Liberalism is Dead, Long Live Bio-Totalitarianism
Societies based on shared trust have been replaced by behavioral management regimes that demand constant censorship
Today we must concede that the long era of liberal capitalism, spanning close to three centuries, is over. What is left is merely its economic form, the profit drive, while its political form – liberal democracy – is in its last gasps. We are not seeing a return of true “feudalism” either, because personal forms of social domination no longer have any political basis. Impersonal social relations are here to stay, not least in the transhumanist agendas that first abolished the idea of the “person” as an autonomous human individual possessing physical and psychological unity before going full horror show with subcutaneously implanted public transport tickets borrowed from a David Cronenberg movie.
To understand what is being lost, it is first important to grasp what the era of liberal capitalism was based on: a normative assumption of trust and civility between strangers, which had come to seem like the natural state of society but was in fact a relatively recent phenomenon. In pre-modern history, tribalism, zero-sum competition, and clan feuds were the norm.
We are again seeing a return to tribalist mistrust centered around the fight for economic resources today. The neoliberal era (1979-2020) established a new consensus on the sectarian ideology of “identity,” i.e. with obligations for employees to partake in various “bias” trainings and for employers to introduce DEI standards, which has been further consolidated by the more radical biopolitical totalitarianism of the Covid regime that has replaced it (2020- ). The idea that we were defined by this or that identitarian marker rather than in our relation to power and capital proved very useful in a landscape of diminished returns, downsizing, decreasing wages for the working class, and recurring economic crises caused by decades of offshoring, automatization, and incipient digitalization. Amid a new struggle for economic resources touched off by the neoliberal era, the preoccupation with personal identity provides an effective diversion. As the philosopher Robert Pfaller noted in 2016, identity politics become especially useful “when people are simultaneously being stripped of things that will no longer be available to them in the future, such as democratic participation, work and income, education, infrastructure, social security, pensions, or even dignity and elegance.”
The new primacy of identity in a society that seeks to strip individuals of assets in the name of making them happier marks the culmination of a process that began with the Industrial Revolution. Following industrialization, hierarchical feudal arrangements disappeared as the relation between capitalists and workers was regulated by mere monetary exchange – in both the work contract and the capitalist’s own profit interests. No longer a personal King or feudal Lord, but impersonal money became the social glue that held everyone together. The setting free of labor obliterated aristocratic rule while generating a new understanding of civil liberties that was unthinkable under the old order: formal equality before the law, a general right to property, democratic participation, the right to assemble, the beginnings of the freedom of speech and of the press.
The “woke” social consensus of the neoliberal era was not powerful enough on its own to fully divide and depoliticize the entire democratic space. For that to occur required the “state of emergency” introduced by the Covid regime, which successfully built on an elite bias against the masses. Identitarian neoliberals first developed the power of the “implicit bias” theory, which posited that people’s internal attitudes made them dangerous and in need of anti-racism training or some other form of therapeutic-managerial intervention. But this framework was subsequently radicalized by the new bio-surveillance state that arose around Covid into the idea that even my next of kin is a dangerous “virus spreader.” While the regulators pushed for more lockdowns, only heretics dared ask whether the Covid regime’s social distancing, masking, hand disinfection, arm’s length-rules in schools, and new guidelines for how people should have sex, were effective in combating this particular virus. And it did not matter, because it was immensely effective in a different way: forcing compliance. For with these meaningless rules emerged a new virological imperative: “Treat every other person as though they had a contagious and fatal disease.”
Against the background of continuous economic crises, and the emergence of a technocratic algorithm-driven state that has eclipsed the former separation of powers, has emerged a new era of social mistrust. Instead of holding debates in parliaments or public spaces to forge a new social consensus, we are told by experts that viruses, abstractions (“the climate”), wars, domestic terrorism, institutional racism, transphobia, and the ubiquitous “threat from the far right” constitute immediate, life-threatening, no-alternative emergencies that leave no time for disagreement, but demand urgent top-down action by the “experts.” In an environment of constant emergencies that fosters mutual mistrust – everybody can after all be a transphobe, a Covid denier, a Nazi behind their human mask – censorship is bound to thrive almost organically.
When tribalism returns, so does mistrust. Political elites know this and exploit it. Their most powerful tool is censorship, now rebranded in Orwellian Newspeak as an effort to fight disinformation. It is no accident that the punishment for an offense against particular identity groups is persecuted in the harshest way – see Meghan Murphy’s “lifetime” Twitter ban under the site’s former owners for referring to a trans woman as “him.” This is not because tech company CEOs and the FBI are genuinely concerned for the safety of trans people. The point of “being woke” is not caring about “disadvantaged groups,” whom the successive abolition of democratic rights precisely hurts the most. Rather, the aim of the new regime is to regulate every minutia of normal life down to our deepest private behaviors to enforce adherence to social norms which the “experts” alone dictate and control. Like all modes of totalitarian power, it begins with an attack on reason: “We need to abolish free speech in order to save it.”
The nexus between the censoring of (online) speech and institutional regulations of individual behavior is indicative of a larger social transformation: “The question of identity,” according to Pfaller, “arises in all those contexts where the previous distinction between public role and private person, between public and private space, has been liquidated.” This collapse of the distance between “matters of the public” and “private matters” is the hallmark of totalitarian regimes. The very concept of totality demands that formerly private spaces be opened up to external managerial regulation. No more “my body my choice.” That was a liberal slogan that upheld a principle of bodily autonomy that is now obsolete. Nothing and no one can remain autonomous under the new system.
