SHARING, NOT KILLING
By Friedhelm Hengsbach[This reading sample of the 2014 book “Teilen, nicht Toten” is translated from the German on the Internet, www.westendverlag.de.]
“You can interpret the clouds in the sky and the direction of the win. Why can’t you interpret the signs of this time?” These sentences from the Gospel of Luke stimulated me to write this book. I see refused sharing as a sign of the present time. At the periphery of a world of prosperity, a violence erupts that rages with weapons produced in the center and supplied for killing. They drive countless persons in a hopeless flight from persecution and privation to the borders and forecourts of the center.
I see another sign of the present time in the rediscovery of sharing. A mental change and a rethinking were announced when the swelling bank crisis mutated into a read growth weakness or growth inertia. More and more people doubt the persuasiveness of that thought current in which individuals competing with each other seek their own advantage although the generated prosperity should be distributed to everyone.
Open-minded economists insist: conventional economic theory is unrealistic and wrong when it assumes a view of the persons where social relations and solidarity feelings are excluded. The overall economic output grows and social inequality grows simultaneously. The capitalist dynamic deepens the social division between privileged and disadvantaged groups. It undermines the solidarity of countries with the communes in Germany, in the European Union and at its borders and erodes the consent of many to democracy.
What decision-making and action impulses should trigger these signs? A change of the following priorities moves me. Persons who previously revolved around themselves and were self-contained now open the same space they claim for themselves to other fellowpersons. The chase for an aimless growth is condemned as dumb and harmful. Individual gifts and achievements are regarded as trifling compared to the conviction that persons are3 born as equals and have equal rights. The redistribution of a privately appropriated wealth is always a second step. The decision about the level and direction of goods production and about their distribution should occur at the source when the goods are produced. A society with a well-balanced distribution of income and wealth has a greater chance of creating inward and outward prosperity and peace – without weapons. Therefore, the urgent plea seems justified to me: “sharing, not killing”!
[Translator’s note: “If we do not accept the necessity of nonviolent revolution, we will face the inevitability of violent revolution,” JFK said.]
1. The Cause
At the beginning of the new century, Wolfgang Thierse declared: “The justice question has returned in society.” More than ten years later, the director of the Institute for World Economy, Dennis Snower, argued economics has bid farewell to a view of the person that ignores moral values, social norms and human relations. The Kiel Institute expanded “its realm from the traditional concentration on efficiency problems to justice problems.” For years, a broad public criticized the increasingly unequal distribution of social wealth. Are we experiencing a turn of the tide in judging what the economy and the state are commanded to do?
In writing this treatise, I was inspired by two authors who thematicized social inequality and social polarization in the last year and reaped an unusual response, Pope Francis and the French economist Thomas Piketty.
Pope Francis
“This economy kills.” So the pope judges socio-economic conditions to which the majority and many Christians see themselves handed over as an unavoidable fate.
Prophetic Criticism
The pope opposes a fourfold radical “No” to the anonymous mechanisms. He sees whole groups of the population excluded from social life and treated like garbage and waste. He resists awarding a religious consecration to the fetishism of money and the logic of the market and idolizing them. He condemns the hegemony of the financial markets that do not serve the real economy. He warns of the growing social inequality from which social conflicts and wards erupt. The political and economic elites should take to heart the words of a bishop from the early church: “Not to share one’s goods with the poor means stealing from them and taking their life. The goods we possess belong to them, not to us.”
German economic journalists attacked these statements of the pope in his programmatic treatise at the beginning of his term in office. The pope is totally confused; he judges in a sweeping way and hardly differentiates. He does not understand how the economy
functions. He is fixated on his experiences in Argentina and does not know the blessed effects of the social market economy that multiplies prosperity more successfully than alms.
The Poor are in First Place
How strange that the economic journalists picked out nine pages from the 270 pages of papal encyclicals and ignored his main interests. Persons in the rich countries and above all Christians should hear the cry of the poor. From a biblical view, this cry has a religious dimension because he God of Israel heard the cry of his people in Egypt the house of bondage and liberated them from this blazing furnace. Today, it is the cry of those denied a just wage, migrants who illegally care for the sick in private households, the women who are marketed as merchandise and the children sent away to beg. The society and the churches should grant a preferred place to those throw-away poor and respect them in their dignity. Poverty in rich countries is evidence that the immense bounty of goods gained by good management that is enough for everyone is unequally distributed. Therefore, trust in the invisible hand of the market or the automatic trickledown effects of prosperity sounds naïve. Rather, the principle that the goods of the earth are meant for everyone assigns the role of private enterprise and private property to the second rank. The growth of justice has a priority over a growth of the economy, the pope says.
Thomas PikettyWith his work “Capital in the 21st Century,” the French economist Thomas Piketty caused a sensation comparable to the pope. In the US, Piketty was celebrated as a star of a new world formula. His book was described as a “watershed” that changes our ideas about the economy and politics.
What worries or alarms Piketty is this opening chasm between poor and rich groups of the population in a democratic society. What tears societies apart and what holds them together? In his research, he sought an answer that includes empirical data, economic theories and historical, political and social perspectives. The distribution of the incomes of managers and workers randomly diverged since the industrial revolution in the 19th century. However, capital income has grown more strongly and faster than labor income because the growth of capital yields exceeds the growth of the people’s income. For Piketty, “capital” is a collective or generic term for land and property, houses, securities, money and patents. One cannot become rich by working as a physician. Rather, one has to marry a woman from a well-to-do house…
An exceptional situation began with the First World War and ended in the middle of the 1970. During the “Trente glorieux” in France or the German “economic miracle,” the growth rate of capital income fell below the labor income. What were the reasons for that according to Piketty? The massive destruction of capital during the war years, intensified tax laws, high economic- and population growth, technical progress and the higher education competence of employees were the causes. Market-radical economists in the US, Britain and Germany promised a way out of the economic crisis since the 1980s if only the self-healing powers of the market were released, taxes lowered, public expenditures cut and wage demands restrained. As a result, the growth rates fell while capital profits skyrocketed.
If this development continues, the 19th century will return in the developed industrial countries in the 21st century. The importance of capital will increase and be concentrated with a few. A small group will have an extremely large share of the national income and the national wealth while the grater part of the population will have hardly anything more than their work capacity. The face of capitalism is changing. Rich employees and business managers appear next to the class of property owners.
The class society did not cease to exist with “hereditary capitalism.”