Actually, the damage is obvious: During the past twenty years, Hartz IV was invented, health care slashed, the retirement provision privatized and the nursing emergency settled. Then the mantra, incessantly repeated: The home is threatened, refugees out, borders tight, if the strangers were not, it would be better for everyone. It is always amazing how well-groomed feelings of oppression and imminent loss of status - justified or summoned - redirect to the weaker. In the fantasy of a homogeneous people, the contrasts between the ruling and the dominated are overcome. And groups are defined that you can despise.
The left answer to the rapid march to the right is not yet striking. If one believes journalist Julia Fritzsche, this is because "left-wing narratives" are not convincing at the moment. "Left" today is mainly associated with minority politics. And if it is not linked to the social issue, it is compatible with the neo-liberal promise: as long as one works and spends one's self, one can be anything. However, anyone who does not want to or is unable to exhaust themselves threatens to fall into the abyss - whether black or white, male or female, queer or straight.
An adequate left-wing response to neoliberalism as well as to the discourse of the New Right is not, however, in the adoption of minority politics, but, writes Fritzsche in her book "Deep red and radically colorful", in a policy that combines both - "manifold self chosen collective identities "and ideas" for a new economic order ". Life and work must be geared to needs rather than profitability, that is the simple central requirement. This is neither compatible with the neoliberal nor the right discourse.
imago / Seeliger
Demonstration of striking nursing staff at the Berlin Charité
"Deep red and radically colorful" exemplifies the attempts of nurses at the Virchow-Klinikum in Berlin to win colleagues for a strike, and combines the nursing emergency with the idea of the "Care Revolution": the economization and simultaneous devaluation of feminine connotations is criticized and demands a remuneration that is based on the social value of work.
The experiences of social struggles
One quality of Julia Fritzsche's work is that it combines social struggles with considerations of a different economy. The struggle of a Colombian village against the attempts of a coal-mining company to land-take is linked with considerations on municipal organized economies and climate protection, the work of a Munich refugee initiative with the idea of solidarity cities, the Slut Walk demonstration with an idea of queerness, the more than one itself Selected sexual identity means because it torpedoed the "capitalist division of labor".
"Deep red and radically colorful" is about the experiences of social struggles, out of which something like a contemporary left narrative should develop. If you have demolished several night shifts in a row plus overtime in a broken-down hospital, you can think about a concept such as the four-in-one perspective again very different. Then the social division of sixteen hours of waking hours into four times four hours for paid work, family work, community work and time for personal development may no longer be just utopian, but also quite reasonable and worth considering.
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Julia Fritzsche
Deep red and radically colorful: For a new left narrative (Nautilus pamphlet)
Publishing company:
Edition Nautilus GmbH
Pages:
192
Price:
EUR 16,00
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The phrase "left narrative" in the book title suggests that the fight wins, who is rhetorically better placed. The use of Elisabeth Wehling's controversially discussed framing concept is fortunately not very decisive. An elaborate plan that dictates how the left should rhetorically establish spares "deep red and radically colorful" the reader.
Rather, the book ties in with its search for the tales of social experiences. "How many areas of life do we want to subordinate to capitalist logic - all, few or none?" Asks Fritzsche in principle. The answer is then rather vague. The necessary changes concern "at least the provision of general interest, such as health, education, nutrition, housing, energy supply and mobility - profit-oriented industries and a few Rolex watches may well end up in dire straits".
"Deep red and radially colorful" can be read as a sketch of problems, possibilities and ideas in times of ever more expansive right metapolitik. The impression that it is not about the systemic question, but about "pushing back capitalist principles on many levels" is imminent; supplemented by the knowledge of how essential it is to be different without fear.
However, Julia Fritzsche's book leaves open how the structurally anchored compulsion to profit maximization can be leveraged. In other words, that has to be decided out of the movement.