Norbert Blüm’s new book is also a well-founded criticism of Angela Merkel’s CDU

by Karl Müller, Germany

“This is an economy which is tending to become totalitarian because it seeks to force everything within the logic of economic reason. But this is a stunted reason. (…) An economic system whose responce to redundancies is an increase in profit will not survive. The people won’t put up with it.” Norbert Blüm

The German chancellor Angela Merkel is courted by the wealthy and mighty of the world. On the occasion of this year’s WEF in Davos she gave the inaugural address on the 24th of January, for the second time in succession. This address makes it clear why Angela Merkel is courted. With contrived modesty she claimed that globalisation is a good thing, an opportunity and not a risk. But for the world to grow together, there must be an adequate political environment, such as “more freedom”. According to Merkel this means an expansion of the single European market with its four principles of globalisation: unfettered trade in goods and services, moving people from one part of the world to another without restraint, and above all the free movement of capital. It means especially “deepening the economic integration between the EU and the USA” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 25th January). Merkel has “a single market in mind” (NZZ, 25th January). Merkel stands for the idea of a “homo oeconomicus”.

Norbert Blüm’s new book “Justice. A Criticism of the Idea of Homo Economicus” takes a very different posizion. Blüm was Minister of Labour and Social Affairs in Germany for 16 years. Blüm and Merkel are members of the same political party but their views are worlds apart, and have been for more than just a couple of days.

A Person of Integrity

The author of this article remembers a situation in autumn 1973 when he was a Delegate of the RCDS (Ring Christlich Demokratischer Studenten). The RCDS meeting was held some weeks after Pinochet’s violent putsch against the elected government of Chile. Criticism of this coup d’état organised by the CIA was frowned upon within the CDU of the time and the RCDS, an organisation linked to the CDU. A critical statement by Norbert Blüm was therefore a matter of a controversial debate. He did not toe the informal party line but preferred the rule of law. He stood his line and denounced the coup. The author has remembered Norbert Blüm’s honest position ever since.

In his new book Blüm tells about a meeting with Pinochet himself, at which he, without mincing his words, denounced the brutal methods of torture and demanded justice. Blüm has also spoken out on another issue: since 2002 he has stood up for the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, and he has repeatedly accompanied Rupert Neudeck on journeys to Palestine. Blüm is a sharp critic of the Israeli policy of occupation, and refuses to be forced into a corner by polemics. According to Blüm, justice is not only a matter of intellectual debate but also a matter of putting basic ideas about human co-existence into practice.

Blüm’s book comprises six chapters and an introduction entitled “Setting the mood”; the chapters are entitled “What moves the world?”, “Justice”, “Images of Humanity”, “Neo-Liberalism”, “Economisation of Life”, “Looking around”.

The Microcosm and Macrocosm of Globalisation

The first chapter “Getting into the mood” examines the microcosm and the macrocosm of globalisation. At the meeting point of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, a huge dam is in the process of being built. Blüm calls the project a “symbiosis of megalomania and fun”. We see the same pictures all over the world, often in poor countries, especially in the most exploited ones. Oversized billboards, films and TV programmes suggest the illusion of a brave new world, an unnatural demonstration of a shining prosperity. But Blüm describes the reality: “Unfortunately behind the happy face of progress you see the grimace of squalor: exploitation, oppression and contempt for mankind.” Within sight of the giant hydro-electric powerstation thousands of children are being forced into prostitution, children are being murdered. The rich of the country live in isolated mansions like fortresses, “closing their eyes to what is going on outside their walls”, and sending their daughters to business universities in Switzerland. There are international conventions against misery. But these conventions are useless as long as they are only written on the paper and nobody cares whether or not they are put into practice.

Blüm also mentions the figures from the macrocosm. For example: “793 billionaires in the world as compared with 3 billion people that have less than 2 dollars a day, with 1.3 billion having to make do with less than 1 dollar.” Or: “In 98 countries income is lower than it was 10 years ago.” Or: “1 billion people do not have access to clean water.” Or: “30 000 people die every day for lack of food and drink.” Or: “What is spent in the USA (8 billion dollars) and in Europe (11 billion Euros) on ice-cream and cosmetics alone would cover the costs of providing 2 billion people with a basic schooling and clean water.” Or, later in the book: “When the price of shares on the world’s stock exchanges changes by 1 percent, about 4 billion dollars are instantaneously and silently redistributed. That is three times as much as all the workers in the world earn in one day.” Or: “Globalisation is an exclusive game of a privileged minority that assumes they are the only people on earth.”

