FRANZ SEGBERS
Franz Segbers, born August 8, 1949 in Gelsenkirchen, is a German theologian. He studied catholic theology, pedagogy and the social sciences at the University of Munster. He was a social or industrial pastor in Frankfurt up to 1985. Out of protest against the repression of liberation theology, he withdrew from the Roman Catholic Church in 1986. He was a professor of social ethics at the Philipps-University in Marburg from 2004. He has urged a just distribution of paid work and is a shining example of social enlightenment and progressive theology. His website offers scores of essays, lectures and books.
Segbers is engaged in the struggle against neoliberal globalization and works with Marxist categories in a theological criticism of capitalism as a religion. The future of work and globalization on the background of Christian social ethics are two of his research interests.
These essays were translated by Marc Batko. The cover design is by Nick Caya.
Marc Batko @2018CONTENTS
1. Poverty Returns with Misguided Policy
2. Work and Human Rights
3. Forgive us our Debts
4. Democracy and the Social State
5. Capitalism as a Religion
6. Capitalism in the Faith Crisis
7. The Great Ecumene against Capitalism
8. Social Justice and the Sacred Nature of the Person
1. POVERTY RETURNS WITH MISGUIDED POLICY
By Franz Segbers[This article published on May 12, 2011, is translated abridged from the German on the Internet. Up to 2014, Dr. Segbers was a professor at the University of Marburg.]
When you hear the word poverty, what picture do you have? Is it the beggar, the unemployed Hartz IV recipient or the woman, the single parent taking care of her children? Who comes to your mind?
Poverty in Germany strikes the long-term unemployed engineer, the academically trained single parent, the factory- and service person slaving away, the deregulated subcontracted worker, the creative and precarious small- or Internet entrepreneur and parts of the core personnel in businesses. Very normal pensioners stand in line at the soup kitchens. Poverty extends to the middle classes and our communities that for a long while were not stricken by poverty.
"I was not really described as poor." Elisabeth is a single parent. She lives with her two children in a small apartment on the outskirts of Frankfurt. She has a part-time job that she supplements with Hartz IV (radical German welfare reform that combined unemployment assistance and income support, drastically reduced the duration of benefits and was ruled in violation of civil rights by the German Constitutional Court). She has slightly more than 900 euros. Is she poor? No, she says. "We have a tight budget but we aren't starving. When the children need new things, I get money from my parents…" She has no prospect of a full-time job…
There are many Elisabeths in Germany. Every eighth person has to manage with an income below the subsistence level. European statistics set the mark at 60% of the median income of the country. Whoever has less is defined as poor. Three groups are particularly afflicted by poverty: unemployed at 54%, single parents at 40% and migrants at 27%. Those are nationwide numbers; the Berlin numbers are always higher. But poverty is different than income poverty or lack of money. There is no objective definition of poverty. Poverty means fellow persons have to live in miserable housing, have low-paying work, can hardly feed themselves and suffer with poorer access to education. This undersupply is largely a consequence of income poverty. The more or the less a rich society is ready to hand over part of its wealth to combat the plight of fellow citizens, the more or the less poverty exists in a society. Poverty is the exclusion of people from the possibilities and resources of a society. Why are they excluded? Who excludes them?
Poverty is returning. That must be our first discovery when we speak about poverty in Germany. Once it was fought and became a marginal problem. Why is it returning? For a long while, there was the firm belief that life goes forward and we live in an elevator society. Our children will be better off. That was the motto when I was growing up. This picture of the elevator society where everyone would be prosperous is not reality any more. Everyone is not on an upward course any more. The picture has turned upside down. While some are going upward, others are going downward. A Lord's Prayer society has replaced the elevator society. The formerly secure middle class at its outskirts has long been eroding. Children with good education can not find good jobs and work their way from one traineeship to the next and one temporary job to the next.
In the 1980s, unemployment was the main reason for poverty. In the 1990s, child poverty moved into the center of attention. Since the turn of the millennium, work is the main reason for poverty. Now poverty gnaws in the situations of many families who are counted in the middle class. Why is that? Why is poverty returning and why is the number of the poor increasing – and also the number of the rich? Why is the middle class shriveling?
The poor are the first ones who suffer from a false or misguided economic and political policy. Economic and financial crisis on one hand the crises of the social state are two sides of one and the same coin of a flawed economic and social policy. A policy according to the motto "Less state and more market" has failed. That was the EKD's (Evangelical church in Germany) theme in its word on the global economic- and financial crisis of June 2010. In its Foreword to the memorandum, Wolfgang Huber, chairperson of the EKD, said: "A new era or chronology has begun. We speak of the time after the crisis as twenty years ago in Germany after the turn… The call for a strong state can suddenly be heard where privatization and deregulation were heralded as bringers of economic prosperity."
The financial market crisis has not ended by any means – it has only shifted. It has become a crisis of the public budget. The crisis costs should now be shifted to the weaker and the poor and not be assumed by the profiteers of the crisis, the banks, the speculators and the wealthy. The German government has made it unmistakably clear from whom it will get the money to finance the financial crisis. The "austerity package" of over 80 billion euros altogether will result in more poverty. There can be no talk of social justice as long as Germany represents a tax haven for heirs, speculators and the super-rich.
The tax revenues are rising again. The question is: who pays for the state and its tasks? Consumers and dependent employees finance the state. However, owners of capital are spared. The extent of their exemption is amazing… This discrepancy has a system. Like the Black-Red coalition, the Red-Green coalition ensures that consumers above all pay for the expenditures of the state by paying the sales tax, the energy tax, the lotto tax, the tobacco tax or the insurance tax. On the other hand, the taxes on profits and incomes are constantly falling – and recently only amounted to 39.2% of state revenue. This shift is dramatic since everyone pays the consumer taxes – whether poor or rich. Officially
taxation in Germany should be according to output. The technical term is "progression." However progressive income taxes are actually becoming increasingly insignificant. The tax reforms of Red-Green and Black-Red were not without consequences. Public poverty rose when the top tax rate fell from 53% to 42% and owners of capital only had to pay a 25% compensation tax on their interests and dividends.
The empty public treasuries are politically caused and are not natural phenomena. For years, the financial- and budgetary policy relied on tax reduction…
The consolidation of the budget in view of massive state indebtedness is strategically instrumentalized for "the absolutely necessary" reorganization of the social state. The revenue side is not a theme since budget revitalization is declared the pressing goal. Social-political reforms for the whole society are made plausible by pointing to the empty treasuries. The practical restraint – saving or economizing – is imperative and prevails at the end. So a policy of empty treasuries is staged through rigorous revenue cuts.
The existence of millions of people was threatened and their jobs and social security destroyed. Many generations will have to bear the costs and the interest burdens. But the financial crisis also led to an incredible enrichment of the actors of finance capitalism. In 2010, the hedge-fund manager John Paulson earned $5 billion. Paulson earned $2.4 million an hour... A society with only one John Paulson is degenerate and feudalist. In 2010, the top 25 hedge-fund managers "earned" more than $22 billion. More dividends were poured out in 2011 than in 2010. Nearly all DAX-companies paid their investors very generously… Keeping a tighter rein on hedge-funds was ended by the lobbyists of the finance industry. The financial market transactions tax is still a utopia – like a stronger regulation of the finance system or even the crisis causal agents sharing in the crisis costs.
What we experience is not only an economic crisis that can be ended like a disturbance. We face an economic-, social-political and ethical orientation crisis. When we first identify this crisis and its causes, we can also properly see the problem of poverty.
The previous political-economic concepts "More market - less state," deregulation, privatization and liberalization have failed.
The head of Deutsche Bank Ackermann confesses to having changed from Saul to Paul: "I do not believe in the self-healing powers of the market any more." Thus Ackermann has broken away from the faith he preached for years – as if the pope could fall from the catholic faith! Reversing direction is vital. Admitting a mistake is not enough. Such social inequality has long been regarded as economically dynamicizing. Distributionjustice was taboo. What is the result? Since 1998, the number of millionaires doubled to 800,000 and rose again in the time of the financial crisis. Millionaires do not know any crisis. But there are simultaneously more and more poor in a rich society.
The state that first said it was poor and weak and then was made weak should now help out and step into the breach. The weakening of the social state, the social insecurity, the
impoverishment of people, and the financial crisis are results of a false misguided policy that has failed.
POVERTY IS POLITICALLY INTENDED AND ECONOMICALLY CAUSED AND IS NOT A NATURAL PHENOMENON
Poverty in a rich country is the result of political decisions and is not a natural phenomenon. Poverty is produced. It is not made by the poor even if responsibility is shifted to them. Income poverty is the end on a scale of income conditions whose other end is formed by wealth. Therefore we cannot speak of poverty and be silent about wealth.
The Federal Republic of Germany finds itself at a critical stage of wealth development. Germany's wealth has never been distributed more unjustly. The wealth distribution from the bottom and the middle to the top accelerated in the last years according to a study published in January 2009 by the DIW. According to this study, the richest 1% of the population possessed 23% of the wealth in Germany while the lower half of the population had no assets and 10% only held debts.
This inverted distribution has structural and political causes and is not a natural phenomenon. What causes could be named?
The first cause is the deregulation policy of the last three decades accompanied by the promise that the self-healing powers of the market were the best control instrument for social development. The consequences were the "achievers" earned more, wages fell and social benefits had to be slashed. The governments were not strong enough or willing to resist the pressure of the international finance markets. The deregulation of the social state and the deregulation of the finance markets are two sides of the same coin.
Politics has favored the rich:
the property tax was rescinded,
the profits of the "grasshoppers" were made tax-free,
And the top tax rates and business taxes were lowered.
The second cause is the social reforms. Agenda 2010 and the Harts laws intensified the inequality in the lower income sector. Unemployment benefits II forces the majority of recipients of unemployment assistance below the subsistence level. The reforms deformed the social solidarity and individualized the social risks. The social state was dismantled and the system broken. In the economic crisis, the dismantled social state severely impacts people. The damaged social state no longer fulfills its function of protecting citizens from the uncertainty of the market. The social state that was slandered so irresponsibly and permanently dismantled is needed more urgently than ever. Cutting
or eliminating the social state benefits and services and deregulation of the economy are two sides of one and the same coin.
The third cause is the weakening of the unions and collective bargaining. There will be a fair distribution when the unions first gain a fair share of the social domestic product…
These three main causes were provoked by financial market capitalism. This special form of the development of capitalism consists in weakening and reducing marketlimiting institutions. Stock markets with the trading of fictional capital are the real control center of finance market capitalism. Businesses are capital investments n the hands of shareholders. Consequently, managers only serve the interests of shareholders. The interests of the workforce, dependent employees, customers, the public authority and the interest in preserving the natural environment do not play any role or only a microscopic role. The financial markets put pressure on the businesses so the fewest possible taxes, the lowest possible wages and the least possible social- and environmental fees are paid. Flexible employees become a maneuverable mass serving the profit goal while the capital profit rate is fixed at 16, 18 or even 25% despite the crisis. Mammoth financial assets acted like a fuel for the financial markets. This money seeks ever new investment possibilities in the casino and puts the social state under pressure.
Stagnating mass incomes were the backside of the rising income- and wealth concentration… The partial privatization of the social security system and vital necessities, the public health system and nursing care expanded the investment spectrum on the financial markets. Everything becomes a means to profitably invest money and earn a living.
MONEY HAS BECOME A RELIGION TO WHICH WE SACRIFICE EVERYTHING
Bishop Wolfgang Huber rightly criticized the profit goal of 25% and pilloried Mr. Ackermann, a worshiper in the great dance around the Golden Calf. Ackermann is not the only culprit. A whole system that dances around the Golden Calf is involved and not only individuals…
Bishop Huber rightly criticized high-profit goals as a dance around the Golden Calf. Money has become a god demanding sacrifice. We can no longer afford the social state, it is said. Benefits according to Harts IV are so low they violate the human dignity command of the German Basic Law – according to the judgment of the regional labor court in Darmstadt along with precarious jobs and low wage sectors. The promise of a boundless increase of wealth that is hidden behind greed is a religious theme and not only a moral problem. Jesus spoke of an opposition between two powers God and mammon (Mt 6, 24/ Lk 16, 13) and did not condemn riches.
Mammon means "what one trusts." Money becomes a power that the Bible calls mammon whenever the purpose of money goes beyond exchange. In his interpretation of the First Commandment, Luther moved an antithesis – God or mammon money – into the
center of the speech for God. "That on which your heart cleaves and you rely is your God…"
The enrichment of one results in the impoverishment of others. Excessive profits and dismantling the social state occurred at the expense of the social state and fair wages. In Latin America, theologians of liberation speak of a "sacrificial capitalism." Poverty is politically intended and economically created and isn't collateral social damage. Poverty is part of unbridled deregulated capitalism as water is part of a shower. Therefore poverty and exclusion must be seen as consequences of a neoliberal economic policy and the costs calculated just as CO2 emissions are counted as an environmental consequence of a flawed eco-policy.
HOW CAN WE BE A DIAKONICAL CHURCH IN THE CRISIS?
Which church does God need for our country? Does it serve the healing and salvation of this society that was wounded twice by social uncertainty and the financial crisis? Is it enough to be a Samaritan church that binds the wounds of victims fallen among robbers and organizes tables?
Money is a central theme for Christians. We could learn this in the example of the Good Samaritan. The one fallen among thieves gets back on his feet… Repairing the structures of thievery is crucial. That is a political task. The engagement of a Samaritan church that only counters social state deficits through works of mercy is celebrated as an innovative element of an active civil society but makes possible dismantling the social state and social rights. It wants to help in a distress but falls into a mercy trap and accompanies the backward social-political step from fighting poverty to caring for poverty.
A church that limits itself to the help-ethos of mercy and organizes tables or social department stores as help against poverty reduces the biblical message. It is in danger of falling into a trap of mercy. Mercy is from the Latin misericordia "having a heart for the poor." Biblical spirituality is a spirituality of mercy that presses for justice. Biblically mercy is by no means a mere feeling. Mercy is expressed in a concrete act of justice and presses for just structures and a just politics.
The concrete reality of poverty in a rich country is the great question to us. That we raise this question and see it from the perspective of the poor is a fruit of mercy. Biblically based spirituality is practice in the right way of seeing. The catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz says Jesus' first concern is the suffering of others, not the sin of persons or theological questions. He calls the biblical dowry "compassio," an elementary sensitivity to suffering that opens eyes, feels sympathy and sides with those gravely burdened and in distress with all power and passion. This passion becomes a compassio, a "world responsibility sensitive to suffering." Compassio is not sympathy or an apolitical empathy. Compassion sees suffering and therefore seeks justice. Compassio has a categorical imperative: eyes open (Hans Jonas). There is no experience of that God proclaimed by the Bible without looking.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's vision of a "church for others" was the motto for a church that sought the best for the city. "Only the one who cries for the Jews may sing Gregorian." He said to the apolitical pious of his day. He wanted the singing of hymns allied with the works of the just – and vice versa. Translated for our time, Bonhoeffer's saying means: Only the one who openly does his utmost for welfare recipients made poor may sing Gregorian.
The Good Samaritan has become the model of helping and love and affection to persons "who fall among robbers." Whoever helps the poor fallen among robbers does not only take the Good Samaritan as a model. What should be done to help the poor is clear according to Luke 16 in the parable of poor Lazarus with "Moses and the prophets." Jesus explains this in the parable and cites Abraham as the highest authority. What do we hear when we listen to Moses and the prophets?
The key to understanding the total biblical picture in the judgment of poverty and riches can be read in Moses and the prophets. Moses means the social laws. Prophets are the men and women who interpret these social laws for their time so they are God's word for their time. With social laws, God's will can be converted in binding rules of justice. The poor have rights and should be validated. The poor should not only be thankful for mercy. Whoever is poor is someone whose right to participate should be validated according to the Bible. This legal claim characterizes the biblical response to poverty. "But there will be no poor among you" (Dtn 15, 4).
However social conditions were and are contradictory. A deep gulf existed between the claim of the Torah and social reality. Jesus cites the verse "For you always have the poor with you" (Mt 26, 11 and Dtn 5, 19) in apparent contradiction to the ideal of a society without the poor. While poverty persists, poverty should not exist. The land is richly blessed and there is enough for everyone. No one needs to live in poverty and distress. The Bible breaks through the seemingly unshakable reality and sets the programmatic obligation against it: "But there will be no poor among you… for the Lord will bless you" (Dtn 5, 4).
People have always dreamt of a society and a world without poverty. They have postponed this dream in utopias or the world to come. The biblical draft of a just world shares this hope. However, this ideal of a just world without poverty can become reality when the wealth with which the land is blessed becomes the blessing of everyone. Therefore the rich are obligated to share the riches of the land so it can become the blessing of everyone. Blessing lies on wealth when shared but disaster occurs when wealth is not shared.
The basic conviction of the Bible is outfitting the poor with rights and not asking the rich and powerful for mercy with open hands. For the Bible, fighting poverty always means curtailing the power of the powerful and helping the poor with the aid of the law. Only the strength of the law ensuring the blessed circulation of wealth from the rich to the poor helps against the power of the stronger. Whoever interprets poverty as a deficiency in
material goods will appeal to mercy so there can be sharing. But whoever sees poverty as a lack of rights will ask about justice. The Bible answers poverty by holding together mercy, law, and justice. The poor should not be dependent on the open hands of the rich or on their charity. One must hope and be thankful for mercy; people have a claim to the law.
What distinguishes a Samaritan community from a diakonical community? We are living once again in a Lazarus society. But what do we hear when we listen to Moses and the prophets today? Hearing Moses and the prophets means naming injustice by name, intervening legally for the interests of the poor and being concerned for rights and justice. Inequality cannot be combated through works of mercy since the poverty of the many and the riches of the few are politically caused and did not arise through a lack of mercy. Hearing Moses and the prophets means seeing the poor compassionately and doing your utmost for their rights and justice.
A Samaritan church helps in distress but does not deliver from distress. But a diakonical church does both: helps in distress and is concerned that people have rights. The key for rights and justice today is strengthening and developing the social state. What holds together a diakonical church, mercy, rights and justice?
