Translated from a text by Freerk Huisken

Correspondence on the topic:

“What do you actually have against values? Without morals, there’s no reasonable way to live together!”

“... I keep coming across reservations about morality in your work. What do you actually have against values? I simply don’t get it. The fact that there is so much to criticize in this country, that there is injustice, discrimination, intolerance, and hate everywhere, suggests that the necessary value orientation is missing. I ask you this as a reader of your books and texts because I always discover the values that I consider vital in your criticism, which I generally share. You write that there is a lack of equal opportunities in schools, refugees are discriminated against, women are paid unfairly, selfishness prevails in competition, right-wing extremists spread hate speech, etc. For me, this makes it clear: Without morality, there’s no reasonable way of living together! ...”

“Everywhere” you look, you see the values you hold dear lacking. You will agree with me that this is not just a phenomenon of modern capitalism, but was even more pronounced in its early days. The complaint that the realization of values is lacking and the call to return to them is as old as this society itself. And time and time again, there are more or less successful efforts to put an end to one injustice or another: “unfair pay for women” is declining, if the statistics are to be believed. The result: women are increasingly being paid just as poorly as men. To combat intolerance, schools are offering lessons that encourage young people not to discriminate against their classmates on the basis of their origin. The result: bullying in school takes place without racist pre-sorting. An anti-discrimination law that makes unequal treatment a criminal offense has been in place for some time now. The result: to avoid punishment, bar owners are opening their establishments to black people who nevertheless avoid them for good reason. Social media is even taking action against hate speech. The result: the hate stays inside the heads of the right-wing extremists.

What do you think of the following initial conclusion? Instead of merely noting the absence of the values you hold so dear, one should ask why the fight against injustice and intolerance never seems to run out of material in this country. On the other hand, it would be appropriate to take a closer look at the content of the virtues you mention, especially since it is not difficult to see that their partial realization by no means results in a “reasonable way of living together.” Or to put it another way: I would not want to live a single day in a society where – taking your idea at face value – living together is based on values.

I want to illustrate this with the values you mentioned:

1. The virtue of equal opportunities testifies to the fact that the pursuit of one’s concerns, one’s interest in one’s own well-being, is dependent solely on an opportunity; hence that, firstly, it leads only to the possibility of success; secondly, that the means of achieving it are not in the hands of those for whom opportunities are opened; which is why, third, the question arises as to “who allocates opportunities and for what reasons?”; that, fourthly, they presuppose submission to a process that distributes success and failure; and fifthly, it is not even clear what such an allocated success consists of. So much for a “reasonable way of living together!”

As for your verdict on school, I understand what you are getting at when you write about a lack of equal opportunities – children from the lower class, even with the best of intentions, mostly end up back where they started from after they finish their school requirements. However, I must point out that there is no lack of equal opportunities in school. Rather, the whole point of education is that all students without exception must prove themselves in the same learning competition, hence have an equal chance. This is the only way to ensure that more than half the younger generation will be blocked from reaching the better paid jobs.[1] I don’t like your proposal to roll out genuine equal opportunities, i.e., to level the highly unequal conditions for learning before entering the learning competition, for two reasons: Firstly, you don’t seem to be bothered by the learning competition itself, and the intellectual confusion it causes young people seems completely unknown or irrelevant to you[2]; and secondly, you have obviously lost sight of the fact that your leveling proposal affirms the class division that it presupposes. The facts that kids come from “educationally disadvantaged” families, that they end up there again, that this means a life of precarity for them and their parents – according to your school reform, that should be equalized only once, and indeed before the start of the learning competition, and solely for them through compensatory allowances; for you, this is apparently negligible compared with the lack of equal opportunities. So much for a “reasonable way of living together!”

2. You know that it’s not just refugees who are discriminated against in this society. Disabled people, gays, the homeless, and Germans with dark skin are also “faced with discrimination.” You don’t like that – and neither do I. But the fact that this discrimination leads you to advocate equal rights for all is a difference between us. Here, in addition to the anti-discrimination law, you even have a more important witness for this: the Basic Law [note: the Basic Law = the German constitution adopted in 1949]. Article 3 states that “all people are equal before the law,” and no one shall be disadvantaged or favored because of “their gender, their ancestry, their race, their language, their homeland, their origin, their faith, their religious or political views.”

