Die Zeit Proposes a Communist Manifesto for the 21st Century

Happy B-Day, I suppose, and here's the most stupid (Trojan) present that intimates, at 75, the Grundgesetz shall be re-written because 'Climate Change™'

Translation, emphases, and bottom lines mine. ‘Enjoy’, if you will.

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The German Constitution Needs an Update

The time in which the Basic Law was created was a time without climate change and before the digital revolution. Now new concepts are needed—such as responsibility.

By Georg Diez and Philipp von der Wippel, Die Zeit, 23 May 2024 [source]

Society is change. But what does this mean for the constants of society, such as the constitution, which functions as the Basic Law in Germany and is celebrating its 75th anniversary today? It is a question that is in many ways central to the workings and above all the resilience of democracy in times of its obvious vulnerability.

This vulnerability means that what is currently being celebrated, the Basic Law and the German democracy that has grown out of it since 1949, is in many ways seen as a given—change is seen as a danger at this moment. The idea is that even if those who want to abolish democracy as outlined in the Basic Law with dignity and tolerance come to power, the structures will hold. That is the hope. And it is one of the contradictions of our time that this can be both right and not right, or at least not enough [go and watch ‘Minority Report’]. We are convinced that this anniversary is the right time to build on the great success of the past 75 years and to further develop the Basic Law.

The Basic Law was created in a specific historical situation [uh-oh, history, goodie, let’s see how many ‘creative’ interpretations we’ll get, shall we?]. It was written in the aftermath of the two world wars and the fascist destruction of the Weimar Republic [I don’t want to downplay Hitler’s accomplishments, but he didn’t ‘invent’ the whole rule-by-decree thing; it was in the Weimar Constitution, and if you don’t believe me, trust the Ministry of Truth: ‘presidential cabinets (German: Präsidialkabinette) were a succession of governments of the Weimar Republic whose legitimacy derived exclusively from presidential emergency decrees (lasting) from April 1930 to January 1933’; I would further point you to Dirk Schuman’s excellent Political Violence in the Weimar Republic (2009) to learn more about left-wing extremism, too]. The first articles are a declaration, a promise, and an ideal at the same time. ‘Human dignity is inviolable.’ The Basic Law is characterised in many ways by the Holocaust, in which human dignity was not recognised in an incomparable way—so this declaration marks a new start.

At the same time, it is followed by the realisation and promise that human dignity can be violated and must therefore be protected: ‘It is the duty of all state authority to respect and protect it.’ [question here for statists: protected by ‘the state’? *shudder*] Followed by Article 2: ‘Everyone has the right to the free development of his personality.’ [hence the woke-queer Selbstbestimmungsrecht, i.e., the legal right to change one’s gender ID once a year]

How distant and dreamy must the claim to personal fulfilment have seemed to people in 1949, surrounded by rubble and ashes, and shaped by years of war in which personality had no place? In the same way, Article 3: ‘Men and women shall have equal rights’—women were anything but equal in 1949. The actual realisation of equal rights would take many decades, right up to the present day. [again, the ‘rubble and ashes’ had come about by ‘strategic bombing’ of civilians, to say nothing about the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Germans east of Germany’s present-day borders, on which see R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane (Yale, 2012); finally, we note the ultimately collectivist nature of National Socialism, which paved the way for, ultimately, post-WW2 state-centric utopias on both sides of the Iron Curtain].

But does this country still function as envisaged in the Basic Law? Or does it need a further developed agenda for the next 75 years, based on the insights and, above all, the necessities as they are today? [this is perhaps the most nefarious aspect: the perceived, or proclaimed, ‘necessity’—watch the argument, introduced with a few brazen lies of omission about Weimar Germany, degenerate from there] Where are there gaps to reality, to our own aspirations, where are shifts of a fundamental nature? [see the Hegelian dialectical nature yet? ‘gaps to reality’ = thesis, ‘our own aspirations’ = antithesis, with the aim, of course, being a synthetic ‘future’] The fact is that the challenges of democracy were different in 1949 [were they?], as were the opportunities. The Basic Law as an instruction manual for the present and future must be adapted to these new circumstances.

Offences Against Young People Should be Punished More Severely

The post-war period was a time without climate change and before the digital revolution. Europe was the future, federalism promised stability, anchored in the past. So what would the founding fathers and mothers [61 men and 4 women] write into the Basic Law in light of today's challenges? [what a hypothetical, eh?] It is about opening up a way forward, starting a process to continue the success of the Basic Law and to further develop the Basic Law as a living Basic Law that will still enable a form of democracy that is there for everyone in 75 years’ time.