A spirituality of open eyes: In the EKD memorandum (Evangelical church in Germany), we read: "A new conversion to the Diakonia is vital in which the joy and hope, the sorrow, fear and distress of people needing help become the joy and hope, sorrow and anxiety of Christians." A culture of solidarity and high esteem of the foundations of the social state are crucial. If this culture of solidarity disappears, the foundations of the social state also disappear. Christians cannot resign to living in a Lazarus society where the unnoticed poor live on the street. They ask about the reasons and the persons responsible. A spirituality of open eyes does not only see the distress of people but asks: who makes them needy? Why is there poverty in the midst of wealth? When we adopt the plight of people as our own, we first see and regard them with compassionate eyes.
Praxis of the hands: From time immemorial, the Samaritan service has been one of the basic tasks. We see the tasks with the eyes of mercy.
Designing social policy: For the Bible, mercy, justice and rights are always connected. Christian engagement can not be limited to the immediate service. We cannot erect enough tables to compensate for a misguided and deficient social policy. Therefore mercy must press for rights and justice. The road between Jerusalem and Jericho must become safer so no one falls among robbers any more.
Fighting poverty is first of all demanding politics to combat poverty through just policies. We need a policy that helps the wealth of a society become the blessing of everyone again. New approaches include a wage from which one can live in dignity; a needoriented minimum security and reintroduction of the property- and inheritance taxes.
Organizing a poverty policy with the following themes could deliver people out of the crisis in a socially just and economically efficient way:
The social state must protect from poverty and contain elements of minimum security. Raising the benefits for adults, children, and youths of the Hartz IV laws, children's basic security and minimum pensions are long overdue.
The educational system must guarantee social ascent irrespective of social origin;
A progressive tax rate and high tax share;
Family-wage jobs and diminution of the low-wage sector: a minimum wage that protects from poverty…;
Increasing the female share in the working life and compatibility of work and family for parents;
Retraining groups that are disadvantaged on the labor market;
Affordable housing.
The countries that realize the best results in these seven points have the lowest poverty rates in Europe: Denmark, Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands. Whoever wants to fight poverty must test the respective social system by these indicators.
Investment in the social state means creating additional employment fields in health care, nursing, therapy and education and building environmentally-friendly transportation systems. Both would strengthen the human quality of life and the public welfare, for example, an innovative development of the social state and also elude play money for casino capitalism. Beyond that, a guaranteed basic income would be an innovative development of the social state that would be economically sensible and socio-politically necessary since the existence of poor persons would be safeguarded. A basic income would make unnecessary more tables organized by charitable churches!
The church is urged to raise its voice for those made poor and unemployed and demand a policy for them and with them that is oriented in the ethical guideline proclaimed in the Bible: "But there will be no poor among you."
The poor need rights and justice, not alms or handouts. A diakonical church needs a double-strategy as long as politics fails in its task of averting poverty and social state undersupply in a rich country: help in the distress and politically do everything to help people out of the plight. It can only do this when it becomes a justice-movement.
2. WORK AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Human Rights and Women's Rights in the Global Production Chains
[This study presented at the University of Bamberg, February 21, 2017, is translated abridged from the German on the Internet.]
THE GREAT NORMATIVE BREAKTHROUGH ON RIGHTS TO WORK, IN WORK AND THROUGH WORK
Starting from human rights is vital in the search for humanity and justice. Human rights are fundamental moral, legal claims with a universal authority. But they are not simply presented and not realized. Their authority mostly had to be claimed in moral struggles for acknowledgment and as a rule won against the profiteers of violations. Therefore Jurgen Habermas correctly calls them a "realistic utopia." The hope for more humanity and justice is not shifted into a utopian future. Rather this hope is realistic and now anchored in the law in the goal of a just society. Human rights turn to ethics and the law. The preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights speaks of a common ideal to be attained by all peoples and nations. Human rights are normative standards for a world society oriented in humanity and justice and not a legal lyricism or a moralism.
In the history of ideas, work, human rights, and human dignity were connected for a long time. Some refer to a grammatical influence of our culture by biblical ethics. To others, human rights start from the Enlightenment. In the following, I will explain that human rights were formulated and realized in only a brief decade after the catastrophe of the great worldwide economic crisis in the last century and reach far back ethically.
In modern capitalist market societies, the labor market is the central place where life chances and social security are distributed. But one of the basic experiences of the working class is that gainful work often cannot ensure one's livelihood. Therefore utopian socialists like Charles Fourier urged a right to work for the first time at the beginning of the 19th century. He understood this as "the elementary human right […] without which all others are null and void." Originally, the right to work was by no means a right to a job but rather the more basic right to life and a secure existence. The right to work was raised programmatically for the first time in the February 1848 revolution in Paris as "a right to pay for one's life costs through work."
The demands for rights to work, rights in work and rights through work were central in the workers' movement. After the First World War, these demands were reflected in the founding of the ILO (The International Labor Organization), the 1919 Weimar
constitution and the early state constitutions in Bavaria and Hesse after the Second World War. In Article 166, the Bavarian constitution declared "Everyone has the right to a reasonable existence through work." Many sources of international law also guaranteed this primal demand of the union- and workers' movement like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 23), the Social Pact (Art.7), the Social Charta of the EU (Art. 1) and a series of state constitutions…
This development can only be understood when the little time window between 1934 and 1944 is analyzed. At the end of the 1920s, the world economy was shaken by a deep crisis that meant distress, unemployment, and misery for millions upon millions. An antibudgetary attitude prevailed. A social state change of capitalism gained acceptance in the US as an alternative that guaranteed union- and worker rights instead of crushing unions with blood as in Germany when the way into the barbarism of fascism was taken in Germany, Italy, Japan and other countries as a reaction to the crisis of capitalism.
Respect for human dignity and a world order based on human rights were intellectual answers to the breakdown of the liberal economic order in the great worldwide economic crisis and an ambitious reform project. The National Labor Act of July 5, 1935, guaranteed the right to form unions, the right to strike and prohibited unfair business practices. In the same year 1935, the Social Security Act regulated the introduction of social security under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1938, the Fair Standards Act was passed after the protracted strike of the United Automobile Workers at General Motors. This act introduced a minimum wage, limited working hours to a maximum of 44 hours and prohibited child labor for children under 16. Roosevelt was the first to take up the programmatic word social security when he formulated the "four freedoms" in 1941. These freedoms appeared later in the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: freedom of speech and opinion, freedom of faith, freedom from distress and the freedom from fear.
Strikes, factory occupations, and demonstrations occurred everywhere. The resistance had amassed great power because the people saw the system in danger. The dramatic extent of the great worldwide economic crisis led to the reversal of past basic political and economic assumptions. A new understanding of the state arose through struggle. The state was taken up on its promise to assume responsibility for the social well-being of its citizens and guarantee their civil freedoms.
In the 1941 Atlantic Charter, the former heads of government of the US, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Great Britain, Winston S. Churchill, formulated common principles that were later accepted by more than 21 states. An ambitious economic and social reform program was drafted for "a better future for the world" as we read in the Preamble. Freedom was understood as the foundation for social justice and as a political right. The Atlantic Charter sought a globalization on the basis of the "closest cooperation of all
nations in economic areas, cooperation for better working conditions, economic balance and protection of workers as goals. The formula "life in freedom from distress and fear" proclaims a goal, not a social right. The concept of international responsibility for a welfare state was developed for the first time: no longer competition but the closest economic competition of all nations, better working condition s, economic balance, protection of workers and social security for all citizens.
The Declaration of Philadelphia from 1944, one of the founding documents of the ILO, was a breakthrough. The conference of the International Labor Organization in Philadelphia demanded "full employment and improvement of the standard of living, guaranteeing a just share of everyone in the fruits of progress, wages and income, working hours and other working conditions as well as a minimum wage for all employees who need this protection, acknowledgment of the right to collective bargaining agreements, social security measures, a minimum income and proper food and housing conditions…
The Declaration formulated the following normative foundations:
"Labor is not a commodity": respect for labor, acknowledgment of unions as a prerequisite for social progress;
"Poverty, wherever it exists, endangers the prosperity of everyone": solidarity;
Justice as the "main goal of the domestic and international order";
Human dignity is the foundation and goal of all social and economic orders.
These declarations establish a welfare internationalism, a "New Deal for the World" for a normatively integrated world society. Previously there were many selective individual measures in labor law and social law. Now a normative development proposed guaranteeing universal rights.
In 1944, Roosevelt announced a "Second Economic Bill of Rights" that was adopted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with a right to a reasonable wage, a right to food, to a proper living standard and a right to housing and social security. What Roosevelt urged here first for the US was taken up in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a few years later in 1948.
Since 1945, the legal codification of human rights has been underway. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed. The Universal Declaration was the first international formulation of a substantive catalog of human rights with the claim of worldwide authority. Article 28 of the UDHR declared everyone has the right to live in a social order and enjoy all his or her human rights. This institutional human rights concept shows that human rights are more than only individual rights. They aim at a corresponding international social and economic order.
While the social pact was negotiated in 1954 and moved from the mere declaration of rights to obligatory rights, the two human rights pacts on civil and political rights were first passed in 1966, the civil pact and the pact on economic, social and cultural rights… With all its different forms, an embedded capitalism developed with legal codification on the international plane corresponding to the framework of the United Nations. Between 1940 and 1980, a broad New Deal Consensus prevailed in the OECD-states altogether until it was largely dissolved by Reagan's neoliberal counter-revolution that was introduced by Jimmy Carter and then later abolished definitively by Clinton.
Neoliberalism (or neoliberal constitutionalism) formed. This describes a form of rule one-sidedly oriented at legally converting the economic pressures of global competition. The common foundations of human rights, democracy and capitalism in force for a long while were canceled.
For the international law scholar Andreas Fischer-Lescano, the cancellation of the normative consensus led world economic actors to create their own neoliberal legal norms. While property rights are protected, the social rights of people are undermined. Labor and economic interests are subordinated. Social rights were originally conceived as counter-rights. In the new world order, they are downgraded to soft laws in n oncommittal behavioral codes without obligation.
The decline began with counter-reforms in labor- and social law just when the zenith of normative rights of labor was reached.
THE HUMAN RIGHTS TO WORK, IN WORK, AND THROUGH WORK
Human rights determine the position of individual persons in society. The equal right to a life in freedom, equality, and solidarity is formulated for every person. The individual person is the standard, not the system for an ethics based on human rights. Working persons who depend on selling their labor power to secure their existence and therefore are dependent labor need social rights to lead a dignified life. Autonomous rights to work, rights in work and rights from work are guaranteed.
Dignity of Persons: Precedence of Labor Over Capital
The starting point of human rights is safeguarding the dignity of the person. Human rights arose out of indignation over the violated dignity of the person. In economic ethics, this means the dignity of the person should have priority over the interests of capital. In Christian ethics, this normative value leads to the priority of labor over capital.
The Right to an Economic Order Founded on Human Rights
In Article 28, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights formulates a momentous ethical and political claim. Article 28 says on human rights: "Everyone has a right to a
social and international order in which the rights and freedoms proclaimed in this declaration can be fully realized. This straightforward and absolutely utopian claim formulated here has proven to be a pioneer for an institutional understanding of human rights. It connects the goal with a mandate and gives a standard for both: All institutions should be judged on how they respect, protect and fulfill human rights. Thomas Pogge calls Article 28 an "institutional human rights concept…"
Social and economic rights are often criticized for being utopian and unrealizable. The tension to the existing economic order is obvious… The place where the economic system is organized so it can be more just to human rights is the national or supranational framework prescribed to the economy. What is ethically commanded must be institutionally ensured by a primacy of a politics, not by the virtuous conduct of an honest businessman." A rule ethic has priority over a virtue ethic. Under an economic ethics perspective, the moral quality of an economic system is higher the less it depends on the oral quality of actors for guaranteeing human rights…
Social Human Rights
For a long while, social human rights only referred to paid labor. Other forms of labor were overlooked or not recognized. The reproductive work so important for production was economically and legally made invisible. Only paid labor was regarded as work. The division ran along gender-specific lines. ILO agreement 189 in 2014 was a first important international laws step in acknowledging reproductive work in private households that were long without rights. This agreement will improve the work of over 50 million employees in private households: mostly women, many migrants, performing caring-activities for older persons, child care, and other activities. For the first time, this work was understood as professional paid labor, legally protected and delivered from the socially precarious, insecure and degrading grey-zone. Like all employees, those working in private households also have the right to normal working hours, overtime pay, daily and weekend rest and paid annual vacations. The expansion of the work term to the previously informal care work of domestic servants is an important step of esteem and legal protection. Agreement 189 must be accompanied by a criticism of the global division of labor for care work.
The Social State
The reserve of the German Basic Law toward basic- and human social rights was long inconsequential since the social state was built dynamically and extended far beyond human rights standards. This was also true for labor law as long as production and trade were not globalized to the extent they are today. Globalization set the importance of global social rights with universal validity on the agenda. The missing human rights anchoring prove problematic when the normative rights of employees come under pressure through the legal constitution of world trade and worldwide production chains. The extended global production with its value-creation chains has not brought any new social participation or more legal standards for dignified working conditions in a
countermove while labor standards gained in long struggles in western and central Europe are rapidly retracted…
The social human rights to work, in work and through work are gained through struggle. These social rights oppose a free enterprise thought model according to which labor is a commodity like other commodities. In human rights, there are clear norms for gainful work that did not result from market events. They are refractory norms for a decommodification.
Acceptance by jurisprudence and political realization are lacking. Starvation wages, precarious work, excessive working hours or inadequate social security are human rights violations. States violate their obligations they made in the social pact. Mechanisms for filing lawsuits are lacking. This is also true for the decisions of human rights tribunals and ILO-procedures because there is no authority that can force states to comply with legal judgments or with assessments of the ILO, UN groups or tribunals. Which legal system has precedence is by no means clear in a collision of human rights – and economic regulations. Struggles must be waged in the legal arena. Battles over the law are always emancipatory battles over participation. The strength of normative or ethical human rights consists in clearly marking violations of a limit.
Social human rights are the form in which relations are conceived before they are realized. Having rights is indispensable. However, that alone does not guarantee you will get them. Appropriating refused, damaged rights in the "regressive modern age" (Nachtwey) can first regain the social vision to support the struggles over just work, just wages and just shares in social security and the gross domestic product.
3. FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS
Debts and Indebtedness. Who is Responsible?
[This essay published on May 11, 2012, is translated abridged from the German on the Internet.]
Christians, Jews, and Muslims stand in a centuries-old tradition of debt relief. By remembering this tradition, they unmask the ruthless indebtedness crisis. In view of the prevailing disastrous financial policy, speaking about debt relief means giving hope. The Torah, Bible and the Koran have a treasure. Debt relief is ethically commanded and economically rational in light of oppressing debts and is not utopian.
Social achievements from Athens and Madrid to Lisbon are put in question. Wages and pensions are cut, state civil servants dismissed, wage contracts shattered and regular employees released so the financial markets can be satisfied. Otherwise, misery and abuse threaten. While the unloved social state is destroyed in Greece, the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, declared in the Wall Street Journal: "The welfare state model has had its day. Restoring the trust of the financial markets must be the highest goal" (2/22/2012). Thus Mario Draghi understands the so-called debt crisis as a lever for a European system change to get rid of the social state and its civilizing achievements. What happens in Greece happens exemplarily for the whole European project of a social democracy. Draghi underlined this sequence: the "trust of the financial markets" has priority over democracy. The social state and democracy should withdraw over against the "trust of the financial markets" where a loss of financial assets is feared. For a long while, financiers increased their wealth through Greece's government loans and indebtedness. Therefore "trust in the financial markets," the past policy of wealth multiplication, should remain the highest and only goal.
The bailout measures for Greece, Portugal, and Italy recall the unbearable structural adjustment programs forced on Latin American countries by the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s. Industrial nations recommended a credit-financed industrial development to countries in Latin America. However, when the interests rose, countries fell into an indebtedness-spiral that led to poverty, distress, and unemployment. More capital flowed from the poor South to the rich North than the rich North granted in financial aid. The EU repeated this policy in its crisis management. What Europe did to others is now striking back on Europe.
Institutional investors like hedge funds and pension funds that develop an economic and political power are the financial markets and by no means the millions of individual market actors. A financial oligarchy constitutes the current dominant world power. So the US bank Goldman Sachs supplies several leading politicians in Europe: Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, the Greek president Papademos and the Italian president Monti. The present US Treasury Secretary was a colleague of Goldman Sachs. The Goldman Sachs bank helped Greece veil part of its state debts so it
could remain in the euro zone. Thus the commentary in the "Handelsblatt" newspaper correctly speaks of a "silent coup" in the appointment of Papademos since "the financial markets get what they want" (Handelsblatt, 11/16/2011). Financial democrats were enlisted after Greece's premier dared to call a referendum after experiences with an Iceland referendum. Financial markets do not like democracy and the participation of people who are compelled to support the debt service. The term "technocrats" for the executors of an undemocratic policy as in Italy and Greece is a cynical euphemism for financial lobbyists who serve in the name of the financial oligarchy. Democracy is sacrificed for the debt service. This is nothing less than a turning away from European ideals and shows that the financial crisis was more than a technical-financial or politicaleconomic malaise that could be confidently left to the solutions of economists.
The European fiscal pact and the debt brake are now taking effect where financial technocrats do not form the government as in Italy and Greece. The pact stipulates that the debt situation must be reduced in the medium term to a maximum 60% of the gross domestic product (GDP). Every tax cent must be used first for the debt repayment. Tax revenues can first be used to finance the public life after debt repayment. The pact cements the austerity course and makes social dismantling into the state's goal. An unconditional categorical imperative prevails: the debts must be paid under all circumstances even if people are grievously affected. Labor laws and social standards gained over decades of struggle are sacrificed for that mantra.
WHAT INDEBTEDNESS MEANS
No one lives only for him- or herself. We do not owe our existence to ourselves. We owe education to parents, educators or teachers. We have adopted everything – our language and our culture, our way of eating and dressing – from other people. The life of every individual is bound in a whole net of "obligations" (the historian Norbert Elias said "we are bound to one another like the waves of the sea"). So everyone owes or will owe something to another in his life. We are all indebted to others in some way. We cannot repay everything we owe one another. We owe many things to one another – not only economic debts. Debts mean people are obligated to one another…
While people owe many duties to each other, some ethical standards of civilized persons have been annulled and are no longer in force. To collect outstanding financial debts, people were enslaved in antiquity or mired in debt bondage. The pressure is not less merciless today. So-called "vulture funds" carry on business with the most extreme brutality with the misery of whole states…
Greece is plunged inexorably into bitter poverty so the debts will be repaid. Pensions are cut, wages fall and the public health system is driven back. The minimum wage and unemployment benefits are drastically slashed… The banks profit, says the German economist Max Otte, not Europe or Europe's citizens. Debt repayment is given the rank of a human right. According to the New York Times (January 19, 2012), a hedge fund is suing against partial debt relief at the European Tribunal in Strassburg with the argument that the human rights of shareholders would be violated…
Why are citizens and states within Europe so merciless toward each other regarding debt repayment? How can debts push back all moral reservations and legitimate a conduct that otherwise would be completely ethically unacceptable?
