German court declares Karl Marx's teachings unconstitutional
harici.com.tr
harici.com.tr
Actual news: A group was in risk of being considered left wing extremist, which could jeopardize their non profit status. The court ruled in their favor actually.
It just so happens that the wording of the court’s justification of the ruling irked some people - quickly paraphrasing, “Marx teachings might be contrary to democracy but this people aren’t acting on those teachings so their reading isn’t reason to consider them extremists”.
Some groups are worried that this wording about marx sets a precedent, being unclear if there is actual legal concerns.
> The plaintiff's activities, which are centered on the theories of Karl Marx, are in principle contrary to the free democratic basic order.
>The plaintiff's activities centered on the theories of Karl Marx are fundamentally at odds with the free democratic basic order.
For example, because of his talk of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which excludes other groups, which is undemocratic.
The only reason the case was dismissed is because the group was insignificant enough and not “actively combative”.
The thing that is unconstitutional isn't the "dictatorship of the proletariat" by abolition of capital, it's the oppressive authoritarian rule that has in the past and present been justified with appeals to that kind of language, especially in Marxist-Leninist schools of thought. This is relevant because the likely frame of reference for the court here is the German Democratic Republic, the former vassal state of the Soviet Union. But even they opposed a close reading of Marxism which they argued was "utopianist", instead justifying the supposed inevitability of their totalitarian rule as "real existing socialism" rather than communism.
Marx did not argue for a ruling bureaucrat class to replace the capital owning class. It's easy to see how that kind of thought would be at odds with the constitution but even most "left wing extremist" groups in Germany are ideologically opposed to it, Marxist or otherwise.
But, for example, the German Constitutional Court declared legalized abortion to be a violation of the Basic Law’s right to life (though it permitted circumstantial exceptions to whether punitive measures were required for such violations): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Constitutional_Court_ab....
I would suggest the Germans decline to take a page from the Americans here and not read the Basic Law for all it could be read to mean.
I'd love to see these judges clearly define what the "free democratic basic order" means without paradox, and then explain which part of Marx's work violates it. The Grundgesetz is based on three main principles: human dignity, the rule of law, and the separation of powers. Which of these does Marx's theory actually attack?
Marx's writings are huge, complex, and usually analytical. They look at how economies work, not how to abolish democracy. A big part is the philosophical debates of materialism vs. idealism, which aren certainly not a threat to the constitutional order.
By painting the whole of Marx's thought as incompatible, the court shows not only ignorance and arrogance but also chips away at a core pillar of the very order it claims to defend: free speech. Saying that some knowledges are forbidden is like censorship of the dark ages, not something a modern democracy that's confident in its values would do.
There are plenty of reasons to argue that Marx might not be compatible with the principles of a capitalist/bourgeois state - he e.g. argued in his works on the Paris Commune that they should have gone further in smashing elements of the state.
But this is a wildly ahistorical, though not atypical, reading, and shows the judge might want to attend a reading grous, given that Marx also used the term "dictatorship of the bourgeoise" about capitalist electoral democracies.
This use doesn't make any sense if one reads the term the way the judge did.
I don't understand the court's point or I do and it is just being very one-sided.
The only way I could see this ruling make sense, though is if the court was saying "this is a possible interpretation, but even if we interpret it this way it doesn't matter, because ..."
It would be reasonable for the court to accept it is a reading but punt on deciding it if it's not going to change their final decision.
But I haven't looked at the original ruling, and my German is weak enough I wouldn't hazard trying to tease out that distinction in a legal ruling.
The validity of the interpretation itself, on the other hand, is questionable - as the newspaper highlights, other courts do have a different point of view on this topic, so it is by no means a mainstream opinion.
Note: the headline is somewhat misleading. The first line of the article reads
> A court in Hamburg, Germany, has stated in the details of a ruling concerning a Karl Marx reading group that Marx’s teachings may be contrary to the “free democratic basic order.”
(emphasis mine)
A more relevant legal context if you want to horseshoe this is that Germany banned the German Communist Party as the second party right after banning the literal successor party of the NSDAP. But it only did so due to what we would nowadays call illegal interfering by the government in the proceedings of the constitutional court (though of course it was mostly legal at the time). This literally led to the ban of the Communist Party being reversed later (which wouldn't have been possible if the arguments had been valid). The Nazi party on the other hand remains being banned.
(He favoured a US-inspired model of public licensing, but privately run schools instead)
The argument is also extremely dodgy, at least the way it is being presented here. The court seemingly argues that whether or not Marxism necessarily requires a violent overthrow of the government is irrelevant because the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would be an undemocratic rule to the exclusion of a demographic group (presumably capitalists) but this is paper thin.
Communism would abolish "capitalists" as a concept, not as a demographic group. It's more like the abolition of chattel slavery - it simply stopped providing a legal mechanism to be a slave owner, it didn't "discriminate against slave owners" because that was no longer a thing you could meaningfully be (or at least not more than "human trafficker").
