🎓 Christoph Burgmer im Gespräch mit Christoph Butterwegge (geb. 1951). Der Politiloge und Armutsforscher Christoph Butterwegge erläutert in diesem Gespräch, wie Armut aktuell die europäischen und die deutsche Demokratie gefährdet. Dazu wird die Geschichte der Verteilung von Reichtum und Armut seit der Währungsreform 1948 entmystifiziert. Christoph Butterwegge lehrte an der Universität Köln und wurde 2017 von der Partei "Die Linke" als Kandidat für das Bundespräsendentenamt aufgestellt.
🎓 Christoph Burgmer in conversation with Christoph Butterwegge (born 1951). In this conversation, political scientist and poverty researcher Christoph Butterwegge explains how poverty currently threatens European and German democracy. To this end, he demystifies the history and distribution of wealth and poverty since the currency reform of 1948. Christoph Butterwegge taught at the University of Cologne and was nominated as a candidate for the office of Federal President by the Left Party in 2017.
📚 Veröffentlichungen u.a. / publications a.o.:
- Christoph Butterwegge / Carolin Butterwegge: "Kinder der Ungleichheit. Wie sich die Gesellschaft ihrer Zukunft beraubt." Campus Verlag, Frankfurt a.M. 2021.
- Christoph Butterwegge: "Umverteilung des Reichtums." PapyRossa Verlag, Köln 2024.
- Christoph Butterwegge: "Deutschland im Krisenmodus. Infektion, Invasion und Inflation als gesellschaftliche Herausforderung." Beltz Verlag, Weinheim 2024.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Welcome to Audio Archive, the channel for historical interviews with writers, philosophers,
activists, and intellectuals from around the world.
(00:34):
Hello! The barrage from political parties and media against social security systems has had an effect.
The dismantling of the past years continues unabated.
While billions are being allocated for the new German army, the benefits for citizens receiving
citizen's income are being cut.
At the same time, single parents, children and youth, poor retirees, migrants, minimum wage
(01:00):
earners, etc., are being morally blamed and every conceivable societal crisis is being attributed to them.
While billionaires have been able to multiply their wealth nearly tax-free for decades, any
criticism of this is dismissed as a debate about envy.
As if the recipients of citizen's income were to blame for the hyper-rich not wanting to get
(01:22):
up in the morning because they have already arranged everything in their favor in their state.
In this conversation with poverty researcher Christoph Butterwegge, we are not talking about
the republican concept of equality, but only about the reasons why some people are historically
and currently poor while others are rich.
What social policy of the CDU and SPD has to do with the predictable path to fascism.
(01:47):
Because a neoliberal parliamentary democracy without social justice, the best example currently
being the USA, is simply a form of government for the rich, in which the poor live off charitable donations.
Of course without any legal entitlement.
Thus, democracy has degenerated into a theatrical performance, a propagandistic seduction for the rest of society.
Or let's say it less polemically (02:08):
the gains of the AfD, whose racist state project is more national
socialist than fascist in nature and promises societal advancement to criminals, scoundrels,
and good-for-nothings, are promoted by a strategic redistribution of societal wealth from the bottom to the top.
(02:30):
This neoliberal policy leads to the disintegration of solidarity among large parts of the population.
For many in neoliberal society, the motto is (02:35):
Save yourself if you can.
Everyone is the architect of their own fortune.
Even at the risk of repeating myself (02:44):
Democracy without social justice leads to fascism.
And the people who experience neither security, nor support, nor freedom in a neoliberal society,
for most, democracy is just a facade.
Thus, in this desolidarized society, militarization replaces fair redistribution and solidarity,
(03:08):
and war replaces social development and equality.
Historically, we know that only the rich benefit from this.
Democracy, parliaments, and parties aside. Mr.
Butterwege, perhaps you can define, just briefly, the difference between poverty and structural
poverty, individual poverty and structural poverty.
(03:30):
I would understand individual poverty as a situation where a person, due to poor decisions they
make, for example, choosing the wrong profession or moving to a region where their qualifications
are not in demand, ends up earning little.
(03:52):
Structural poverty, in this sense, is based on societal conditions, on the distribution mechanisms
of society, and of course also on political decisions that are made.
This means that many people, millions of people, are affected because they cannot really decide
(04:13):
or influence the situation themselves; rather, it is those who sit at the economic and political
levers of power who do.
That is to say, those who own businesses, those who make laws, they naturally decide how the
wealth of a society is distributed, among which classes, strata, and also age groups.
(04:40):
And these are essentially processes that do not allow for blame to be assigned, because people
have not made mistakes themselves or are responsible for it, but they find themselves in a material
misery that is somewhat imposed on them.
(05:00):
But hasn't something like poverty always existed, so to speak, as a natural phenomenon?
One must distinguish between absolute and relative poverty.
What has always existed is absolute poverty.
Absolutely poor is someone who cannot satisfy their basic needs, who does not have enough to
(05:20):
eat, no safe drinking water, no clothing appropriate to the climatic conditions, no shelter, no basic medical care.
This has always existed and is particularly pronounced.
Today, we are accustomed to locating this absolute poverty not in the Federal Republic, but
in the global south, thereby somewhat pushing the problem away from us.
