Werner Rügemer, a voice from the other Germany: interview

Fausto Giudice, 23 April 2021

Werner Rügemer undoubtedly belongs to that “other Germany” – the one we love -, the one of “poets and thinkers” (Dichter und Denker), engaged in a secular struggle against that of “judges and hangmen” (Richter und Henker). We felt it was urgent to talk to him.

Dear Werner, on 4 September 2021 you will be 80 years old and the Federal Republic of Germany 72 years old. We think it is time to take stock – personally and collectively. Let’s start with the personal assessment: when you were 20/30 years old, what did you want to achieve? Did you achieve it? What are you most proud of? What do you regret most?

When I was 20/30 years old, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to achieve. I was trying to emerge, like a half-blind mole, from the post-fascist period. Since his return from the Wehrmacht in 1945, my father, who was a schoolteacher, had been beating me up a lot, at that time it was allowed anyway. I got a very dangerous asthma. I was sent to a boarding school in the Alps, “because of the good air”: the boarding school was near Berchtesgaden on the Obersalzberg, well situated, above the Königssee, and very close to the highest mountain in Germany, the Watzman. The boarding school with a grammar school belonged to the Christliches Jugenddorfwerk Deutschlands (CJD) [Christian Youth Work in Germany]: it had been founded after 1945 by Professor Arnold Dannenmann, who in 1933 had founded the Nazi church “German Christians”. After the war, most of the Nazis came together under a Christian label, thus in the two repainted parties CDU and CSU under the leadership of CDU President and Federal Chancellor Adenauer: since the imperial era, before World War I, he had become politically very influential in Catholic Cologne, thanks to the support of bankers and entrepreneurs, and had continued to build up this position after World War I.

Until 1945, the Nazi hierarchs, including Hitler, Göring and others, had their second home on the Obersalzberg. After 1945, the boarding school became the property of the former NSDAP chairman, Martin Bormann. Most of the teachers were former Nazis. The CJD had close links with the Federal Association of German Workers (BDA). In the boarding school there were sons of entrepreneurs and diplomats. The star pupil was the son of Hitler’s second in command, Rudolf Hess, who was in prison at the time. In the surrounding mountains there was a lot of Nazi nostalgia tourism – I could only understand this much later.

After graduating in 1960 on the Obersalzberg, I studied German philology, Romance languages and philosophy in Munich, Tübingen and Berlin. I participated in left-wing meetings and demonstrations, but I did not join any organisation. In 1968 I founded the Critical University with socialist students in Berlin. Then I spent a year in Paris, where I lived with a Vietnamese man: he had taken in two US soldiers who had deserted in Vietnam. I had finished my studies to become a teacher, but did not want to become a civil servant. That’s why, until 1974, I was the manager of the German section of the pacifist organisation Service Civil International in Paris, and I organised international workcamps. Then, until 1989, I was a salaried editor of the magazine Democratic Education; at the same time, I did a doctorate on the subject of “philosophical anthropology”. Then I found myself without a job, and since then I have coped mostly as a ‘free’ writer.

What am I proud of? Not much. I am always pleased that the mole has grubbed its way relatively well, albeit with lingering wounds, through uncertain circumstances. And that some people appreciate my work. What do I regret most? That I never reconciled with my parents, especially my father, until they died. As a belated and unfortunately weakly symbolic compensation, I dedicated a book to them in 2016: Bis diese Freiheit die Welt erleuchtet. Transatlantische Sittenbilder aus Politik und Wirtschaft, Geschichte und Kultur [Until this freedom lights up the world. Transatlantic genre pictures from politics, economy, history and culture].

Now to Germany, the pale mother. You were eight years old when the FRG was founded, in 1968 you were 27. At the time of the ‘turning point’, the ‘reunification’ of Germany, you were 51. Is Germany still a Winter’s Tale? How has society changed, what has remained almost unchanged? What are the new forms of the contradiction between the ‘two Germanies’, the Germany of ‘judges and hangmen’ and the Germany of ‘poets and thinkers’?

The Federal Republic of Germany is, even after its enlargement to include the GDR in 1990, dominated by the USA, in terms of military, secret service, investment, media, culture, morals – with “values” contrary to human rights and the rights of peoples. Moreover, no other state in the world has, in addition to its NATO membership, such a dense US military presence, with about three dozen military bases: some of these bases are central nodal points for global logistics, e.g. for the use of drones in Africa and Asia and for deployment against Russia. I have documented this over and over again in publications, on the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, on the role of major US credit rating agencies, US corporate law firms and US corporate advisors.

Since the massive purchase of GDR companies, and the financial crisis of 2008 has only reinforced the trend, the stranglehold of US investors has become even more direct: BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and others are now by far the most important owners of the most important banks and companies in the stronghold of Germany, as well as to a lesser extent in other EU states. With the pandemic and computerisation, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Zoom & Co. and their big shareholders like BlackRock are becoming even more powerful, with even standing transfers from the state into public health and companies.

The working class is socially and politically scattered as never before, between precarious, small jobs and illegals more than the unemployed, migrants, “normal employees”, whose numbers are decreasing, privileged employees and at the top, up to the very well-paid executives of the ruling class. Traditional associations, trade unions, democratic initiatives, are each time deeply divided from within, disoriented, and assume certain positions of the dominant ideology (e.g. against China and Russia, or identity “values”), but have no idea of today’s renewed capitalism and global relations.

