Translated from GegenStandpunkt 3-22

“The Self-Righteous”:

Sahra Wagenknecht’s reckoning with the left

In April 2021, Sahra Wagenknecht published her book ”The Self-righteous: My counterprogram – for social cohesion and the public good,” which advanced to a bestseller. In the run-up to that year’s federal election campaign, the talk show regular and leftist candidate presented a fundamental reckoning with her own unsuccessful party and the “left-liberal” milieu in general.[1] As she announces in the two-part title, she attacks the left for an elitist attitude which she makes complicit in a division, in the “disintegration of our social cohesion,” and in the lack of a “we feeling” from which German society is suffering. This negative diagnosis, which conversely results in her positive program, is the guiding principle of the book.

This reckoning has, on one side, earned her the anger of her leftist allies, but mainly the applause of right-wing conservatives, which is not exactly what she is looking for. While for the former, those she wants to address in their leftist (remaining) consciences, she is drifting to the right by airing the left’s dirty laundry, for the latter she serves as a key witness to the fact that this remaining bunch of hard leftists are for good reason tearing themselves to pieces. The following examination of the arguments presented by this critic of capitalism has nothing to do with this sort of ostracism and appropriation.

I. The left’s retreat from the social question

The expected shitstorm from her own ranks is even included in the author’s forward to the book as the first piece of circumstantial evidence of her diagnosis. The division in the community can be seen in a matching intolerant culture of opinion:

“Because the truth is that the climate of opinion is not being poisoned just by the right...Left-liberalism has played a major role in the decline of our culture of debate. Left-liberal intolerance and right-wing hate speech are interrelated phenomena that need each other, reinforce each other and live off each other...With this book, I find myself in a political climate in which cancel culture has replaced fair debate. I do so in the knowledge that I too could now be ‘cancelled’.”[2]

When Wagenknecht speaks of “left liberals” who she finds intolerant, then this liberalism which is supposed to be on the left stands for a self-centered, individualistic attitude that has degraded leftist social commitment into a privileged lifestyle. For the diverse currents of the left-liberal milieu, she comes up with the insult of a “lifestyle left.”

“The public image of the social left is dominated today by a type that we will call the lifestyle left in what follows, because for it the focus of leftist politics is no longer on social and political-economic problems, but on questions of lifestyle, consumer habits, and moral attitudes.”

She uses an example that, in her opinion, could not be more striking:

“Yes, the social left can still win. It can bring multinationals like the Dutch-British consumer goods company Unilever, which owns the Kronor brand, to its knees. Due to the racism debate on social media, the company announced in August 2020 that the Kronor classic Zigunner sauce would be available on supermarket shelves with immediate effect under a new name, namely Hungarian-style paprika sauce. ... Of course, the worsened collective agreement that Unilever imposed on the 550 remaining employees at the main Kronor plant in Heilbronn almost at the same time as the heroic farewell to gypsy sauce, with the threat of closing the plant completely, remains unchanged. For Kronor employees, it means staff cuts, lower starting salaries, lower wage increases and Saturday working. Unlike the gypsy sauce, however, none of this ever made national headlines or even caused a shitstorm among the left-wing Twitter community.”

Her venomous tone here is aimed at the commitment to hygienic language, which she criticizes as missing the point because – instead of that – the injustice suffered by the workers in question should be the cause of leftist outrage. In doing so, those who like to hawk their moral sensitivities show their callousness as “moralists without compassion”[3] for the socially disadvantaged. The cheap tit-for-tat response, the logic of which, like the polemic as a whole, always follows the pattern of an “instead,” boils down in substance to a central point of reckoning: the friends of the left-liberal lifestyle look after whatever the fads of the zeitgeist might be instead of fulfilling their traditional political mission as leftists. The author, however, reminds them of their political vocation by looking back to the days of the workers’ movement when the moral compass of the left still held true:

“The left once stood for striving for more justice and social security, it stood for resistance, for rebelling against the top ten thousand and a commitment to all those who had not grown up in a wealthy family and had to earn their living with hard, often uninspiring work. The goal on the left was to protect these people from poverty, humiliation and exploitation, to give them educational opportunities and opportunities for advancement, and to make their lives simpler, more orderly and easier to plan. ... Left-wing parties, whether social democrats, socialists or, in many Western European countries, communists, did not represent the elites, but the underprivileged. Most of their activists came from this milieu themselves, and their aim was to improve their living conditions. Left-wing intellectuals shared this concern and supported it.”

