Change “Everything”!

If there are no alternatives within capitalism, we need alternatives to capitalism.

The Ökumenische Netz Rhein Mosel Saar e.V. invites its members and friends—both groups and individuals—to participate in the completion of a 
statement on the current economic and political crisis.
Reforms are being demanded in political discussions.  However, they merely refer to the systems of social security.  The ”social” is to be newly conceptualized and ”reformed.”  But it is becoming more and more obvious that it is not that which is ”social” that must be changed, but ”everything” about our economic, political and cultural way of life.  Within its framework there is clearly not any long-term potential for all the people living on the earth.  Therefore, we are inviting you to develop a position that takes ”everything” into account.  We are placing it in relation to the ”processus confessionis” (the process of confession) against economic injustice and environmental destruction.  The 8th plenary assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1998, as well as the WCC’s Western European delegates in Soesterberg, the Netherlands in 2002, called for this.  The provisional conclusion to this process is supposed to take place at the 9th plenary assembly of the WCC in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
In Germany, KAIROS Europa and the Ökumenische Netz, as well as Catholic and Protestant groups have already participated in this process with conferences and appeals for an ”economy in the service of life.”  Because the confession of Christians is demanded by
→ the fact that increasing numbers of people are becoming the victims of globalization through exclusion and barbaric forms of violence,
→ and the observation that capitalism is taking on increasingly religious characteristics in its global dispersal.

Within this context we want to name experiences that many of us have had with globalization in our everyday lives—experiences that include and recognize injustice, exploitation and exclusion.  However, we also want to formulate guidelines that are indispensable for our political involvement.

1.	Experiences we have at work . . .

Justice, peace and the integrity of creation are the matters which the Chrisitian churches have made their concern within the framework of the conciliar process.  For many, visions of worldwide justice, new possibilities for peace after the end of the East-West conflict and hope for a new relationship with creation were connected to this.  In the meantime, many of us have become disillusioned.  Despite all of our efforts, we were not successful in sustainably asserting humane and environmental alternatives  through campaigns and in discussions with business and political representatives.

On the contrary, within the context of globalization and the local competition that is connected with it, it is coming to processes of increasing exclusion and cutbacks in the social welfare system, to old and new forms of exploitation and supression.  At the same time, the role models are shifting: The “rich” North is no longer the ”model” for the ”development” of the ”poor” South.  Rather it is reversed: The ”developments” in the North and East are increasingly leading to conditions that we used to only know from the ”poor” countries.

If we only think of our own society, engaged in an important fight against cutbacks in the social welfare system, we are too short-sighted.  If we only consider the ”social” market economy, with its promise of (national) ”affluence for everyone,” we overlook the fact that this ”model” was only short-lived.  In addition, it mainly benefited the well-educated, full-time, ”normal employee” with an unlimited contract: women, who had to carry out unpaid family work, the Southern countries, which served as suppliers of cheap raw materials, as well as nature, whose goods were used at nearly no cost, profited far less or not at all from this model.

For this reason, the fight against cutbacks in the social welfare system cannot simply be called ”back to the happy times of the ‘social market economy’” and an allegedly ”socially just capitalism.”  Instead, we must fight for humane possibilities of survival and life on the whole planet.  These possibilities and the planet itself are threatened by the unleashed dynamic of capitalism that has gone global.

The reversed developmental paradigm is politically justified by the necessity of ”reforms” and ”modernization.”  However, in today’s usage ”reform” means ”modernization” into a society of national competition.  Such modernization is linked to more and more people worldwide becoming ”redundant.”  Local competition is a ”competition” for the lowest possible social and environmental standards.  It leads to poverty and unemployment, to wage dumping, to scarcity in public budgets and to cutbacks in the social welfare system that are connected to this.  Meanwhile, private wealth is growing.

As the political rhetoric in the politics and churches of our land—following the trend of the  neoliberal zeitgeist—defines the ”social state” as the problem, we have come to the following realization: The inter-societal and worldwide division and process of exclusion, the inequal distribution of wealth and power, the growing potential for violence, the road to an environmental catastrophe, and the claims that we have no alternatives make ”everything” about economic and political behavior, as well as its ideological orientation, into the problem.

2.	Globalization as a Crisis of Capitalism

We recognize the absolute priority of increasing money and capital above all other needs to be the central cause of the global economic and societal crisis.  The  compulsion inherent to capitalism of always mutiplying capital leads to an increasingly aggressive hunt for new possibilities for commercialization in space and time: the globalization of markets, longer and more flexible working hours, wage reduction and low income, the abolition of Sunday as a day of rest, the privatization of public goods and services and the increasingly unrestricted subjugation of people to the demands of capital commercialization.  All of this means more wealth and prosperity for some and unemployment, poverty and exclusion for others.  While some profit materially from the fact that capital is increasingly unconditionally being made into the most important thing, more and more people are being made redundant.  Whoever is not of economic use is only considered to be a financial strain on society or even a threat to it.