MORAL CULPABILITY AND MONEY DEBTS
When someone owes a favor or even his life to another person, this debt is special for these persons. This is different with money. Through money, a mutual obligation of persons becomes an abstract impersonal debt that can even be transferred and sold. Debts are also obligations that can be used as a moral weapon and are more than financial or monetary debts. This has been true since the time of the Mesopotamians 4000 years ago. Debts became a moral obligation enforced with all power and authority since early highly advanced civilizations and with the rise of the money economy.
The American sociologist David Graeber explored debts in history and discovered that the battle over interests is always a battle between poor and rich. In a society divided in poor and rich, some must become indebted to survive and others are rich enough to lend money and profit from that. Thus debts basically reflect the conflict between poor and rich as a conflict between debtors and creditors. Whoever does not repay a debt is culpable. The poor one owes a debt to the rich. Whoever lends money does not do this as an unselfish benefactor. He follows his self-interest. Without the indebtedness of the poor, he could not increase his wealth. However, this state of affairs is reinterpreted and made invisible. The indebted who helps the rich become even richer take on a moral debt…
Many words from the financial world have religious origins… In the Our Father, forgiveness of debts is sought. Debts are an ethical and moral principle.
Why can debts be collected with such severity and unyieldingness so persons are plunged into distress and misery? Debts seem to justify legally and morally a conduct that would not otherwise be legitimated. Thus we could ask: who is responsible and culpable?
INDEBTEDNESS EVERYWHERE: WHOLE CONTINENTS, COUNTRIES, AND INDIVIDUALS ARE HEAVILY INDEBTED
Banks are institutions that get into debt so others get into debt and earn enormous, sometimes outrageous sums of money. This admittedly provocative formulation calls attention to a central fact. The debts of states and individual persons are an inevitable and indispensable fact of finance capitalism.
Right after the economic crisis in the fall of 2008, German chancellor Angela Merkel used the figure of the Schwabian housewife to explain the worldwide financial crisis. "We should simply ask the Schwabian housewife. She would teach us a wisdom of life. You cannot live beyond your means in the long run." The wise housewife from
Schwabia does not live above her means. She tucks away something to realize the dream of her own little house some time or other. In any case, she did not get into debt.
The Schwabian housewife is a symbol for a supposedly obvious causal analysis for indebtedness. The state and ultimately citizens who "lived above their means" are responsible and the financial system is innocent. However, this judgment is not tenable and is completely absurd for two reasons. A glance at the indebtedness rate shows the debt rate fell up to the outbreak of the 2007 financial crisis – particularly in the later crisis countries Ireland and Spain. With the beginning of the worldwide economic crisis, debts rose through bank bailouts and economic programs. The bank crisis is responsible; no one lived above their means. Banks were bailed out with an enormous state indebtedness.
In 1996, the head of the German Central Bank Hans Tietmeyer explained bluntly who governs to the assembled heads of government and corporate CEOs at the World Economic Forum in Davos: "Most politicians are still not clear how much they already are controlled or even ruled by the financial markets today." What Tietmeyer announced in 1996 has long been reality and is carried out as rational policy under the motto of ensuring the trust of the financial markets. This means banks force democraticallyelected governments to adjust to the interests of the financial oligarchy. German chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed this when she said in the debate on aid to Greece: "We live in a parliamentary democracy and the budget law is a core law of the parliament. We will find ways of making the parliamentary joint determination marketconforming."
This power forcing democratically elected governments to a policy corresponding to the interests of the financial oligarchy is concealed by pointing to the Schwabian housewife. The Schwabian housewife and all politicians who orient themselves in this figure are mistaken in an important point. A family can only spend what it receives. But a state budget functions in a reverse way. The financial assets of one are always the debts of another. The indebtedness of one is the reflection of the assets of others. The culprits changed with the concept "state debt crisis." The states that bailed out the banks are now the guilty parties and the banks that caused the crisis are passed over. The states with their citizens who lived beyond their means are the offenders.
DEBTS ARE USEFUL
Debts and assets are two sides of the same coin. The creditor needs the debtor since he cannot increase his wealth without him. The assets of the creditor are fictional wealth that first becomes real wealth when they are used and paid back. "Trust the financial markets" should be the highest goal of politics and means this transformation from fictional wealth into real wealth and the debtors pay their debts plus interests. However, debts may not and should not "disappear" because the process of increasing wealth would then stop. Therefore the extension of debt conditions and not the repayment of debts is the systemic goal of the financial oligarchy. The debt spiral of the debtors also
corresponds to a wealth-spiral on the side of creditors. The continuous indebtedness of debtors caught in a debt spiral; must be enforced for the continuing increase of wealth.
What is called a debt crisis is not a crisis of debtors but a crisis of the financial oligarchy who increase their wealth in the crisis. Therefore citizens should now pay the financial oligarchy by means of bailout umbrellas, budget cuts, debt brakes or the fiscal pact so the process of multiplying wealth continues. The wealth of the financial oligarchy should be bailed out at the expense of citizens. The transformation of private debts into public debts is concealed by reinterpreting the crisis of the financial oligarchy into a debt crisis triggered because citizens lived above their means.
Over 3 million private households in Germany are over-indebted. Unemployment, separation, irresponsible consumption or a failed independence were often the triggers. The heavy debts of private households in relation to their disposable income grew after 1995. While wages stagnated, employees got into debt and sought to cover their expenses for their own apartment, car or costs of living altogether. Typically the largest share of the indebtedness of private households was due to mortgages for their homes. Households received mortgages when buying real estate they really could not afford, as the sub-prime crisis in the US showed. The core of the mortgage boom was in the US… The debt carousel turns when expenditures exceed revenues and debts are accepted. New credits must be taken to afford the debt service. This is true both for the debt crisis of the South and for private indebtedness. The interest-duties are sacrosanct. They cannot be infringed or put in question. They must be served unconditionally. But what are the private debts averaging 22,000 euros per private debtor compared to state debts amounting to 7.8 trillion euros in Europe alone?
State indebtedness means state revenues are not sufficient for state expenditures. The state borrows money from the well-to-do whom it previously relieved fiscally and repays them at attractive interests at the expense of the general public. This happens instead of taxing the well-to-do sectors and businesses to supply the state with the necessary revenue for its programs. The growing state indebtedness and the burden of interest are reflected with the private creditors. State indebtedness is a sound less and permanent redistribution from bottom to top. But it also makes the state dependent on the creditors with whom it gets into debt.
Debts are necessary economically. Capitalism can be understood as a credit-driven economic system with two faces. It creates prosperity by getting into debt. Therefore debts are useful and necessary. Indebtedness is the dark or shady side – borne on the backs of the weak and the poor. The poor are called on to repay the debts from which the rich profit. A debt of the poor comes out of debts.
The borrower must settle his debt and pay an interest. The banks must award credits incessantly… A process of perpetual debts is set in motion. These debts could increase endlessly and make debts into money. Therefore (finance-) capitalism systemically needs heavy debts to function – whether private or public…
WHO HAS RESPONSIBILITY GIVEN STRUCTURAL INDEBTEDNESS MECHANISMS?
The chief interrogator of the causes of the unparalleled financial crisis in the US Senate asked a former banker: "Are you robbed of sleep when you think of what you have done?" His answer was: "We are really not responsible. Sorry for that." In other words, we are victims of an unpredictable fate. However what happens is the consequence of actions, abnormal behavior, and system errors and is not a natural phenomenon like a hurricane.
Are people in systems responsible? Responsibility is something that happens between persons. How can we speak of responsibility for processes or for the indebtedness dynamic of capitalism? Ethically and legally, responsibility means answering for a committed act or an act to be carried out that can be ascribed to someone. For example, I drive through a red light. I violate a rule. Therefore I must live with the consequence: a a fine if I am caught.
From his experience in resistance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood responsibility in a new way. "Stopping the spokes of the wheel when the coachman is drunken" is part of responsibility for him. Bonhoeffer joins two planes here: the plane of analysis (the coachman is drunken) and the plane of the active subject who must stop the spokes.
Applied to our problem of the indebtedness of persons, countries and nations, we ask: Is the coachman drunken and the system without responsibility? Who is the coachman that can and must reach into the spokes?
IS THE COACHMAN DRUNKEN – AND THE SYSTEM WITHOUJT RESPONSIBILITY?
Debts are a necessary component of the capitalist money economy. The money owner needs the debtor so his possession of money is rewarding. The global financial system is responsible for the increasing over-indebtedness – more strongly than the debtor countries and their representatives, more strongly than the governments that cannot control their state indebtedness and more strongly than the over-indebted person. The global financial system profits from the debtors whom it needs to increase its assets.
The neoliberal tax-cutting mania has reduced the revenue of the state. State expenditures are financed through indebtedness by those whose taxes the state previously lowered. So it is not surprising that states depend on private banks and financial institutes to finance their spending since they cannot pay for this through tax revenues. Debts pile up when revenues and expenditures are not in balance.
WHO IS THE COACHMAN WHO CAN AND MUST REACH IN THE SPOKES?
Where is the responsibility in a complex legal, economic and political system like financial management? Consider this example. Someone buys a car. The car is a main
cause of environmentally harmful gasses. Question: who is responsible for reducing CO2 emissions? Is the buyer of a car responsible? The manufacturer is responsible, not only the buyer. Politics is responsible, not only these two. Politics should reduce CO2 emissions through laws…
The financial markets are the result of the economic and political power of the financial oligarchy. Politics is the solution and also the problem. It was politics that deregulated the financial markets.
IN EUROPE'S CULTURAL MEMORY: DEBT RELIEF
The problem of over-indebtedness is only modern in its complexity insofar as the indebtedness of private households, state budgets and the indebtedness of whole states are passed over to their sponsors. Otherwise, the problem of over-indebtedness reaches back to the early ancient advanced civilizations and the beginning of the money economy.
There is a thousand-year-old tradition that extends back to Mesopotamia and can also be found in the Bible. The Bible comes from a world foreign to us. In it, the economy was an obvious part of a more comprehensive life world. The economy was part of life and society was not subject to the economy. Obviously, economic laws were also in force there. Whoever does business cannot commit fraud. Whoever invests something in a business wants to get his money back. But the economy was embedded in a world whose higher ideal was paraphrased as "law and justice." God is the supreme guarantor of such a just order. When a poor person is denied a credit, he appeals to this God according to Dtn 15, 9 and blames the hard-hearted creditor (Dtn 15, 11: You shall open your hand wide to the needy.).
In some debates around the indebtedness of countries like Greece, the indebted countries are sometimes made the problem or lazy and corrupt Greeks. Biblical texts on the indebtedness of people speak from the perspective of the one who suffers the debts.
Prov 22, 7 formulates matter-of-factly: "The rich rules over the poor and the borrower is a slave of the lender."
Whoever is rich can make loans. His wealth makes him one who can exercise power. The word wealth also has a double meaning. One can do something because one has wealth. The rich can make the poor their slaves. Thus indebtedness is a rule instrument with a market conforming character. That the debtor is threatened, not the creditor, is still a current experience.
The biblical texts keep alive the memory that believers are by no means only supplicants seeking loans. Persons can become rich in the debts of debtors! Awarding credits is interest-conditioned and not an act of magnanimity or noble-mindedness.
Indebtedness was the core problem of ancient rural societies. Indebtedness that grows into mass over-indebtedness can destroy the foundations of society. Legal principles were codified for the first time when a development threatening society's cohesion was visible in Israel and Judah since the 8th century.
The Hebrew Bible knows counter-instruments for indebtedness: debt relief and the liberation of debt slaves. There is much evidence that the seven-year Jubilee year of the Deuteronium (Dtn 15, 1-11) was practiced while another regulation of the Jubilee year had a programmatic character with a land reform, a debt relief and liberation of debt slaves every fifty years (Lev 25). The debt relief in Dtn 15 also includes a loan command. The real danger was that no credits would flow with the approaching Jubilee year. Dtn 15, 7 ("If there is among you a poor man, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother") only encountered this problem with an urgent appeal to voluntary giving. That the Jesus-movement later took up this idea approvingly ("lend expecting nothing in return," Lk 6, 35) proves debt relief was a social praxis.
The Our Father "forgive us our debts" is part of this Jubilee year tradition. It is a cry for help and expresses a human experience with debts and indebtedness over centuries. The affirmation "as we forgive our debtors" means readiness to mutual debt cancellation…
The biblical relation with debts and indebtedness starts from a basic twofold orientation:
a clear rule of priority: the logic of humanity includes an unconditional priority over other claims. With indebtedness, this means concretely: human rights to life have priority over money- and credit-interests;
the freedom-postulate: the rule and power that threaten humanity must be limited. This means concretely the power of creditors over debtors must be controlled or restrained so freedom can develop.
The Our Father prayer in the tradition of biblical debt relief is an expression of a periodical revolution which is part of our tradition. The Bible and the Koran of Muslims (lailat al-bara) do not tolerate any interest and demand debt relief. The underlying basic ethical desire of religions for over a thousand years is so refreshing that we remember today: the money system may not rule over the life of people.
CONCLUSION: FOR A MONEY ECONOMY THAT SERVES LIFE
Debts do not arise because the "Greeks are so lazy" (BILD newspaper) or we "live above our means" (A. Merkel). Capitalism needs indebtedness and cannot increase wealth without getting into debt. No one should feel ethically guilty when he gets into debt since indebtedness is a necessary element of destructive finance capitalism and yet obviously is not desired.
The growth of debts is necessary so assets can increase. Private debts that could go back to a failure of debtors who lived above their means did not cause the debts. The
individual over-indebted person stands before a giant insurmountable mountain of debts like the states.
Politics is responsible for the financial architecture. In its 2009 declaration on the financial crisis "Tear in the Wall," the EKD (Evangelical Church in Germany) formulated a new orientation that reveals the inversion of the ruling financial system:
"A global order needs as goals an economy that serves people today without destroying the life foundations of future generations, a (world-) society that makes improvement of its poorest and weakest members its precedent task, and finally, a financial system that serves this task."
If capitalism needs debts to create wealth and money multiplication and if debts always correspond to an asset, we could ask: who are the guilty parties? Are the poor the culprits who have to pay off a debt that arose through getting into debt? Or are the rich the offenders to blame for the indebtedness because they accumulated their money when the others got into debt?
The old thousand-year old conflict between the poor and rich is carried out and hidden with the struggle over repayment of debts. The old liberating insight should be recalled: when individuals or even whole states get into debts, they are not culpable in a moral sense. Those who want to draw benefits and profit from indebtedness are culpable when others are plunged into distress and misery. They would never have become so rich without the indebtedness of others.
As the indebtedness of one corresponds economically to the assets of others, there are debts without moral culpability of the indebted. Even the seemingly "abnormal behavior" is still useful for those who can draw profit from awarding credit. Thus the wealthy have to reimburse those to whom they actually owe their wealth. Their wealth could not have accumulated without culpability. The creditor needs the debtor.
That was what Bert Brecht meant when he said: A rich man and a poor man stood and watched. And the poor one said white as a sheet: "if I wasn't poor, you wouldn't be rich."
A debt relief would take those up on their promise. Creditors were actually culpable in the indebtedness and profited in the indebtedness. The conflict around indebtedness is a power struggle between the primacy of the economic and the primacy of the political. We know about the dignity of the life of people and oppose a liberation tradition to those who want to sacrifice the cultural and civilizing achievement of the social state. We have something to defend: the protection of people and particularly the poor from the storms of unfettered capitalism.
For the sake of justice, we need this revolution about which the Bible reminds us: a real revolution, a returning to the original state and the return of increased wealth at the
expense of others. Therefore it is time to recall the old wisdom of the religions and bring about a debt relief, to cancel the debts of the indebted. "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors."
4. DEMOCRACY AND THE SOCIAL STATE
[This essay published on April 24, 2010, is translated abridged from the German on the Internet, Http://www.franz-segbers.de/resources/N$C3$BCrnberg_24.4.2010.pdf. Franz Segbers is a professor of theology in Marburg.]
THESIS 1: The financial- and economic crisis and the social crisis that poverty and unemployment persist in a rich country are two sides of the same coin.
THESIS 2: We need a renewal of social state discourse. The social state is the key to regulating capitalism.
THESIS 3: Justice is the standard for reform policy. The strength of a people is measured by the well-being of the weak.
THESIS 4: The social state is more than an alms state for the needy. The social state promotes social balance and relies on the output of the economy.
THESIS 5: Reforms of the social state must strengthen the social foundation of democracy. The current social state expects too little solidarity from citizens. A different reform policy that expands solidarity is necessary.
THESIS 6: Reforms build the social state foundation of democracy. A new start beyond finance capitalism seems the proper answer to the crisis, not mere repair of the damages.
Here is a thought game. What if the eight million Hartz recipients did not exist? Are these unemployed needed? Guido Westerwelle seems convinced these are superfluous persons who only cost money. Shouldn't they clear the snow away at least?
Whoever says this endangers democracy. As a constitutional state is undermined when courts are dismantled, democracy is undermined when the social foundation of democracy is dismantled. Thus the democratic and social state is at risk. We do not only face problems of the unemployed or income support recipients. Democracy is at an end when the social foundation is absent.
THESIS 1: We have a bundle of crises – the financial crisis, the economic crisis, the environmental crisis, the social state crisis and a crisis of reasonable work, not only the financial- and economic crisis.
These crises have one thing in common: they are the results of a misguided policy oriented in neoliberal principles. The financial- and economic crisis and the social crisis that poverty and unemployment exist in a rich country are two sides of the same coin. We stand before a shipwreck. The neoliberal market fundamentalism that marked
politics and determined thinking for two decades has failed. However, this does not mean it is at its end because the last years were a golden time for many.