(05:45):
But of course, there is also absolute poverty in Germany.
If you look at the sixth report on poverty and wealth by the federal government, you will see
that even before the Covid-19 pandemic, there were 678,000 homeless people and 41,000 people without shelter.
So, absolute poverty has always existed.
(06:07):
Relative poverty, however, depends on how the wealth of a society is distributed among certain social classes and strata.
A relatively poor person is someone who can meet their basic needs in a prosperous, if not rich country like ours.
But they cannot afford many of the things that are considered normal for most others in this society.
(06:35):
Going to the movies, to the theater, meeting friends in a restaurant, or taking children to
the zoo, to the circus, or to the fair.
That rarely or never happens because there is a lack of money.
And this relative poverty did not always exist; rather, it depends on the existence of wealth.
(06:56):
Ultimately, of course, in Germany, this relative poverty is much more widespread than absolute poverty.
But I also want to add that relative poverty is not something that should be relativized, sugar-coated, or downplayed.
It is called relative not because it should be relativized, but in relation to the wealth and
(07:20):
prosperity that surrounds those affected.
So I want to give an example.
If a teenager stands on the schoolyard in the middle of winter wearing summer clothes and sandals,
and is laughed at by their classmates, they suffer more from being laughed at and socially excluded
(07:43):
than from the cold they feel.
So the cold is absolute poverty.
Being laughed at is relative poverty.
And with that, I want to clarify that it is not some kind of deluxe poverty that prevails here,
where one can say, okay, a person growing up in the slums of Nairobi is really poor, but a person
(08:06):
growing up on the outskirts, in a high-rise, receiving citizen's income, is not really poor,
but is just complaining at a high level.
This is the widespread public opinion among us, which pretends that this is not a problem at all.
(08:26):
In reality, this relative poverty in high-rise neighborhoods can be much more depressing, much
more humiliating, much more degrading than absolute poverty, because the poor person in the
slum of Nairobi is never asked, say, why are you poor? Now justify yourself.
(08:48):
But here, the citizen receiving welfare is asked, say, aren't you just a slacker, a freeloader, a social parasite?
Couldn't you work instead of lying around on the lazy skin in the hammock of the welfare state?
And the poor among us particularly suffer from being socially excluded, having to justify themselves,
(09:11):
not being recognized and not being seen.
So they suffer not only from having little money in their wallets, but poverty among us also
means being disadvantaged and discriminated against in various or almost all areas of life.
In health, in education, in leisure activities, in sports.
(09:33):
Everywhere in this society, you need money. More and more.
And yet it is pretended that the real problem is not the lack of money, but for example the lack of education.
So when it is pretended that one only needs to be educated to escape poverty, it also implicitly
means that the poor are accused of not having educated themselves enough or their children.
(09:58):
In reality, however, 11 percent of all employees in the low-wage sector have a university degree.
So today it is no longer enough to be well-educated, as might have been the case in the past.
I myself am, if you will, also the living example of that.
Son of a single mother, born out of wedlock, but sent to high school, completed my studies,
(10:25):
then unemployed, read many books, wrote many books, and then became a C4 professor.
But today that works much less frequently, and of course one also needed a bit of luck back then.
Because poverty is a structural problem, this problem cannot be solved by individuals making
(10:47):
social advancements, but one must, so to speak, address the economic structures, the property
relations, and also the distribution mechanisms of society if one truly wants to solve the problem
of poverty and social or, as I prefer to say, socioeconomic inequality.
(11:09):
This structural poverty is also related to this and is increasing because access to education,
sports, and such is becoming more and more closed off by society.
This means that not only is money lacking, but access in the tertiary sector is simply closed off.
(11:29):
I consider money to be central.
So poverty is fought with money, and in a society where many reforms have been initiated in
the past due to the influence of neoliberals, which have ensured that, firstly, money is more important than ever.
(11:51):
When almost all areas of life are economized, commercialized, and privatized, then money is indeed decisive.
I want to give an example.
Little Christoph was photographed by his mother in 1960 at a public swimming pool.
And next to this photo of little Christoph, my mother pasted the entrance ticket into the photo album.
(12:16):
It cost ten pfennigs back then.
If you go to the fun pool with your children on the weekend today, the pfennigs are of no use
anymore because they no longer exist.
But it is also wise to take 50 or 100 euros with you.
And this clearly shows that even in this leisure sector, money decides whether you are part
(12:39):
of social and public life or whether you do not have such access.
And this is no different in the education sector.
So if, for example, you do a retraining that the job center pays less and less for because the
job centers are underfunded and, according to Friedrich Merz, billions are to be saved there,
(13:02):
then you need money to afford retraining privately.
And that means without money, money is not everything, but without money, everything is nothing,
to paraphrase a famous saying by Willy Brandt about peace.
So in a society as commercialized and shaped by neoliberalism as ours, money is the crucial
(13:24):
adjustment screw that must be turned to achieve social justice at least a little more.
Now the Federal Republic or Germany also lives from the Federal Republic, emerging from the
myth that everyone started from scratch after the war. Is that correct?
