Anger among the population: Anyone who comes late...

Among the sayings that almost amounted to aphorisms, Adorno's remark was always one of my favorites: It is often claimed that "only those who can propose something better instead of what is being criticized can criticize." And: “By imposing the positive, criticism is tamed from the outset and deprived of its vehemence.” Anyone who turns against the new fascists and their incitement to strife and violent fantasies, against the stirring up of emotions and mobilizing passions, is neither subject to a political obligation nor an intellectual imperative to present the solution straight away.

It is certainly not enough to describe our reality as sharply and as precisely as possible, but radical criticism, which is initially nothing other than unsparing criticism, has its own justification. Simply because the second step, how to get out of the malaise, necessarily presupposes the first step, namely understanding the malaise.

Gaps in representation and the feeling of no longer being represented make people receptive to ultra-right narratives; fear and experiences of decline increase this receptivity. Anyone caught in the maelstrom is transformed by the hourly bombardment of these narratives and, in extreme cases, agitated into paranoid desire for revenge and revenge fantasies. If a society is completely infected, the poison spreads throughout all capillaries.

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The ground for this has been prepared by the mood of struggle in which the neoliberal ego ideology puts our societies: If the world is described as an arena of “everyone against everyone” and solidarity is undermined, then a cult of harshness is spreading. The old saying that anyone who doesn't want to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism has since degenerated into a platitude - but here it claims to be correct.

The “positive individualization” on the upper rungs of the social ladder is reflected on the floors below as depressive individualization: a feeling of being left alone. In the formulation that you hear everywhere from Detroit to Gelsenkirchen, from East London to Halle an der Saale, almost word for word: “I only care about myself anymore.” It is not presented proudly, not in the sound of modernist “personal responsibility”, but in the tone of fatalism. “Change” means at the top that you can start a start-up, and at the bottom it means you get laid off.

Where fatalism and negativism spread, anger and justified anger grow. Pollsters know that many people are angry today, far beyond the circle of right-wing extremist voters. What distinguishes the supporters of right-wing extremism from the others is that the anger, the resentment, the rage have become second nature to the former.

But there is also the other anger. Many people feel threatened. And they feel defenseless. If the rent is 30 percent higher than it was five years ago. When you can no longer get affordable housing anyway. When the investor rabble drives the residents out of their cities. When shopping becomes 30 percent more expensive when you know that the climate catastrophe will undermine the basis of life. The potential for resistance is growing - and this resistance is being articulated in many places.

It expresses itself in self-defense, in riots, in uprisings, in neighborhood actions, in loud and quiet rebellion against the right-wing education in cruelty, against the looters, the new fascists and the oligarchs, against the end-time prophets and the unscrupulous tech bosses who are stealing the future from us and our children. The call of this rebellion is already ringing faintly in our ears: “You will not steal our future.”

A few years ago, the US sociologist Eric Klinenberg described in his book “Palaces for the People” what holds solidarity-based societies together. The starting point for his studies was an extraordinary heat wave in Chicago in the 1990s, which led to extreme excess mortality. At first glance, everything seemed to follow the expected patterns: excess mortality was low in the rich districts, and dramatic in the poor districts.

But as soon as he looked at the data more closely, he realized that in some poor neighborhoods the excess mortality was stark, while in others it was not detectable at all. And this difference made him curious. Klinenberg soon discovered that resilience, the ability to help one another, was high in those underprivileged areas where the social infrastructure worked. Where there were local businesses where people knew each other. Where there is social trust, where people ask for help or take care of others. Where the social infrastructure did not function, people died alone at home.

The functioning social infrastructure includes public libraries, beautiful parks and playgrounds, i.e. all sorts of community places where people of different status and different origins, lifestyles and cultures meet. When there are places like this, the community works. If there are no such things, she suffers.

People live longer where there are nice public libraries. Social infrastructure is not only material, it is above all immaterial because it is concentrated in the social threads that are woven between people. Work on the community must also promote activist resistance, incite rebellion, and give anger a voice. So it cannot be purely social work. If you understand this too late, life will punish you.