A whole system dances around the Golden Calf. More than greedy individual bankers are involved. For years, the Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella described a 25% profit as the minimum. The Bayer CEO Werner Wenning set 24% as his operative profit goal for 2007 and declared the margin would be raised to 28% for the health sector. Porsche's 2008 profit exceeded its sales. A new radicalism of management appears. Why be satisfied with 15% capital profitability when 25% is possible through outsourcing or work condensation? Reaching these profit goals will only be possible if pressure is exerted on employees, social standards, taxes etc. Every fifth employee works in low wages; working hours are extended and men working 42.7 hours are at the same position as 1982. Hartz IV is the state-prescribed under-provision for poor persons (as explained later, Hartz IV is a drastic German welfare reform combining unemployment benefits and income support and radically reducing the duration of benefits. The German Constitutional Court ruled that Hartz IV violated citizens' basic rights to life and health.). Good, family-supporting work, a developed social state, adequate financing of social services and services for human welfare appear as costs deducted from the profits of businesses.
THE STATE IS PART OF THE PROBLEM, NOT THE SOLUTION
The state gives the economy the freedom that it uses. The state promotes finance market capitalism. The former German Central bank president Hans Tietmeyer said: "Most politicians are still not clear how much they are under the control of the financial markets and are even ruled by them." If the financial markets, shareholders, and investors determine the direction of politics, that means lower wages, lower non-wage labor costs, and lower taxes. The result is that the number of asset-millionaires doubled to 800,000 since 1998.
The governments were not strong enough or willing to resist this pressure of the international financial markets. In May 2008, the President of the German Republic Kohler spoke clearly about the financial crisis: "Every responsible person must now recognize that the international financial markets have developed into a monster that must be put in its place or cut down to size." The market for innovative financial products in Germany was actively prepared by a coalition of the SPD, the Greens, CDU, and the FDP. Those security businesses soon became black holes on the balance sheets of the regional banks. That state-owned business exhibited a similar risk structure was not an accident since the ministry of finance and economics had massively promoted the German state banks. The financial crisis in no way broke over us like a thunderstorm from the US. Rather the German government was enormously involved in the causes like the fourth financial market promotion law (2001) the investment modernization law of the German government that allowed hedge funds in Germany the securities market advanced tremendously by the government with its "Asset-Backed Securities" (ABS) that was a kind of fire accelerator of the financial crisis. An internationally competitive
financial center Germany is one of the most important prerequisites for a growth of the economy and employment.
The German financial market has a great potential that should be developed further in the coming legislative period. (…) Product innovations and new marketing processes must be supported energetically. To that end, we want to create framing conditions for new investment classes in Germany. This includes the development of the securities market –the expansion of investment possibilities for public-private partnerships." A financial market monitoring "with a sense of distance" is desirable.
The entrepreneurial freedoms of capital market actors were legally expanded. The backside of increasing income- and wealth concentration was stagnating mass income. In Germany, the real incomes of employees do not rise anymore in the upswing. High incomes and wealth were managed according to the taxes. The partial privatization of social security systems and vital necessities widened the investment spectrum to the financial markets. Unions were weakened through the political deregulation and precariousness of the labor market.
Like the Great Depression in the US, the current worldwide economic crisis can only be overcome when citizens join forces for a halfway fair economic system and social state. The pendulum that moved in one direction with the victory of neoliberalism and "activating" social reforms must now swing back again! Such a political change of course can be spelled out differently in the individual countries – in the US, perhaps through an introduction of health insurance as Obama brought forward, in Germany by building the social state and strengthening unions so the social wealth can be distributed justly and does not only flow to the owners of capital.
THESIS 2: We need a renewal of social state discourse. The social state is the key to the regulation of capitalism.
The present crisis is not a purely economic crisis. It is also a crisis of the long-dominant ideology and politics. This crisis offers a historical chance for civilizing unfettered capitalism in reform policy through the social state. This historical crisis is a historical chance for a social and ecological reform policy. We need a social embedding of the economy. Therefore the civil society powers and unions must be strengthened so a democratic appropriation of finance market capitalism can be organized.
In his little volume, Meinhard Miegel tries to say the truth. He speaks of a capitulation in all social state countries… Politics veils its true intentions when it speaks of reorganizing the social state. "The experts know this term only enables traditionalists and social policy makers to save face and play down an epochal change. In truth, there is a partial demolition… This can be called reconstruction but it should be clear to all actors that the familiar social state does not exist anymore today and something else is taking its place."
The crucial question is: where should we orient ourselves so a core of the old building does not come out of the reorganization of the social state? We urgently need a renewal
of social state discourse. The reforms of the last years have blocked the view to the real fields of reform and relevant future questions. Agenda 2010 and Hartz IV have not solved any of the problems. Unemployment was not banished. Poverty rose and more and more people worked and were poor. This was a reform spectacle.
The core question of a democratic society that reflects on its own future is: how do we want to live? It is not: what is good for businesses and economic growth? What is good for businesses is a secondary question because a community must first agree on the criteria for a good life. The question what an individual and the economy can contribute to this good life has to be answered first.
How do we want to live? The nature of pluralist societies is that particular interests and social interests are balanced. This consensus is damaged when the particular interests of a social group like a business decide the issues. When reform projects are only seen economically, the view wanders to bankruptcy records, mass unemployment, and nonwage labor costs and does not focus on the increasing chasm between poor and rich, low wage-earners and the ecological damages of our way of life and economic style. If this is considered, we get a completely different answer to the core question.
How do we want to live? We want to live in an intact environment, in a more peaceful world where prosperity is distributed as justly as possible and benefits everyone. We want people to have an income that can be a good basis for successful interpersonal relations. We need more social security in view of a flexible capitalism. In short, Germany is a place where people live and not an investment site organized as profitably as possible. We must speak about the well-being of people and not only about the optimal location conditions for businesses.
THESIS 3: Justice is the standard for reform policy. The strength of a people is measured by the well-being of the weak.
Since the Hartz IV judgment of the German Constitutional Court, Guido Westerwelle presents himself as the only politician who openly speaks the truth. He believes he has discovered "new territory" with intolerable exaggerations and loutish behavior against the poor. Consequently, public attention is directed at whether the social state must be fundamentally reformed.
The social state is one of the most precious treasures that this republic has created. The social state is the roof that protects people from the thunderstorms and hail of capitalism. Only one who does not need a roof can criticize this. Life cannot go well when more and more people are excluded, when German society becomes a class society again and when an increasing number of children grow up in poverty. Social rights are rights to participation. These rights should protect the cohesion within society and preserve society from dissolution. The social state must be established so it can hold its ground to the storms, protects, and does not let the rain through.
We need the social state because life begins unjustly, ends unjustly and happens unjustly. One is born with a silver spoon and another in a high-rise project. One grows up with books and others with drugs. One hits the jackpot in the lottery of nature and another draws a blank. One is healthy all life long and another is born with a serious disability. Fate is distributed unjustly. Nature is a justice risk. The social state is needed so this lottery does not determine the whole life. Thus the social state is a fate corrector.
That a needy person has a right or claim to a humane subsistence level is part of the social state… The Karlsruhe judgment assigns an energetic task to the social state. A social state is not automatically a good social state when it spends enormous money for the social, the court said. It must have a clear underlying concept that considers the isolated case. The highest judges criticized the policy that culpably prescribed the legislation where children were mired in poor conditions. If the state cannot ensure that all children are born in orderly conditions, it must at least ensure they get the promotion they need. The social state is a fate corrector.
This judgment was the contribution of the highest German court to the "European Year against Poverty and Social Exclusion." This EU Year 2010 runs under the motto "With New Courage." The courage of the German government cannot consist in seeking ways of dodging the Karlsruhe decision and minimizing basic security so tax gifts can be given to the well-to-do. Seldom has a judgment of the German Supreme Court turned round the political discussion as the Hartz IV judgment. Guido Westerwelle roundly criticized Hartz IV recipients as lazybones seeking "effortless wealth." The insulted lack work, social recognition, and also lack the strength to resist and organize. There are Hartzers who have established themselves somehow in social dissolution and view the state as a spigot. The worst reaction to that is when annoyance is poured on all Hartz IV recipients.
Poverty in Germany is different than in the 19th century. There is no poor class anymore that can join forces combatively as unions and social democracy did in the 19th and 20th centuries. The megaphone that unions once provided for the working class is lacking the poor of today. Pride, self-confidence, and the feeling of solidarity are lacking to them. Everyone is only for himself and is relatively poor.
Poverty has many faces today. There is the unemployed academic, the casual laborer, and the skilled worked rationalized away. There is the single mother who cannot take the leap into vocational life anymore. There is the supermarket cashier working by the hour. There are the long-term unemployed. There are the persons always cut short at the edge of society. There are the immigrant children who cannot escape the ghetto. The German Constitutional Court wrote its judgment for all of them.
The judgment of Karlsruhe that rehabilitated the social state is the long-version of a sentence in the preamble of the 1999 Swiss constitution: "The strength of a people is measured in the well-being of the weak." That is a very courageous sentence because this strength is measured by very different factors. Some measure the strength of the people and the state by growth, the gross domestic product, and the export surplus. Others speak of the strong state in urging more police, more criminal justice, and more
prisons. Too few speak of the strength of a people in enforcing humane minimum wages. Too few speak of the strong state in repairing social inequality, doing something against long-term unemployment and connecting social- and educational policy.
A reform policy should be oriented in the social state, as the judges reminded us again. Improving the quality of life of all people is the task of the social state. Reforms are for the sake of people, as Bishop Huber, the EKD (Evangelical; Church in Germany) chairperson, titled his programmatic address on reform policy. "The goal is making human life more secure and giving people confidence for their future and for the common future." Therefore reforms must be measured by this goal whether they give people more future certainty, life security, and chances of freedom.
It is by no means a matter of course when a state does its utmost for humane living conditions and commits itself to a "balance of social oppositions" and to the production of "a just social order." This commitment of the state to a social balance, solidarity and social justice marks the European social model and distinguishes it from the AmericanAnglo-Saxon concept. A creeping changeover in European policy is clear since the 1990s.
THESIS 4: The social state is more than an alms state for the needy. The social state relies on social balance through state action and depends on the output of the economy.
The social state aims at dismantling the structural causes of discrimination and does not only set up tables or soup kitchens. Thus it is not exhausted in caring for underprivileged persons. It extends a hand to those needing a helping hand. It is the great facilitator. It gives the poor a way out of poverty and not only a bed and a roof. The free unfolding of the personality of every individual is the concern of middle-class freedom rights, not the free unfolding of capital. Therefore middle-class freedom rights and social rights are connected. A redistribution from top to bottom for the basic social security of all citizens and for approximately equal chances and living conditions is a democratic right that the state supports, not a socialist remainder or a social fuss. The social state and democracy belong together and form a unity.
What are the prerequisites of the social state? The basic conviction underlying this conception of human life and cooperation is a certainty that has deeply marked Europe. It goes back to biblical and Christian thinking. Therefore the social philosopher Hauke Brunkhorst in his book "Solidarity: From Citizen Friendship to Global Legal Cooperatives" said: "Europe began in Jerusalem. But what began there? – Brotherliness and sisterliness – I would say in a somewhat long-winded way – express the hope in a form of human cooperation where people are respected as persons without preconditions or advance concessions, without distinctions of race, class or origin and have rights. Whether someone is poor, enslaved, captive or foreign as a foreigner, slave or poor person, he is always a brother and therefore in the same legal position. Brotherliness or sisterliness is not mercy and solidarity is not grace but a right. If this basic conviction is lost, there is no motive that justifies the social state anymore.
These basic ideas had consequences. Through an active formative social policy, the social state emphasizes social balance and lays claim on the output of the economy for financing the social state and grants an important role as bearer of social state tasks to welfare associations.
THESIS 5: Reforms of the social state must strengthen the social foundation of democracy. The present social state expects much too little solidarity from citizens. Another reform policy is necessary that expands solidarity.
Westerwelle wants to reinvent the social state. This can be understood as a threat. The last "re-invention" of the social state by German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder led to more poverty and greater annoyance, not to anything better or more just or to cost savings. The social state must be reorganized and recalculated, not re-invented. The judgment of the Constitutional Court is a good plan for that reorganization. That judgment finds today's weak spots without "inventing" anything.
The weak spot insisted on by Guido Westerwelle could be added to the others. It is also a problem of the social state when unemployed persons receive more money than those who work. It is a problem when work is not worthwhile anymore. Westerwelle & Co. think the excessive social benefits are to blame, not the low pay. But the downward spiral into distress cannot be stopped by cutting the social benefits for those without work. That does not make low-income earners richer but encourages employers to reduce the low pay again. What will happen then?
Employers will obviously save costs – and the state will be relieved because it must lower his social benefits (according to the logic that the one who works must have more than the one who doesn't work). All this ends in anti-social behavior. Only the way taken by twenty member EU states leads out of this poverty trap: the introduction of minimum wages that guarantee a distance between the low wages and the stateguaranteed subsistence level. Democracy and the social state belong together. Citizens in a democracy need education and livelihood; they need a reasonably secured existence. Life begins unjustly and will end unjustly. The social state exists so life happens somewhat justly.
A society assures its essential solidarity in social policy. Thus reforms do not serve the goal of organizing the functional systems more securely or stabilizing the pension system or the health system. Rather reforms must show that the health reform or the pension reform make life more secure.
Under this perspective, the main problem of the social state crisis is that the real existing social state integrates too few people in solidarity. To guarantee this, citizens must be assured equal rights and the material prerequisites to realize their equal rights. As they "need" the constitutional state to guarantee equal rights, they "need" the social state to ensure these material presuppositions. Thus the democratic social state is an instrument of solidarity between citizens to promote their participation in equal rights.
Expanding the foundations of solidarity will be central. The social state needs a democratic justification – in a double sense. The democratic social state gives all citizens the right to social state support – and in a countermove obligates all of them in financing its projects. Therefore the state has both the right and the duty to provide the funds for the social state projects through taxes. Compared to 2000, the state renounced on 80 billion euros of revenue through its tax cutting policy. Compared to France, the public authority has a shortfall in receipts of 131 billion euros. Thus expanding solidarity means businesses and citizens sharing justly and fairly in financing the social state. The social state task to counteract the distribution disparities that have increased drastically according to the German government's second Poverty and Wealth report to be published in the next weeks.
The great man of catholic social teaching, Oswald von Neil-Breuning, pointed to this inner constitution of the social state and emphasized that a value-oriented action is necessary: "If the statement the economy exists for people and not the person for the well-being of the economy should not be a meaningless empty phrase, the satisfaction of need should not only mean the generation active in the economy. Those not active or no longer active are not "costs" that narrow the profit of the economy or its achievement but fulfill the intention of the economy… The question what our social state "costs" can only refer to whether it is worth what it costs… This ethical value-standard of solidarity is the only common standard in which the expense and results are measured and compared with each other. The social state and the question what it "costs" are senseless for anyone without this standard." (1982)
THESIS 6: Regarding the reforms, a new start beyond finance capitalism seems the proper answer to the crisis, not the mere repair of the crisis damage. Building the social state foundation of democracy is central.
Very different questions are raised in building the social state foundation of democracy.
How can social security be developed further so it is no longer only bound to the employee status but does justice to the fact that the gainful situation of people has become fragile and they need a security in this situation? The IG metal union has brought an insurance of employed persons into the debate. Women experience that security outside the assumed normal existence of the family and continuous gainful activity. The risks of precarious gainful developments must be covered by basic security models. The great social security systems must be rebuilt into an insurance of citizens or employed persons. The social state of the future needs a well-balanced relation of flexibility, social security, and training. Minimum wage, protection from unlawful termination, and high wage compensations ensure a minimum in income- and employment-stability. Therefore this perspective must be in force: everyone must be able to live in dignity from work and even without work. But what would a social security look like that is no longer and exclusively bound to paid labor? To that end, we need a minimum wage and a subsistence-level basic income for victims of the labor market crisis.
How can the work- and social system be reformed to push back the overpowering access of the world of work on the whole lifestyle and grant more autonomy to people? Reduced working hours is vital.
How can the close connection of work and income be loosened so life chances are not only decided by acce4ss to the scarce good paid labor? Health and unemployment arise in the same act. As a consequence, people become superfluous. The economy of the future needs the computer – not people. Today's reforms press people on labor markets that do not have sufficient jobs. They force them to accept work at any price. The future of work is work in service of people. However, this cannot be offered as residual work like a service at low wages while the winners of rationalization appropriate the largest share of the gross domestic product. Unfinished tasks are crucial for a community. How should we deal with seniors, the sick, disabled and social minorities? Employment conditions that are satisfying for workers and profitable for the community must be created. Social services should be developed…
A modern social state must rely on prevention, training, and reeducation instead of the unimaginative pressure through transfer cuts and intensified exactions. A publically promoted employment sector is the alternative to passively financing long-term unemployment. Profit- and asset revenue must be taxed more robustly to finance the future social state.
A stronger future social state will only arise with a far-reaching democratization of society. Now is the moment to continue the strong economic democracy tradition of German unions and to further develop this tradition. More economic democracy means more joint-determination, a democratic self-government of the economy, plural forms of ownership, better regulation, and a macro-economic control. By strengthening the barriers against a marketing or commercialization of labor, namely individual labor law and collective bargaining, a well-balanced even distribution of economic value-creation can be realized and social cohesion restored.
The crucial imperative of a new start beyond finance capitalism is regaining a macroeconomic policy with the following aspects: an active employment policy, an employment-oriented monetary policy, an income- and wage-policy referring to productivity and a financial policy that taxes all income recipients and owners of wealth according to ability.
Changing direction is necessary. Germany is a rich country. The financial possibilities for real reforms that could contribute to a more just and future-friendly society exist. The political will to take up necessary reforms is lacking. In a democratic society, citizens are mutually connected to each other so no one is excluded. The right to political participation is in force for all citizens. Social security is the foundation of freedom. The president of the German republic at that time Gustav Heinemann had this in mind when he said on the 25th jubilee of the Basic Law:
"The experiences of Weimar have taught that we must join both together – the constitutional state and care. The second foundation is indispensable for democracy… Social security is part of the basic equipment of all citizens in industrial society as a visible proof of practiced solidarity."
