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Interview :: Globalization

A Moralist on the Social State

A hundred years ago eight farmers worked to feed one non-farmer. Today one farmer feeds 88 persons..Income from assets and business activities have been consistently relieved of taxes in the last 25 years. Profits soar while investments fall and the social fabric is torn.
A MORALIST ON THE SOCIAL STATE

Interview with Friedhelm Hengsbach

[This interview originally published in: Stern, 11/19/2003 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.stern.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/magazin/index.html.]

{“We are not living above our means,” says Frankfurt professor Hengsbach, 67. “Justice is not a biological problem. It is the ancient question of just distribution between poor and rich.”]

[Friedhelm Hengsbach, b.1937, taught economic- and social ethics for 17 years and is presently director of the Oswald von Nell-Breuning Institute in Frankfurt. As a 20-year old, Hengsbach joined the Jesuit order and is today a leading representative of Christian social teaching. The quarreling Jesuit sees himself as an advocate of the weak. The catholic professor aroused the displeasure of church leaders with his critical views. In 1998 he received the Gustav Heinemann prize of the SPD (Social democratic party of Germany) for his social engagement.]


stern: Mr. Hengsbach, you must be incredibly frustrated.

Friedhelm Hengsbach: Why? Because I still swim against the neoliberal stream and do not believe that privatization and deregulation are the gospel? Because I resist the dominant dogma hammered into the people with missionary zeal: We cannot afford the social state any more! The social state is too expensive!

Everyone says this.

I see this differently. Sometimes I seem foreign with my opinion as though I were from Mars. Shades or nuances have become rare. There are moments in which I may become cynical, doubt myself and ask whether I am dumb.

You must seem like an idiot…

We live in strange times. There is something like a collective delusion, a collective narrowing of thinking.

What do you mean?

Hundreds of years passed until humanity realized that the sun does not turn around the earth. Certain dogmas are sold to us today as natural laws. This is like a collective blind spot. The modern dogmas insist: The sleek state is the best of all possible states! Trust the self-healing power of the market!

What is wrong with that?

For 25 years people have chased after these promises, dismantled the social state and reduced the solidarian securities. Christian Democrat Merz calls this a “liberating blow,” a promise that everything will be better for us and there will be more work. However the number of unemployed rose from one to five million in this time. The cart cannot be extricated from the mud through savings and more tax cuts.

Tell us the true way out of the crisis.

The state must massively invest in ecological reorganization and education. Working hours must be reduced, not lengthened as passionately urged in an absurd way today and often practiced without increased wages.

Your prescriptions, honored professor, are of yesterday!

Are they wrong? I don’t think so. Everything attempted in the last decades and now enforced ever more stubbornly and obstinately has accomplished nothing. Germany, representing a third of European economic power, will only find more employment when the purchasing power stimulating domestic demand is finally strengthened. Instead of reflecting about a change of course, the wrong way is reinforced with Agenda 2010 and the Hartz laws. As with a junkie, the dose is increased. The social state is pulled down.

These reforms, chancellor Schroeder and the opposition say, are unavoidable. Nothing else is possible.

This is a declaration of bankruptcy of all policy. If there are no alternatives any more, I am helplessly delivered up to natural laws. However economic processes are not forces of nature but are always embedded in social and political decisions.

How do you explain that everything social is as embarrassing as hemorroids today unlike three or four decades ago?

This public mood comes from the US financial world. The US has long been the model. As the leading economic power, the US can enforce militarily and politically what it wants worldwide. This fascinates milled class elites who idolize their heroes. They ignore the horrifying shady sides of the American model. The model is this elbow-strength that enforces its will. In Germany, elites complain that the élan of the winner is curbed on all planes, that there is too much parliamentarianism and too much fun society. Participatory learning in the schools supposedly inhibits efficiency and competitiveness.

Does a culture battle rage over the philosophy of our life together?