(13:45):
Is it true that we all or our parents, my parents too, had the same state and that, in principle,
those who are now poor are to blame for it because they achieved nothing in the 70s?
Yes, the currency reform of 1948, where everyone received 40 Deutsche Marks, created the impression
(14:06):
that everyone had started almost from scratch and that those who became wealthy or rich owed
it to their diligence, their efforts, and their competencies, while those who remained poor
were somehow punished for being lazy, not making an effort, and achieving nothing.
(14:29):
But in reality, these 40 Deutsche Marks were, of course, just pocket money for some.
Those who owned factories, real estate, or land didn't actually need the 40 Deutsche Marks to
get started again and to become even richer during the so-called economic miracle of the 50s and early 60s.
And Franz Josef Degenhardt made such a nice song back then (14:53):
"When the Senator Tells," and in
this song, it says that the senator blew the 40 Deutsche Marks in one night, and then the song
continues, and then the senator went and set up a second steelworks on the Wackelsteiner Ländchen.
So he had a steelworks and could blow the 40 Deutsche Marks immediately in one night.
(15:20):
Other small pensioners and other people had it much harder, and it also depended, as it does
today, on owning capital or property.
And those who didn't have that already had the problem of being unable to pay the rising rents
in the big cities and metropolitan areas of the Federal Republic.
(15:43):
And this shows that there was no equality in this sense at the beginning with the founding of
the Federal Republic in 1949.
Nevertheless, the judgment persists stubbornly that everyone benefited in the economic wonderland.
I want to tell a bit about my history.
My father was born in 1934, a gardener.
(16:05):
He worked 50 to 60 hours a week and had to do gardening for people on Saturdays.
We had our first car in 1970 and our first television in 1968.
Even in the economic wonderland, equality was not present, and structural poverty existed.
Absolutely, but it is pretended as if social mobility, which was the promise of the young Federal
(16:31):
Republic, had ever been possible.
But of course, if the structural prerequisites were missing, then it didn't work.
You needed capital to be able to invest.
And those who, for example, during National Socialism, these family dynasties, who mostly became
rich through forced labor and armaments, their offspring had absolutely no social problems at
(16:58):
all; rather, these families are still fundamentally, I call it hyper-rich, not super-rich, because
if a child is more active at night than during the day, it is also not called super-active, but hyper-active.
So these hyper-rich, whose enormous fortunes were partly created even centuries ago, through
(17:22):
certain feudal privileges enjoyed by their ancestors, have maintained these enormous fortunes
to this day, partly also due to the inheritance laws we have, namely that the tax essentially
bypasses the very rich and collects little from them.
(17:45):
The person who really started with 40 DM in 1948 may have also become relatively wealthy.
Wealth has indeed spread in the old Federal Republic, so one was certainly already in the 60s
and 70s; by the way, in my family, the television and the telephone did not exist at the beginning, but rather in 1963.
(18:11):
I lived in Dortmund and was of course a BVB fan; when the football final for the German championship
was on, I had to go to friends to watch it on their black-and-white television.
Let alone the Italy vacation of the 50s.
(18:33):
Yes, that was just how it was, and sometimes, even when crime shows like Stahlnetz were on television,
you couldn't join in the conversation at school because the children were talking about it,
while you came from a family that had not yet reached that prosperity.
And prosperity did indeed grow for almost everyone for a while, but today it is of course much
(18:57):
harder to rise, and there are also studies showing that the proportion of those who can work
their way out of poverty today is much lower than it was a few decades ago.
And that shows that there is also a glass ceiling in society that prevents people from rising socially.
(19:20):
Those who are already at the top partly prevent that by, for example, being very rich and politically influential and influencing legislation.
If you inherit three apartments in Germany, you usually have to pay inheritance tax.
If you inherit 301 apartments, you do not have to pay inheritance tax. Why not?
(19:41):
Because the tax office assumes that it is a real estate holding, and holdings are not subject to inheritance tax.
This example clearly shows how those who benefit from it have influenced legislation, in this
case the gift and inheritance tax, and ensured that they themselves are not affected while others
(20:03):
still have to pay taxes.
So today you can inherit an entire corporation without paying a single cent in inheritance tax,
and that is profoundly unfair and naturally leads to those who are multimillionaires or billionaires,
of which there are 250 in the Federal Republic, remaining so rich while others struggle to get
(20:27):
by at the bottom of society because living costs are rising.
Basic foodstuffs are becoming increasingly expensive.
It is pretended that inflation is over, it is pretended that there is no mass unemployment,
while the number of unemployed is already clearly rising to over three million officially registered unemployed.
(20:48):
That means, in reality, there are of course many more.
Especially when you take families into account.
That means poverty is concealed and glossed over and obscured, and basically wealth is denied
or completely falls out of sight, because there is little in the public eye about the very rich,
(21:10):
while the poor are also not seen, but at least there are more reports about them today than
there were 30 years ago when I started dealing with child poverty.
Back then, poverty was actually only talked about during the pre-Christmas season, and only
because it was about raising donations during that time.
(21:31):
And this can of course be most easily done with poor children.