5. CAPITALISM AS A RELIGON
THEOLOGICAL ENLIGHTENMENT ABOUT CAPITALISM AS A RELIGION A CAPITALIST CREED
[This article is translated from the German on Franz Segbers’ webpage. Franz Segbers is a professor of theology at the University of Marburg and a prolific writer.]
"Capital is the only god that the whole world knows, sees, touches, smells, tastes and excites all our senses. it is the only god that doesn't encounter any atheists" (Paul Lafargue's little known genial satire "Religion of Capital" from 1887.
Trust in the "invisible hand" is a trust in a religion that has a money god. Capital and its multiplication claim an all-determining authority. Only an enlightenment about the economy with the means of religion helps against a capitalism as religion. As Christians refused the worship of the imperial cult, they must resist today the religion of capitalism as atheists.
I believe in the market, the Almighty, the creator of prosperity and happiness, and in profit, its only begotten son, our Lord, conceived by liberalization, arose out of the protestant ethic, suffered under communism and regulation, minimized, maximized and spared, descended in the kingdom of recession,
rose from the bear market, and ascended in times of boom.
Profit is rightly part of the market of the almighty Father, and will come to judge the owners of capital and the wage-earners. I believe in private maximization of advantages, constant profitable growth, the community of banks, forgiveness of credits, resurrection of shares and the eternal business cycle.
[Dirk Kresler, The Forced Global Religion of Humankind, Notes on Religio-Capitalism. HTTP://WWW.LITERATURKRITIK.DE/PUBLIC/REZENSION.PHD?REZ_1014504.]
A satire can first reveal the hidden and mad rationality of an economy that feels awkward like a conviction of faith in a secular society. The above satire recalls Paul Lafargues’ little known genial satire “Religion of Capital” from 1887. There we read “Capital is the god that the whole world knows, sees, touches, smells, tastes and excites all our senses. It is the only god that does not encounter any atheists…”
The other religions are nothing but lip service. Faith in capital governs in the depths of human nature (Paul Lafargue, The Religion of Capital). In a visionary way, Lafargue diagnosed: “Capital does not know any homeland or border, any skin color or race or any altar or gender. It is the international god, the universal god and forces all human children under its law (Ibid). A hierarchy of power is central, not the criticism of greed that is older than a millennium. No one can elude the pressure that starts from capital. The creed quoted at the outset formulates a conviction that is believed though not expressed. “It has taken over those functions religion had earlier for its billions of forced believers.”
In the following, I will explain how neoliberal capitalism is free4 of legal prescriptions and instead is guided by reliio-theological assumptions… It is normatively based on a
religiously founded faith and in this sense is a religion.
RELIGION, THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN RELIGION AND DESTRUCTIVE RELIGION AND BETWEEN GOD AND IDOLS
Up to today neither the religion-disciplines nor sociology have formulated an acknowledged definition of “religions” since the dilemma persists of defining religion as a realm of the “holy” separated from society or the world or understanding religion “functionally” in the tradition of Durkheim and Parson as a complex that creates values, rituals or faith themes for the cohesion of society. Erich Fromm took up this religion term when he defined religion as any system of thinking and acting shared by a group that offers individuals a n orientating framework and an object of devotion.” [Erich Fromm, Having or Being, The mental foundations of a new society, 1976]. At the same time he formulated an ideology-critical task in showing “the nature of idols that were and still are worshipped to this day in the history of humanity.” [Erich Fromm, You will be like gods. A radical interpretation of the Old Testament and its tradition, 1989].
Religion then is in no way a system that is necessarily connected with an idea of God or recognized as a religion. In religion, the person is entrusted with an “object of devotion.” This object of devotion could be animals, trees, an invisible God, a class, a party, money, success, the market or even a football team. Therefore religion is more than a conviction of dogmas. It orients thought and action. The all-decisive questions are political, social and ideological: What functions as religion? “Does it promote human development and the unfolding of specific human powers or paralyze human growth?” {Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion, in: Collected Works, 1989}. Thus Fromm develops a criterion for clarifying what religion people confide in. Erich Fromm takes up a distinction between God and idols that was deeply at home in the Jewish-Christian intellectual tradition. “A religion that serves life worships God while a religion that serves destructive forces is idolatry” (Ibid). For him, “God” is a code for “love and justice” and “idol” is a code for a destructive “power over people” (Ibid). In the biblical tradition, the idol criterion acts as an immanent criticism of destructive religion and in no way refers only disparagingly to a foreign religion of another.
MULTIPLYING CAPITAL AS “GOD’S WORK”
The “invisible hand” is the central metaphor for legitimating neoliberal capitalism. Only a market free from all incursions can produce optimal results. Whoever intervenes in the market – even with the best will – brings about the opposite. So the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung newspaper (FAZ) diagnosed Opel’s over-production crisis by referring to the effects of the “invisible hand” as follows: “The invisible hand cqaresses the one capiable of adjustment and kicks those who refuse adjustment” (FAZ, 10/28/2004). The US Senate subcommittee on the financial crisis concluded: “The crisis was not a natural disaster but the result of high risk, complex financial products, hidden conflicts of interest and the failure of monitoring authorities, rating agencies and the market itself” (United States Senate Permanent subcommittee on investigations: Wall Street and the Financial Crisis, Anatomy of a Financial Collapse).
Alan Greenspan who authoritatively defined American monetary policy from 1987 to the beginning of 2006 admitted this in 2008 gnashing his teeth before the congressional committee on explaining the financial crisis. He erred since he overrated the self-healing powers of the market and regarded strict regulation as unnecessary (Alan Greenspan, Zerknirscht im Kongress, http://www.fax.net). In 2008 Frank Schirrmacher, editor of FAZ, uncovered the “bankruptcy of the metaphysics of the market.” The breakdown of basic convictions that theoretically and practically supported neoliberal finance capitalism is blatant.
However the paralysis over the market failure did not last long. Untouched by all criticism of the banks for causing the financial crisis, the chairman of the board of Goldman Sachs Llyod Blankfein proclaimed his faith in an invisible hand: “banks serve a social purpose and are doing `God’s work’” (Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfeinh says Banks do “God’s Work,” in: NY Daily News, November 9, 2009).
Ben Bernanke, chairman of the American Federal Reserve, remained deeply religious despite the crisis and unswervingly adhered to the marvelous effect of the free market. “When one teaches the economy, understanding the idea of the invisible hand is one of the most exciting moments… Markets are a marvelous thing” (Patrick Weiter, Federal Reserve chairman Bernanke “Markets are marvelous” in: FAZ, 8/9/2012). Colin Crouch diagnosed a “surprising survival of neoliberalism” with its “supreme creed,” letting the market mechanism rule without state or other incursions (Colin Crouch, the Surprising Survival of Neoliberalism, Berlin 2011). This surprising unswervability despite all crises can only be explained as an unswerving faith in the working of an invisible hand.
THE “INVISIBLE HAND” AS KEY METAPHOR ION NEOLIBERALISM
The demand for more market and less state is the real ideological center of neolIberalism. So Milton Friedman, George Stigler and Friedrich A. Hayek rising in admiration of the “invisible hand” is not surprising. So the Nobel prize winner and economist Friedrich August von Hayek urged “humility” toward market processes. “Whether people earlier submitted on account of notions that are often regarded today as superstitions is not important from a religious feeling of humility” (Friedrich August Hayek, The Road to Serfdom). The term “humility” according to its original meaning belongs to the dialectic of the relation of master and servant and describes an attitude of deep devotion and readiness to submit.
Despite all secularity of modern society, George Soros recognizes a “belief in the magic power of the market.” Some think “the public interest is best served by the unrestricted pursuit of self-interest.” How did the marvelous inversion from private interests to a public interest occur thought he “invisible hand”?
ADAM SMITH AND THE INVISIBLE HAND
In 1926 John M. Keynes in his Berlin lecture “The End of Laissez-faire” called the principle of the “invisible hand” a “religion of economists” which served nothing but “the unlimited possibility of private moneymaking” and the “profit of the individual.” Keynes criticized the ignorance of economists. “National economists today have no relation any more to theological political philosophies from which the dogma of social harmony arose and their academic research no longer leads to similar conclusions” (Keynes, John M., The End of Laissez-faire). In his unfortunately largely unknown 1945 treatise titled “The Failure of Economic Liberalism as a religio-historical problem” called the emphasis on the “invisible hand” an “economic theology.” Trust in a universal Creator God who guides and preserves the world in his goodness with an “invisible hand” is an expression of a religiously grounded trust in a God who governs the world to the good. The theme of “trust in the invisible hand” was theological with Adam Smith and by no means merely metaphorical or pictorial.
Even if Adam Smith only used the metaphor of the “invisible hand” in two passages, this conviction occurs frequently in his main work “The Wealth of Nations.” Whoever wants to enlarge his own profit will be “guided by an invisible hand to promote a goal that he has no intention of fulfilling.” Thus a “providence” transforms self-interest into public interest since the rich “are guided by an invisible hand to accomplish almost the same distribution of vital goods that would happen if the earth were divided in equal parts among all its inhabitants and promotes them without intending this and without knowing the interests of society.” (Adam Smith, Theory of Ethical Feelings). Unhindered striving for private gain and advantages add up to the public interest through the providence of an “invisible hand.” A regime of selfishness is established that one can confidently trust. Whoever indulges his selfishness as much as possible also contributes to the social wellbeing.
Since the market is guided by an “invisible hand,” the ethical consequences resulting from the pursuit of self-interest are faded out. A tremendous revaluation process stands at the beginning of the modern age. People began to regard greed, that striving for material gain, as a harmless and even useful attitude. Greed or avarice was morally neutralized and even valued as personally advantageous. Therefore there was no reason to limit it. This de-stigmatization of greed broke with a barrier that all ancient philosophies and religions had erected since time immemorial. The vice of greed condemned since antiquity by the philosophers and religions was promoted to a morally innocent and even honorable occupation. Greed and the economic ally organized insatiability that we call growth today becomes a respectable motive. There is also no perpetrator or culprit. Everyone is only a little wheel in a big machine. No one acts. They all only reenact what happens anyway because a divine providence works in the world according to Adam Smith whose kindness and wisdom invented and guided the tremendous machine of the universe since all eternity so it brings forth the greatest possible measure of happiness at all times” (Adam Smith, Theory of Ethical Feelings). Since God’s providence governs, one can confidently trust the invisible hand and refrain from all interventions in the market. “The management of the great system of the universe is God’s task and not a
human task” (Adam Smith, Theory of Ethical Feelings).
In his “Theory of Ethical Feelings,” Smith discusses the Stoa in detail. “The ancient Stoics were convinced every individual event was a necessary part of the world plan since the world was ruled by the providence of a wise, powerful and kindly God who promotes the general order and blessedness of the whole. The vices and follies of human are a necessary part of the plan – like their wisdom and virtue. Bringing the good out of evil is an eternal art for the thriving and perfection of the great system of nature” (Quoted in Hans Christoph Binswanger, The Faith Community of Economists. Essays on the Culture of the Economy, 1998).
A conflicting picture appears. Trust in the market comes out of the theologically established trust in the (deistic) God. But the market becomes an end-in-itself and is itself part of a higher order when the market as with Adam Smith is understood as part of an order guaranteed by God. The revival of the theory of the “invisible hand” shows neoliberalism has fallen back to the state of a religiously substantiated worldview. Binswanger points out Smith struck out all references to Christianity in the sixth edition of the “Theory of Ethical Feelings.” “Adam Smith was a believer in the sense of the Stoa, not in the sense of Christianity” (Hans Christoph Binswanger, The Faith Community of Economists). He calls economists who argue with the effects of an “invisible hand” a “Stoic faith community.”
A theologically established faith in the “invisible hand” returns with the acceptance of neoliberal capitalism. However the original context and the religio-theological connection of this idiom were not considered. Neoliberal capitalism is religio-theologically established. This means a criticism of capitalism with theological terms is appropriate and is not irrelevant or extraneous. Therefore a capitalism criticism that does not argue religio-critically ignores the central legitimation figure of capitalism and its effect. Therefore capitalism criticism as religion criticism is a mode of enlightenment. An economy based on an “invisible hand” argues religiously in an unenlightened sense, not scholarly or scientifically.
THE RELIGION OF CAPITALISM AS A NEW OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE
What John M. Keynes described in 1926 as the theoretical and practical refutation of the balancing effect of an invisible hand is still true. “An orthodox faith is in danger. The more convincing the argument, the greater the blasphemy” (Keynes, John M., The End of Laissez-faire). The supposed lack of alternatives in the religion of capitalism sacralizes capitalism. State regulation of capitalism amounts to blasphemy. Pierre Bourdieu also interpreted the theory and concept of neoliberalism as a utopian faith system. “Neoliberalism appears in the semblance of inevitabiolity” (Pierre Bourdieu, The `Globalization’ Myth and the European Social State, in Gegenfeuer. Resistance against the Neoliberal Invasion, 1998). People have no cjhoice. Bourdieu summarizes: “This is a religion.”
The system replaces the acting subject. This is clear in one of the statements of Milton Friedman, Hayek’s student: “Economic persons are ultimately nothing but marionettes of the laws of the market” (cf. Die Zeit, April 7, 1989). The market is determined by divine laws, not by humans as acting subjects. Milton Friedman transferred the responsibility of economic persons to the market. The market replaces acting persons as subjects of responsibility. Thus economic actors are ethically relieved as “marionettes of the laws of the market and does not act independently. In a countermove, the market is promoted as an acting subject. There is no causal agent for economic distresses or social injustices from this economic school of thought. The emphasis on “marionettes or practical constraints demoralizes and relieves from responsibility. Everyone must join in since there are no alternatives. The “invisible hand” legitimates an “irresponsibility that becomes a system” (Emil Brunner, 1932, Zurich). The market becomes the guarantee for ethically-normatively correct conduct of market actors. The economic ally-active person as a responsible subject has long abdicated. Thus the market acts like an active subject that can caress and kick and degrades the human subject to an object. The inversion of the person as historical subject to an object and the “invisible hand” to an acting subject means the abolition of the person.
Karl Marx’ criticism of religion as “opium of the people” refers to a neoliberal capitalism that demands a submission of the person under a pressure without alternatives. Capital should dominate and its central function, the infinite increase of capital, be made unrecognizable, unchangeable and unassailable. Capital should be promoted as the alldetermining reality before which “the world makes a graven image and falls down before it” (Isa 44,15). Thus biblical myth criticism becomes actual in ideology criticism where people are ruled by a “work of their hands” (Isa 17,8). Criticism of idols turns against the subjugation of persons under self-created authorities like those of an economic system. The fetishism of capital can be compared with idolatry like the objective antithesis of the autonomy of capitalism and God’s liberating presence in history.
In the act of trust as a genuine religious act, a structural analogy appears between the tr5ust in God in religion and trust in money. This structural analogy occurs in the application of religious and theological terms by neoliberal theoreticians. Capitalism is religion and not merely like a religion. Its cult is capital multiplication.
SACRIFICIAL RELIGION OF FINANCE MARKET DRIVEN CAPITALISM
Finance market capitalism is a formation of capitalism that has prevailed since the middle of the 1970s and took down previous market limiting institutions through privatization, deregulation and flexibility. The profit-mongering (Plus-macherei) was always the central desire: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!” What is new in finance market driven casino capitalism is that it wants to receive capital movements on the international capital market from dependence on the profits of real businesses. Karl Marx’ well-known formula G-W-G (money-goods-money) is shortened in finance market driven capitalism to a direct G-G (money-money) (Christoph Deutschmann, The Promise of Absolute Wealth. On the Religious Nature of Capitalism, 1999).
The economist Hans Werner Sinn said: “Germany must court business capital because innovation, growth and jobs can only be guaranteed that way” (WSM News, 10/30/2005). The financial crisis is the result of a policy that courts capital. The interests of shareholders become the only goal of economic transactions. This strategic goal ruins the profit exploitation goals for employees and “produces” precarious forms of employment like low wages, subcontracted labor, employment limited in time or mini-jobs to employment flexibly adjusted to the demands of the market. The alleged lack of alternatives to adjustment to the market reminds Christoph Deutschmann of atoning or expiating religious rituals. “As to the prescriptions of sacrifice (for example, here reduction of unemployment, there falling rain implored by the gods), the answer always consists in the demand for increasing sacrificial offerings, not in a testing of the functionality of the sacrifice (here: more wage- and social budget cuts on one hand, productivity increases on the other hand: offering additional sacrificial goods to finally pacify the angry gods). In both cases, the cause-effect chains are staged circularly and thereby are immune to empirical criticism (Christoph Deutschmann, The Promise of Absolute Wealth. On the Religious Nature of Capitalism, 1999).
While capital profits are fixed at 16, 18 or even 25% despite crises, the employees become a flexible manoeverable mass for ensuring the fixed profit goal. This precariousness is essentially a social power of finance capitalist actors, not a consequence of a logic of the market that could be executed by very small businesses (Klaus Borge, Precariousness in Finance Market Capitalism, in: R. Castel/ K. Duerre (ed), Precariousness, Descent and Exclusion. The social question at the beginning of the 21st century, 2009). The pressure on the real economy and skimming off current profits have produced play money for the finance casino. In the last years, there was a massive redistribution of social wealth in many industrial states – benefiting capital profits and at the expense of mass income. The precariousness of work, the extension of working hours and the reduction of social security are real sacrifices forced on dependent employees for extra profits of shareholders.
According to Marx, the sacrifices in capitalism are wicked. The sacrificial cult does not belong to a past religious epoch. “An idol is made out of these metals (gold and silver)… to make them deities to which more goods, important needs and even humans are sacrificed than blind antiquity ever sacrificed to its false gods” (Karl Marx, MEW 13, 103). In the inaugural address of the International Workers’ Association in September 1864, Karl Marx addressed this sacrificial character of the religion of capitalism and quoted smug complacent scholars who said “every legal restriction of the workday must ring the death-bells of British industry that like vampires cannot live without blood, children’s blood. In all times, infanticide or child murder was a mysterious rite of the religion of Moloch. However this was only practical on very solemn occasions, perhaps once a year. At that time Moloch did not have an exclusive special liking for the children of the poor” (Karl Marx, Selected Writings, 1934). Thus for Marx, capitalism has become a system and the sacrificial cult is in no way an overcome pre-modern or unenlightened epoch of humanity’s history.