However, you may already have noticed from the provisions of Article 3 that the Basic Law – not just with regard to this article – is a problematic authority to appeal to. Equal treatment applies only before the law, which means that all citizens, regardless of any other differences that distinguish them in this country, are granted the great honor of being measured by the same yardstick by the legal authority of the democratic state when they break the law. The only thing that always occurs to me is that it would be much better if people were punished for legal offenses differently, for example, based on their fame and reputation, possessions, and wealth! I also wonder why it is considered the highest value in our civil society when the Basic Law assumes that all its citizens must be regarded as potential lawbreakers. And, finally, I find it objectionable that all people are considered equal before the law, i.e., as legal persons, but not as economic subjects. Why doesn’t the Basic Law state: All people shall be treated equally with regard to their property, no one may be disadvantaged or privileged because of their property in pursuing their interests and satisfying their needs? That would be something! But, no, material differences are not listed in Article 3. Yet that’s what determines the lives of all citizens.

The idea that the authors of Article 3(3) of the Basic Law simply ignored the economic differences and conflicts can be dismissed out of hand. They knew full well that they simply do not belong there. In plain language: the egalitarianism of the democratic system which allows everyone to freely pursue their interests regardless of whether they own a source of income in the form of a factory, a bank, a block of shares, a rental property, or land, or whether they are, precisely because they do not own any of these things, propertyless in this sense, and therefore have to earn money in the service of others’ enrichment, i.e., do some form of wage labor – this egalitarianism thus protects the economic domination of the property-owning class over all those who lack property. From this perspective, it would be downright silly to accuse Article 3 of the Basic Law of being incomplete. As it stands, it is exactly what the authors intended. After all, this article enshrines a central systemic feature of this society, namely the economic “discrimination” of the majority of citizens who do not own property![3] So much for a “reasonable way of living together!”

The discrimination against refugees you mention, for example on the basis of their “race, origin, or language,” does not violate the German Basic Law because, as the preamble states, its articles apply only to Germans. That is why foreigners and refugees are covered by a separate Article 16a: This stipulates that they are equal not before the law, but only under the right to asylum.[4] Everything else is regulated by the Asylum Act, which in any case only grants asylum status to refugees who can prove to political decision-makers that they have been “politically persecuted” and have had to endure one or more “serious(!) violations of fundamental human rights” (Asylum Act §3a).[5] Given the clarification in Article 3 of the Basic Law, it should come as no surprise that economic “discrimination” against refugees in their home countries, for example through the destruction of their livelihoods or the ruin of their agricultural sources of income, is reason to exclude them from asylum from the outset. Their discrimination as “economic refugees” is legal and allows for immediate deportation back to the misery from which they fled. With a degree of cynicism appropriate to the situation, it could be said that these deportees are then subject to neither political discrimination under the letter of asylum law, which consists of granting nothing more than residence, nor to private discrimination by all those German citizens for whom even that is too much, because they insist on a purely Aryan homeland. So much for a “reasonable way of living together!”

3. I want to deal with the issue of fairness somewhat briefly here.[6] About the unfair women’s wage: the slowly being pushed through fair wages in women’s pay is measured by the pay for men’s work. This is remarkable insofar as the starting point for female wage laborers’ complaints about unfair wages is, after all, solely low wages, not unequal wages. Why then don’t women demand a wage increase that at least is measured by the prices of all the necessities for living a good life? Why do they instead use the wages of men in similar jobs as a measuring rod, even though their male colleagues also have to fight for wage increases year after year? This is easy to explain: a wage demand that is not relativized by established moral standards immediately falls under suspicion of materialism.[7] This is why demands for fair wages are dealt with in the corresponding way:[8] Decency is highly valued in women – and men. And not uncommonly, recognition of a highly decent request replaces its fulfillment. Of course, the rejection of demands for justice also invokes morality – what else is it for? Because women might not be keeping in mind that men can accomplish more, which is why equal pay would again be very unfair. Because wage demands, it is said, jeopardize jobs, thus are ultimately obscenely reckless. Incidentally, this does not really mean that wage concessions secure jobs and thus opportunities to make money. The fact that income-dependent people are hired and fired according to completely different criteria can be read about every day in the newspapers, e.g., when a company lays off people due to a necessary rationalization. Thanks to the unions, the days when organized workers really attacked competitive profits in wage struggles are long gone – if they ever really existed. Why materialism has fallen into disrepute in this country, why it is almost the same as communism, why every interest must be questioned not in terms of whether it is right, but whether it is justified, why decency takes precedence over the goal-oriented pursuit of success, the latter being condemned as selfish, why, conversely, modesty, self-restraint (i.e., for example, “cutting down on consumption”), frugality, or thriftiness are held in high regard, is thereby already almost explained by this: a relativization of interests and needs, indeed even occasionally abstraction from them, is only considered a necessity in a society in which people get in the way with their interests, whether in competition or in the resolution of conflicts between wage earners and wage payers. The subsumption of even the most elementary interests or needs under the enforced canon of values of high decency serves no other purpose than to confirm and reinforce the prevailing capitalist competitive society.[9] So much for a “reasonable way of living together!”