The destructive forces against people and nature, which are fundamentally connected to capitalism, reveal themselves with particular clarity in the global economic, political and social crises we are currently experiencing.  Through forcing societies to restructure, capitalism forces national, competitive societies.  These are required to subject themselves to the demands of mobility and flexibility, as well as to economizing and to cutting back the social welfare system.  Continually new ”feats of adaptation” are required for the only goal that capitalism knows: Increasingly unrestricted and limitless commercialization of capital.  
Humanity and the environment are ”sacrificed” to this irrational end.  Under the pressures of global competition and with continually new technological means, these processes are taking place increasingly faster.

The basis for the commercialization of capital is capitalism’s relationship to property, which allows societally produced wealth to be privately appropriated.  The powerless are faced with the power of the owners and, because they lack property, the powerless are forced to make their labor available for the commercialization of capital without themselves being able to do what they want with the products of their labor.  In the context of the capitalist owners’ global strategies of commercialization, their power becomes a global force.  The world belongs to them.

We, the undersigned, see the central cause of our economic and societal crises in the neoliberal globalization that is the current phase of the capitalist economic and societal model.

3. The World Is Becoming a Commodity 

The strategies of deregulation, price reduction and privatization, along with the search for continually new possibilities for commercialization give the goods of our daily lives a new character: Patents turn natural remedies into private property; water is becoming unaffordable for many due to privatization; humanity is becoming a workforce.  However, the diverse worlds in which people live are also subjugated to the logic of capital commercialization.  Human life and living together is economized.  The process of commercialization is determining human needs, the way in which we work and live, mentalities and habits to an ever greater extent.  Social security, education, happiness in life and religion are isolated, but they are offered as a commodity to customers with buying power.  Non-commercialized space is not allowed to exist.  The world is becoming a commodity.

More and more people are losing autonomy over their own lives in these processes of ”valuation.”  They are dispossessed of their own lives—materially and ideologically.  Human survival worldwide is materially bound to access to earning a living and the access to money; traditional forms of securing a living, as well as subsistence production are in rapid decline.  Ideologically there has been obvious success in pushing through patterns of observation, interpretation and problem solving that allow the commercialization of society to appear possible and necessary.  This conditions people to observe and to think with economic logic.

We, the undersigned, resist the subjugation of the world, society and humanity to the laws of the capitalist economy.  We cannot allow people to be degraded from subjects to objects of economic and societal processes.

4.	The Commercialization of Humanity (As the Core of Globalization)

Our society is dominated by the image of humanity represented by the self-employed person: An image of the person who is individually responsible for the marketing of his of her human capital and for making provisions for his or her own existence.  It is the person who is ”flexible” and ”mobile” for the commercialization of capital.
Essential to the image of humanity that the Judeo-Christian tradition has passed down to us is a person’s ability to perceive the suffering of others and to remember what people in history have suffered, why they have fought and for what they have hoped.  However, the self-employed person must learn self-assertiveness more than anything else.  In this way an essential prerequisite for his or her success and happiness is forgotten.  Everything that would hinder the functioning of commercialization should be forgotten.  That includes visions of another life, forms of collective living and solidarity, as well as the other as a fellow human being.  Above all, the realization of his or her suffering could distract one and call for responsibility, particularly responsibility for the weak and for the victims of commercialization and suppression.  Such responsibility, which is based on solidarity and attempts to answer the cry of the victim, exposes the ”responsibility for oneself,” which is now loudly being called for, as collective irresponsibility.

The result of such forgetfulness is an apathy in which the ”unthinkable” again becomes thinkable and/or excusable: Torture in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and a discussion about whether torture is necessary for humanitarian aims.  Therefore, it is only logical for a discussion about the ”humanitarian” use of torture to follow the tabu-breaking use of the military for ”humanitarian” missions.  The brutality that to a large extent is made possible through societal apathy can be seen daily in political policies that can only regard and treat refugees as a risk to security and prosperity.  The only pragmatic answer to refugees’ growing misery is increased deterence, deportation and exclusion—to the point of discussing a refugee camp outside the borders of the EU.  Globalization is not meant for people in need.  The borders, which are unconditionally open for the transport of goods and capital, are sealed to these people.  Whoever has become immune to human suffering does not see anything wrong with policies that oppose refugees and yet continually create reasons for flight through the destruction of the necessities of life around the world.