The trust in the “invisible hand” is a trust in a religion that has a money god. Capital and its multiplication claim an all-determining authority. The notion of self-regulating finance markets that function efficiently was refuted by the crisis. The central ideological motive of faith in the “invisible hand” is veiled. However the cynical conditions that bar alternatives and demand sacrifices can only be unmasked through a theological criticism of the religion of capitalism because the false fetishized worship of God makes possible and legitimates sacrifice for capital. At the beginning of the 1980s, theologians of liberation reacted to the disastrous effects of the neoliberal economy particularly in Latin America by unmasking capitalism as a false and destructive (church) service. Now it is time to air a theological criticism of the mechanisms of the religion of the market when the consequences are very clear in the economic and political centers.
Neoliberal capitalism is not only a religion in a metaphorical sense. It is a religion that demands real human sacrifice as inevitable. With this, religion criticism has another object. Not believing the supposed secularism of the world religion of globalized capital becomes the challenge of the enlightenment. Only an enlightenment about the economy with the means of religion helps against a capitalism as religion. In the Roman Empire, there was a Pantheon full of gods. Whoever refused the central cult, the worship of the emperor as God’s Son was persecuted like Christians as “atheists.” As Christians at that time refused the worship of the religion of the imperial cult, so they must resist today the religion of capitalism as atheists.
6. CAPITALISM IN THE FAITH CRISIS
[This essay published in a 2010 Rosa Luxemburg anthology on theology of liberation and democratic socialism is translated abridged from the German on the Internet, www.rosalux.de.]
No one speaks any more of an "end of history" that was proclaimed twenty years ago with a victorious howl. Instead what was already immense at that time twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall was repeated intensively: the crisis-proclivity of capitalism breaks out in a severe economic and financial crisis. The economic system praised as victorious has failed. The traces of devastation can be seen worldwide. Argentina, Mexico and Southeast Asia were the first countries where the crisis-proclivity of financemarket-driven capitalism was manifest. Now the crisis devours its children in the US and Europe and from there infects the countries of the South. "Believers are running away from capitalism" (Freitag 47/2009). So Michael Kratke summarizes a worldwide study on acceptance of the market economy. The slim majority of the surveyed are convinced capitalism is shaken but can be reformed within the system and through more regulation. Turning to Germany, only a minority of 16% are diehards insisting capitalism is unbeatable – less than in the US but more than in Great Britain (13%) or France (6%).
How can it be explained that neoliberalism has even intensified in a black-yellow garb rather than withdrawn despite its obvious failure and disaster? Hans-Jurgen Krysmanski has analyzed the mechanisms and functions of the financial power complex by which a small minority of super-rich hoard wealth and power as in the times of feudalism: "In its center, there is a linked ultra-rich clientele that has grown historically. This clientele is surrounded by corporate and financial elites who explore and investigate new possibilities of capital accumulation benefiting this clientele. Political elites transport social wealth from bottom to top as quietly as possible" (H-J.Krysmanski). According to a 2008 study of the World Institute for Development Economies Research (WIDER) of the UN, the richest ten percent of the population possess 85.2% and the richest one percent of the world population 40.1% of the worldwide wealth. The citi-bank group speaks openly of "plutonomies," wealth economies that split humanity into two categories: "the plutonomies where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by a wealthy few." The neoliberal epoch represents a glittering time for the minority of the financial elite and its official classes and doesn't run disastrously for everyone. Why should they change anything?
The analysis of the financial power complex presented by Krysmanski describes the hidden mechanisms and functions of a global redistribution and acquisition caste. This analysis could be deepened through the fetishism analysis that Marx offered in analyzing the capitalist economy. Strikingly Karl Marx carried out the critique of capitalism with terms taken from religion. Marx used biblical or theological terms again and again. He spoke of "Baal," "the golden calf," "mammon" and "Moloch" to describe the nature of capitalism as the false service of profit and money. The most important term of the Marxian criticism of capitalism is a metaphor that refers to religion: fetishism (MEW 23). Marx' concern was to unmask the economic law of the capitalist production method and
describe its so-called "natural laws" that actually make things into subjects to which the repressing subjects have to submit. Marx uses a term from the world of religions, fetishism, to characterize this act. A fetish is a dead object awarded qualities by people which then can gain power over them. Social relations of persons are inverted into a social relation of things. People submit to social conditions that they created themselves. Thus the fetish analysis can explain capital movements where economists speak mysteriously about inexplicable effects of an invisible hand.
The Latin American theology of liberation took up this criticism of the fetish character of social relations and accomplished two things. Firstly, the fetishism analysis was read in a new way with biblical traditions, especially of the prophets. Now where the crisis of neoliberal capitalism is manifest even in the North, it is time to take up this liberation theology re-reading of the fetishism analysis and make it fruitful for the ChristianMarxist dialog for a criticism of finance-market-driven capitalism.
My thesis is that capitalism criticism as religion criticism can explain the neoliberal intensification and the fact that "all believers do not run away from capitalism." The economic- and financial crisis is understood as a "faith-temptation." In this temptation, one must believe more robustly and attest to the imperturbability of their faith in the challenge and temptation in the economic and financial crisis.
CAPITALISM CRITICISM AS RELIGION CRITICISM – RELIGION CRITICISM AS CAPITALISM CRITICISM
An admission of guilt on the failure of political-economic concepts could be read in the "News of the German Association of Engineers" at the peak of the financial crisis. "This means the so-called invisible hand of the market has not taken hold. The invisible hand is a philosophy that is widespread not only with the economic elite." To explain the overproduction crisis that Opel had to fight in 2004, the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper decried the deficient competitiveness in a 10/28/2004 commentary and also referred to the role of the "invisible hand." "The invisible hand strokes the one capable of adjustment… The market behaves like an active subject… and degrades the human subject to an object. This inversion of the subject to an object and socially-created relations to an acting subject describes exactly what Marx intended with the fetish character.
This idea occurs often even if Adam Smith only used the metaphor of the "invisible hand" so important for economic theory in two passages. In his main work "The Wealth of Nations," he says: Whoever wants to multiply his profit will be "guided by an invisible hand to advance a goal he did not intend to fulfill." "Providence" transforms self-interest into public interest since the rich are led by an invisible hand to carry out the same distribution of vitally necessary goods as though the earth were divided equally among all its inhabitants. So they promote the interest of society without intending or knowing it" (A. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments). Through the Providence of an "invisible hand," unhindered pursuit of private gains and benefits becomes the common good. A regime of
self-interest is established that one can confidently trust. Whoever gratifies his selfinterest as unrestrictedly as possible also contributes to the social welfare. The ethical consequences resulting from pursuing self-interest are faded out since the market is guided by an "invisible hand." There is no causal agent for economic problems or social injustices in this economic approach. There are no culprits or perpetrators. Everyone is only an executor without a will or a little wheel in a big machine. No one acts. Everyone only carries out what would happen anyway. Therefore everyone must join in since there are no alternatives. The system replaces the acting subject. In a countermove, the market is promoted as an acting subject.
Adam Smith did not only understand the term "invisible hand" in a metaphoricalfigurative way. He saw a divine Providence effective in the world whose "favor and wisdom invented and guided the tremendous machine of the universe from all eternity so it produces the greatest possible measure of happiness in all times" (Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments). Honoring God and trusting his invisible hand now mean not intervening in the incidents of the market since God's Providence governs there. "The management of the great system of the universe…is the task of God and not of humans" (Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments).
So the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper) commented on the Mexican crisis with a shrug, referred to the "merciless governing of the invisible hand" and veiled the debacle of finance-market-driven capitalism that Marx analyzed with fetishism. The disastrous consequences of this crisis in whose course the real GDP fell seven percent and industrial production 15% caused thousands of believers to declare bankruptcy and hundreds of thousands of workers to lose their jobs. What is comically called the "merciless governing of the invisible hand," Alexander von Rustow in his, unfortunately, unknown 1945 treatise "The Breakdown of Economic Liberalism as a Religio-Historical Problem" already called an "economic theory." Trust in the universal Creator God who in his kindheartedness maintains and guides the world with an "invisible hand" is an expression of a religiously-established trust in a God who rules the world to the good. Smith did not mean the Christian God but appealed to the antique philosophy of the Stoa that experienced a renaissance as deism in the era of early capitalism and started from the notion that God created the world like clockwork that functions independently.
Adam Smith's emphasis on "trust in the invisible hand" was established theologically and was not meant metaphorically or figuratively. Therefore a capitalism criticism with theological terms is very appropriate. A capitalism criticism that doesn't argue religiocritically misses the sub-theological justifications of capitalism and its operations. Capitalism criticism as religion criticism is more an enlightenment approach to an economy that appeals explicitly or silently to an "invisible hand." It argues religiously in an enlightened sense.
The Swiss economist Hans Christoph Binswanger concludes that neoliberal economists are a "stoic faith community and… a value-judgment community par excellence" (HansChristoph Binswanger, The Faith Community of Economists, 1988). This means whoever refers to the invisible hand today and speaks about neoliberal capitalism must
speak about religion and faith. The conviction that Adam Smith believed imperturbably in the good effects of a free market where people could pursue their enrichment unhindered is completely unknown today in its religious substantiation but continues unbroken and unshakably in a secular form as the indefatigable "faith tenet" of the economic and political class shows in the financial crisis. The worldwide gambling casino continues spinning. Bankers receive salaries in the millions and stock prices soar. The greed for new fast money drives the culprits of yesterday back to the roulette table today – and no doorman controls them.
The financial power complex creates a power going beyond the expropriation-, exploitation- and distribution function with theological legitimation. Capital accumulation as a central law of capital is legitimated by a religion without being enlightened by that religion. The biblical distinction between a fetishized and humanized transcendence makes visible the religious substantiation of capitalism that makes its central function invisible and unassailable with the talk of the "invisible hand": infinite capital multiplication. Capital should be advanced to the all-determining reality "before which all the world falls down" (Isa 44,15). Thus religion criticism is necessary where the financial power complex wants to dominate people trough the "work of their hands" (Isa 17,8). Capitalism as a religion criticism has an enlightenment interest: "The mystery of multiplying money must be finally unmasked " (MEW 23). Not believing the alleged secularity becomes the preeminent task of enlightenment. Such enlightenment about the destructive religion of capitalism is legitimated by the talk of an invisible hand and at the same time evades rational legitimation and takes the bottom out of this faith system. The contribution that religion criticism could make to the church and theology is important because no system can survive without legitimation.
FETISHISM AND MAMMON
Absolutizing capital accumulation was only possible after a thousand-year-old philosophical tradition was removed that criticized avarice as a vice. The classical political economy began in the 17th/18th century top judge greed or avarice positively in the form of self-interest as a human drive in economic conduct and reinterpreting pursuit of profit to desirable social conduct. This revaluation broke with the philosophical and religious traditions since the rise of the money economy in antiquity. There were many complaints in antiquity about the negative consequences of the money system. Aristotle said, "All profiteers want to boundlessly multiply their money" (Aristotle, Politics). We read in the Bible: "He who loves money will not be satisfied with money" (Eccl 5, 10).
The biblical tradition goes beyond an ethical judgment against greed for money and criticizes replacing God (Mt 6, 24; Lk 16, 13; Col 3, 5; Eph 5, 5). With God and that power that replaces God, mammon, rival understandings of God are thematicized in the saying "No one can serve two masters… You cannot serve God and mammon" (Mt 6, 24). Only the relation of contradiction can exist by sharply differentiating between God and mammon. Who is the all-determining reality – the power of money or God?
"Mammon" is a financial power complex that does not serve the life of everyone in freedom and justice and means more than only money or an unjust relation with money.
In theological language and ethical judgment, usefulness to life and destructiveness are examples of the play of forces between God and the false god mammon.
In his theological thought, Martin Luther reflected on this question of money power in which people put their trust. He analyzed the early capitalist context and interpreted it theologically as a new possibility of having a god, namely a money-god… Luther pursued theology in the context of early capitalism and raised the question about God and mammon again. Martin Luther's Large Catechism says in the well-known interpretation of the First Commandment: "Having God means expecting everything good from him and taking refuge in him in all distresses. Having a God is nothing other than trusting him from the heart and believing. Only the trust and faith of the heart makes both God and an idol. A person can set his or her faith and trust in the "true God" or in a "false god, an idol."
Whether a person believes in God or an idol appears in whom he actually trusts. Luther continued "One could think he has God and everything when he has money and goods but boasts so inflexibly that he doesn't give anything to anyone. He has a god, mammon, that is money and goods on which his heart trusts which is also the most common idol on earth. According to Luther, having a god is not enough. The question which god is worshiped is crucial. In what does a person really trust? Which does he make his god through his act of trust? Mammon and God are exchangeable in this act of trust… Thus "idol or false god" is a system-analytical category in a discerning theological language that criticizes that the money system of mammon rules when the permanent multiplication of money is accepted as the highest goal. There is a worship of the money-god in the midst of a religion with a different creed.
THE SACRIFICIAL RELIGION OF FINANCE-MARKET-DRIVEN CAPITALISM
As Luther reflected theologically the context of early capitalism, reflecting financemarket-driven capitalism is vital today. "A compromise between Christ's church and the idolized state and money worship which is practically the religion of a capitalist society is just as impossible as a compromise between the church and the idolized state in the Roman Empire" (R.H. Tawney, Religion and Early Capitalism, 1946). At the peak of the economic crisis, the German chancellor Angela Merkel admitted: "Banks and bankers may no longer make a clean sweep with taxpayers paying the bill. We need rules so the state can never be extorted by the banks." Thus Angela Merkel admitted being extorted and noted a superiority of the financial markets ten years before Hans Tietmeyer, head of the German Central Bank, threatened the assembled heads of government and corporate CEOs at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "Most politicians today still do not see how much they are under the control of the financial markets and are even ruled by them." That the financial markets have such power that the most powerful governments of the world cannot evade their judgment is regarded as proper and in no way as problematic because the markets direct everything to the best and mercilessly punish malformations opposing their capital interests. Capital interests and public interests allegedly coincide.
Finance market capitalism is a formation of capitalism that gained acceptance since the middle of the 1970s and through privatization. Deregulation and flexibility dismantle market-limiting institutions. The strategic goal is the exclusive validity of the logic of the market. Directing business policy to consistent capital accumulation is the sole goal of economies. Profit maximization was always the central concern: "Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!" (MEW 23). What is really new in finance market-driven casino capitalism is that it wants to free capital movements on the international capital market from dependence on the profits gained in the businesses…
The pressure on the real economy and skimming off profits produce play money for the financial casino. In the last years, a massive redistribution of social wealth occurred in many industrial states – in favor of capital profits and to the detriment of mass incomes. In the year 2000, the share of wages in the gross domestic product was 72% and in 2008 it was 64.6%. For businesses and the rich, the neoliberal right of way for profits led to massive liquidity surpluses that poured on the financial markets and sought profitable investments. Surplus profits flowed on the financial markets. The precariousness of labor, the lengthening of working hours and the dismantling of social security are real victims. Extra-profits for shareholders are wrung from dependent employees…
"People make an idol out of these metals (gold and silver)…and make them deities to which more goods, important needs, and even people were and are sacrificed than the blind antiquity ever sacrificed to its false gods" (MEW 13). In his address to the International Workers Association in September 1864, Karl Marx emphasized this sacrificial character of the religion of capitalism and quoted smug complacent experts who thought "every legal restriction of the workday sounded the death-bells of British industry who like vampires cannot live without blood, above all children's blood. In all ages, infanticide was a mysterious rite of the religion of Moloch." However, this was only practiced on very solemn occasions, perhaps once a year. At that time Moloch did not have an exclusive special liking for the children of the poor. For Marx, capitalism became a system and the sacrificial cult was by no means part of a defeated pre-modern or unenlightened epoch of humanity's history.
The idea of efficient functioning financial markets was refuted by the crisis. The economic- and financial crisis exposed the lie and revealed the central ideological motif, belief in the "invisible hand." Norbert Walter, chief economist at Deutsche Bank, said the "invisible hand" has a civilizing function. "Ultimately the `cunning of nature' or the `invisible hand' is superior to clever monopolistic and interventionist tactics […]. These principles are so powerful they lead people to civilization, partly against their own will" (N. Walter, Ethics + Efficiency = Market Economy, in Roland Baader (ed), Against the Welfare Dictatorship, 1995). The "invisible hand" is equated here with a natural principle of the "cunning of nature" to which a civilizing power is ascribed. That did not hinder demanding massive support from the state in the economic crisis in a "financial state trick directed against the government and the population" (D. Harvey, The Financial State Trick, Its Crisis and Our Liability in Blaetter, the End of Casino Capitalism, Globalization and Crisis, 2009).
A market fundamentalism or radicalism is expressed in this ideological core, a trust in the invisible hand that definitively ended through the crisis. Even the Neue Zuricher newspaper, the "church paper of the neoliberal faith community," admitted a "breakdown of an excessive market ideology." This market fundamentalism is the belief that selfinterest leads to the public interest, the epitome of ethical reason, thanks to the "invisible hand." The exaggeration of market logic to the principle of good life and just cooperative life generally not only in the economy failed. A structural analogy between trust in the liberating God of the Bible and trust in the money-god of capital, verified by neoliberal theoreticians through the use of religious and theological terms appears in the act of humble trust in this power as a genuine religious act. Thus Friedrich-August von Hayek marveled at the self-regulating market as a "miracle" (1952) and described the proper human attitude toward the market laws as "humility toward the processes of the market. The person has a model for his conduct toward market processes in the "humble reverence that religion…infused." The market was ultimately elevated into the realm of the gods. Liberation theologians call this the idolatry of the market (Jung Mo Sung, The Evil in the Ideology of the Free Market, in Concilium 33, 1999). The religion idea is an enlightened category for analyzing the all-determining market.
Trust in the "invisible hand" is a religious exercise as Alexander Rustow's analysis showed. It is a religious trust for a religion in its money-god that ensures a rule over people that is destructive and deadly. Capital and its multiplication claim an alldetermining authority in the religion of capitalism. Therefore capitalism and the service of the money-god is a real worship of a destructive "false" god and isn't a substitute sociological religion. Biblical mammon criticism analyzes the all-determining financial power complex, judges it ethically and calls it theologically a "false god."