In her once upon a time narrative, the comrade recalls buzzwords from militant times: “poverty, humiliation and exploitation.” She does not have in mind a call for “resistance” and “rebellion against the top ten thousand.” How could she? After all, she wants to heal the divisions in the country, not tear open new ones. And even if she refers to socialists or communists and uses the irritating word “exploitation,” it is not because the former head of the Communist Platform wants to agitate for the liberation of the wage-earning class from their proletarian existence as a destitute labor force that is at the mercy of the owner of the means of production, who have to dedicate themselves to increasing his wealth, on which their livelihood is in turn only an expense. She does not mean the core of the capitalist class antagonism when she cites “exploitation.” She immediately defuses any contrast, any incompatibility that can be taken from the expression; she trivializes the relationship between capital and labor into social inequality. Exploited wage laborers thus become the “underprivileged” – people who are merely socially disadvantaged and have a harder time; a capitalist class whose wealth comes from the exploitation of others become “elites” whose wealth is often unjustly lavish. Wagenknecht transforms the struggle against the exploitation of wage earners into a quest for more justice for the “common people,” for their right to what they, as members of this lower class, are actually entitled to. And that is modest enough: more security in the face of the continuing insecurity of their source of income; opportunities to have it better some day, to at least be able to adapt their existence in a more manageable way: “to make their lives simpler, more orderly and easier to plan.”

As a matter of course, Wagenknecht speaks of “these people” – then as now – as powerless people in need of protection, dependent on political party supporters of their cause which stick up for them within the social hierarchy of power in order to make sure that state resources are used in a socially just manner. Ordinary people need the aegis of a political force that represents their special needs in the machinery of political rule and carries out the permanent necessity of socio-political advocacy and welfare. Like all her political colleagues, Wagenknecht also masters the rhetorical twist that her sovereign assistance would be an mission on the part of those she assists. She modestly spells this out as a service, one which political leaders always only carry out by “sharing” and “assisting” the concerns of those they look after. As a down-to-earth friend of the hard working lower class, the leftist politician thus decrees herself and the status of her own profession as a standing order to define the interests of her ideal constituents into an object of socially responsible administration from the perspective of the political elite.

Wagenknecht’s accusation is that the lifestyle left denies her constituents this caring paternalism. When she, for her part, transforms the poverty of the wage laborers into a case of discrimination, as if it were not the result of a (fair because) appropriate treatment of them as wage laborers, but rather of an unfair unequal treatment of “people,” then she is certainly coming very close to the political moralism of the left which she is so scathing of. For they are precisely the ones who have committed themselves to fighting discrimination as an issue of equal, fair treatment and community recognition. This prompts Wagenknecht to draw the dividing line all the more sharply:

“Since the lifestyle left has hardly come into contact with the social question personally, it usually interests them only marginally. So, they do want a society that is fair and free of discrimination, but the path to it no longer leads via the stodgy old topics from social economics, i.e. wages, pensions, taxes or unemployment insurance, but above all via symbolism and language.”

A society that is fair and free of discrimination – they might mean well, but it isn’t a matter of pronouns and the kind of stuff that shows these left-liberals have lost sight of their social target group, not least their electoral constituency: Wages, pensions, taxes – that’s the real battleground against discrimination. These “moralists” should for once mobilize “compassion” for these kinds of material injustices.

But why does unjust poverty leave today’s left cold? Wagenknecht’s answer: because it has nothing to do with them “personally.” If she thinks she has simply discredited the left because they do not do what she herself thinks is the right thing to do, she then shifts her attack away from the substance entirely to the question of how it can be that they are not doing what they should. She thus decides what kind of people they are and identifies the lifestyle “type” with a privileged caste: she constructs a sociological theory of changing layers and people rising out of the left milieu, which explains their views in their social alienation from their traditional constituency:

“When parties and movements change, when their narratives transform, the reasons for this almost always lie in changes in the social milieu from which they are supported. The transformation from the traditional left to the lifestyle left also has such causes. It is a result of the rise of the new academic service professions and of the new social class of metropolitan, predominantly well-off university graduates that has emerged with and from them, whose lifeworld and canon of values are reflected in what is now considered left-wing.” “The academic middle class is ... today a largely exclusive milieu that reproduces itself predominantly from itself and into which ascents from less favored positions are hardly possible. In its everyday life, this milieu lives largely among itself.”

What by minimal logic sounds like an excuse is, of course, not intended to be. For the vulgar materialist milieu theory, according to which social settings determine thinking, only underpins the moral accusation that these pseudo-leftists are merely ostensibly committed to their fellow humanity, but basically want nothing more than to defend their own privileges – especially good earnings and a high level of education – and to reserve them for themselves and their offspring.[4]

It’s an egoism that is already revealed by the better material position of the left-wing bohemians. Wagenknecht denounces these people for making themselves comfortable in their elitist, exclusive “filter bubbles” where they know nothing of the common people and want to keep to themselves. And when they – outside this bubble – take to the streets to demonstrate, it’s then “mainly about self-affirmation” and “self-realization” – which is why their demands are often “so exaggerated” that “they don’t have the slightest chance of being realized.” This is “not even seen by them as a shortcoming” because “instead of change” they are about nothing more than cultivating their self-image. It’s all a lifestyle.[5]

II. The left in the moral mirror of the good people

The author clarifies how “common people” deserve political solidarity from above with a stylization and heroization of her favorite stratum, which in its moral veneration of the proletariat[6] is reminiscent of the pro-worker leftists of yesterday, when she supplements her “narrative” of the labor movement with a “great” one of the workforce:

