot in squalor; with his call for liberation in the name of this hardship, the content of the freedom he wants to restore to his beloved people becomes clear: it consists of the license to resume the necessary struggle for survival. And that’s it.

3.

And those who are being addressed from above and talked about in this way?

In America, they are fighting with Trump caps and in full observance of their sacred constitutional right to bear arms against a democratic-elitist elite that is locking down the American people while making itself comfortable in home offices and waiting out a supposed pandemic. In any case, this is a health luxury that they certainly can’t afford: after all, they have to go out and work for themselves and their families.

In Germany, the workers do not yet have such a charismatic leader to stand up for their rights; and accordingly, the wage dependent masses do not turn out for the “hygiene demonstrations” on May 1. But when work can finally resume and production lines start up again, they are of course ecstatic and happily make this known to the media. Because they have to live from their work by being employed by others, they demand to be allowed to do so, feeling in any case like they are being looked after when they can once again make themselves useful as lackeys of profit: they affirm the shabby role they play in society and suffer from particularly in corona times.

A true class society simply needs its useful idiots to have at least this much consciousness of where they stand.