Striving for Justice

“Humanity is not satisfied with the world it lives in.” This sentence begins the first chapter, while the first section ends: “A successful and just life in a just and good society is the fortune that we strive for.”

In response to the question: “How do we want to live together?” Blüm presents the intellectual achievements in the history of mankind. “The call for justice follows the history of mankind” and: “Justice is a sign of humanity”, and: “The call for justice will grow louder, the darker the world appears”, and: “The ruling class must be measured by the standard of justice” and: “It is not the right of the powerful that is justice (…), justice (…) is the weapon of the weak. The powerful do not need it. Both, the strong and the weak can only live together in peace under the mantle of justice”, and: “Everyone has the right to justice, and no-one is excluded” and: “The elementary doctrine of justice is easy: recognising the dignity of every person”.

Justice: Virtue and Principle of Society

Justice is a personal virtue and a social principle for the arrangement of life and for the institutions that regulate living together. “Without justice virtue is an empty word meaning, and without just institutions justice remains without form.”

Justice has nothing to do with a “philosophy of utilitarianism”: “The great philosophy of justice from Aristoteles to Kant does descend to such a calculation of morality. Every human being is an end and not a means.” Therefore justice can never “sanction violations of human rights”.

How very topical these sentences are considering the present policy of world domination and world war, considering the way international law and human rights are treated with contempt!

The doctrine of justice that Blüm develops by taking up Christian social teaching has further practical consequences, particularly for the structuring of the economic order in the countries of the world. The blatant social injustice, the egoism of the greedy, and the radicalisation of the concept of the market are totally unjust, and in conflict with the knowledge of the nature of mankind.

“Gaudium et Spes”, the Pastoral Constitution of the Second Vatican Council, states: “Hence, the social order and its development must invariably work to the benefit of the human person if the disposition of affairs is to be subordinate to the personal realm and not contrariwise.”

What is the human? The Person!

But what is the “personal realm”, what is the human being?

It is neither an isolated individual nor a cog in the collective wheel. In “Gaudium et Spes” we can read: “For by his innermost nature man is a social being, and unless he relates himself to others he can neither live nor develop his potential.”

The human being is both an individual and a social being. The human being is a person: “Personalism puts replaces an anonymous ’Weltgeist’ or anonymous matter with a ’person’ that develops in a relationship.” This “somebody” is “unique but not alone”. “Being a person means that I cannot be used by someone else but that I am end in myself”, says religious philosopher Romano Guardini. Human beings are not at anyone’s disposal. Norbert Blüm reminds us of the question in the Bible: “(…) what did you do for one of the least of my brothers?” At the same time he also recalls the position of human beings in the world: “Man will not be called to account for what he did for himself but for what he did for others.”

The “old” Neo-liberals of the Social Market Economy

Politics and the economic order must be measured against these social ideas. This was something the creators of the social market economy knew. When Blüm speaks about “old” neo-liberalism he means academics and politicians like Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm, Alexander Rüstow, Wilhelm Röpke and Alfred Müller-Armack, as wellas the former German Minister of Economics and Chancellor Ludwig Erhard. These personalities fought against an economic order which develops corporate power, and championed free competition within a social economic system which benefits the common welfare, they championed “a third way” between communism and capitalism.

The “new” neo-liberalism is very different: “The old liberalism was a social idea. The new liberalism has degenerated into an economic idea.” Profit is the “God of the neo-liberals”. “Common features are lost, society is atomised. The lasting becomes out-dated. Morality is a temporary agreement. Structures are condensed and become vaporized like rain-drops in the sun. (…) Liberalism is the casting off of chains; globalisation is the removal of all limits. (…) Neo-liberalism is basically nothing other than an ideology of boundlessness.”

The “new” Neo-liberalism: a Cultural Revolution plus Money, Money, and more Money

The three dogmas of neo-liberalism are: “Deregulation, competition and cost cutting,” plus in addition the destruction of a state which is focused on the common good, and the destruction of its public functions; replaced by a focus on profit in all fields of life, extending even to private patents on genes and cells in order to “master and use the process of life”; the slogan is “privatisation”. And the person released from all relationships becomes “flexible”, and a sort of “job nomad”.