“The great narrative of industrial labor ... was borne of pride in one’s own labor, which produces the material prosperity on which the whole of society depends. And it was based on the self-confidence of a social class that, through its cohesion and solidarity, had succeeded in asserting its interests in society: against management, against capital and generally against those up there. We-awareness, community orientation, solidarity and mutual responsibility were the cornerstones of this worldview. Only employees who stuck together had a chance in the workplace against superiors and management. ... In the workers’ neighborhoods, too, mutual help and support were often essential for survival. Cohesion was facilitated by the fact that people knew and trusted each other. After all, many industrial workers worked all their lives in the same company where their father had often earned his bread and butter. The working class was therefore predominantly settled down and attached to their hometowns.”

The morality tale about the “social layer” immediately tints the economic category of labor morally and psychologically: The fact that this class is condemned to wage labor, producing a wealth from which it gets nothing, becomes the source of “pride” and “self-confidence.” Wagenknecht simply abstracts from the relationship of exploitation under the regime of private property and casts labor in the idyllic light of a commendable service “for the whole of society.” Maddeningly but consistently, all the miserable conditions of capitalist labor then drive out the true, beautiful, and good: “cohesion and solidarity” – out of the necessity of a means of struggle, this friend of the underclass promptly makes a virtue. She translates the existential plight, the extortionate competition that capital organizes and exploits, into the best condition for creating a “worldview” and acquiring an intact morality – a cynicism of the dialectical kind. The so-called struggle for survival in poor districts, in which people help each other out, is celebrated for having taught a willingness to help and to stick together. The working class is congratulated for being a model of the virtue that society as a whole needs – today more than ever: “We-consciousness, community orientation, solidarity and mutual responsibility.” In the end, these people, who spent their entire working lives unable to get out of their hovels, were commendably “settled down and attached to their hometowns” because they identified so much with their hovels.

It is therefore easy to see that Wagenknecht portrays her lifestyle leftists, vice versa, as the negative caricature of these working class heroes in every respect: Their lifestyle is suspect because of its individualism: “In general, the lifestyle left values autonomy and self-realization more than tradition and community.” (p. 26) They advocate all kinds of lifestyles and “diversity,” which in reality do not enrich society, but rather undermines the social and national community and thus the identity of the people:

“Identity politics amounts to focusing attention on ever smaller and ever more bizarre minorities, each of which finds its identity in some quirk by which it differs from the majority society and from which it derives the claim to victimhood.” (p. 102)

If in the inner life of the community left-liberals are indifferent to, or even contemptuous of, its overarching identity, they appear outwardly “cosmopolitan and pro-European” (p. 25). This is anything but the usual praise, because it likewise testifies to their lack of a sense of belonging:

“His convictions include considering the nation-state to be a discontinued model and himself a citizen of the world with rather little connection to his own country.” (p. 25)

In this way, her attack escalates from a private lifestyle to a refusal of a sense of unity and even to an accusations of not being patriotic. Allegedly, these lackeys do not love their country and allegedly inherit this vice from neoliberalism. To be in favor of globalization, i.e. to be in favor of the unrestricted market in which the anarchic power of the monopolies reigns, amounts to the same thing as seeing oneself as a cosmopolitan in that this citizen of the world may be as anti-globalization as he wants. [7]

When the critic of the left allows her two creatures – the leftist bohemian and the working class hero – to meet, there is a collision of values that could not be more contradictory, and this has the foreseeable consequence of a disturbed relationship that she blames on the left:

“...instead of respecting these people [the poor and less privileged] and simply standing up for their interests, they are usually met with the attitude of the benevolent missionary who not only wants to save the unbelievers, but above all to convert them. The lifestyle leftist wants to ... explain [to them] their true interests and drive out their provincialism, their resentments and prejudices. For the addressees, this usually goes down as well as open contempt, and in fact it is only a version of it.” (p. 29)

If one confuses capitalism with a moral educational institution in which the proletariat trains its healthy moral instincts, then this also arms it against suspicious leftist fads of all kinds. This amounts to a very principled taboo against criticism, because whether the “resentments” of the good people are justified or not, the left sins against the paternalism which it is actually summoned to when it lectures the people “from on high.” (p. 28)

“Those who have trouble affording a vacation once a year from their meager salaries, or who must live on a meager pension despite a lifetime of work, do not appreciate it when people preach renunciation to them who have never lacked for anything in their lives.” (Ibid.)