In its core, the speech of the "invisible hand" demolishes the enlightenment as a permanent process of the modern age. Seeing through the mechanisms of the financial power complex, uncovering the visible hands behind the "invisible hand" and decoding the mechanisms are all part of enlightenment. Today's world is ruled by an unenlightened belief in the free market economy. The creed of competitiveness has its evangelists, theologians, priests and – obviously – believers (cf. on the different classes, H/J. Krysmanski, Who Owns the EU?). The evangelists are those thousands of economists and other representatives of the knowledge elite from the US and Western Europe who codified and established the quasi-natural law character of the principles and mechanisms of the modern capitalist market economy on the strength of their academic authority. There are thousands of priests of the cult of competition all over the world. Business- and management advisors are the most credible and the best outfitted. The doctrine and the diffusion of the creed give them an extremely profitable source of income. The political elite organizes the distribution of the social product and determines the political victims of the system: sinking the social security systems, the labor standards, the wages, the social achievements etc… The close connection between capital accumulation and power accumulation constitutes a "new sovereign" beyond democratic legitimation…
The perversity of these conditions can be unmasked through the theological critique of the religion of capitalism because the false fetishized worship offers sacrifice for capital. At the beginning of the 1980s, theologians of liberation reacted to the disastrous effects of the neoliberal economy by unmasking capitalism as a false and destructive service. The affinities between the biblical struggle against false gods and the Marxist critique of goods-fetishism is vital now where the consequences appear ever more clearly in the economic and political centers. Marx cited religious metaphors for a scholarly analysis of capitalist estrangement and exploitation while these describe for theology an opposition between the true God of life and the false god of death. Despite this distinction, the religion criticism of capitalism can establish an alliance partnership across worldview oppositions because it has its ground in the common moral ethos and in the common humanistic indignation that people submit to a money-god demanding sacrifice and worship. In the struggle against this financial power complex, Christians and Marxists wage a common struggle against the spirit, logic, and praxis of the false moneygod and its servants of the plutocratic financial power machine so people will never be humiliated and sacrificed again.
[Translator’s note: The state should represent the public interest and yet private or special interests are in the driver's seat with privatization, deregulation and liberalized markets. Trump's proposed 2018 budget is a sledgehammer with cuts to Meals-on-Wheels, school lunches, WIC food assistance, EPA, National Institute for Health, PBS, Legal Services Corp. and more. Majority rule must be balanced by minority protection (Lani Guinier). Indifference is love's enemy. Our lives are necessarily fragmentary. One act of obedience can be more important than a thousand sermons (Dietrich Bonhoeffer).]
7. THE GREAT ECUMENE OF THE CHURCHES AGAINST CAPITALISM
From the Margins to the Center
By Franz Segbers and Simon Wiesgicki[This reading sample from “This Economy Kills! The Churches against Capitalism” (2015) is translated from the German on the Internet, www.vsa-verlag.de.]
Seldom has a church statement had such a nervous resonance in the public as the Evangelii Gaudium encyclical by Pope Francis. “This economy kills.” So the pope in this treatise judgers the socioeconomic conditions to which the majority sees itself handed over like an unavoidable fate… Rainer Hank of the Frankfurt Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung newspaper said, the pope offers nothing but Mother Teresa’s conceptthat is charity and alms. “This pope cannot see the market economy and capitalism are needed to overcome poverty” (FAS, 2013).
The resolutions of the tenth plenary assembly of the World Council of Churches in November 2013 in Busan (South Korea) were adopted by nearly 350 churches from all over the world only a few weeks before the publication of the papal encyclical. These documents deserve attention: the call to an Economy of Life, Justice and Peace for All (Economy of Life 2013), the Mission Declaration Together for Life (Mission 2013), the Diakonia document (Diakonia 2013) and the Sao Paulo declaration (Sao Paulo declaration 2012). For the first time, there is a great ecumene of orthodox, anglican, baptist, lutheran, methodist, reformed, catholic and roman-catholic churches in clear rejection of the spirit, logic and praxis of capitalism. This important agreement will be explained in this article.
The First Ecumenical Agreement: The destructive structures of capitalism
In its call to act for an Economy of Life, the World Council of Churches did not judge the present situation differently than the pope. “Our current reality is so full of death and destruction that we will not have a future if the dominant model of development is not radically changed and justice and sustainability do not become the driving forces for the economy, society and the earth” (OL 2013). The plenary assembly calls to a seven-year pilgrimage for justice and peace in which the churches should consult with other religions and social movements about alternatives to capitalism. The clearest and most radical document for that journey passed in Busan is the Sao Paolo declaration “Transformation of the International Financial System to a Life-serving Economy.” “We strive to
overcome capitalism.” “The crucial choice presented by Jesus is between God and mammon (Mt 6, 24)” (Sao Paulo declaration 2012). Thus, the churches criticize the basic structures of capitalism and not only its destructive effects: an “institutionalized greed.” Capitalism is a deadly threat for persons and nature and this threat is systemic.
Germany is at the center of finance-market-driven capitalism. Seeing this great ecumene tackling the survival questions of our globe is hard. Both the “right” and the “left” are irritated by this. Rainer Hanks criticism of the pope’s naïve anti-capitalism is similar to the criticism of the Marxist journalist Freerk Huisken. He only hears the pope’s “holy anger about the dominant economic mode” and nothing more. He quotes from the pope’s press report: “the person is only sought as a consumer.” The pope turns against the fact that “the person is only valued as a consumer.” He becomes a “consumer article” or object disposed of like “waste” or “rubbish” (EG).
Huisken claims the pope only speaks abstractly about people. However, the pope is grieved about concrete, exploited, marginalized and impoverished persons who are thrown away like rubbish. Francis pleads for the perspective of the excluded and impoverished and does not merely seek a better economic theory. The excluded are not only excluded but are degraded as “waste.” The technical progress or the international division of labor makes people redundant and excludes them from gainful life. At the end, they simply no longer belong to society. Exclusion is a structural part of the economic system and is not only an unfortunate mistake. “This economy kills.” That is the pope’s judgment on this economy. It does not kill everywhere but more often than people think and this is simply ignored.
The common conviction of all churches is that the dominant economic system is an “unjust system” (OL). In the pope’s words, it is “unjust at its root” (EG). Persons on the right and the left refuse to believe this fundamental criticism of the churches. Huisken does not give any significance to the Marxist criticism of capitalism as fetishism and only allows a metaphorical meaning. This is problematic.
The German churches react in an alarmingly provincial way instead of taking up these initiatives from the ecumene. A few months after Busan and the pope’s declaration, they published an ecumenical social initiative that did not acknowledge the great ecumenical agreement. In a lukewarm way, they want to encourage a debate on economic, ecological and social questions about the future. The social initiative presents textbook economic axioms about a social market economy to the long-term unemployed, single parents and precarious employees and gives its blessing to the Agenda of the Great Coalition. The market economy is celebrated as the “best possible system.” The social market economy is adroitly reinterpreted in harmony with the neoliberal mainstream… The state should only cushion the disastrous consequences and not intervene anymore in the economic process. Such an “adjusted market economy” is ennobled as a social model that is
“deeply rooted in the European culture” and part of the “cultural inheritance” of Christians. The message is: If everyone would only adopt the German social market economy, capitalism would be a working animal for everyone’s well-being instead of a wild animal and the world would be saved.
The churches in Germany do not generally take note of the broad ecumenical agreements. They do not reach the level of ecumenical debates. Therefore they are provincial. The initiatives are easily set aside if on one side they would cause confusion in the churches and on the other side when indignation about conditions would be appropriate.
The Second Ecumenical Agreement: Capitalism as idolatry and destructive religion
Walter Benjamin was the first to describe capitalism as a religion or cult that celebrates the incessant multiplication of money and mercilessly subordinates all life interests to this goal. When Benjamin wrote his text in 1921, he did not know the consumerism celebrated in the gigantic shopping malls. The boundless multiplication of money in finance market capitalism was unforeseeable. The motto of capitalist profit-maximizing was always: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets” (Marx, MEW 23). The well-known Marxist formula money-commodity-money (M-C-M) is abridged in finance market-driven capitalism without the roundabout way through the “C,” commodity, to a direct money-more money (M-M).
Untouched by all the bank criticism in the crisis, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of the Goldman Sachs group, declared: “Banks serve a social purpose and do God’s work” (Blankfein, 2009). How can Blankfein speak that way? He is one of those neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman, George Stigler and Friedrich A. Hayek who are convinced the markets can best achieve its prosperity-friendly effect when they regulate themselves. Capitalism fell into a deep “faith crisis” after this certainty was shown to be nonsense in the 2008 financial crisis.
This crisis was caused by forgetting the lessons from the great worldwide economic crisis from 1929. The important economist John Maynard Keynes blamed the dogma of an “invisible hand” for the crisis-proclivity of the market economy. He called it a “religion of economists” that are fixated on “private money-earning.” Like Keynes, Alexander Rustow saw the decisive cause for the economic crisis in a religiously-justified trust in an “invisible hand.” He saw there a “disguised religion” (Rustow 1945) that went back to Adam Smith who justified the market mechanism as the work of the “invisible hand” of a Creator God who in his goodness preserves and guides the world so goodness can come out of greed. Rustow called that conviction an “economic theology” and Smith a
“believer in a false deist theology” (Rustow 1960) who believed in the efficacy of an “invisible hand.”
Theologies are very effective in the economy and many economists are theologians who are not conscious of the theological justifications of their doctrines. This belief in the “invisible hand” always leads to fatal consequences today because the gods that are worshipped are always somehow real and effective. This faith is still unbroken even if the religio-worldview backgrounds for trusting a blessed “invisible hand” of today’s economy are not known any more. But the basis for trust is inverted or upside down. Trust in the self-regulating power of the market comes out of the theologicallyestablished trust in the works of God’s invisible hand by Adam Smith. An actual faith operates here, not only a figurative way of speaking or use of imagery.
The criticism of the unhindered multiplication of money going back to antiquity and the biblical emphasis on mammon shows that unhindered money multiplication is by no means a typical phenomenon of the modern age. That greed for money and mammon are ethically neutralized and even valued as a dynamic factor of the economy is typical for the modern age. In the Bible, idolatry refers to man-made institutions oppressing people. “Idolatry” is a system-, analytical category in an evaluative and ethical-theological language. The money system of mammon rules when permanent money-multiplication is accepted as the highest goal and people act correspondingly. The Mission declaration from Busan described the present “as a global system defined by mammon” that only protects the boundless growth of the wealth of the rich and powerful through endless exploitation” (Mission 2013). The idol criticism reveals the dominant even if concealed religion in capitalism: the unlimited multiplication of capital.
According to Pope Francis, the subjugation of people under the market assumes religious characteristics when corrections of the market are refused “in the interest of the idolized market” (EG) and the sacralized mechanisms. Previously, the Lutheran World Alliance (LWA) at its tenth plenary assembly in Winnepeg (2003) condemned an economic policy based on absolute trust in market laws and unbridled competition as idolatry. However, the German nationals committee of the LWA deleted this section in publishing this declaration (cf. Duchrow 2008). In the same way, the Reformed World Alliance at its 24th general assembly in Accra, Ghana (2004) criticized neoliberalism as an “ideology that claims there is no alternative. Neoliberalism demands endless suffering from the poor and creation, appears with a dominant claim in all spheres of life and demands an absolute allegiance amounting to idolatry. Clear, unmistakable and very strange for German ears, the Mission declaration theologically criticized the economism of a total market as a destructive idolatry and called to resistance against this idolatry. “Economic globalization replaced the God of life with mammon, the god of free market capitalism that claims to save the world by accumulating enormous wealth” (Mission 2013).
Given the destructive consequences of capitalism, humankind, the earth, and creation, the churches are unanimous in rejecting capitalism as a destructive religion and idolatry – at least in their official documents.
The Third Ecumenical Agreement: Option for the poor and marginalized
A far-reaching change occurred with the transition to the 21st century that is hardly noticed today. Christianity has become numerically a non-western religion and a religion of the poor. We find a resonance of this turn of the era in the resolutions from the ecumene. Still, this has hardly arrived in the general public because we in Europe are caught in colonial prejudices and judge the world from Europe’s perspective. An arrogance is expressed that is part of a continuing colonial thinking. Thinkers from Africa, South America and Latin America demand a process of de-colonizing thought. When it is not abridged, the criticism of capitalism is also a criticism of the modern age, euro-centrism and colonialism that are closely interwoven.
The pope plays with a euro-centric perspective when he says he came from the “end of the earth.” It was a sublime blow for Europe’s self-perception as a place of human rights. That Francis visited the island Lampedusa as the first important act of his term in office was a crucial symbolic gesture. Like no other, Lampedusa is a place that stands for the failure of the noble goals of European human rights rhetoric. With Francis, the sharp reference to European double-talk on moral standards also enters in the Vatican. With the first pope who did not come from Europe, a change of perspective occurs as in the ecumene that is unfamiliar to Europeans. The future of Christianity can be found in the global South, not in Europe.
In his address to the social movements, Francis emphasized that they come from the periphery, from the slums of the cities and from the marginalized realm of informal work, from areas that are systematically marginalized and made invisible. This orientation should guide the political and social works of the church and every analysis of reality. The World Council of Churches also argues from the “marginalized and excluded” (OL). The marginalized can also be found in Europe and no longer only in the so-called developing countries.
The well-known “preferential option for the poor” concentrates on the margins. The pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes (1965) of the Second Vatican Council is regarded as the original document of the theology of liberation where it says “the joy and hope, the sorrow and anxiety of the poor and needy are all the joy and hope, the sorrow and anxiety of Christ’s disciples.” In the Social Word of the Churches (1997) and in the EKD’s (Evangelical Church in Germany) memorandum on poverty (2006) the churches abridged
the phrase “the poor and needy” to “people who need help.” The marginalized are characterized as persons needing charitable help. In the EKD’s memorandum on entrepreneurs, we read rather vaguely: “The `preferential option for the poor’ expressed in many biblical texts demands responsible action enabling the weaker to share in the social prosperity and does not aim at idealizing the poor or poverty” (EKD 2008). This analytical perspective is replaced by the concept of participation that is still understood purely economically. This is a classical example how critical voices from the margins are appropriated in a well-meaning way in the interest of the ruling class.
In Evangelii Gaudium, the “option for the poor” is introduced as an alternative concept to the Roman Empire (EG). “God’s option for the margins” embraces a great variety of people who are excluded by the hegemonial powers of society. The resolutions from the ecumene emphasize all the margins as places of resistance that cannot be domesticated and summon rethinking. The poor and marginalized are subjects in the process of their own liberation and not objects of state solicitude. Persons on the margins of society know their survival is put in question by certain values and that certain values have priority in relation to a life in abundance for everyone (Mission 2013). Instead of only focusing on where these persons are stripped of their power and incapacitated, privileged persons could learn something from their powers of active hope, perseverance and collective resistance. This idea underlies the concept of a “poor church for the poor” (EG).
The Fourth Ecumenical Agreement: Imperial lifestyle at the expense of the poor
The tendency for the economic sphere to spread to all other aspects of life and society has been recognized since the middle of the 20th century. Therefore, the totalitarianism of the economy must be analyzed in its effects on all life including the sets of values that are seemingly untouched. Pope Francis reproaches the rich countries for ignoring unconcerned the violations of human rights. “A globalization of indifference” has developed to defend a lifestyle that excludes others or is enthusiastic about this egoistic ideal” (EG). The World Council of Churches in Busan criticized similarly. “These lifedestructive values have slowly crept in, now dominate today’s structures and lead to a lifestyle that ignores the limits of the renewability of the earth and the rights of humans and other life forms” (OL).
What the pope and the World Council of Churches decry is called an “imperial lifestyle” by the Vienna sociologist Ulrich Brand. The imperial lifestyle profoundly marks the everyday lives of the upper- and middle classes in rich countries and influences the leading culture. You can find Coca Cola in Berlin and Stuttgart as well as Sao Paulo and Manila. Brand calls this lifestyle “imperial” because it is based on products manufactured by cheap workers to maintain an excessive consumption here at home. The
“imperial lifestyle” is a class question. High incomes prescribe the model. People are not living above their means as neoliberal propaganda wants to make us believe. They live above the means of others. Manufactured products like garments for example are so cheap because the true price is paid elsewhere – by the female workers in Bangladesh, China or the Philippines.
Different perspectives for a good life for everyone are vital. A new idea of the “good life for all” – buen vivir – comes from Latin America’s Andean world. “Buen Vivir” means more than “good life” as understood in the tradition of European philosophy since Aristotles. This orientation breaks with an anthropocentrism that produces an economic mode aiming at appropriation, accumulation and economic growth.
The Fifth Ecumenical Agreement: Resisting the spirit of empire
The debate around the imperial lifestyle shows a new world order is propagated and pervades all areas of life as a logic of capitalism, is transnationally effective and can be understood as a system of empire (cf. also Hardt/ Negri 2002). This empire puts in question religious self-expectations since capitalism itself is a religion and does not only require individual religious systems. Studies point to a structural greed. The World Council of Churches referred to an important aspect of a possible solution. “Avarice and injustice slowly crept in and now dominate today’s structures and lead to a lifestyle that scorns the limits of the renewability of the earth and the rights of people and other life forms.” Therefore, the crisis has deep moral and existential dimensions. The challenges facing us are firstly ethical and spiritual and not technological and financial. Despite all their differences on dogmatic questions, religious traditions agree in rejecting greed, consumerism and a view of the person glorifying competition and repression.
Developing a transformative spirituality that helps defeat the spirit of empire is crucial, not only analyzing the spirit of empire. The Mission paper speaks of a transforming spirituality that resists “all values and systems destroying life wherever they are at work in our economy, our politics and our churches” (Mission 2013).
Against a misunderstood “feel-good spirituality,” God’s spirit and participating in God’s love require struggle and resistance against the powers hindering the abundance of life intended by God for everyone and readiness to cooperate with all people engaged in movements and initiatives for justice, dignity and life” (Mission 2013).
The logic of empire with its divide and conquer can only be reversed in the search for a transformative spirituality. Alternatives can be discovered with new models of economics and community that reject the destructive logic of capitalism.
The Sixth Ecumenical Agreement: A life-serving economy
The No of the churches does not fizzle out in a mere rejection of destructive capitalism together with its basic dynamic. The churches adopt a clear option regarding the economic system. They see from the perspective of those excluded from economic processes and formulate usefulness to life as a standard for another economy. A lifeserving economy takes its measurements from the poor and the marginalized with their rights. Like the ecumene, Pope Francis urges a “return of the economy and financial life to an ethic in favor of humans” (EG). “The economy must be an art for managing the common house. This house is the whole earth” (EG). Such an economy does not exclude anyone from the common house and seeks the good and just life of everyone inhabiting the planet.