Examples of the reach of this new regime abound. Take, for instance, a Code of Conduct sheet recently circulated by a Digital Rights NGO. The intention was noble: to set a precedent with a distinctly “non-woke” set of guidelines that avoided references to race, sex, or gender. Yet the final product, while superficially anti-woke, still reproduces the larger and even more dystopian system of power relations of which wokeness is only a symptom.
We as members and contributors, pledge to make the participation in our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of any personal characteristic dimension that essentially amplifies differences among people instead of embracing their similarities.
By participating in this activity, we pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, and healthy community.
There is obviously nothing to see here if you are already used to soft-nudging social engineering terms such as “healthy community” or “harassment-free experience” – as though what we should normally expect, absent regulation, is a closed and unwholesome community and continuous harassment. But in fact we should pay particular attention to how widely internalized such newspeak already is. In a perhaps even more disturbing list, the company holds the employees to the following standards.
Act rationally
Demonstrate empathy and kindness towards other people
Be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints and experiences
Give and gracefully accept constructive feedback
Accept responsibility and apologize to those affected by our mistakes and learn from the experience.
Refuse to weaponize others' mistakes
Focus on what is best, not just for us as individuals but for the overall community and project.
The danger of this list lies precisely in its innocuousness. “Demonstrating empathy” and “being respectful of different opinions” are no longer the self-evident basis for reasonably well socialized individuals to go about their everyday encounters. Instead, social behavior has become a regulatory task for external management. The message is clear: no, we cannot trust people to behave in a civilized way. We also want you to think you cannot be safe from irrational behavior. Most of all, we cannot trust that the civilizational project has been a historically organic process of trial-and-error, in which we have found that the best way to live and organize a self-determined life is through mutual trust—by realizing that, as humans, we best survive by trusting one another. The very thing that built civilization in the first place gets undermined by regulating conduct in this way. Distrust becomes institutionalized.
In this sense identitarian politics has no substance at all. It merely has a function: the consolidation of power. By liquidating the necessary distance between the public and the private that allows individuals to develop an autonomous personality independent of institutional requirements or managerial control – and to diminish our expectations of others while doing so – produces conformity. Woke slogans and diversity training do not protect “vulnerable groups,” nor is that what they were designed to do. To the contrary: compliance is so centrally built into its practicality – think of the ritualized obsession with pronouns – that any wrongdoing in the minefield of misgendering will lead to guilt. This is why, in reaching compliance, the reference to “vulnerable groups” is so effective. The authorities reprogramming behavior and language are not to be blamed, but rather your reckless usage of the common idiom.
The new totalitarianism is the result of eroded trust in our fellow humans after decades of social division and the emergence of the depoliticization of public spaces, where debates are replaced with the fetishistic belief in “objective constraints” (the virus, Climate, war). This is fertile ground for divisions between friend and enemy, and between the good, the bad, and the ugly, which gives authoritarian practices such as censorship – the first symptom of a dying civilization – such a good name.
Today, most of us may still implicitly assume that fellow passengers on the bus are not out to kill us. But with the experience of identitarian divisions and new virological imperative, our civilization’s main currency – trust – has suffered. It would be good to remember that without trust – the faith that the other person is just as human as yourself – civilization becomes impossible.
Dr. Elena Louisa Lange is a philosopher based in Switzerland. Her last book is The Conformist Rebellion. Marxist Critiques of the Contemporary Left (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). She writes on Substack at Lawyer's Fees, Beetroot, and Music.
The central argument, that without trust, there can be no civilization, and that we live in an era of institutionalizing mistrust is of course true. That identitarian tribalism under a feudalizing capitalism is a perfect precedent for an expansion of rule, true. That identity politics is a total failure, true. But, to use an untranslatable idiom, du schüttest das Kind mit dem Bade aus.
1. Climate breakdown is not some abstract narrative being pushed by mysterious elites to gain power. It’s a very concrete process that turns out to be *the most devastating* consequence of capitalism. It’s just being used as a precedent to justify an ongoing power accumulation and to help create all kinds of *others*. It’s being co-opted into systemic stabilization in times of looming public anger. That doesn’t affect its being real. The name of the appropriate *measure* in the face of climate breakdown is communism.
2. People had and have all types of reasons to be distrustful of certain other people: they were afraid of being hurt, raped, killed, molested, chased and reduced to a racialized or gendered other by their *master* to have a justification for a power relation. This mistrust is not grounded in some ~woke agenda~ and otherwise unfounded. And yet, people afford trust in others continuously simply because they couldn’t function if they didn’t. Antisociality fosters mistrust and vice versa. The way out is communism.
3. The reemergence of tribalism and and essentialism under liberal dystopia is horrible and its simplistic, antisocial and enjoyable appeal is a huge problem for any emancipatory, universalist, left project. As the liberal-leftist »answer« to forms of oppression and exploitation, it merely completes an essentialist, anti-universalist and anti-emancipatory circle of endless culture war. But to start bashing the »disadvantaged« as the supposed new masters is frankly delusional and falls back far behind it’s initial line of critique. It also produces its own brand of tribalism that is no less dumb. Die Kritik der Kritik wird hier vorkritisch. We must not forget Schernikau.
Neoliberalism was the counterrevolution to '68, the rise of neofeudal-extractivist capitalism and moralist censorship is not so much a counterrevolution butane least a massive blow to whatever is left of politics in general. Truly truly dark times. But the self-dismantling of the left is just being sped up by whiny antiwokeness. Tragic!