The same applies here: whether the agitation of the people by these leftists is wrong in substance or not, the common people have a fundamental right not to appreciate such things, i.e. not to tolerate them. After all, their bleak poverty not only makes them morally honorable, but their situation gives them moral immunity – especially against people who are, vice versa, morally disqualified from criticizing them solely on the basis of being better off materially:

“The working class, for example, which has been dependent on loyalty and solidarity with one another since its inception and which could not and cannot assert its interests without cohesion, will certainly not allow itself to be talked out of the value of community ties by left-liberal academics.” (p. 222)

Neglected and even despised, betrayed (of all things) by the left, the class of their ideal loyal voters repays them – precisely in the powerless role of voters. The just punishment is the electoral defeats of one’s own party – success/failure is ultimately the decisive argument for Wagenknecht the politician. For her, the fact that born leftist voters give their vote to the AfD only proves that they rightly feel alienated from the left. If the AfD, now the “leading ‘workers' party’” (p. 17), misuses this popularity to divide the people, this too is ultimately the fault of the left for driving ordinary people into the wrong arms. At the same time, the lower social stratum, as the core constituency of the left and a role model for the community, would be picture perfect for taking on the great mission of uniting all strata of society into a single “we.”

III. The nation state as the social home and protective power of the lower classes

When Wagenknecht forbids the left from criticizing the attitudes of ordinary people, this applies in particular to the people’s identification with their own nation, which the left – very wrongly in her opinion – defames as “nationalism”:

“Most people also tend not to see themselves as citizens of the world, but identify with their country and – worst of all! – their nationality. In Germany, for example, 74 percent feel ‘strongly or very strongly’ that they are Germans. ... This result ... is a worrying sign for the lifestyle left that nationalism is still deeply rooted. Anyone who expects their own government to primarily look after the welfare of the local population and to protect them from an international dumping competition and other negative consequences of globalization – a principle that was taken for granted by traditional leftists – is now considered to be national social, with the suffix -ist.” (p. 32)

The old maxim of the Socialist International that the proletariat has no country has evidently been scratched by the author from the ideas of the “traditional left.” On the contrary, she knows good reasons for both the lower classes and the majority of citizens to identify with their own state. She argues for a social protective function which she credits to the nation state and which every leftist should be in favor of. Even state interventions in favor of local capital ultimately serve to protect the domestic workforce, and even the vast “low-wage sector” in the country, which she herself deplores, does not bother her in ascribing a pro-people mission to the nation state in the battleground of international competition. The demand that the German state “should primarily look after the welfare of the local population” indicates who or what this leftist politician has identified as the threat to the blessings of the German nation state:

“Labor migration leads to growing competition on the labor market with corresponding consequences. ... The German low-wage sector ... can be traced back to the labor market reforms ... under Gerhard Schröder, which removed many of the protective rights of employees and gave companies the opportunity to replace regular full-time jobs with irregular employment on a large scale. ... However, the fact that wages fell by up to 20 percent in many sectors and that even years of sustained economic growth could not change this was solely due to the high level of migration to Germany.” (p. 160)

Wagenknecht reminds us who regulates and organizes the competition with the workforce and exploits it across borders for themselves: the state and capital. But ultimately those who are used, i.e. the migrants, are the problem. Competition on the German labor market should be the privilege of the native-born, please.[8] This applies not only to the labor market, but also to the housing market and the education sector. Here too Wagenknecht legitimizes national exclusion – in sober economic terms – with a realism that originates from the law of the market – supply and demand – as an objective constraint:

“However, increased competition for jobs and falling wages are not the only problems resulting from high levels of migration for the lower half of the population. The negative consequences also affect their housing situation and the education of their children. ... When more immigrants arrive, there is therefore more demand for housing in poor neighborhoods, which also has an impact on rent levels there. On the other hand, more people then compete for the limited and currently shrinking number of available public housing units.” (p. 164)

Not a trace of nationalism or xenophobia, just sober calculations. Only it’s striking that in her theory of aggregates she knows exactly who is too many here in her own country. But even for this she has an expert realism ready, which has unfortunately been completely lost on the leftist friends of unchecked immigration; according to the motto: “Who is going to pay for it?”

“Any genuine solidarity system must keep the number of contributors and recipients in a healthy balance to avoid collapse. Normally, this is ensured by the fact that such systems are only open to a certain group of people. Anyone who potentially includes the whole of humanity in them accepts that solidarity systems offering above-average benefits in global comparison can no longer exist. This is because social security at the level of Western countries would of course be unfinanceable on a global level.” (p. 129)

Certainly, not even the most cosmopolitan lifestyle leftist is demanding this;[9] nevertheless, Wagenknecht points out how impossible, how “obviously unfinanceable” this idea is. For the leftist economist, it is simply self-evident: under the title of “solidarity system,” she finds the state confiscation of parts of the wage earners’ incomes for the welfare state’s care of the notorious emergencies that are part of this source of income so beautiful that she can see nothing in it other than a scarce, i.e. precious, good that is to be held in trust by the state as the property of the nation’s working people. So the “healthy balance” can only be maintained by ensuring that there are not too many mouths to feed. Again it goes without saying who is too many: the foreigners who, like the natives, only make others rich economically and remain poor, but simply do not belong in this “certain group of people.”

