With an almost full auditorium in the new C-building, the series of events on the topic of "Social Issues" kicked off on Tuesday, October 15, 2024, with a lecture by Frankfurt sociologist Prof. Dr. Stephan Lessenich. After a brief welcome by Prof. Dr. Immacolata Amodeo from the Ernst Bloch Centre in Ludwigshafen, which helped launch the event series as a cooperation partner of the university, and Prof. Dr. Jörg Reitzig from the Department of Social and Health Care, who moderated the evening, Lessenich presented his thoughts on the "insanity of prevailing conditions". In a concentrated and sophisticated manner, he covered the contradictory relationship between capitalism and democracy, the dwindling opportunities to collectively deal with existential challenges beyond their ideological treatment ("displacement - displacement - negation") and the consequences for our present. And if ever there was an epoch, Lessenich explained, in which the political-economic possibilities of self-stabilization of 'democratic capitalism' were exhausted, then it is the present one. Against the backdrop of problems such as the ongoing global warming, late capitalism is mutating into "terminal capitalism". Indifferent ways of dealing with the crisis at the level of everyday life or government action and the prevailing "technosolutionism" threaten to reinforce each other and lead to a social normalization of the climate catastrophe. According to his diagnosis, the more the unresolved problems emerge as contradictions, the more physical violence and armed conflicts become a "last resort mechanism" and a defining signature of the times.
The subsequent discussion was just as high-level as the lecture, with numerous committed contributions and questions, for example on the theoretical connection to the tasks and possibilities of social work. From the organizers' point of view, it was a successful start. The "Social Issues" event series will continue on Thursday, November 28 at 6 p.m. on the topic "Against the Gap between Talk and Action - How Much Civil Disobedience Does the Socio-Ecological Transformation Need?" (Dr. Jörg Alt) - then at the Ernst Bloch Center.
Text & image: HWG LU