Such a beginning would be a kind of constitutional convention similar to the one that met on the island of Herrenchiemsee in 1948—structured, for example, as a citizens’ council to reflect the wealth and diversity of views and perspectives. With the chance that such a convention would bring together different social groups and create a new sense of community for the coming decades [couple of things: first, such a convention was lawfully possible after ‘unification’, but the German gov’t determined not to convene one; second, the past four years were quite a sight to behold in terms of gov’t crackdown of ‘mandate protesters’ carrying the Grundgesetz]. The aim here would be to examine the issues on the agenda today and develop them for a sustainable democracy [the key word here is ‘sustainable’, which is code for UN Agenda 2030 submission]. A few of the possible directions are suggested in this text, fully aware that it is only an excerpt and can certainly be formulated differently in tone and substance, perhaps even more fundamentally or radically.

A central, perhaps the overriding element of the coming decades will be climate change, of which the Basic Law knows nothing. In a landmark ruling on 29 April 2021, the Federal Constitutional Court noted that today’s climate policy will affect the freedoms and fundamental rights of tomorrow. It clearly highlighted the dimension of time that is already laid out in the Basic Law—and sees climate change as a kind of offence against the future. [the Climate™ has never changed before, and since the past no longer exists, everything is new; it’s almost like autism/amnesia on a society-wide scale; let’s note, in passing, that the authors can’t make a coherent argument and contradict themselves within five lines]

This dimension of tomorrow should be greatly strengthened in a new version of the Basic Law, not least because the issue of intergenerational justice [hi, Wokies] has become a central arena for current and future political debates—from tax and financial policy, demographic change, an ageing society, and the pension gap to education, especially in pandemic times. [here we have a laundry list of stuff that everyone knows will collapse before too long]

Offences against young people should be punished more severely and the Basic Law should be aware of these dangers. Against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic [which means that all gov’t and agency heads who locked up children should be in the gallows, you know, to prove that point] and its consequences for education and family cohesion, for example, it is clear how sensible it is to include children’s rights in the constitution and to amend Article 1, paragraph two as follows in order to fully implement the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in Germany:

‘The constitutional rights of children, including their right to develop into independent personalities, must be respected and protected’, according to a proposal by the coalition government, for which, however, a two-thirds majority could not be found in favour of the amendment to the Basic Law in spring 2021. ‘The best interests of the child must be given due consideration. The constitutional right of children to be heard must be upheld. The primary responsibility of parents remains unaffected.’ [back to history, shall we? In the US Civil Rights movement, the most important lesson is the placard reading ‘I am a man’, indicating that no re-writing of the constitution was required—but its consistent application and enforcement; talk about ‘the lessons of history’]

The right to education is linked to one of the fundamental stipulations created by the Basic Law, which is increasingly proving to be a seemingly unsolvable problem: federalism, which places a heavy burden on state reality in Germany—for example through the strict separation of the federal and state governments in Article 83 of the Basic Law: ‘The states shall implement federal laws as their own responsibility.’ [make no mistake, what the authors call for is a strong, streamlined, centralised gov’t, i.e., a very different body politic: this is nothing short than, technically, a call to abolish the current régime—instead of being investigated by the ‘Office for the Protection of the Constitution’ (sic), this is printed in Die Zeit…hypocrisy by thy name]

This results in a strong delimitation of responsibilities. Although the federal government makes the laws, it generally has nothing to do with their implementation [see how little the authors know: the legislature makes laws, the gov’t implements/executes them]. It is even prohibited from intervening here. This means that the federal levels work one after the other: A federal law, which is then transposed into state laws, which the local authorities then apply. In theory, the clear and consistent demarcation of responsibilities sounds good, but in practice this demarcation leads to considerable gaps in the implementation of the law. [this is a long-standing principle in constitutional law, and it’s name is subsidiarity, apparently unknown to the authors]

A Crutch Construction

The practical integration of federal, state, and local authorities requires overarching teams. But ‘co-creation processes’ have not yet been provided for in the administration, and mixed administrations are even explicitly prohibited—this must change. Article 91a of the Basic Law provides a starting point for establishing the previously prohibited cooperation between the federal government and the federal states:

The federal government shall cooperate in the fulfilment of tasks of the federal states in the following areas if these tasks are important for the whole and the cooperation of the federal government is necessary to improve living conditions. [this is so vague you could drive a battle tank through this loophole without, technically, breaking the constitution; who watches the gov’t? Who watches the watchers?]

Further development would involve redefining the concept of ‘tasks that are important for the whole’ more clearly. In a reformed federalism, financial equalisation must also be rethought in order to meet the demand for equal living conditions and to promote positive competition between the regions [equity, or socialism, is the word here]. At the moment, neither one nor the other is working well.