We, the undersigned, refuse to accept that the processes through which the world is made into a commodity also reduce the image of humanity to its economic usability and so make it capable of functioning successfully.  Here we see an irreconcilable contrast to the image of a person who, as a fellow human being, is capable of perceiving the suffering of another and of accepting responsibility for justice and solidarity.

5.	Capital as an Idol and Capitalism as a ”Religion”

In a world that has been commercialized, capital becomes ”the reality that determines everything” (Theodor Ruster).  When expressed in the language of the Judeo-Christian tradition, it takes the place of God and becomes an idol.  Here it becomes clear that:

→Society and humanity’s commercialization—their merciless subjugation to the laws of the multiplication of capital—is accompanied by ”religious” promises of salvation.  Those who obey the laws of the market and trust the ”invisible hand of the market” will be rewarded with wealth.  Whoever ignores them will be punished with ruin.
 
→Commodities are supposed to create identity and meaning.  For this reason, the liturgy of commodities and money is celebrated in the temples of consumption and banks.  Money becomes ”ability.”  Whoever has buying power is able to afford identity and meaning.  A person cannot do anything without buying power.

→ The cult of capitalism is also always a sacrificial cult.  Price reduction and economizing, permanent debt and debt relief are the sacrificial strategies of capitalism.  Capital must be made merciful by sacrifices so that it keeps its promises.  The sacrificial priests and preachers of the market assure us that there is no other alternative.  

We, the undersigned, oppose a logic of commercialization that makes capital into an idol and capitalism into a religion.

6.  “There are no alternatives!”  A “confession” that we have to contradict.

The sentence “There are no alternatives” has become the fundamental dogma of a system of politics that increasingly unreservedly and unconditionally offers its services to the boundless and unending commercialization of capital.  If there are no alternatives, then there is also no longer a need for promises against which conditions can be measured and claims and reality can be examined.  Opposition to conditions without an alternative is as pointless as opposition to natural laws.  If there are no alternatives, democracy is also superflous.  In place of the rule of the people comes the rule of so-called practical necessity.  In addition, democracy in a European and global context threatens to fall into the role of a barrier to competition.  A location that is capable of being competitive “must” be able to act quickly and effectively.  So no one can really be surprised that during the process of European unity “streamlined”—i.e. undemocratic—structures and processes are being introduced.

The dismissal of ideological models of justification (e.g. prosperity for all, development for the South) is connected to the claim that “there are no alternatives.”  And in this way ideological criticism is brought to a standstill.  Out of a capitalism that was ideologically vague and therefore able to be criticized comes a cynical capitalism whose only yet powerfully effective form of self-assertion lies in the tautology: “It is how it is.”  The Judeo-Christian tradition must oppose such totalitarianism if it does not want to forfeit its claim that God is the “Lord” of history.  Speaking of God’s “sovereignty” contradicts all claims to power that are imposed upon people.  It stands for the hope of liberation from ruling powers, the rule of people over poeple as well as the subjugation of people to the rule of the fetish of capital.  As long as this hope is not fulfilled, history remains open and therefore also open for alternatives beyond that which appears possible and feasible in the “logic” of that which currently exists.

We, the undersigned, protest against the impositions from politics, the economy and churches that claim there are no alternatives to the ruling policies and that seek to “sell” its policies, which always produce new crises, as the only possible form of crisis management. 

7.  The Theological Challenge: Differentiating between God and Idols

Our “no” to capitalism is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Speaking about God is here inseparable from humanity’s history of suffering and bound up with its cry for salvation and liberation.  This tradition makes ones sensitive and alert to what is being done to people.  It cannot resign itself to a world where people are tormented and have to suffer and where some live at other people’s expense.  Therefore, this tradition calls for responsibility and for an answer to the cry of human suffering—it calls for human responsibility and God’s responsibility.  

We oppose people needing to suffer in the world of global capitalism because their human right to life, their interests in life, and their social human rights are increasingly uncompromisingly being sacrificed to the laws of capital commercialization.  We see a contradiction to our faith in God’s sovereignty and the expectation of his reign within the processes that assert capital as the “reality which determines everything else.”  

In the Judeo-Christian tradition we discover images of people and of people living together that contradict the logic of capitalist exclusion and commercialization.  Above all these are pictures of the kindgdom of God and its righteousness.  These pictures developed out of experiences with poverty and exclusion, with servitude and supression.  By contrast, they portray images of a world where no one is hungry and everyone is living happily, where everyone experiences the same respect and acknowledgment.  Such images allow one to resist divisions between the poor and the rich and to rebel against supremacy and power.  They are rooted in the idea of God in which God, as a mother and father, binds all people as brothers and sisters into unified humanity.  Everyone has the right to life and acceptance.  This is especially true for the poor and the marginalized, whose participation and acceptance is rejected.  Social division and economic and political supression are an attack on human dignity and at the same time blasphemy against the biblical God, of whom it is not possible to speak with one’s back turned to the victims and without a preferential option for the poor and the excluded.

