Political geography lecture: Social forms,spatial forms,and the New Right. Celebrating Capital at 150 and explaining the rise of the AfD

The federal elections of September 2017 that swept the authoritarian-nationalist political party with leanings toward the extreme right, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), into the national parliament marked a significant change in Germany's political landscape. The platform of the AfD is built on three pillars: nationalism/racism, sexism/homo-/transphobia, and neoliberal market-radicalism/utilitarianism. This lecture proposes a form-analytical approach to historical-geographical materialism that pays proper attention to both the social forms and the spatial forms of capitalism to shed light on how the principle of abstract equality is challenged by the AfD in a selective manner within these three pillars. Bringing together two branches of Marxist theory—form analysis in the tradition of the West German state derivation debate and Marxist theories of the production of space—it argues that the socials forms of capitalism are productive in that they both veil and make processable the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, but that this productivity faces substantial obstacles that are inscribed into the spatial organization of capitalism, i.e., its spatial forms—namely territory, scale, and (a reactionary understanding of) place. Drawing on these theoretical deliberations, the three pillars of the AfD platform are discussed. Although the abstract equality of market individuals is fully embraced by the AfD and its constituency, women and L.G.B.T.Q.I. people are denied the full realization of the potential of the principle of abstract equality. In particular, nonmembers of the ethnically and territorially defined demos are denied abstract equality altogether. Taken together, this lecture argues that the way in which the social forms of capitalism face substantial obstacles in the spatial forms within which they are organized helps to explain why a party with one core theme—a nationalist and racist position on migration, refugees, and Islam—can be so successful in the current conjuncture.