One example: the federal government is only allowed to make regular funding available to the federal states and municipalities to a very limited extent. This is why the federal government is increasingly resorting to the instrument of subsidies, which allow cities and municipalities to receive direct funding for specific tasks—such as municipal climate protection [i.e., the feds are breaking the constitution by claiming it’s ‘for the greater good’]. A crutch construction to support municipalities in the fulfilment of new tasks. This has resulted in a funding business with thousands of programmes to which municipalities apply, but often only the rich municipalities that can contribute enough of their own funds and have the staff to apply. At the same time, there is little planning security for local authorities because the funding programmes are usually limited to one to three years [we must have five-year plans, eh? Moreover, where does the federal gov’t gets its money from? Oh, right, from the technically sovereign taxpayers whose rights and opinions are about to be shafted to provide for more ‘planning security’ to ‘fund business with thousands of programmes’—if there only was a name to designate such a political ‘system’…]

Changes of this fundamental nature are as difficult as they are important, and what is needed is a non-partisan understanding, as in 1949 [see, let’s do away with politics in these domestic matters because this is too ‘important’], that would do justice to the magnitude of the task, beyond ideology and with the pragmatism of good politics [WTF? this, once more, reads like ‘for the greater good of the whole, sacrifices must be made’]. Then perhaps it would be possible to better recognise the imbalances in both the theory and practice of German democracy—and to clearly identify one of the major issues of the next 75 years and incorporate it into the Basic Law in a different way: this is, of course, the issue of migration and immigration [as if these were the same, which they are not], which is still being reduced to the concept of asylum, which is strongly characterised by the post-war situation.

Migration is a Reality

‘Politically persecuted persons shall enjoy the right of asylum’ is the wording of Article 16a, which is also very ambiguous in terms of language, as it is unclear what this means. More central, however, is the problem that this article arose from a specific historical situation in which political persecution was the lived experience—and that flight and migration reflected a different history. [I’ve written about this at-length: these asylum systems are all failing, if not failed already, and more migration will do but one thing—speed up these processes of decay]

This attitude is no longer sufficient for today and, above all, for tomorrow. Migration is a reality of our time; it only becomes a threat to democracy if it is either ignored or poorly managed or leads to illiberal hardening that undermines democracy from within [none of this mumbo-jumbo makes any sense; ignoring or poor management are the only options, for ‘illiberal hardening’, i.e., quotas or the like, ‘undermine democracy’: these authors know nothing about history]. The Basic Law does not offer any suitable thoughts and words here—it is therefore now a matter of taking the step together from a society of isolation to a society of arrival. The function of a rethinking and forward-looking Basic Law would certainly be to provide a vision beyond the legal framework [WTF would that mean in practice? Extra-constitutional governance because…? This is a call to abolish the constitutional order, plain and simple], as it did in 1949, i.e., to combine the legal with the social. The immigration society that Germany is and must be if we take demographic change and the issue of industrial prosperity seriously must be given a constitutional framework. This means that the right of asylum must be supplemented by legislation that creates a framework for state-regulated immigration [a ‘pathway to citizenship for asylum-seekers’, you see, is a right-wing, loony conspiracy theory, and those who question ‘replacement migration’ are, of course, ‘enemies of the constitution; note that by ‘state-regulated’ is meant: directed by the federal/central gov’t].

Here, as in other places, a modernity deficit of the Basic Law becomes apparent, which also concerns digitalisation, for example, and the central question of which media reality underlies the democratic debate. The Basic Law does not recognise the Internet [neither did George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry], it does not recognise fake news [most propaganda comes from the gov’t], it does not recognise the opportunities and dangers that await in a new digital media world [such as ‘Skynet’ killing humans?]. It only recognises television and radio and thus lags far behind the present. However, because communication is so important for a functioning democracy, both in theory and in practice, this topic of technology needs to be more prominent [I disagree; it’s irrelevant for the aggregation of sovereign individuals].

Digital possibilities are changing the understanding of politics itself and questioning fundamental certainties: what is human and what is machine, who serves whom, and how does artificial intelligence change the possibilities of social innovation and ultimately the good life? And what if this concept, the good life, were to complement the concept of dignity in the Basic Law? So what would a basic understanding and concept of humanity for the 21st century, changed by the times, be, reflecting the experiences of the 20th century and updating them for the times to come? The logic of the Basic Law is that dignity is given, inherent in human beings [natural law]; the good life must be created, so it is more a dimension of action than a promise [oh, look, now ‘the state’, instead of the bourgeoisie, becometh the ‘demiurge’].