The principle of this solidarity is therefore an exclusive, exclusionary matter, and its advocate justifies this with a distinction that ultimately also gives the appearance of sober objectivity. Wagenknecht has, of course, nothing against taking in political refugees, but she does not like those who are looking for “a better life,” i.e. who emigrate for materialistic motives and immigrate here: Some, the “refugees,” have to leave their homeland; the others, the “migrants,” only want to “because they expect better prospects here [in the richer countries]” (p. 142). Indeed, anyone could come here. Of course, she adds the tried and tested mendacious concern that those who are too many here will then be missed by their poor country of origin. But the moral dividing line she draws is unmistakable: that it is simply unfair if people immigrate into a solidarity system and are supported by it when they have not yet contributed anything to it. If 70% of the refugees here, some of whom are highly qualified, live on Hartz IV, then “the impression arises that Hartz IV benefits go to people who don’t actually belong and who have never worked for these benefits.” (p. 217).

These kinds of demarcations, behind which is the idea that the national community is something like a fair exchange and balance of give and take, is followed by an understanding that the native “people in need of help” then want to exclude “non-citizens” from the beautiful community of solidarity and don’t give a damn about a welfare state with its solidarity system if it unjustly supports foreigners. “The more” this is the case, “the more” these people can expect understanding for the change that must occur in their feelings:

“The sense of obligation towards poorer fellow citizens diminishes to the extent that the circle of those in need of help is extended to include non-citizens. ... The more people feel that social benefits disproportionately benefit others, i.e. people with whom they feel no connection and who, in their eyes, have no real right to social solidarity, the more the welfare state’s equalization loses approval.” (p. 217)

And where appealing to the objective constraints of the nation state and its social economy leads Wagenknecht to understand her constituency’s healthy sense of justice, there is hardly any transition from a patriotically inspected labor and housing market to elementary feelings of attachment to home:

“The majority are also quite prepared to help refugees and persecuted people. However, they do not want to compete with more and more immigrants for jobs and housing, nor do they agree to their own living space being changed beyond recognition.” (p. 197) And so it seems only natural to Wagenknecht that “people ... feel insecure when they are traveling alone on public transport with a large group of men who speak a foreign language.” (p. 32)

With these transitions, it is no longer necessary to ask what one thing has to do with the other. If – what a perversion! – the native has to feel like an “‘immigrant’ in his own neighborhood” (p. 169), Wagenknecht is no longer surprised when the aggressive side of native pride comes forward, which of course always results from understandable fears and feelings of threat and insecurity, no matter how absurd they may be factually.

“People become more intolerant when they are insecure and feel threatened. The threat may concern their social situation, their living environment or their values and moral order. The greater the insecurity and the more acute the perceived threat, the more intolerant people become towards those who think differently, especially if they are associated with the threat.” (p. 200)

Intolerance and xenophobic resentment can get out of control in an ugly way, but there are objectively good reasons for them at the outset, and as a leftist one must at least approach them with empathy; under no circumstance should one paint grassroots racism as right-wing. For the aforementioned revenge of protest voters who “give their vote to the right because they feel socially abandoned and culturally no longer valued by all other political forces” (p. 174) does not, as leftists would have us believe, show their “right-wing attitudes” (p. 184), but rather the right-wing parties bait and seduce the actually left-wing electorate with actually left-wing programs. Their voters criticize “egoism and the pursuit of profit” (p. 178) – and rightist governments even follow up with leftist actions: From Trump’s creation of industrial jobs under national protectionism to the “courageous social policy” of Poland’s Law and Justice Party to Le Pen’s program, which is “more left-wing in terms of economic and social policy” (p. 184) – the left has abandoned its battleground to the right. On the other hand, this proves to the comrade that the signs of the times must favor the left if even the right cannot pass them up. And what do left-liberal culture warriors do? They don’t see the signs, they invent an enemy called the right-wing zeitgeist and fight “for moral superiority at seminar tables” (p. 201).

*

Wagenknecht is not at a loss for anti-intellectual put-downs when presenting herself as the patron saint of the common people. But when she intends to give her moral sermon the weight of scientific authority, she herself plays the academic. At the beginning of the second part of the book, she undertakes an excursion into human history, political science, sociology, and anthropology in order to make one thing irrefutable: The morality incorporated in the nation-state is not only in line with the nature of the working people, but springs from human nature as such. So she cranks out the same thing she extracted from her story about the working class heroes once again in a story about the human race:

“People live in communities and they need togetherness. This applies to all times and ultimately to all social classes. For thousands of years, social isolation even meant certain death for the individual. Such experiences leave their mark. ... It also means that people have deeply internalized the need to think in terms of communities. ... A key category for communities distancing themselves from others is the distinction between belonging and not belonging. In an intact family, we feel more closely connected to other family members than to people who are not part of the family. We are more willing to support family members than strangers. ... This is not morally suspect, but normal human behavior.” (p. 205)[10]