Nowadays, one gets the impression that there is a veritable barrage from all sides in the political
class, but also in the media against recipients of citizen's income and structurally impoverished
children, for example with the motto (21:53):
No pain, no gain.
So the poor are lazy, work is the key to happiness, the poor do not work, and conversely, the poor are lazy.
They used to call them social parasites, and we are actually not far from calling them that again.
Yes, that still exists, and especially this agitation against the welfare state and the defamation
(22:17):
of those who receive citizen's income as abusers of social benefits is already taking on unprecedented dimensions.
I mean, in economic crises, the welfare state is always used or abused as a scapegoat, more
precisely, for the politically responsible, who should actually ensure that everyone is doing well.
(22:40):
Then the focus is directed at the few who abuse the welfare state, in order to cut benefits for everyone.
Or as is the case with citizen's income, neither in 2025 nor in 2026 will the citizen's income
increase, but prices in the supermarket are certainly rising.
(23:03):
This means that the person who buys coffee, the one who buys bread or milk or other products
that have particularly risen in price, like chocolate, cocoa, those people are noticing that
they are having more and more difficulties, especially when it comes to the 500,000 single parents receiving citizen's income.
(23:25):
On the 20th of the month, something warm will still be on the table for their children.
But this is hidden behind the abuse, so to speak.
Instead of consistently pursuing and punishing the few who abuse such transfer payments, one
prefers to lower the benefits, putting pressure on those who, completely without any fault,
(23:51):
especially children, have fallen into this social misery.
And especially the children (23:56):
Their poverty is still taken into account in the coalition agreement,
but only the children are considered at risk of poverty and affected.
Poverty and also inequality and wealth do not come up at all otherwise.
The word wealth appears only once besides the poverty and wealth report, namely as cultural wealth.
(24:21):
And this shows how much this CDU, CSU, SPD coalition is bypassing the problem of growing socioeconomic
inequality, which I consider to be the cardinal problem of our country, if not of humanity as
a whole, because it leads to economic crises, ecological disasters, social conflicts, and even
(24:42):
wars and civil wars on a global scale.
And only if one were to consistently combat this inequality would many other problems also be solved.
We emphasize the concept of freedom daily in the media.
The concept of equality hardly comes up at all.
And it is also not spoken about those who manage and own the wealth.
(25:09):
Even the Greens and the SPD actually had no social charter during their time in government.
There is no social charter in the EU, there is a common market, there is a common currency in the monetary union.
How can cohesion actually exist when there is no social equality?
(25:31):
The growing social inequality is indeed also responsible for the erosion of social cohesion.
And inequality is also poison for democracy.
So the electoral successes of the AfD result significantly from the fact that society is drifting further apart.
(25:52):
And the SPD and the Greens wanted to overcome Hartz IV in the traffic light coalition, but they
only created a few reliefs and improvements with the citizen's allowance, which they are now,
but also in a backward role, the SPD, immediately retracting in the new federal government.
(26:12):
So when it comes to imposing stricter sanctions again, when it comes to reintroducing the priority
of placement, that means, hardly anyone knows that a single mother might receive a letter from
the job center stating that her son should leave high school just before graduation to take a job.
(26:34):
That means priority of placement, which is now to be reintroduced in this so-called new basic
security, as stated in the election program of the CDU and CSU.
This is of course not a new basic security, but it is essentially the old basic security dressed
up, so I simply call it Hartz V.
And inequality also leads to social injustice.
(27:01):
And people feel this social injustice, and I believe it leads to this deep mistrust in society,
also to more brutality, to dissatisfaction that spreads across the country.
The concept of justice has also somewhat fallen into discredit because it has been reinterpreted
(27:24):
in a way that leads to performance justice instead of social justice. But who defines performance?
Is it performance if you buy the right stocks at the right time and sell them at the right time, preferably tax-free?
Is that then a performance?
(27:45):
Economic success is defined as performance.
I would always define performance as something that must be provided for the whole society.
So a caregiver, a nurse, a teacher, they provide something for society.
Not a top manager who rationalizes away thousands of jobs in a company and then restructures
(28:09):
it to ensure that dividends for shareholders increase.
But in our society, neoliberal success is equated with justice, which is essentially a perversion
of the concept of justice.
And distribution justice is no longer placed at the center.
(28:29):
In my opinion, the welfare state has the task of first preventing and combating poverty.
Secondly, to ensure that people are socially secured against accidents, against illness, against poverty in old age.
The social insurances do this, and thirdly, the welfare state also has the task of ensuring social balance.
(28:50):
So to prevent the gap between rich and poor from widening further.
So it does not have to ensure that everyone owns the same amount or the same little.
But it must prevent the rich from becoming richer and the poor from becoming more numerous.
And it does not do this if instead of distribution justice, the so-called participation justice is in the foreground.
(29:14):
One acts as if it is enough to enable access to education and to the market, especially to the labor market.
But of course, no justice is possible if the material resources are not available to create
the corresponding opportunities for advancement with this access to the labor market and education.
(29:38):
And that is why, I believe, neoliberalism has succeeded in establishing ideas in the minds of
the majority of the population that enable the dismantling of the welfare state and, for example,
the cutting of citizen income, effectively turning it back into another Hartz IV.