Yes, certainly. The mental orientation of our elites appears in the best-selling books like those by Ms. Hohler with the programmatic titles “Rules of the Game for Winners” or Hans-Olaf Henkels’ “Ethics of Success.” The moral, the respect of others, is repressed in favor of the Olympic champion, the athlete who must reach the top. They as the strong who don’t know unemployment refuse to count those at the edge of society. Therefore this systematic de-solidarity occurs.

The president of the German business association Rogowski calls this “courage for freedom.”

Yes. They skillfully sell their reforms as liberation. They speak of personal responsibility, freedom, self-realization and reorganization of the social state. These are all beautiful words used by the economy and politics. The official version covers up the constitutional breach, the farewell to the social state.

SPD chancellor Schroeder says these reforms are unavoidable.

Yes. I have the feeling that Schroeder wants to please the economic elites. He is driven downwards by them. That the SPD chancellor implements the Lambsdorff-Tietmeyer paper of 1982 is a really bitter irony of history…

Didn’t SPD chancellor Helmut Schmidt fall because massive social cuts were demanded?

These cuts have even intensified. Schroeder’s Agenda 2010 is a declaration of war on the victims of the crisis. Reagan and Thatcher could have announced this. March 14, when he read the agenda in the parliament, was a black day for the social state and democracy.

Mr. Hengsbach, you are exaggerating.

Am I exaggerating? No, unfortunately. Have you heard the language of the chancellor? No chancellor has ever brushed off the socially weak or thrashed the people so roughly. Schroeder’s cold determination was unique. He converted in action what the business consultants Berger and McKinsey urged, ending this little debate. A jolt is necessary! We need a strong leader, a strong chancellor. With a brutal language that talks around the feelings of his own party and the people, he said: “We will carry this out!” What a ruthless elbow-language!

Hard times, it is said, require hard measures.

Yes, the times are hard for many. We have a dreadful mass unemployment.

The Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber says “We are the last!” He carried out a whole election campaign with this slogan.

Yes, Germany is regarded as rigid and stiff, a chained giant with a red lantern. The same theme is heard in every chancellor’s speech. Germany must take the lead again! These slogans are repeated again and again. However they aren’t true but are a willful deception of the population. A depressing picture is painted according to the model of the hell-fire preachers, a menacing picture projected on the wall so people tremble. Everything is then accepted. Whoever influences people this way and exercises power through threatening gestures despises the afflicted and doesn’t take them seriously. This cannot be good in the long-term.

Do you expect revolts, riots and resistance?

I don’t know how the frustration will erupt. Everything will be attempted. The deviationists in the parties are immobilized and made trite or uninspired. Still I don’t believe that the will of a small group can turn the whole people upside down. At the moment people are irritated and disoriented and will not bother to vote any more.

Over 100,000 persons recently took to the streets in Berlin to demonstrate against the “social dismantling.”

That amazed everyone even the government. People feel something is not right. What is happening is unjust. People see Agenda 2010 as the emperor’s new clothes. A child need only come and shout: “He is naked!” Then the chancellor who damaged his SPD and chips away the social state stands naked.

The child at the moment shouts something else. He cries: The seniors today are plundering the social system and squandering the pensions. The child is afraid. In old age, I will be poor. I am the victim of the demographic catastrophe!

This is also a legend. Does it suddenly become the truth because the SPD and the Greens now defend it? Should fear replace thinking? There is no demographic catastrophe.

What did you say?

In a modern work society, there are no generations. What is a generation, the earliest ancestors, grandmother, mother or child? Family relations cannot be transferred to today’s society. Justice is not a biological problem. Even if it sounds terribly dated, the ancient problem persists of the just distribution between rich and poor. Productivity, growth and employment statistics decide over the economic output of a people, not biology. A hundred years ago eight farmers worked to feed one non-farmer. Today one farmer feeds 88 persons.

Can we continue as in the past?

No, reforms are necessary. However you must simply see that the increasing injustice was produced politically with simultaneous impoverishment of the state budget. Income from assets and business activities has been consistently relieved of taxes in the last 25 years. The profit rate has doubled while business taxes have fallen.

In America it is said: “The horses must be fed so the sparrows can eat!”