A constitution adapted through learning [no need for anything stable or lasting, our future is one of ‘becoming’, i.e., permanent revolution] should name this common practice [any more doubts about the collectivist utopia at the end of the Bolshevik rainbow?]—also with a view to social justice, which should be a state objective [need for a slight correction: a permanent social revolution], especially in times of systemically generated inequality through a form of capitalism that seemed unthinkable in 1949 [who thought ‘capitalism’ didn’t create inequalities in 1949? I mean…this is so stupid, it boggles the mind]. So if wealth is an obligation, as the Basic Law states, then the question remains: to what end? And what does the common good mean?

What Does the Common Good Mean?

One suggestion would be to take another look at Article 15 of the Basic Law, which provides for the socialisation of ‘land, natural resources and means of production’—and which is underused [do you need any other ‘hints’ as to what the future imagine here will bring?]. It would be important to establish for the future that all forms of infrastructure in particular should be common property: from roads and railways, and indeed digital technological infrastructure, such as networks and data, to schools, hospitals, social, and public infrastructure, to issues of economic infrastructure in terms of income and wealth inequality, which are increasingly jeopardising democracy [see where this road leads to?].

It should be emphasised that the state, in its responsibility for democracy, must not allow itself to become dependent by handing over state tasks to subordinate market players [ta-daa: what did I tell you?]. This raises questions such as: which economic practices that have become established in recent decades would thus be unconstitutional? Is it constitutional if private ownership of clinics or nursing homes by investors leads to a reduction in the quality of treatment and optimisation of profits? [the road to ruin is outlined clearly; note that the answer to the question at the top of the section, ‘what is the common good?’, is not provided]

What About Civil Society?

The longer you look at the Basic Law at this moment of celebration, the more you realise that it is an instruction manual for democracy that needs further development [an assertion]. The vision of what a different, lived form of democracy beyond parties could look like is very limited. What about civil society actors, to whom the Basic Law seems to be rather sceptical in tone and practice? How can democracy in general be defined much more broadly, beyond laws, rights, and duties [note the contradiction here], as the basis of a common life and experience?

An amended Basic Law would have to reflect this in its language and function. From a changed understanding of democracy, the constitution, and political practice [careful there, here’s what this means to Bolsheviks], a few basic concepts can be distilled that can provide a new direction for how society and thus also the Basic Law can change. Responsibility is one such guiding principle that links individual freedom with the issue of social cohesion, but without being as connoted as equality, which—as history shows—is difficult to realise or sue for.

What would result from such a concept is, for example, the link to solidarity, i.e. the mutual and also economic responsibility for ensuring that the good life is attainable for as many people as possible [i.e., ‘equity’, or ‘socialism’]. This is not sufficient as the sole rule of coexistence, but this form of life-world extension of the Basic Law would open it up and make it richer.

The Good Life as a Social Goal

Other basic concepts for democracy in the 21st century could also be named in this new Basic Law. Plurality [as opposed to pluralism], for example, as a constructive principle of a diverse democratic society; or impact as a requirement for effective administration; or trust [a thoroughly individual thing: hi, wokies] as a previously underexposed category that is of central importance for the functioning of society; combined with the requirement for more cooperation both within the administration and between the sectors, whereas the current Basic Law places a strong focus on separation [of powers] and division of labour; or even the good life as a social goal towards which the constitutional reality should be oriented.

So how can other forms of solidarity and social justice, and thus social freedom, be named and implemented? What can a constitution look like that is orientated more towards impact and less towards promises? The aim is to make the instructions for democracy more open and inviting while retaining the dual character that characterises the Basic Law: it describes the horizon of what society can be. At the same time, it provides all citizens with concrete means to walk this path together.

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Bottom Lines: The Bolshevik Manifesto of 2024

Rarely does one encounter such openly revolutionary and seditious texts in legacy media.

Calling for the abolition for the existing constitutional and social order on the basis of one definitely man-made reality (the internet) and one yet-unproven hypothesis (anthropogenic climate change) makes for both utterly strange bedfellows as well as for one tantalisingly unconvincing argument.

As to the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis, have a look:

We’ll soon find out if Professor Dilley et al., such as Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Clauser are (more) correct than, say, the two gentlemen who are calling for a socialist revolution in Die Zeit.

I would furthermore argue that ‘the internet’ is no inherently dangerous threat to the constitutional order that warrants immediate changes to it.

We didn’t do that when technological advances occurred in the past; if the continued use of paper ballots, as opposed to ‘voting machines’, in most Western countries shows, that notion, too, is more of a hypothesis than factual reality.

As George Orwell famously wrote—‘History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’—we clearly see this here.

We as societies have already made innumerable experiences with collectivism of all stripes and kinds; there is nothing new under the sun, literally, and the above ‘proposals’ are a thinly veiled attempt to try the arguably worst kind of form of government once more.

Let’s hope that, this time, the poisoned chalice of permanent social revolution in the name of ‘the common good™’ passes us by.