A way out of destructive deadly capitalism depends on social movements and cannot be found through a pre-fabricated program or alternative model. There are moments when people all over the world rise up, say some things are not in order and demand changes. A global movement cycle has seized many countries since 2010: from Seattle to Chiapas, the Arab Spring, Tahrir-Plaza in Cairo and Taksim-Plaza in Istanbul, the Puerta del Sol in Madrid with its Indignados and resistance against the Troika at the Syntagma-Plaza in Athens and in the Occupy- and Blockupy movement. When the ecumenical assembly in Busan called to a pilgrimage for justice and peace, it sought connection to this global movement cycle and initiated a process where the churches confer with each other, with other religions and social movements. The pope acted that way. In October 2014, he invited spokespersons of base movements all over the world to Rome and encouraged them: “This meeting of social movements is an important sign. You come to speak about a reality that is often kept silent to God, the church and the peoples. The poor fight and do not only endure injustice!” (Francis 2014). The pope confirmed the demand of the social movements for defeating capitalism and joined this with the liberation theology core of the biblical message: “We must change this. We must move the dignity of persons into the center again and then establish the necessary alternative social structures on this basis. We must use courage and intelligence, persistently but without fanaticism, passionately but without violence and together seeing the conflicts without getting caught in them and intent on dissolving tensions to reach a higher stage of unity, peace and justice. We Christians have something very beautiful, a guide for action, a revolutionary program, one could say” (Francis 2014).
Strengthening this great ecumene and the agreement of the churches is the hope of this book. It aims at a great alliance of churches, religions and social movements.
“Tenderness will not succeed without struggles for another world of solidarity,” Michael Brie formulated regarding his experiences with command socialism in East Germany. We recall the words of Pope Francis from Rome to the world assembly of social movements: “Out of the depths of our hearts, let us resolve together: no family without housing, no farmer without land, no employee without rights and no person without dignity represented by labor. Dear sisters and brothers, continue your struggle. Your struggle is good for us and is a blessing for humanity.”
8. SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE SACRED NATURE OF THE PERSON
On the Biblical Impulse of Human Rights
By Franz Segbers[This article is translated abridged from the German on the Internet.]
1. The Inversion of Human Rights in Neoliberalism
Starting from human rights is essential when we say today another world is possible and if we want a new socialism of the 21st century. However, what is hoped-for from human rights is contested. As the Internationale of socialist movements demonstrated, human rights always had a combative origin. They are the results of an empowerment process and are not put into effect by decree or edict. Human rights define the position of individual persons in society and promise life with freedom rights, rights of political participation and basic social rights. But how do they define the position of the person?
From the beginning, the principle of equality was inherent in human rights. On one hand, equality is a general principle and on the other hand it is an independent human right. Liberal-civil human rights began in efforts to de-legitimate illegitimate rule. But the liberal-civil conception of human rights is essentially limited to formal equality before the law, to rights in the state and toward the state. The socialist movement also demanded economic and social equality. A truly universal declaration of human rights must include both dimensions. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 first achieved a viable compromise of the two conceptions of human rights.
Human rights form a common reference point of secular pluralist societies. However, speaking of human rights today means speaking of their instrumentalization and erosion. Strikingly, the violation and contempt of international law is not only manifest in intervention wars. The economic- and social policy based on neoliberal dogmas represents a systematic erosion and reversal of human rights. In the South, neoliberalism gained power violently through state coups, in Europe’s South through the austerity policy and in the Euro-Atlantic world altogether in a subtle way through transformation of the discourse, laws and subjects. Wendy Brown sees an “insidious revolution” (Brown 2015) underway here – when terms are only understood economically. Freedom is narrowed to deregulated markets, the Homo politicus into a Homo oeconomicus, the human into human capital, justice into justified inequality, markets into mechanisms of truth-finding, social rights into competition barriers and the right to a proper standard of living into a market obstacle. The political and social achievements manifest in human rights mutate into a hurdle to market freedom.
Human rights embody the claim to the state to organize a better, liberal and democratic future and to ensure legislators give a priority to human rights. This demand to the state is often summarized in legal commentaries with the triad: respecting, protecting and fulfilling human rights. However, this human rights purpose of the state is inverted in the neoliberal project. The state obligation to respect, protect and fulfill capital- and investment-interests comes out of the state and its duty to respect, protect and fulfill human rights. The state changes its function and becomes an instrument for enforcing economic interests. A state that has to legitimate itself in relation to the interests of the economy comes out of the state that has to legitimate its rule regarding the interests of the economy. This inversion is cataclysmic. According to Wendy Brown, it is an expression of a “seep anti-humanism” and represents a “turning point of civilization,” a process that is new and actually revolutionary in the history of the West because the Homo politicus is replaced by the Homo oeconomicus. Neoliberalism violates the historical compromises of human rights as it does in wars of intervention.
In the following, I will show that this conceptual-systematic turning away from human rights by neoliberalism extends to the normative root supporting the idea of human rights, namely the deep cultural influence of Judeo-Christian ethics. The cultural foundations of human rights face their neoliberal destruction. The nearness of modern human rights and the Jewish-Christian ethical tradition does not negate other normative substantiations of human rights. Human rights have many justifications and do not belong to a certain culture. Otherwise, they could not claim any universal authority. In a first step, I will cite welfare studies and show that welfare state development was a process that was not exclusively carried out in the horizon of Christianity. In a second step, I will name the moral sources from which human rights are fed and then demonstrate how this basic intention in human rights is unfolded.
2. Religion and the Welfare State
Why was Germany the first state worldwide to introduce a state-regulated social security system? Why wasn’t there a global development of social states as was the case in Europe with the global diffusion of capitalism?... Persons have an absolute importance in Christianity. “The theoretical understanding of modern social policy as `decommodification of workers, a claim of the dignity and intrinsic value of the individual, against the forces of the invisible hand of the market has its ultimate religious roots here. Therefore, Rieger and Leibfried declared: “Western social policy is ultimately an innerChristian phenomenon.” Christianity was important in the formation of social states and basic social rights. According to Rieger and Leibfried, motives from the JewishChristian tradition acted like catalysors activating the process of a social state development. The social state and social policy are based on normative-cultural orientations that award the same dignity and common rights to all people. Jewish-
Christian ethics traditions contributed to the formation of social states in which states assumed a social and solicitious responsibility for the well-being of all members of a society and are not only the results of economic or social developments. This can be shown historically in the genesis of social states.
That a rights-based welfare state development is ascribed to Christianity as a whole is too vague. Specific conditions contributed to the formation of universal rights for everyone in the horizon of confessionalized Latin Christendom with states defined by Lutheran ethics. The state was the bearer of a social responsibility in that Martin Luther transferred the social functions from the community to the politically-constituted polity. The state was also a bearer of social functions and was not only understood as a poweror police-state. So the model social state function of the Scandinavian states marked by Lutheranism and continuing to today could develop universal social rights. The social state researcher Franz-Xavier Kaufmann speaks of a “seedbed” that created the specific constellation in states influenced by Lutheranism and where the ethical potential of Christianity could be effective. German chancellor Bismarck authorized the first social state security. He called it a “practical Christianity in a legal form.” Christianity has a potential for favoring the development to welfare states compared to world religions in its specific cultural manifestation in Lutheranism.
3. Moral Sources of Human Rights
Christianity’s normative potential for forming rights-based welfare states was unfolded in the process of concretizing human rights. Erich Fromm already referred to this when he said “egalitarian universalism represents a principle deeply rooted in the religious and humanist traditions of the West.” He said this when the economic, social and cultural rights of the social pact were ratified by the UN in 1966. Fromm continued: “This right to life, food and housing, medical provisions and education is an inborn human right that cannot be restricted under any circumstances. Fromm connected economic and social rights with the claim of human dignity and did not speak of a mere legal claim to social services as a characteristic of the religious and humanist traditions. This connection was an innovative achievement of the 1940s.
According to Jurgen Habermas, the Christian-Jewish tradition has a special character even if the normative substance of the equal human rights of everyone can also be found in motives and figures of the Stoa and the Enlightenment. “Christianity was a model or catalysor for the normative self-understanding of the modern age. The egalitarian universalism from which arose the ideas of freedom and solidarity life together, autonomous lifestyles and emancipation, individual conscience, morality, human rights and democracy is an heir of the Jewish ethic of righteousness and Christian love. Unchanged in substance, this inheritance was critically appropriated and re-interpreted again and again” (Habermas 2001). In his “geneology of human rights,” Hans Jonas
described the “sacred nature of the person” as a central motif. With that, he emphasized the respect for persons that takes legal form in human rights. Like Habermas, he saw a continuation of the Jewish-Christian motive in human rights and on the other side a “modern re-articulation of the Christian ethos.” Thus, he identified a typical influence for the Jewish-Christian tradition. A direct derivation of modern human rights from the Jewish-Christian ethos is impossible. Still, the Jewish-Christian ethos was able to initiate an historical process in which the Jewish-Christian universalism could be effective even outside the churches. Karl Marx developed his categorical imperative “to overthrow all relations where a person is a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned and contemptible being” (Marx 1842). This ethos has profoundly influenced European culture. The ethos of Christianity remains effective where a radical opposition to religion and the church is raised in the name of the Enlightenment.
From the start, human rights included the idea of equal dignity that comes to all persons without distinction. The conviction of the equal dignity of all persons is the moral source of human rights. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares: “All persons are born free and equal in dignity” (United Nations 1948 – UDHR). Article 22 demands the guarantee of economic, social and cultural rights so everyone can live under conditions that “are indispensable for the dignity and free development of personality.” With an independent right to equality (Art. 7 and Art 26), equality as a normative principle pervades the whole system of international protection of human rights. The emphasis in classical human rights declarations on innate and inalienable rights raises a claim that this equality of all persons in a religious language has a moral substance evading state control.
The egalitarian universalism or universal equality has one of its strong sources in the biblical metaphor of the God-likeness of persons. With the formulation God created persons “in his own image” (Gen 1, 26), an equality of persons is established and a dignity common to all persons is awarded that a person according to the biblical narrative cannot lose even after the Fall of Man. This human dignity is a profound normative term that is a critical-normative standard. So the so-called biblical credo connects the violation of dignity with the affliction in Egypt’s slavery: “The Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. Then we cried to the Lord the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice, and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression” (Dtn 26, 6f).
The biblical ethics tradition raises a legal claim of the oppressed to be bearers of rights against that “affliction, toil and oppression,” as experienced in Egypt. With the emphasis on God-likeness, a human dignity is awarded against whose violation and slander the Torah formulates legal rules. What Hannah Arendt, centuries later, called the only human right, the “right to have rights” (Arendt 1993) is proclaimed here in narrative language.
The Torah or Old Testament contains a “right of the poor” (Ex 23, 6; Jer 5, 28; Ps 140, 13) and a “right of the foreigner, the orphan and the widow” (Dtn 27, 19; Isa 10, 2). The social law of the Hebrew Torah represents an early attempt to protect the “right of the poor” (Ex 20, 22-23, 33; Dtn 12, 28; Lev 17, 2b) in a consistent economic-, labor- and social law that aimed at preserving the gained freedom of the released slaves from the Egyptian house of bondage with the means of the law. This was understood as God’s commandment and thus evaded the king’s control. God is the source of justice, not the king. This substantiation of law legitimates a rule criticism because even the king is subordinate to the law and one can appeal to God’s law against the king… The right of the poor includes the obligation of legal enforcement against all who violate this right with the demand “Seek justice!” (Isa 1, 17).
The legal rules of biblical social law are substantiated stereotypically with the formula “Remember that you were once slaves in Egypt…” (Dtn 5, 15; 15, 15; 24, 22; 24, 28; Ex 22, 20; 23, 9; Lev 19, 34.36). The individual is addressed. His or her responsibility is motivated with the remembrance of the unjust experience in Egypt. This structure reflects a peculiarity of biblical law described by Leo Baeck: “The laws in the world wherever you looked – in the Oriental, Greek or Roman world – were written from the standpoint of the propertied. […] The ancient biblical law as the prophets proclaimed it was written from the viewpoint of the little, the weak and the needy. […] A very different view is taken. The laws are given from the perspective of the weak, the needy and the small and are always announced and proclaimed anew” (quoted according to Klappert 1990). The Torah with its legal rules and modern human rights have much in common. They draw from a common moral source that goes back to the biblical metaphor of the God-likeness of persons. The Torah as a reaction to the biblical exodus from “Egypt the house of bondage” (Ex 13, 3) has a combative origin. The modern human rights idea also reacted to political unfreedom and in the Declaration of Human Rights with inclusion of social human rights to the social and economic catastrophe of the great worldwide economic crisis. The Torah and modern human rights live from the indignation of the offended by the violation of their dignity, their disfranchisement, lack of rights, exploitation and oppression and react to this with the medium of the law. The ethical universalism of the human dignity of all persons is the hinge that joins the modern humans rights declarations with the biblical traditions. Modern human rights can accentuate intensions that already existed in the biblical orientation of legal principles in the situation of the poor, the economically weak and persons needing social protection,,,
4. The Basic Ethical Intention in Human Rights…
The biblical Sabbath commandment (Dtn 5, 12ff; Ex 20,8 ff) represents an ancient right to a free work day that is also formulated in the right to limit working hours and holidays in Art. 7 of the social pact… That the poor, the degraded and the oppressed have rights
according to the Jewish-Christian tradition seems to be a singular achievement of the Euroepanc ulture.
Human dignity moved from an ethical-normative idea to the acknowledged legal form of human rights. The evolutionary power that led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights including social rights should be understood as a reaction to the great worldwide economic crisis. Respect for human rights and a world order based on human dignity that should moderate the obvious hardships of capitalism were the conceptual answer to the failure of the economic order in the great world economic crisis from 1929 to 1933 that led to poverty, misery and unemployment in the millions worldwide. In 1935, the US President Franklin D Roosevelt created the legal foundations for social reforms in the Social Security Act. Social security was the programmatic word with which lessons were drawn from the great economic crisis. Roosevelt took up the programmatic word of social security again when he formulated those “four freedoms” in 1941 that were later inscribed in the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the freedom of speech and opinion, the freedom of faith and the freedom from fear and want. Working out the dramatic extent of the great worldwide economic crisis led to a reversal of past political and economic assumptions. A new understanding of the state appeared. The state was no longer the authority that threatens middle-class freedoms. The state assumes responsibility for the well-being of its citizens and ensures their civil freedom.
In the Atlantic Charter of 1941, the heads of government at that time, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Britain’s Winston S. Churchill, formulated shared principles that were accepted by more than 21 states in the following years. In the midst of war and as a reaction to the great economic crisis, they drafted an ambitious economic and social reform program for “a better future for the world.” In the Preamble, freedom was not only understood as a political right. This was a New Deal for the world. In 1944, Roosevelt announced a second Economic Bill of Rights that was included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with a right to a reasonable wage, a right to food, an appropriate living standard and a right to housing and social security.
The formula “Life in freedom from want and fear” was the essential point of the reforms and entered in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the social pact. The demand for a life in freedom from material want and freedom from existential fear was a reaction to the world economic crisis… The acknowledgment of the dignity of every individual regardless of social position and the idea of moral universalism marked Roosevelt’s program of social security and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the civil- and social pacts.
Since 1945, a substantial process of the legal codification of human rights has been underway. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed in 1948. That was the first international formulation of a substantive catalogue of human rights supported by
all states with the claim of worldwide authenticity. Although mostly unnoticed, Article 28 of UDHR formulates that everyone has the right to live in a social order where hr or she can enjoy all human rights. This institutional concept of human rights shows that human rights are more than only individual rights. They aim at an international social and economic order. In 1966, the human rights pact on civil and political rights, the civil pact, the pact on economic, social and cultural rights and the social pact with international law themes were adopted. The numerous ILO (International Labor Organizations) agreements were also part of this upswing of human rights. On the European plane, the European Human Rights Convention of 1950 was added. The 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights was the last attempt to implement universal human rights and a just world order over against the forces of a rapidly globalized free market.
Jurgen Habermas correctly calls human rights a “realistic utopia” (Habermas 2011). They are realistic since human rights do not shift the hope for more humanity and justice to a remote utopian future. They are now anchored in the law and dynamicize social development to a legal goal. They give an orientation for the development of the world society. Human rights are the form in which relations can be conceived before they are realized. Human rights are not simply presented and are not already realized. Their conversion is a constant struggle of interpretation. But they are fundamental moral legal claims for which a claim of universal authority must be raised and contested again and again. They share a common function with the law. They have a defensive character and a social commission for changing society toward its ideal formulated in the law Therefore, they can specify very concretely the form and corresponding tasks of a social order founded on human rights and are not mere legal lyric poetry or a simple moralism. In their struggles, people can now appeal to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the social pact including social rights.
It was a long way until the potential and the central motive of biblical ethics could become effective in modern human rights with a new advance after 1945. The social catastrophe of the world economic crisis at the end of the 1920s, the devastations of the war and the shock over the civilization breach in the holocaust released idealistic energies and created a specific constellation for a world society that could reflect the ethical universalism of the biblical ethos in a legal form in human rights. Even if Confucian, Buddhist or oriental traditions know an ethical universalism, they were not involved in the formalization or codification of human rights. A normative framework is presented for a global economic- and social order oriented in human rights. While the cultural influence of the biblical ethos did not always develop its potential, it was ultimately effective in the scope of the movement that led to the global acknowledgment of universal human rights including social rights. The ethical substance of the biblical ethics tradition was effective in modern human rights that are considered today the most influential moral foundation of cooperative global life.
The universal consensus of civil-liberal and socialist human rights was undermined and destroyed by neoliberalism since the 1970s. Human rights including social rights are endangered. Their existence is not guaranteed once for all because they are qualities of a world organized by people. Cultural traditions cannot prevail automatically. The egalitarian universalism of human rights that has deeply and culturally marked Europe can inspire resistance against the inversion of human rights. Europe is confronted with the miserable reality of neoliberalism. This inversion can create commotion, provoke conflicts and play dance music for the neoliberal elites in view of the openly destructive tendencies of neoliberal capitalism.