Yes, of course, but the promise that this tax policy will lead to more jobs has proven to be a fallacy. The problem here is also distribution. It is dreadful that property- and inheritance taxes cannot be seriously discussed or that all income including capital income should be finally included for solidarian security. If the social state were politically desired, it could be financed.

You are a dreamer.

That may be. Chancellor Schroeder would send everyone who thinks beyond the day and has visions to the doctor. He doesn’t know what to do with people who develop perspectives. The political message of Agenda 2010 is clear. We don’t want this social state any more. Social risks like sickness and old age should be charged to the individual. More is expected from the weak than the strong. A suffocating de-solidarity takes place. We are on the way to a wolf society.

You can criticize but globalization…

Globalization! Globalization! That is a magic word, an all-purpose weapon to lower wages, taxes and social expenditures. It is a delusion.

Is the location Germany endangered or not?

Location Germany is a butterfly word. The German economy likes to appear as a victim. Germany is not a victim of globalization but its most important motor. We are export nation No. 1. We are more productive than Japan. Germany is one of the richest nations of the world. We are not living above our means but far below.

What did you say? The financial expert Oswald Metzger sees this radically different: “Germany as a fool’s paradise or land of milk and honey does not exist any more! Away with the national bliss mentality!”, he cries on talk-shows. “The social state is responsible for poverty!”

Oswald Metzger became a success by bravely repeating the neoliberal and modern slogans of business managers. He is a helper of those who don’t need the social state, the top earners and the independent.

Not long ago the journalist Arnulf Baring in “FAZ” (Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung) urged citizens to take to the “barricades” against a patronizing state and “politicians” who “make the country rotten” and form citizen conventions to radically turn the social state upside down.

Do you mean the “Initiative for the New Social Market Economy” or the “Convention for Germany”?

This circle embodies a socially conservative to reactionary milieu. They are economically liberal and have a clear goal: a sleek state. How the wealthy and high-income persons organize and thrash those who work dependently, are unemployed or receive income support is mad! The solidarity of the strong against the weak is unparalleled. This citizen convention has considerable power and invests vast money in advertising campaigns. They control the public political discourse and are more respected than members of parliament, the representatives of our people. They devalue the democratic institutions of Germany. Democratic processes are nuisances to them. Federalism, the Upper House of Parliament, referendums and discussions – everything takes too long for them!

As Baring said, “We need more competition everywhere in and between the schools, universities, territories and communes.”

Yes, competition is offered as a miracle drug. On top of this, they systematically run down the social state because they don’t need it. They call for reforms and mean de-solidarity, undermining the social systems and ultimately canceling the social contract.

You teach at a Jesuit academy. But your devout Jesuit brothers have enough of the social state. Cardinal Lehmann welcomes Agenda 2010. The Jesuit priest urges less help for the unemployed and less protection from unlawful termination.

Yes, this is disappointing. In 1997 a church memorandum declared there is no alternative to the solidarian security systems. Unfortunately this has changed somewhat. I expect church leaders – not the churches! – may avoid the mistake of the unions in disengaging from the elite-dialogue on account of vehement confrontation. The fear of stigmatization is great. Church leaders want to have a say with the leading worldly elites.

They can even say in a very Christian way: mass unemployment is a sin!

Mass unemployment is unjust and a structural sin. Five years ago the churches said this. Today, I fear, church leaders refuse the discoveries of caritas and diakonia. Like high-ranking politicians and managers, church leaders move in a milieu where distress and unemployment are alien and do not have the faintest idea how the poor feel and how hard millions of citizens fight for a life in dignity. This is repressed. This ignorance endangers democracy.

What has especially annoyed you in the past years?

That I sometimes did not raise my voice loud enough against injustice, that…

That sounds very dramatic.

It shouldn’t. I reproach myself because I wanted to spare my nerves or was simply weary. My superiors in Rome must hear my complaints. I am not tolerable any more. Perhaps I shirk some conflicts. Still I cannot constantly fight. I need a few niches of personal contentment.
 
 

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