Capitalism and its Anthropology

By Barbel Danner and Paul Schobel

[This address at the European Action Day for Social Justice on April 3, 2004 in Stuttgart, Germany is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.lebenshaus-alb.de/mt/archives/002216.html.]

The proverb “Those presumed dead are living longer” is true. The “social question” has returned to the stage from the props room of the 19th century. No wonder! Another mummy is also raised from the dead: economic liberalism. A little stylized, powdered and dressed up, this mischievous spirit flits around the globe as “neo-liberalism”, dividing the nations, inflicting indescribable suffering and driving its wedge in our society. Should this system with its primitive logic of market and competition organize a world society? Neoliberalism has proven its incompetence in Germany for a century. Reich chancellor Bismarck had to be set right. The wild market forces must be restrained by social policy. The invisible hand of the market needs the strong hand of the state, market logic needs politics and competition needs regulation and organization. Otherwise justice falls by the wayside. “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people”, we read in the Bible (Prov 14,34). Why isn’t this communicated to politicians today?

THE LOSER BENCH

In pastoral care, we meet those run over as a result of state deregulation and massive social cuts.

· There are persons who are totally absorbed and lost in work, work that knows no bounds, work around the clock and around the planet, without regard for health, family, partnership and children. Leisure time is a foreign word. Quitting time is never heard. The most certain prescription for making people into cowards is as old as humanity itself. The pharaoh in Egypt commanded his overseers “Oppress people with work…” Whoever has to work until he collapses certainly doesn’t get any dumb ideas. That is presumably the purpose of extending working hours for everyone.
· Work that knows no bounds for one person means unemployment for others. Wearing down people without work is more than a material loss. What wears them down is the mental cruelty that they now endure as a result of the new legislation. A hunt and chase on the unemployed is now arising out of the Hartz law: Get moving; seek work that doesn’t even exist in reality. Toward all jobless, there is a kind of “initial suspicion” as though they caused their unemployment themselves. Making victims into culprits is shameless. More and more unemployed are without hope and without perspective. Life on eye level with others doesn’t exist any more.

Where there is still work, work is mutilated beyond recognition and robbed of its rights and dignity, work at starvation wages, mini-jobs without claim to social security, contract- and temporary work, pseudo-independence and time limits. How should a young person plan a life, begin a family and bring children into the world if one constantly pants after the next fixed-term contract as a modern industrial monad? Here today, there tomorrow and jobless the day after tomorrow. Capitalism produces an anthropology or human type that is too much for the dear God: masculine, eternally young, dynamic, highly flexible, mobile, well educated, efficient and ready for propagation. We believe God does not treat us as human capital on the stock exchange or skim us from the balance sheet as a troublesome cost factor. God created us as men and women with hearts full of love and a deep longing for successful life.

Seniors, disabled and sick persons can no longer keep up. Those who have problems anyway now feel they don’t really belong any more. The registration fee at the doctor and the immense co-payments devour nearly a third of their incomes. More and more persons, unemployed, single parents and low wage earners go downhill. Poverty in Germany is poverty in a rich country. Whoever is stricken falls into material distress. Poverty insults and humiliates people. Poverty allows no space or air to breathe. Whoever is poor is preoccupied with him- or herself. He or she is excluded and emigrates inwardly. Whoever must struggle to survive day after day has no stamina for culture and politics.

ENDANGERED SOCIAL STATE

These few highlights confirm what the two large churches bemoaned in their common proclamation: “Deep cracks divide our country.” These cracks are the result of a crazy distribution policy that sends more and more wealth into private caskets and reduces the public budget to poverty or beggary. Faithful to the neoliberal motto, only a weak state is a good state… Now cash is missing where work must be finally created in education, the social area, and ecology. Where educational work and voluntary engagement should be upgraded, there are instead cuts and cancellations. The social state is dismantled; solidarity as a supporting pillar has broken apart. Cannot everyone share in work and income where all hands are full of activity?

ETHICAL EVALUATION

Agenda 2010 – and the “reforms” in all Europe – damage the foundations of the social state. Promoting social cuts is like a master-builder who saves on cement and then is amazed when a heap of gravel falls slowly at his feet. Enforcing social cuts endangers democracy and risks the collapse of society. Social wealth is the glue that holds the shop together. Therefore with all the unions and engaged groups across Europe, we urge a policy of social balance because the worth and dignity of people are inviolable. We oppose a security society where everything is calculated arising out of a value society.

· Many “reforms” resolved in all Europe are without effect. Pressure on the unemployed doesn’t create a single new job. This pressure is nonsense and only produces suffering and despair. Cuts in benefits on all planes cost even more jobs because purchasing power declines. Since when does poverty create growth?
· Private care may supplement but can never replace solidarian security systems! Low-income persons cannot afford care. This divides society even more. That the poor should die earlier is an ethical scandal!
· Life risks that strike each and every one, sickness, old age and need for care, may not simply be shifted and privatized. Should old age pension schemes and health care be destroyed on the stock exchange? Nothing is more certain than solidarian care that includes all people and all incomes.
· The unjust distribution of burdens is contestable. Nearly all the austerity measures are financed by the affected themselves since private wealth is spared. Those who pay at the end are clear!

ENCOURAGEMENT FOR THE END OF THE ICE AGE

Today a jolt is felt through all Europe. Hundreds of thousands demonstrate and demand: Stop the social cuts and attacks on employee rights! A group demonstrates here on the plaza with a 300-foot long homemade scarf against the social coldness. We have had enough of being frostbitten in the early spring. End the social ice age!

We encourage all of you to continue what was begun here in regional alliances and realize the project in your own lives.

· Strengthen the solidarity in the workplaces. Accept one another as colleagues. Keep a close watch on the harassers! Don’t tell off one another. Deal carefully with one another. Give yourselves respect.
· Bring warmth in your relations. Resist and stand firm in this dangerous time.
· Focus special attention on those already run over. Be attentive to the distress and human suffering around you.
· Above all, stay political, grumpy and active. We will not let this social state be trampled that our mothers and fathers fought for.
· Respect your dignity.

CONCLUSION

This society needs a vision, the vision of Shalom as the Bible calls it. That is the vision of social peace, of a good life for everyone.