Social justice and AfD: The social question, re-posed

After the election in Saxony-Anhalt, I read a sentence from many colleagues: Now we really have to ask the social question. And my first reaction is: yes. Naturally. Wealth is distributed extremely unequally, inheritances cause biographies to drift apart, rents become the dominant cost factor, and public infrastructure falls into disrepair.

So: let's ask the social question. I just notice that something about it bothers me. Maybe it's just conceptual pedantry, but by the social issue we surprisingly often mean the financial one. Who has how much? Who earns how much? Who owns what? All important questions. But are they really the only social questions?

Because “social” refers to something much bigger: how people live together; who receives recognition; who feels like they belong, who doesn’t; which lifestyles are considered normal; what status someone has and what happens if this is actually or supposedly lost. So maybe I'm just misunderstanding the term. But when did the social shrink so much to the economic?

The strange thing is that even harsh criticism of capitalism remains close to its logic. Work gets a price, time gets a price, attention anyway. The criticism responds: This is unfairly distributed. True. But if we describe social conditions primarily in terms of who gets what share of something that can be expressed in money, haven't we already accepted that this is the measure of human well-being?

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This is of course an unfair objection. Property means power. A billionaire can advance his interests in ways not available to a geriatric nurse. It would be silly to brush aside such differences by pointing out that people ultimately have feelings that now determine their choices.

Perhaps that is why there is a great temptation to understand cultural conflicts as manifestations of material conditions. Competition, fear of relegation or differentiation can certainly ultimately be linked to capitalist conditions. Perhaps. I'm just stumbling a little bit over this “in the end”.

Because if you zoom out far enough, almost every social phenomenon can be traced back to a fundamental structure. The only question is whether this makes the explanation any better. Or whether at some point the opposite happens and we lose sight of the very level at which people actually perceive their world. After all, a broken railway line does not necessarily mean that refugees will be rejected. No hostility towards queer people because of a low income. There is no longing for traditional gender roles from a closed savings bank branch.

Between material experience and political reaction lies an interpretation. Someone needs to explain why I'm feeling worse, why my surroundings are changing, who's to blame. And probably even more important: who this ominous “we” actually is from whom something was supposedly taken away. Such interpretations do not arise in our heads alone.

We have outsourced a significant part of social communication to digital spaces that belong to companies and were not built to facilitate communication. Attention can be monetized, and conflict creates attention. This does not mean that platforms invented racism, misogyny or nationalism. That would almost be reassuring because then you would just have to turn it off. It's not that simple. They encounter insults and prejudices that are already there and reinforce them.

This is precisely what shows how difficult it is to separate economics and culture. The fact that attention is sold and outrage can be a business model is itself an economic logic. It encounters cultural conflicts, reinforces them and changes political identities. These in turn influence elections and material circumstances. So it's not just about which story about social problems is the most convincing. It's also about which stories a system that deserves our attention promotes.

At this point it becomes difficult to understand the rise of the AfD exclusively or even primarily as a distribution issue. Of course, material insecurity plays a role. Anyone who experiences that the bus no longer runs, the doctor no longer accepts patients (or that he no longer exists within a 30 kilometer radius) and the children move away does not need a lecture about the fact that Germany is still a rich country. But people can also feel like losers without having become poorer.

A man can experience that women claim power more naturally and see this as a loss of his own status. Heterosexuals can perceive the visibility of other ways of life as a loss of an order in which their own was taken for granted. People in rural areas can get the impression that urban lifestyles dominate and that they make fun of theirs. One does not have to consider these experiences of loss to be legitimate in order to acknowledge that they exist.

Perhaps “revanchism” is even more appropriate than “fear of relegation”. Not just the desire to rise again economically, but the longing to be back in a place socially that was taken for granted. Country versus city, men versus women, heterosexuals versus queers: rough comparisons, but conflicts that an additional bus route alone will not solve.

This does not mean that the answer is now simply “more cultural policy”. Because at the same time something strange happens. On many material issues, politicians have been explaining for years why they can only act to a limited extent. No money. No growth. Debt brake. There is always something. In cultural conflicts, movement is easier to achieve because they allow conflict without necessarily losing wealth or economic power.

This is good for a party like the AfD. It doesn't need a complicated answer about how care should be financed and wealth distributed, but rather a story: You were once someone. Then others came. Different people, different elites, different values. They took something from you. We'll give it back to you. Economically this explains little, but politically it can have an effect. And outrage is easier to convey than a financing concept for care.

So: Anyone who ignores material inequality and narrows politics to representation is rightly asked what a diverse board of directors brings to the cleaners. Conversely, anyone who believes that higher wages will make racism and authoritarian desires disappear is making people into surprisingly simple creatures. Both should not be played off against each other.

Maybe that's why we don't need less social questioning. Maybe we need more of it. A social question that takes wealth and income just as seriously as dignity, recognition and belonging. It asks who has power, but also why people accept certain power relationships. This asks who organizes the public and what incentives work in it. Which does not declare every cultural need to be progressive, but equally does not reinterpret every reactionary need into a misunderstanding of an actually economic conflict.

And above all a social question that asks: Where do we actually want to go? The promise of permanently growing prosperity no longer holds water, and the idea that one's own children will automatically be better off is fragile. How do you create a positive picture of the future when the future itself increasingly appears to be a threat? If climate change raises the question, which parts of our current lives actually have a future? Perhaps this is an imposition of our times: we should develop a desire for a tomorrow from which we learn that in many ways it could be worse than today.

The right has it easier. Your future is a past that probably never existed. Back to clear conditions. Back to the nation. Back to the supposedly healthy family with mother, father and child. Back to an order in which everyone knew where their place was, which sounds pleasant especially because it is rarely said whose place was pretty low back then. It doesn't have to create a credible future. She simply claims that somewhere behind us there was already a better one.

But what is the counter-narrative? More net from gross will not be enough. Neither does a colorful Germany. Neither of these describes a society in which people enjoy living together.

So maybe my colleagues were completely right. Maybe we finally have to ask the social question again. I'm just not sure if we're making them big enough. Because it may not just be: Who gets how much? But also: Who are we to each other? What do we owe ourselves? Which changes do we want to endure together, which ones we want to push forward, which ones we want to limit? And what does a future look like that not only those who are already among the winners are interested in?

Maybe that would be a start. It's not an answer yet.