(30:00):
This will, by the way, drive society further apart and create even more social coldness.
Because that was the accompanying phenomenon of Hartz IV.
At that time, I wrote a book, Hartz IV and Its Consequences, when Hartz IV turned ten years
old in 2015, and the subtitle of this book is (30:16):
On the Way to a Different Republic with a Question Mark.
I would omit that question mark today because Germany has become a different republic.
There has been a desolidarization, there has been a demoralization, and the path is increasingly
(30:37):
leading to the fact that due to the right-wing development in large parts of society, parties
like the AfD are gaining support.
And this will, of course, particularly lead to a situation where, with the participation of
this party in government, one will no longer recognize the old Federal Republic.
Thank you for being with us at Audio Archive.
(31:00):
Follow us so you don't miss an episode.
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See you next week, your Audio Archive team.
Welcome to Audio Archive, the channel for historical interviews with writers, philosophers,
activists, and intellectuals from around the world.
(00:34):
Hello! The barrage from political parties and media against social security systems has had an effect.
The dismantling of the past years continues unabated.
While billions are being allocated for the new German army, the benefits for citizens receiving
citizen's income are being cut.
At the same time, single parents, children and youth, poor retirees, migrants, minimum wage
(01:00):
earners, etc., are being morally blamed and every conceivable societal crisis is being attributed to them.
While billionaires have been able to multiply their wealth nearly tax-free for decades, any
criticism of this is dismissed as a debate about envy.
As if the recipients of citizen's income were to blame for the hyper-rich not wanting to get
(01:22):
up in the morning because they have already arranged everything in their favor in their state.
In this conversation with poverty researcher Christoph Butterwegge, we are not talking about
the republican concept of equality, but only about the reasons why some people are historically
and currently poor while others are rich.
What social policy of the CDU and SPD has to do with the predictable path to fascism.
(01:47):
Because a neoliberal parliamentary democracy without social justice, the best example currently
being the USA, is simply a form of government for the rich, in which the poor live off charitable donations.
Of course without any legal entitlement.
Thus, democracy has degenerated into a theatrical performance, a propagandistic seduction for the rest of society.
Or let's say it less polemically (02:08):
the gains of the AfD, whose racist state project is more national
socialist than fascist in nature and promises societal advancement to criminals, scoundrels,
and good-for-nothings, are promoted by a strategic redistribution of societal wealth from the bottom to the top.
(02:30):
This neoliberal policy leads to the disintegration of solidarity among large parts of the population.
For many in neoliberal society, the motto is (02:35):
Save yourself if you can.
Everyone is the architect of their own fortune.
Even at the risk of repeating myself (02:44):
Democracy without social justice leads to fascism.
And the people who experience neither security, nor support, nor freedom in a neoliberal society,
for most, democracy is just a facade.
Thus, in this desolidarized society, militarization replaces fair redistribution and solidarity,
(03:08):
and war replaces social development and equality.
Historically, we know that only the rich benefit from this.
Democracy, parliaments, and parties aside. Mr.
Butterwege, perhaps you can define, just briefly, the difference between poverty and structural
poverty, individual poverty and structural poverty.
(03:30):
I would understand individual poverty as a situation where a person, due to poor decisions they
make, for example, choosing the wrong profession or moving to a region where their qualifications
are not in demand, ends up earning little.
(03:52):
Structural poverty, in this sense, is based on societal conditions, on the distribution mechanisms
of society, and of course also on political decisions that are made.
This means that many people, millions of people, are affected because they cannot really decide
(04:13):
or influence the situation themselves; rather, it is those who sit at the economic and political
levers of power who do.
That is to say, those who own businesses, those who make laws, they naturally decide how the
wealth of a society is distributed, among which classes, strata, and also age groups.
(04:40):
And these are essentially processes that do not allow for blame to be assigned, because people
have not made mistakes themselves or are responsible for it, but they find themselves in a material
misery that is somewhat imposed on them.
(05:00):
But hasn't something like poverty always existed, so to speak, as a natural phenomenon?
One must distinguish between absolute and relative poverty.
What has always existed is absolute poverty.
Absolutely poor is someone who cannot satisfy their basic needs, who does not have enough to
(05:20):
eat, no safe drinking water, no clothing appropriate to the climatic conditions, no shelter, no basic medical care.
This has always existed and is particularly pronounced.
Today, we are accustomed to locating this absolute poverty not in the Federal Republic, but
in the global south, thereby somewhat pushing the problem away from us.
(05:45):
But of course, there is also absolute poverty in Germany.
If you look at the sixth report on poverty and wealth by the federal government, you will see
that even before the Covid-19 pandemic, there were 678,000 homeless people and 41,000 people without shelter.
So, absolute poverty has always existed.
(06:07):
Relative poverty, however, depends on how the wealth of a society is distributed among certain social classes and strata.
A relatively poor person is someone who can meet their basic needs in a prosperous, if not rich country like ours.
But they cannot afford many of the things that are considered normal for most others in this society.
(06:35):
Going to the movies, to the theater, meeting friends in a restaurant, or taking children to
the zoo, to the circus, or to the fair.
That rarely or never happens because there is a lack of money.