We, the undersigned, orient ourselves according to concepts and images of people and humans living together in which every person has a right to life and acceptance; this right especially applies to those to whom it has been refused through economic and political exclusion.  We demand that the churches work on another perception of reality, another logic, another model of interpretation and problem solving.  We also want to contribute to this.

8.  The Political Challenge

Our experiences and our discussions in our commitment to justice and peace have convinced us that:
We say “no” to the capitalist economic and societal way of life because it cannot offer a humane and environmental way of life (survival).  This “no” is the result of our assessment of the societal and political situation as well as our attempt to understand this situation from the roots of our Judeo-Christian tradition.  Therefore, our conviction as Christians is expressed in this “no.”  We bring it as our point of view into the confessional process the World Council of Churches has called for.
If there are not any alternatives within capitalism, then we need alternatives to capitalism.  For this reason we are looking for a broad base of partners that share an understanding of the necessity and the possibility of alternatives with us.  An alternative “system” is not currently visible.  In addition, alternatives cannot be presented as a finished plan and then implemented exactly as they are on paper.  Our political and economic structures are too far-reaching, and our societal life and people themselves are too deeply penetrated by capitalist principles and models.

However, we can already work on other perspectives and concepts that help us to make alternatives thinkable.  Now we can already work on making our practical engagement such that it helps to make alternatives possible.  Allowing oneself to be oriented according to the harm done to people around the world is essential for another way of thinking.  Opposing this harm allows economic and political power structures to be radically called into question; it also allows relational concepts to develop that let people live humanely.  Necessary alternatives can only be searched for and implemented in a process in which we oppose the logic of capital and resist its pressure to commercialize—wherever that is possible.

The following central areas provide alternative ways in which we can think and proceed:

1. If we assume that all people on earth have a right to live, then we have to realize:
The large and continually growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the few (individuals, businesses, banks, the political elite) contradicts this right when many people are simultaneously becoming impoverished.  Therefore, we have to have ways of living together that allow all people access to the goods they need to live.
The right of all people to live cannot be guaranteed in the context of capitalist paid labor and capitalist conditions of property ownership.  So we should start thinking of uncoupling paid labor and securing a living—this means “participation in societal wealth” and not “security at the lowest level.”  This is only possible on the basis of other conditions of property ownership.  Therefore, we have to develop forms of labor that allow all people a life of dignity and material security.  Important points of orientation for this are the discussions about freeing labor from its reduction to paid labor, cooperative forms of work instead of forms determined by competition, and a new societal division of labor.  
2. If we assume that every person deserves respect and acceptance, then we have to realize:
The exclusion of more and more people from the global and social connections of life contradicts this right.  For this reason we are searching for ways of living together that are free from power and supremacy and that have not been realized in the current societal and political power structures.

We are looking for partners who share our rejection of the capitalist economic model and way of life and who want to seek life alternatives with us.  Those who are the losers in the globalization process and therefore have an existential interest in change belong above all.  However, those who help us to continually re-evaluate and orient ourselves also belong.  Last but not least, we see an important place for analysis and dialogue in the churches:  A central orientation based on sensitivity towards another who is suffering, and the indivisible right to life and acceptance for all people, which is inseparable from the tradition of how God is understood, is binding for churches and can only be called into question at the risk of giving up their own identity.  A clear statement from the churches against capitalist globalization, which brings death, would be the necessary flipside of the churches’ confession of hope in the liberating God of life.

We, the undersigned, are searching for a world “beyond” subjugation to capital’s logic of commercialization and are commited to changes that are already possible in order to acheive justice, peace and the integrity of creation.

Many people have already helped us to think through this current draft, commenting on it and adding to it, so that a clearer, more discernable line of argumentation has emerged as a result.  Nevertheless, we would like to encourage all of you to make this text your own through a process of discussion.  Work with this text, comment on it, sign it and take part in the Ökumenische Netz seminar on Saturday 9 July 2005, when the text will be approved on the basis of the comments that have been received.  Afterwards we are planning to publish the paper as well as the comments that have come in.
Everyone who would already like to sign the statement, whether as an organization or an individual, is warmly welcome to!

May 2005, Ecumenical Network Rhine-Moselle-Saar