In this case, the constants called “need to be together” and “community,” which are as ahistorical as they are independent of any social form, are not just survival strategies compelled by capitalist competition, but rather originate in nature. It is striking how naturally – even in Neanderthal times – conflict arises from togetherness, and inclusion goes naturally and eternally with distancing oneselves from others. The contrast, which is supposed to be made plausible in the mere distinction between the family circle and those one knows or doesn’t know, then applies a few stages of human history later, not only to one’s own tribal community, but to millions of compatriots who one now no longer needs to know “personally.” What begins with the Stone Age family and a “community, however defined,” ends up precisely in the modern nation, i.e. the state sovereign and the society that belongs to it as a people and is subject to its command:

“Very early on, people also began to identify with larger communities, communities in which they did not know all the members personally. ... In the best days of the labor movement, the social status of the worker was the core of a self-confident identity that included the moral duty of solidarity with other workers. Those who identify with their village, their region or their country feel more closely connected to all those who live in a particular territory and cultivate its traditions, culture and customs than people who do not. The fact that members of a community, however defined, are more likely to be trusted than those who do not belong to it is not an irrational whim, but a behavior that has proven itself over centuries.” (p. 205)

The story about people’s very old habit of identifying with communities replaces any reason why they do it or should. The “self-confident worker” who had a reason to stick together with his peers because of the conflict of interests with the capitalist stands next to the villager and the citizen who needs no reason to do so and simply sticks to traditions and customs that have always existed. Wagenknecht honors these brands of small-minded belonging and can make use of the right-wing buzzword “Leitkultur” [translator: dominant culture]:

“If one wants to define the term Leitkultur meaningfully, one should understand it to mean the specific values and typical patterns of behavior within a nation that are based on cultural tradition, history and national narratives, which are part of their common identity and on which their sense of belonging is based.” (p. 240)

Because she is so enthusiastic about the basic lie of the class state that all conflicts are resolved in a national “we,” the former figurehead of the left also values the “Leitkultur” as the – as she affirmatively calls it – “glue” that holds society together and creates this harmony.

The result of this digression: it should not only make Wagenknecht’s moral guideline for society watertight, but also take her polemic against the left a step further. These types, who are driven by “unattached self-realization-individualism and left-liberal cosmopolitanism” (p. 223), must also be told by “modern happiness research”: “People strive not only for freedom and autonomy, but also for recognition, belonging and togetherness.” (p. 224) In other words, this type of leftist has not only alienated himself from the common people, but ultimately from what is only human nature. Such leftists not only negate the patriotism in their target audience, but also suppress this “tried and tested”, “normal,” i.e. primal human need for belonging and togetherness in themselves.

IV. Capitalism regulated by the nation state: an idyll of popular justice

When the author presents her programmatic alternative plan for a society living in a “tamed” capitalism, she places it under the maxim of the “achievement narrative.” While she says of the lifestyle left: “He finds traditional values such as achievement, diligence and discipline uncool.” (p. 26) – she bravely professes these very values and claims: “Having conservative values and being left at the same time is not a contradiction.” (p. 226) Ultimately, Wagenknecht still sees herself as a critic of capitalism, which she criticizes precisely from the perspective of these conservative values.

There is a lot wrong with this system, especially where there is something to be gained without any effort. The nation’s social system being ruined by immigrants who have not contributed anything to it has already been mentioned. Even the left takes a dim view of an unconditional basic income because it is a handout without anything in return, which is detrimental not just to the work ethic of those affected. However, the problem lies at the other end of the social hierarchy, where the rich do not earn their income honestly. This is a reference to the entrepreneurs who have “only inherited” their property and, of course, the financial vultures who have spread out across countries in the wake of “economic liberalism and globalization” (p. 257) and hold the economy in their clutches. When Wagenknecht repeatedly says that “the central goal of capitalist economic activity” is to “turn money into more money” (p. 60), she does not want to criticize and condemn the economic system in which the material life process of society – work and production – is subject to money endlessly increasing itself. It all comes down to this: If there is “functioning competition,” then it forces companies to satisfy their characteristically capitalistic drive for enrichment with useful services for the entire community: with technical progress, new products, and increasingly productive work. This is when the societal return is achieved, which Wagenknecht apparently considers – beyond the “central goal” and the “actual drive” – to be the even more real purpose of the thing.[11] It is clear to the left-wing economist that the promised increase in labor productivity only takes place to increase the company’s profits by “reducing the share of labor costs contained in each produced good” (p. 60); that the workers become poorer in relation to the wealth they create for the other side when they produce more and more products for the same wage, or if fewer and fewer people can live off the production of these goods as wage laborers – she probably sees this as a price of the increase in “social prosperity,” which is of no further significance. She accuses modern-day capitalism of failing to achieve precisely this progress, namely of having become “lazy when it comes to innovation.” It neither produces nor is it based on a socially useful service:

“Capitalism has long since ceased to be as productive and innovative as it once was and as it is still alleged to be today. It is also no longer a meritocracy, but one in which family background is once again decisive for personal life chances and not one’s own efforts.” (p. 272)

The capitalist economy can reinvent itself every day with green energy, the digital economy[12] and “Silicon Valley” as it pleases. It is true that money is being made in all sorts of places, that “high profit margins” are being realized – but if this is measured by the fiction that capitalist progress is actually there for something else, namely for solving social or human problems, the diagnosis of failure results: capitalism today “lives out its existence predominantly in areas that hardly contribute anything to solving the really big problems” (p. 273). It does not serve a common good determined on the basis of accomplishment. Wagenknecht confuses the idealism of her standard of judgment so radically with the system itself that she outright thinks it no longer works if it fails to realize her ideas.