And this relative poverty did not always exist; rather, it depends on the existence of wealth.
(06:56):
Ultimately, of course, in Germany, this relative poverty is much more widespread than absolute poverty.
But I also want to add that relative poverty is not something that should be relativized, sugar-coated, or downplayed.
It is called relative not because it should be relativized, but in relation to the wealth and
(07:20):
prosperity that surrounds those affected.
So I want to give an example.
If a teenager stands on the schoolyard in the middle of winter wearing summer clothes and sandals,
and is laughed at by their classmates, they suffer more from being laughed at and socially excluded
(07:43):
than from the cold they feel.
So the cold is absolute poverty.
Being laughed at is relative poverty.
And with that, I want to clarify that it is not some kind of deluxe poverty that prevails here,
where one can say, okay, a person growing up in the slums of Nairobi is really poor, but a person
(08:06):
growing up on the outskirts, in a high-rise, receiving citizen's income, is not really poor,
but is just complaining at a high level.
This is the widespread public opinion among us, which pretends that this is not a problem at all.
(08:26):
In reality, this relative poverty in high-rise neighborhoods can be much more depressing, much
more humiliating, much more degrading than absolute poverty, because the poor person in the
slum of Nairobi is never asked, say, why are you poor? Now justify yourself.
(08:48):
But here, the citizen receiving welfare is asked, say, aren't you just a slacker, a freeloader, a social parasite?
Couldn't you work instead of lying around on the lazy skin in the hammock of the welfare state?
And the poor among us particularly suffer from being socially excluded, having to justify themselves,
(09:11):
not being recognized and not being seen.
So they suffer not only from having little money in their wallets, but poverty among us also
means being disadvantaged and discriminated against in various or almost all areas of life.
In health, in education, in leisure activities, in sports.
(09:33):
Everywhere in this society, you need money. More and more.
And yet it is pretended that the real problem is not the lack of money, but for example the lack of education.
So when it is pretended that one only needs to be educated to escape poverty, it also implicitly
means that the poor are accused of not having educated themselves enough or their children.
(09:58):
In reality, however, 11 percent of all employees in the low-wage sector have a university degree.
So today it is no longer enough to be well-educated, as might have been the case in the past.
I myself am, if you will, also the living example of that.
Son of a single mother, born out of wedlock, but sent to high school, completed my studies,
(10:25):
then unemployed, read many books, wrote many books, and then became a C4 professor.
But today that works much less frequently, and of course one also needed a bit of luck back then.
Because poverty is a structural problem, this problem cannot be solved by individuals making
(10:47):
social advancements, but one must, so to speak, address the economic structures, the property
relations, and also the distribution mechanisms of society if one truly wants to solve the problem
of poverty and social or, as I prefer to say, socioeconomic inequality.
(11:09):
This structural poverty is also related to this and is increasing because access to education,
sports, and such is becoming more and more closed off by society.
This means that not only is money lacking, but access in the tertiary sector is simply closed off.
(11:29):
I consider money to be central.
So poverty is fought with money, and in a society where many reforms have been initiated in
the past due to the influence of neoliberals, which have ensured that, firstly, money is more important than ever.
(11:51):
When almost all areas of life are economized, commercialized, and privatized, then money is indeed decisive.
I want to give an example.
Little Christoph was photographed by his mother in 1960 at a public swimming pool.
And next to this photo of little Christoph, my mother pasted the entrance ticket into the photo album.
(12:16):
It cost ten pfennigs back then.
If you go to the fun pool with your children on the weekend today, the pfennigs are of no use
anymore because they no longer exist.
But it is also wise to take 50 or 100 euros with you.
And this clearly shows that even in this leisure sector, money decides whether you are part
(12:39):
of social and public life or whether you do not have such access.
And this is no different in the education sector.
So if, for example, you do a retraining that the job center pays less and less for because the
job centers are underfunded and, according to Friedrich Merz, billions are to be saved there,
(13:02):
then you need money to afford retraining privately.
And that means without money, money is not everything, but without money, everything is nothing,
to paraphrase a famous saying by Willy Brandt about peace.
So in a society as commercialized and shaped by neoliberalism as ours, money is the crucial
(13:24):
adjustment screw that must be turned to achieve social justice at least a little more.
Now the Federal Republic or Germany also lives from the Federal Republic, emerging from the
myth that everyone started from scratch after the war. Is that correct?
(13:45):
Is it true that we all or our parents, my parents too, had the same state and that, in principle,
those who are now poor are to blame for it because they achieved nothing in the 70s?
Yes, the currency reform of 1948, where everyone received 40 Deutsche Marks, created the impression
(14:06):
that everyone had started almost from scratch and that those who became wealthy or rich owed
it to their diligence, their efforts, and their competencies, while those who remained poor
were somehow punished for being lazy, not making an effort, and achieving nothing.
(14:29):
But in reality, these 40 Deutsche Marks were, of course, just pocket money for some.
Those who owned factories, real estate, or land didn't actually need the 40 Deutsche Marks to
get started again and to become even richer during the so-called economic miracle of the 50s and early 60s.