It is a “cultural revolution”: “Like Mao the new neo-liberals abolish everything: traditions, conventions, values. (…) The new neo-liberals are Maoists who went underground and have turned up again to teach at German universities. Like their secret master Mao Zedong in 1974 they struggle now, three decades later, against the four evils: old culture, old thinking, old customs, and old traditions.”

Their ideal personality is the “autistic hedonist”. Those who fail can at best live on alms. But alms and social security benefits are not a compensation for justice: “The welfare state cannot provide enough bandages to dress all the wounds that injustice has caused.”

It is extremely alarming that “modern” Christian Democrats (CDU) under Angela Merkel and even the “modern” German Catholic bishops have devoted themselves to this zeitgeist, as Blüm points out in his book.

Does “Freedom” mean Freedom for Billionaires?

The draft of the new party political manifesto of the CDU is entitled “New justice through more freedom”. Blüm: “What kind of new justice can we expect to emerge from more freedom? More freedom for the capital that rules globalisation indeed creates another ’new’ justice, but it is not a kind of justice that corresponds to the Christian understanding of justice. “More freedom for Bill Gates” so that he can add a few more dollars to his personal wealth of 55 billion dollars and increase the one third of his staff that are unskilled workers to a half. Is this what is meant by the new justice, the Bill-Gates freedom”?

In 2004 the German bishops demanded ”a new way of thinking about social affairs”. The “old” social affairs had become a claim to “install an increasingly comfortable normality”. Blüm asks: “The unemployed person that has written 200 applications without success does not consider his situation to be a ’comfortable normality’. In the German welfare state there have been more cuts than increases in the last twenty years. Where do the authors of such texts live?” Blüm points out who was asked by the bishops to write the paper: Hans Tietmeyer, former president of the German National Bank. And Blüm presents the social reality in Germany: “In our country 11 million people are poor or threatened with poverty. 7 million people are welfare recipients. 5 million people are unemployed and 3 million people are insolvent. (…) 10 percent of the population in Germany own nearly 47 percent of the national wealth, and 50 percent have to manage with about 3.8 percent of the national wealth. (…) According to estimates by Caritas the state has an annual loss through tax evasion of 65 billion Euro, while the loss through the abuse of social welfare is only 120 million Euro.”

Homo Oeconomicus is a Caricature of a Real Human Being

Blüm objects to the propagandistic word “self-reliance”: “Self-reliance can only be achieved through a share in responsibility. Man is not self-sufficient and not self-governed. His self is not an isolated individual. (…) To reserve self-reliance for private efforts is an ideological confiscation that harms personal responsibility.”

Homo oeconomicus, economic man, is the leading figure of the neo-liberal world. According to Blüm the motto of such a person is: “Money is what matters. Money rules the world (…)Any gesture of generosity, any sign of affection is of no worth to him unless it has a positive effect on his business. (…) People are tagged with a price label. Something or somebody that has no price is of no worth.”

The world view of Homo oeconomicus is materialistic. He is “the last stage in the degeneration of Homo sapiens”. A poor neurotic figure with a narrow horizon and with an “amputated concept of man”, a “caricature of a real human being”, who does not know that it is one of man’s most fortunate experiences “to love without merit; to trust without insurance, to dare an apparently absurd adventure that will never bring a return.” (Karl Rahner)

Ideas that Touch the Hearts and the Minds of Men

Norbert Blüm says his book is being ignored. A fact that does not astonish but that demonstrates the situation in which we are today. At the same time he is full of confidence, he believes that a forced and false ideology and hence a false reality cannot survive. “Both capitalism and communism have proved that materialism will not advance the worlda single step further. But we can learn by experience.”

He relies on the force of ideas, but people are needed who will put themselves out for good ideas: “People who follow an idea help advance the world. The Christian social idea gives hope for the future, but without people who put themselves out for it, this idea will end gathering dust in a museum for leftovers.”

At the end of his book Blüm puts forward ideas about a working world with employment for everybody who wants to work: not principally in industry but in a way “that allows people to meet each other”, a job “that serves humanity”; a job characterised by worker participation and joint ownership. And it would be a social system characterised by a self-help based on solidarity.

He can only give suggestions. “I learned by experience that the best goals are goals that men really believe are just. Ideas that deeply touch the minds and hearts of man are a real force.” The last sentence in the book is: “I trust in the world power of justice. It will become stronger and stronger.”

Norbert Blüm. Gerechtigkeit. Eine Kritik des homo oeconomicus. ISBN-10: 3-451-05789-1