Wagenknecht sees herself, of course, as anything but an idealist. With a truly grotesque glorification of the “upwardly mobile society” of post-war Germany, she demonstrates that it is neither unworldly nor revolutionary to demand that capitalism return to the good in it; in her view, it was once much further ahead:

“Until the nineties of the last century, the Western upwardly mobile society actually rewarded personal achievement, educational effort and diligence. Social stratification had become permeable, those who made an effort could work their way up – millions of people experienced this. ... It is also true that the first century and a half of capitalist economic activity was accompanied by unprecedented technological change and unprecedented growth in productivity and prosperity.” (p. 270) “If capitalism had its best period in the 1950s to 1970s, this was not least due to the fact that it was not nearly as capitalist as it is today.” (p. 282)

So what’s the difference between good and bad, more or less capitalist capitalism? The “profit drive” becomes bad and unjust when the notorious monopolies undermine “fair competition.” And where “the profits of the digital economy … and those of the financial sector are predominantly based on skimming off value and not on value creation” (p. 278), Wagenknecht’s distinction leads back to the economically irrelevant, because moralistic, opposition between rapacious and creative capital. She depicts the fictitious, already inherently absurd idyll of a mode of production oriented to the creation of use values and the fair distribution of monetary wealth, and knows her enemies:

“Of course, a true achievement-oriented society also includes ... ownership earned from one’s own efforts ... i.e. an ownership that ensures that those who benefit from the fruits of the work in a company are those who do this work, from management to ordinary workers, but not owners outside the company who have never seen the inside of the business premises.” (p. 299)

This “true achievement-oriented society” no longer separates the owners of the production facilities from destitute employees and work from its product, but ensures that the high performers in the company, from the down-to-earth boss to the unskilled worker, work towards a common, at least fairly shared prosperity, however such justice may be established. Seen in this way, the capitalist becomes a “true entrepreneur” who shares a willingness to work with his employees:

“The motivation of true entrepreneurs, as Schumpeter already knew, is different from that of capitalists. Entrepreneurs create companies, work in them and make them great. Capitalists invest money and want to see a return.” (p. 293)

On the stage of Wagenknecht’s melodrama, all the figures of capitalist society come together in a great togetherness. “True entrepreneurs,” “solid bankers” are just as much a part of the cast as the “good care giver,” the “ordinary worker” and “good engineers and motivated skilled workers” who are once again allowed to believe in the basic lie of social advancement earned through one’s own hard work – only the “rags to riches” story (see p. 52) seems somewhat exaggerated to Wagenknecht. The gap between rich & poor should just not become too wide if everyone contributes to the common good and thus to a we-feeling in their place in the hierarchy of fair disparities.

How wonderful things could be if it weren’t for the fall from grace of globalization, the rule of big money, and the invasion of the “locusts” and the monopolies that distort fair competition. In order for capitalism and its society to be straightened out again, the state – in global terms: the nation state – would be called upon to intervene to rein it in. Ultimately, capitalism needs to be “contained and strongly regulated” for its own good (p. 282). Wagenknecht consistently confers this idealism, in which she imputes her own moralistic conception of the economy as its actual purpose, to the state. This is the only way she can come to the unworldly, negative conclusion: “The state is giving up on itself.” (p. 280) And, scandalously, this is exactly in the spirit of the lifestyle left, with its affinity for neoliberalism.

*

A strong state. Under its people-friendly direction, nothing but hard-working, highly decent, home-loving people, where everyone knows where they belong. Where people are among themselves, supported by a solidarity system with few foreigners. No freeloaders at the top or bottom. Where one can finally unabashedly profess a sense of national unity again. With this invocation of a national morality, Wagenknecht recommends that her left-wing companions, who have strayed from the true path, return to their social mission. This consists not only of the cynicism of coping with the social question, i.e. in containing the effects of exploitation and poverty from the standpoint of the state, thus in defusing the danger of division – or even class struggle – for the nation. Wagenknecht makes this cynicism, the national functionality of social provisions and considerations, the working class’s home in capitalist society, as their very own need and actual good right that the left should satisfy. We-feeling, community spirit, and social cohesion in capitalism: this is – and not just “perhaps” – what she means by overcoming capitalism:

“With the dissolution of this sense of this we-feeling and the increasing distance between different population groups – whether through immigration, growing social inequality, left-liberal identity politics or a combination of all of these – the most important prerequisite for a policy that can at least tame capitalism, and perhaps even overcome it in the long term, is therefore also disappearing.” (p. 219)

Footnotes

[1] The author includes parts of the Greens, climate activists, anti-racists among this left-liberal milieu... She accuses her own party, Die Linke, and in particular the so-called “movement left,” of opportunism, of having played up their issues at the expense of their social profile. Oskar Lafontaine recently left the party on the same grounds.