And Franz Josef Degenhardt made such a nice song back then (14:53):
"When the Senator Tells," and in
this song, it says that the senator blew the 40 Deutsche Marks in one night, and then the song
continues, and then the senator went and set up a second steelworks on the Wackelsteiner Ländchen.
So he had a steelworks and could blow the 40 Deutsche Marks immediately in one night.
(15:20):
Other small pensioners and other people had it much harder, and it also depended, as it does
today, on owning capital or property.
And those who didn't have that already had the problem of being unable to pay the rising rents
in the big cities and metropolitan areas of the Federal Republic.
(15:43):
And this shows that there was no equality in this sense at the beginning with the founding of
the Federal Republic in 1949.
Nevertheless, the judgment persists stubbornly that everyone benefited in the economic wonderland.
I want to tell a bit about my history.
My father was born in 1934, a gardener.
(16:05):
He worked 50 to 60 hours a week and had to do gardening for people on Saturdays.
We had our first car in 1970 and our first television in 1968.
Even in the economic wonderland, equality was not present, and structural poverty existed.
Absolutely, but it is pretended as if social mobility, which was the promise of the young Federal
(16:31):
Republic, had ever been possible.
But of course, if the structural prerequisites were missing, then it didn't work.
You needed capital to be able to invest.
And those who, for example, during National Socialism, these family dynasties, who mostly became
rich through forced labor and armaments, their offspring had absolutely no social problems at
(16:58):
all; rather, these families are still fundamentally, I call it hyper-rich, not super-rich, because
if a child is more active at night than during the day, it is also not called super-active, but hyper-active.
So these hyper-rich, whose enormous fortunes were partly created even centuries ago, through
(17:22):
certain feudal privileges enjoyed by their ancestors, have maintained these enormous fortunes
to this day, partly also due to the inheritance laws we have, namely that the tax essentially
bypasses the very rich and collects little from them.
(17:45):
The person who really started with 40 DM in 1948 may have also become relatively wealthy.
Wealth has indeed spread in the old Federal Republic, so one was certainly already in the 60s
and 70s; by the way, in my family, the television and the telephone did not exist at the beginning, but rather in 1963.
(18:11):
I lived in Dortmund and was of course a BVB fan; when the football final for the German championship
was on, I had to go to friends to watch it on their black-and-white television.
Let alone the Italy vacation of the 50s.
(18:33):
Yes, that was just how it was, and sometimes, even when crime shows like Stahlnetz were on television,
you couldn't join in the conversation at school because the children were talking about it,
while you came from a family that had not yet reached that prosperity.
And prosperity did indeed grow for almost everyone for a while, but today it is of course much
(18:57):
harder to rise, and there are also studies showing that the proportion of those who can work
their way out of poverty today is much lower than it was a few decades ago.
And that shows that there is also a glass ceiling in society that prevents people from rising socially.
(19:20):
Those who are already at the top partly prevent that by, for example, being very rich and politically influential and influencing legislation.
If you inherit three apartments in Germany, you usually have to pay inheritance tax.
If you inherit 301 apartments, you do not have to pay inheritance tax. Why not?
(19:41):
Because the tax office assumes that it is a real estate holding, and holdings are not subject to inheritance tax.
This example clearly shows how those who benefit from it have influenced legislation, in this
case the gift and inheritance tax, and ensured that they themselves are not affected while others
(20:03):
still have to pay taxes.
So today you can inherit an entire corporation without paying a single cent in inheritance tax,
and that is profoundly unfair and naturally leads to those who are multimillionaires or billionaires,
of which there are 250 in the Federal Republic, remaining so rich while others struggle to get
(20:27):
by at the bottom of society because living costs are rising.
Basic foodstuffs are becoming increasingly expensive.
It is pretended that inflation is over, it is pretended that there is no mass unemployment,
while the number of unemployed is already clearly rising to over three million officially registered unemployed.
(20:48):
That means, in reality, there are of course many more.
Especially when you take families into account.
That means poverty is concealed and glossed over and obscured, and basically wealth is denied
or completely falls out of sight, because there is little in the public eye about the very rich,
(21:10):
while the poor are also not seen, but at least there are more reports about them today than
there were 30 years ago when I started dealing with child poverty.
Back then, poverty was actually only talked about during the pre-Christmas season, and only
because it was about raising donations during that time.
(21:31):
And this can of course be most easily done with poor children.
Nowadays, one gets the impression that there is a veritable barrage from all sides in the political
class, but also in the media against recipients of citizen's income and structurally impoverished
children, for example with the motto (21:53):
No pain, no gain.
So the poor are lazy, work is the key to happiness, the poor do not work, and conversely, the poor are lazy.
They used to call them social parasites, and we are actually not far from calling them that again.
Yes, that still exists, and especially this agitation against the welfare state and the defamation
(22:17):
of those who receive citizen's income as abusers of social benefits is already taking on unprecedented dimensions.
I mean, in economic crises, the welfare state is always used or abused as a scapegoat, more
precisely, for the politically responsible, who should actually ensure that everyone is doing well.
(22:40):
Then the focus is directed at the few who abuse the welfare state, in order to cut benefits for everyone.
Or as is the case with citizen's income, neither in 2025 nor in 2026 will the citizen's income
increase, but prices in the supermarket are certainly rising.