4. That leaves the issue of hate speech. This isn’t simply about people in their private interactions not being able to stand each other or their dislike even escalating into hatred. It’s about a rift that runs through society to the extent that there is occasionally even talk of divisions within it. There are German citizens who have problems with the presence of so-called minorities (i.e., foreigners in general, refugees, and citizens with immigrant backgrounds) and who therefore accuse political office holders and organizers of civic activities of pursuing an “un-German” immigration policy. Ultimately, the dispute concerns the question of who actually deserves the honor of being a member of the German people. In doing so, both sides of the dispute transform ethnic origin from an involuntary community into a kind of honorary membership. That unites them. The fact that a person becomes a citizen immediately after being born solely by an act of state power against which no one can defend themselves thus becomes something like a connection between people of a special character or even of a special human type, a specifically German nature. The dispute between the parties raises the question of whether there can be good reasons to integrate non-Germans into this enlightened circle of the Germans people. And here some see good reasons that lie solely in their benefit to the nation, while others see their “otherness” as good enough reason to reject them. The rejection of foreigners and immigration policy that turns into hate can only be explained by their entire private existence already being caught up in “pure Germanness.”

To approach hate-filled citizens with demands for respect, courtesy, or tolerance – and these are the values I see behind your rebuke of them – is downright quixotic. Are these citizens, who, by the way, also have violence in their arsenal, supposed to simply hide their resentment, their racist obsession with exclusion, and restrain themselves, merely clenching their fists in their pockets so that the appearance of harmony isn’t disturbed and the state can rely on a national community based on solidarity – every member of the national community in their place – while Europe, as a German-led major power, is to be stabilized again for competition with the world powers and the national business location is to be whipped into shape with ever-increasing demands on the “ordinary people”? So much for a “reasonable way of living together !”

Footnotes:

[1] You’re confusing equal opportunities in the school learning process with the highly unequal conditions with which children enter this probationary period. Incidentally, the same applies here: The complaint about a lack of equal opportunities is as old as school, is shared by those in charge of the schools, and will remain with us forever. Strange, isn’t it?

[2] Studying for grades means that the subject matter takes a back seat, because you don’t want to understand the material, but rather to be better at learning than others. This teaches you something for life, as Brecht summarizes in “The Refugee Conversations”: "The student learns everything necessary to get ahead in life. It’s the same thing that’s necessary to get ahead in school. It’s all about subterfuge, feigning knowledge, the ability to take revenge with impunity, the quick acquisition of commonplaces, flattery, servility, the willingness to betray one's peers to those in higher positions, etc., etc.” (B

[3] The protection of property in Article 14 of the Basic Law fits in perfectly with this; a protection that is particularly welcome for those who do not have any.

[4] See the Asylum Act §2

[5] See F. Huisken, abgehauen..., VSA 2016, p.39ff [untranslated]

[6] Although reading a longer essay is certainly recommended: See “Keyword: Justice,” in GegenStandpunkt issue 4/15. Your criticism that “selfishness prevails in competition” is also discussed there.

[7] The high-earning men, or their unions, never justify their demands by simply stating that they need more money to live on. Instead, wage demands are always justified by the success of the companies, inflation, or the impact of the purchasing power of wage earners – i.e., always on moral and never “selfish” grounds.

[8] There have reportedly been cases where companies have simply lowered men’s wages to match those of women. Fair enough!

[9] See also: Die Moral auf dem Vormarsch – die Patrioten machen mobil, in: GegenStandpunkt, Issue 1/95, p.3ff and 185ff [untranslated]