[2] When Wagenknecht launched the “Aufstehen!” initiative in 2018 to overcome the division in society and not leave the dissatisfaction of those who had fallen behind to the right, she was still very cautious about accusing her party and naming culprits in general. However, the party was already very displeased at the time with this deliberately cross-party commitment by its then parliamentary group leader. For criticism of their call to “Stand up!” see “A. Gauland: Populismus! – S. Wagenknecht: Aufstehen! Zwei Bewegungen der missachteten Anständigen – ein Vergleich” [“A. Gauland: Populism! – S. Wagenknecht: Stand up! Two movements of the disregarded decent people – a comparison] in GegenStandpunkt 4-18 [not translated].

[3] This is the title of the first chapter.

[4] Under the heading of “sealing themselves off from those at the bottom and the return of educational privilege,” Wagenknecht classifies the betrayal that these left-liberal, “high-earning urban academics” (p. 81) commit in the fight for social justice as a historical-materialist tendency: “The fact that privileged classes, which emerged in phases of social openness and whose members can largely look back on biographies of social advancement, at some point try to become an exclusive milieu themselves, passing on their privileges only to their own descendants, is not a new process, but rather the norm historically.” (p. 87)

[5] The lifestyle left cannot please Wagenknecht: if they make demands that are not too high but easily achievable, they are – see also the gypsy sauce – all too cheap: “Raising the minimum wage or introducing a wealth tax for the top ten thousand naturally provokes far more resistance than changing the language of the authorities, talking about migration as enriching or setting up another chair for gender theory.” (p. 39)

[6] The politician, who was once decried as a communist ideologue-in-chief, has now removed the concept proletariat from her vocabulary, as well as working class or even class struggle, because she is of the opinion that the exploited class should be integrated into society in an acceptable way. The outdated vocabulary is reminiscent of a division in society that is rooted in the system, and Wagenknecht wants nothing to do with it.

[7] The author titles the first part of her two-part work “The divided society and its friends,” whereby today’s leftists have inherited the unfortunate legacy of neoliberalism: “There are some differences between neoliberalism and left-liberalism, but also major overlaps. Both ... are not only compatible with economic liberalism and globalization in principle, but legitimize precisely this political agenda.” (p. 92) And the register of sins applies to both: “The demands for mobility and flexibility collide with the desire to establish a stable family, as well as with attachment to one’s homeland and local roots. There was also no longer any room in the new narrative for religious faith, the appreciation of traditions, educated middle-class humanism or the frame of reference of a nation.” (p. 95)

[8] In this context, Wagenknecht is full of praise for the trade unions, which have incessantly demanded and fought for a restrictive immigration policy for the German workers they represent.

[9] She claims: “The more left-wing someone wants to be, the more radical their demands in this regard, even to the extreme position that everyone should have the right to move to any country in the world and not only have access to the labor market but also be entitled to all available social benefits.” (p. 56)

[10] The educated woman knows that the exact opposite fiction is also popular in the science she is attempting, following the same pattern – one reads into history or society the principle that one wants to extract from it. Where homo does not want anything to do with togetherness and appears as an egoist or bad wolf, she simply rejects this theory with the image of humans that she likes: humans are “shaped by the legacy of having lived as social beings in communities for centuries and having learned how important fair cooperation is for their own survival.” (p. 209)

[11] The fact that this critic of capitalism does not base her criticism on the economic purpose as such, but on an idealistic standard, also becomes clear in another context:

“An economy whose central drive is to turn money into more money is based on that cold cost-profit calculation for which tradition and custom, religion and morality, are only disruptive obstacles.” (p. 213)

For a detailed critique of Wagenknecht’s analysis of capital, including her miracle recipes for curing its shortcomings, see also: “Sahra Wagenknechts Hit. ‚Freiheit statt Kapitalismus‘ – damit der ‚kreative Sozialismus‘ den Kapitalismus wieder auf Vordermann bringt!” [“Sahra Wagenknecht’s Hit. ‘Freedom instead of capitalism’ – so that ‘creative socialism’ brings capitalism back into shape!”] in GegenStandpunkt 1-12 [not translated].

[12] Speaking of digital industry: the author sees “surveillance capitalism” at work here, in which “internet monopolists” undermine democratic free speech and culture: “As a result, there is less and less debate with opposing views, which undermines genuine democratic competition of opinions as well as a general we-feeling” (p. 320). Hard to believe: in the end, everything somehow boils down to an attack on the “we-feeling.”