(23:03):
This means that the person who buys coffee, the one who buys bread or milk or other products
that have particularly risen in price, like chocolate, cocoa, those people are noticing that
they are having more and more difficulties, especially when it comes to the 500,000 single parents receiving citizen's income.
(23:25):
On the 20th of the month, something warm will still be on the table for their children.
But this is hidden behind the abuse, so to speak.
Instead of consistently pursuing and punishing the few who abuse such transfer payments, one
prefers to lower the benefits, putting pressure on those who, completely without any fault,
(23:51):
especially children, have fallen into this social misery.
And especially the children (23:56):
Their poverty is still taken into account in the coalition agreement,
but only the children are considered at risk of poverty and affected.
Poverty and also inequality and wealth do not come up at all otherwise.
The word wealth appears only once besides the poverty and wealth report, namely as cultural wealth.
(24:21):
And this shows how much this CDU, CSU, SPD coalition is bypassing the problem of growing socioeconomic
inequality, which I consider to be the cardinal problem of our country, if not of humanity as
a whole, because it leads to economic crises, ecological disasters, social conflicts, and even
(24:42):
wars and civil wars on a global scale.
And only if one were to consistently combat this inequality would many other problems also be solved.
We emphasize the concept of freedom daily in the media.
The concept of equality hardly comes up at all.
And it is also not spoken about those who manage and own the wealth.
(25:09):
Even the Greens and the SPD actually had no social charter during their time in government.
There is no social charter in the EU, there is a common market, there is a common currency in the monetary union.
How can cohesion actually exist when there is no social equality?
(25:31):
The growing social inequality is indeed also responsible for the erosion of social cohesion.
And inequality is also poison for democracy.
So the electoral successes of the AfD result significantly from the fact that society is drifting further apart.
(25:52):
And the SPD and the Greens wanted to overcome Hartz IV in the traffic light coalition, but they
only created a few reliefs and improvements with the citizen's allowance, which they are now,
but also in a backward role, the SPD, immediately retracting in the new federal government.
(26:12):
So when it comes to imposing stricter sanctions again, when it comes to reintroducing the priority
of placement, that means, hardly anyone knows that a single mother might receive a letter from
the job center stating that her son should leave high school just before graduation to take a job.
(26:34):
That means priority of placement, which is now to be reintroduced in this so-called new basic
security, as stated in the election program of the CDU and CSU.
This is of course not a new basic security, but it is essentially the old basic security dressed
up, so I simply call it Hartz V.
And inequality also leads to social injustice.
(27:01):
And people feel this social injustice, and I believe it leads to this deep mistrust in society,
also to more brutality, to dissatisfaction that spreads across the country.
The concept of justice has also somewhat fallen into discredit because it has been reinterpreted
(27:24):
in a way that leads to performance justice instead of social justice. But who defines performance?
Is it performance if you buy the right stocks at the right time and sell them at the right time, preferably tax-free?
Is that then a performance?
(27:45):
Economic success is defined as performance.
I would always define performance as something that must be provided for the whole society.
So a caregiver, a nurse, a teacher, they provide something for society.
Not a top manager who rationalizes away thousands of jobs in a company and then restructures
(28:09):
it to ensure that dividends for shareholders increase.
But in our society, neoliberal success is equated with justice, which is essentially a perversion
of the concept of justice.
And distribution justice is no longer placed at the center.
(28:29):
In my opinion, the welfare state has the task of first preventing and combating poverty.
Secondly, to ensure that people are socially secured against accidents, against illness, against poverty in old age.
The social insurances do this, and thirdly, the welfare state also has the task of ensuring social balance.
(28:50):
So to prevent the gap between rich and poor from widening further.
So it does not have to ensure that everyone owns the same amount or the same little.
But it must prevent the rich from becoming richer and the poor from becoming more numerous.
And it does not do this if instead of distribution justice, the so-called participation justice is in the foreground.
(29:14):
One acts as if it is enough to enable access to education and to the market, especially to the labor market.
But of course, no justice is possible if the material resources are not available to create
the corresponding opportunities for advancement with this access to the labor market and education.
(29:38):
And that is why, I believe, neoliberalism has succeeded in establishing ideas in the minds of
the majority of the population that enable the dismantling of the welfare state and, for example,
the cutting of citizen income, effectively turning it back into another Hartz IV.
(30:00):
This will, by the way, drive society further apart and create even more social coldness.
Because that was the accompanying phenomenon of Hartz IV.
At that time, I wrote a book, Hartz IV and Its Consequences, when Hartz IV turned ten years
old in 2015, and the subtitle of this book is (30:16):
On the Way to a Different Republic with a Question Mark.
I would omit that question mark today because Germany has become a different republic.
There has been a desolidarization, there has been a demoralization, and the path is increasingly
(30:37):
leading to the fact that due to the right-wing development in large parts of society, parties
like the AfD are gaining support.
And this will, of course, particularly lead to a situation where, with the participation of
this party in government, one will no longer recognize the old Federal Republic.
Thank you for being with us at Audio Archive.
(31:00):
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See you next week, your Audio Archive team.
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