An AfD leader’s nod to an Israeli arms firm reveals how ethnic cleansing becomes a growth sector.
By Hüseyin Dogru
The AfD leader on the cusp of power in Saxony Anhalt supports Israeli arms firm setting up shop in his state, as long as it serves the AfD’s “remigration” plan. This matters beyond the unsurprising mutuality of interests between Israeli and German fascism. It tells us something about how the AfD intends to sell ethnic cleansing to German capital, and why the liberal case against it is already failing.
One of the mainstream arguments against the AfD goes like this: Germany’s ageing population means the economy can’t survive without migrant labour. When this is your main problem with mass deportation (ethnic cleansing), not only is it racist, but it’s futile. To see why, you have to start with how capitalism actually works.
Capitalism doesn’t operate according to what’s best for “the economy” in its entirety. Policies that destroy wealth for society as a whole create enormous opportunities for particular fractions of capital. And German capitalism is transforming in one direction: rearmament. As civilian German industry stagnates, military production is expanding. Capital, productive capacity and skilled labour is being repurposed from crisis-stricken civilian sectors towards the guaranteed profits of state military procurement. The car industry is rapidly being absorbed into the arms industry, for example.
This is the context in which the AfD leader, Ulrich Siegmund, made his comments. His remarks on the Israeli arms firm Elbit expose how the AfD intends to articulate remigration not as a cost to German capital, but as a source of demand, and therefore profit, for an expanding security-industrial complex. The AfD’s “remigration” (ethnic cleansing) would require enormous coercive infrastructure. Borders. Detention. Transport. Surveillance. Identification systems. Police technology. Communications. Security personnel. In other words, business contracts.
But none of this can happen in the current political dynamics of courts, demonstrations, civil disobedience and potentially enormous popular resistance. It would require an expansion of the repressive apparatus of the state. Naked fascism. Now that the AfD has demonstrated it is capable of taking power, Siegmund’s comments are right on cue. By placing “remigration,” internal security and military/security equipment within the same vision, he’s saying the AfD is ready for the embrace of Germany’s capitalists.
There is a second layer to this. Capital doesn’t only require labour, it needs cheap and cheaper labour. Labour that is “disciplined” (terrorized) and deprived of bargaining power has many benefits. “Remigration” would fundamentally change the balance of forces between labour and capital. Mass deportation, precarious residency and permanent fear doesn’t eliminate migrant labour, it pushes it underground into the informal economy, where exploitation is more brutal. The state would violently exclude sections of migrant labour while producing a larger population whose insecurity makes them exceptionally vulnerable to exploitation. Any legal rights that exist on paper won’t be exercised under the threat of terror and deportation.
For the most predatory sections of capital, this is an opportunity. Below Germany’s regulated labour market grows the black market of cash wages, subcontracting, bogus self-employment, and workers terrified of speaking out. The expanded apparatus of state repression thereby creates the conditions for even cheaper migrant labour. Repression and profit feed each other.
Today major labour unions oppose the AfD. But with a “liberal” government setting the military and political wheels in motion for the terrifying vision of the AfD, this too can change. A VW worker whose factory is threatened with closure will have their complicity secured with the promise that they can manufacture military or security equipment under state contract. Thereby the constituency for militarisation, and ethnic cleansing abroad and at home, expands.
This is why the question isn’t whether fascism makes Germany richer. It’s who becomes richer through fascism, and who can be made dependent on it along the way.
German capitalism is in crisis. Civilian industry is being militarised. Discontent and the prospect of unrest is growing. The AfD is telling Germany’s capitalist class what it intends to do with all three.
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