German court declares Karl Marx's teachings unconstitutional

https://harici.com.tr/en/german-court-declares-karl-marxs-teachings-unconstitutional/

by Anthony-G • 11 months ago

56 36 11 months ago

harici.com.tr

Anthony-G• 11 months ago

I saw this earlier today and thought it might be of interest, considering that other German court decisions are currently being discussed on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44912085

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)

riffic• 11 months ago

Court declares thoughtcrime. Orwell is not surprised.

notJim• 11 months ago

Well, it's not the first time Germany has had a problem with Marx.

vidarh5• 11 months ago

Marx had plenty of problems with Germany - or specifically Prussia - too... In Critique of the Gotha Programme, for example, he harangued the now SDP for arguing for free state provided education, on the basis that he argued it was rather the Prussian state that had a severe need of being educated by the people.

(He favoured a US-inspired model of public licensing, but privately run schools instead)

Afforess• 11 months ago

The knee jerk anti communism is your propaganda showing. Marxist historical materialism is a mainstream mode of analysis. Nothing inherently leftwing or revolutionary about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism

For the gamers, the Victoria series by Paradox uses historical materialism as its gameplay.

spankibalt• 11 months ago

Alles Kommunisten außer Mutti!

torben-friis• 11 months ago

The title is extremely clickbaity, to the point of being a lie.

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.

lawlessone3• 11 months ago

Thanks for clearing it up.

croes2• 11 months ago

They are wrong. The court said

The plaintiff's activities, which are centered on the theories of Karl Marx, are in principle contrary to the free democratic basic order.

maverwa• 11 months ago

That sounds like the most reasonable judgement coming out of a Hamburg court I’ve heard of yet (selection bias applies, of course)

yk• 11 months ago

The phrasing the court uses is precisely the one used in the German constitution to allow restricting basic rights for political reasons. Though the court uses "probably against the constitution" in German and Germany's law is not as directly case law as in the US, the court ruling is still saying that being a Marxist "probably" warrants suspension of the constitution and only in the specific instance of a long running reading group who are otherwise harmless basic rights may be granted.

croes2• 11 months ago

No, it isn’t. The court said:

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”.

hnbad3• 11 months ago

The "dictatorship of the proletariat" is mostly Marx doing what we would now call "being an edge lord". It's supposed to be a contradiction of the "dictatorship of capital" or rule by the owning class. But it's all edge and no point because the central argument is an abolition of the legal concept of capital, literally abolishing the thing that would allow capitalists to continue to exist a distinct group the proletariat could "rule over".

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.

rayiner• 11 months ago

The Basic Law’s expansive language, and the functional interpretive approach applied by the German Constitutional Court, means that judges could do a lot to overrule the legislature if they chose to do so. Generally, they have not done so.

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.

ath3nd2• 11 months ago

Last time Germany had a problem with Marx, it started a world war and killed a lot of people.

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.

psunavy03• 11 months ago

Just because the far-right is wrong does not magically make the far-left correct.

ath3nd2• 11 months ago

Yeah, it's terrible to have an early pension age, free Healthcare and worker rights and protections.

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.

nothankyou777• 11 months ago

If a man who has been dead for over 142 years is a threat to "the principles of the free democratic basic order", they couldn't have been worth that much to begin with. And it is a lie. Germany is not a free country. Germany is a broken vassal state. Any ideology would be superior to that of being America's whipping-boy.

Springtime• 11 months ago

Oddly when activating reader mode in the browser it contained text from a different article (apparently one that follows the linked article in truncated form). Can't recall the last time I've seen that happen.

ImJamal• 11 months ago

Is this is the same as Germany banning Nazis stuff or is this a separate thing?

lawlessone3• 11 months ago

very different crowds.

hnbad3• 11 months ago

Same legal basis of the argument, but much flimsier logic. Unless you're specifically talking about "Nazi symbols" when you say "Nazi stuff" because those are covered by a specific law originally intended to suppress the former NSDAP.

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.

preisschild• 11 months ago

Sounds like a reasonable ruling

lawlessone3• 11 months ago

Aren't Marx ideas around value creation etc actually pretty accepted by capitalists?

edit: As someone else has pointed out title is a bit click baity

ihumanable• 11 months ago

A lot of what Marx writes is pretty straightforward observations about how capitalism functions.

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.

vidarh5• 11 months ago

A lot of people also has the misconception that Marx "hated" capitalism. But half the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto is Marx being a total capitalism fanboy, arguing that capitalism has brought about advances never previously seen, and championing capitalism as eroding xenophobia because it interferes with the need for trade.

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.

EvertBouw• 11 months ago

Das Kapital is an analysis/critique of capitalism and (thereby) an excellent economic text.

Marx wants capital to not exist so that's not gonna be very popular with capitalists

realityfactchex• 11 months ago

TFA says that

  Court rules Marx is incompatible with the ‘free democratic basic order’

Yet, this seems exactly the opposite of what some socialists claim, which is that that socialism is a path to true free democracy.

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"

hnbad3• 11 months ago

This article and some of the comments suffers from a misunderstanding about the German court system. The court did not rule anything unconstitutional - it only declared it as such in its ruling about the specific case. The decision can be appealed and does not set precedent the way it works in common law systems like in the US. Only the constitutional court could rule Marxism unconstitutional and it hasn't done so in the past and is unlikely to do so in the future.

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".

otabdeveloper4• 11 months ago

Neat. So out of the three most relevant historical Germans two are banned by German law.

vidarh5• 11 months ago

The court points out that the meaning of this concept “inevitably excludes other population groups from the political decision-making process and the indirect exercise of state power,” stating, in other words, that the dictatorship of the proletariat is “undemocratic.”

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.

lostmsu• 11 months ago

The original statement applies to any parliament majority in a democracy. You win the election - until the next election everyone who lost is excluded.

I don't understand the court's point or I do and it is just being very one-sided.

vidarh5• 11 months ago

I'm sort-of not very surprised, given how often people misread this, including intentionally by people purporting to be Marxists, e.g. Leninists/Stalinists, but at the same time it's disappointing if this reporting is accurate.

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.

sinuhe69• 11 months ago

Courts in Germany have a history of rulings that feel overreaching and anachronistic. This one is no exception.

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.

CLPadvocate• 11 months ago

Actually, the main point of the court ruling is not Marx himself, but the court's interpretation that the theories the plaintiff was discussing could lead to the "violent overthrow of the state and economy". That would indeed be a valid reason for declaring any such organisation unconstitutional and thus illegal.

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.

German court declares Karl Marx's teachings unconstitutional

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