The German constitution does not actually establish capitalism as integral to the "liberal democratic order". It's true that it includes protections of "private property" but it also contains a hierarchy of interests that allows for private property to be socialized for the benefit of the public and ultimately yields to "human dignity" above all else. It does not give special protections to capital and certainly not exceeding those offered to humans (regardless of citizenship or residence by the way - this is why German "sex tourism" abroad is still subject to concerns in Germany like the age of consent, and consent in general).
It's also worth mentioning that the constitutional court has previously ruled that some aspects of the constitution including special protections can be informed by changing cultural attitudes. Specifically this was used to argue in favor of same-sex relationships being included in protections of "family" - a change that certain conservatives also saw as a breakdown of the "public order".
edit: As someone else has pointed out title is a bit click baity
If profit isn’t the excess value of labor then where does it come from. You’ve got some inputs, you transform them into some outputs, you sell the outputs for more than the inputs. Something happened to make the output more valuable than the input.
And it seems hard to argue against that idea. Capitalism as a system describes who should get to allocate that value and as the name would suggest, it’s the people with the capital. If you own the factory you get to pay people to do work, they convert low value inputs into higher value outputs, and as the person with the capital you get to capture the difference as profit.
Marx simply looks at this system and says, why should they get to decide what happens with the value that got created by labor.
That tends to be where it goes from an objective “this is how this system operates” to “here’s an alternative system”
I think people would serve themselves well to read what he had to write. Even if you come away thinking the alternative doesn’t work, the analysis of capitalisms strengths and weaknesses is interesting.
As life becomes more unaffordable for many under a capitalist system, as rent seeking and exploitation become more rampant, people are going to want to critically analyze whether this system is really all it’s cracked up to be. Why do some go hungry while Jeff Bezos has more than he can ever use? Why do the wealthy get to have an outsized say in our society and our governments? Can the set of incentives that capitalism erects survive a condition like climate change?
When we decide that people are no longer allowed to ask those questions, we need not worry about the a theoretical dictatorship of the proletariat. Ask only who you are not allowed to question to see who is in charge.
No system should be above examination and reformation for the good of humanity.
He first then goes on, as you say, from a "this is how this system operates" to "here's an alternative system".
To Marx, capitalism was both a necessary stage and a positive step, just in his view not some final utopia.
Arguably, one of Marx' biggest failing was that he severely over-estimated how quickly capitalism would saturate the world markets and get to a stage where growth is only possible through the reduction of labour costs, as his prediction of capitalism failing was predicated on that.
Marx wants capital to not exist so that's not gonna be very popular with capitalists
Court rules Marx is incompatible with the ‘free democratic basic order’
It can be hard to be sure what is argued for by "classical", "modern", or "real" socialists or Marxists, from a classical, western, libertarian, conservative, or progressive perspective.
To try to understand the socialist perspective, from [0]:
"""Socialist revolution would be the means by which to create real, radical democracy. The Communist League, led by Marx and Engels, declared as their goal:
“a democratic State wherein each party would be able by word or in writing to win a majority over to its ideas…. We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. . . . We have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced … that in no social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal ownership.” (16)
Workers would control the economy directly, via councils, election of their own managers. We would gain direct control of the national and multinational corporations, at the point of production. We would expropriate the billionaires, so, as unlikely as it will be to corrupt our truly democratic system, they would no longer have the wealth to even attempt to corrupt it. No, we would not make their lives miserable—as they are trying to make ours now. But they would have to work like anybody else. And they could no longer effect their current sociopathic, “transhuman” schemes against the rest of us.
For we would live in a society that would fulfill our needs, and enable us to enjoy unimaginable freedoms in a truly democratic community: not make a few sociopaths rich, or give them the obscene levels of destructive power over the rest of us they enjoy today."""
Meanwhile, a conflicting perspective from [1] appears to be that:
- "Sooner or later socialism destroys everything in hits path: law, morality, family, prosperity, productivity, education incentive, and finally life itself. The problem with socialism is it creates the conditions for a Stalin or a Hitler to come to power" - "Communism is the final phase and goal of socialism, simply described as big government... using force to take things from one person and give them to someone else."
Which correlates with the perspecives online that :
- "Fascism is exclusive to the Roman Empire, and socialism is the collectivism they push for more easily manageable slaves - like they've already done to the Chinese and are currently in the process of rolling out for the rest of the world."
and that
- "The four steps of the Cloward-Piven Strategy: 1. Overload and Break the Welfare System 2. Have Chaos Ensue 3. Take Control in the Chaos 4. Implement Socialism and Communism through Government Force"
Thus, seems clear that there is some explaining to be done. Anyone able to neatly resolve or explain the (apparently) starkly different outlooks on socialism?
It is also possible that some people believe that "true socialism" is not described by any of the above. If so, any links or insights along those lines would be welcome, too.
[0] https://redfireonline.com/2022/05/08/socialism-the-only-real... [1] Documentary video, "Grinding America Down"
Considering the current rise of fascist/neo-nazi parties like AfD in Germany, I am not surprised that they are trying to suppress socialist literature.
It's much better for Amazon drivers to have to pee in bottles while Gestapo, pardon, ICE kidnaps people and throws them in jail without due process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
For the gamers, the Victoria series by Paradox uses historical materialism as its gameplay.