In 1984 you published what was perhaps the first book on Silicon Valley: “Neue Technik – alte Gesellschaft. Silicon Valley” [New Technology – Old Society. Silicon Valley]. This was at the dawn of the neo-capitalist and neo-liberal era. 34 years later, you published “21st Century Capitalists”. How would you sum up these four decades? What was already clear then, and what happened that was unexpected?

Yes, it was the first book on Silicon Valley; even in the USA, there were none. The new clean technologies that connect people better and faster – I didn’t believe in this myth: I went there in 1983 and 1984 and saw for myself what it was like. I was helped there by US peace activists who had come to Germany to protest with us against the installation of US medium-range rockets.

Silicon Valley – already at the time of its founding, during and after World War II – was as “neoliberal” as the whole of US-led Western capitalism a few decades later: a close connection between high-tech companies like Hewlett Packard and the military and secret service; the elite private Stanford University in Palo Alto as its central core; no trade unions, likewise, no democratic and left-wing organisation. During my field studies in Silicon Valley in 1983, between San Francisco, Mountain View and San Jose, I met trade unionists and peace activists -they were isolated but very hardy. I met lawyers, firefighters, critical professors from Stanford University, and also Steve Jobs, who was then, with Apple, on the rise. I also got to meet low-wage, disenfranchised workers in the sweatshops: chip production was often done by illegal migrants from Mexico or the Philippines, and Vietnamese boat people. There was no protection at work, the toxic fumes produced by the manufacture of the chips were inhaled directly. I met workers there whose hair was falling out and who had suffered miscarriages.

An important difference from then and now is that, in the early 1980s, electronic chips and terminals were still manufactured in Silicon Valley. At the end of the 1980s, the systematic relocation of production, and then also of other industries such as automobiles and pharmaceuticals, began, especially to China and Taiwan, and then also to other countries such as India, Vietnam and Mexico. US companies and advisors started, the whole Western economy followed, led by Germany.

This led to deindustrialisation, first and foremost in the USA, which was accompanied by the working poor: a persistent and growing proportion of workers have jobs but remain poor. In the meantime, this is spreading widely among the middle classes: at least two members of the family have to work, have to take a second job, are permanently over-indebted. I was the first person in Germany to present this as a systemic development in 1986 in the trade union magazine WSI-Mitteilungen. At the time, I did not think that, 40 years later, this would happen on such a massive scale in the EU.

Working poor means, at the same time, working sick: you are poor, you become chronically ill sooner, and you die sooner. This relationship between working poor and working sick became particularly apparent during the coronavirus epidemic, for example among blacks and migrant workers in the US meat industry, but also in a similar way in the EU and Germany. In addition to the new direct EU member states, such as Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, Romania and Lithuania, there are also associated or ‘candidate’ states such as Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The new large IT companies in the USA are also very active in setting up subsidiaries: Amazon, Google, Microsoft need unemployed people and cheap specialists available.

Hundreds of subcontracting companies produce at extremely low wages – minimum gross wage 283 euros per month, which is not always paid – for the chic textile brands such as Boss, Versace, Gucci, Strellson, Escada, Max Mara, Seidenstöcker and Jack & Jones. These companies thus escape global criticism of the situation in Bangladesh, benefit from shorter and cheaper transport times, and also receive subsidies from the EU. This is how the small Lithuanian state became the logistics powerhouse of the EU: the Lithuanian company Girteka employs tens of thousands of lorry drivers from Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldavia.

This weakens the national economies of Eastern Europe. A fifth to a third of the population, especially the young, emigrate temporarily or permanently; the old remain at home, and are increasingly poorly looked after due to the dilapidated infrastructure, while a local oligarchy with its clans, supported politically and financially by the West, profits quite openly from its wealth.

In essence, one development in the ‘eastward enlargement’ is that the EU and NATO are moving together, and in most cases NATO was and is already there beforehand, e.g. in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and finally in Northern Macedonia and the Baltic States. This is also related to the US-led war against socialist Yugoslavia. Kosovo was separated from Serbia under US direction, contrary to the rights of the people, so that the US could maintain one of its largest international bases there: Camp Bondsteel, named after a highly decorated US officer who had participated in the Vietnam War. I have analysed this “eastward expansion”, and its military investments, of the EU with NATO in the book: Imperium EU: Arbeitsunrecht, Krise, neue Gegenwehr (2020) [The EU Empire: Labour injustice, crisis, new resistance].

Perhaps the biggest surprise for Western companies since global relocation began forty years ago is that low-cost assembly in China of their devices is working less and less, and their applications organically linked to US intelligence are being banned from China and Hong Kong. The People’s Republic – unlike other developing countries such as India – has developed into a specific, popular and sustainable economy, with sustainably rising labour incomes for hundreds of millions of workers and members of the middle classes, with technical innovations, such as in the development of public transport systems, and with recognition in the new international Silk Road.

Thousands of Western companies are surviving in the midst of the national and technological decline of their home countries only thanks to production and sales in China, e.g. the leading German car companies such as Volkswagen, the German metal and pharmaceutical companies -but this is only a temporary situation. China is working towards economic, financial and technological autonomy, strengthening itself step by step.

This is why, since the presidency of Barack Obama, the US rearmament and campaign against the Chinese enemy is gaining momentum, including the possible nuclear first strike. Meanwhile, the EU is also participating in this strategy. Rearmament, aggressive campaigning and economic sanctions are not only directed against China itself, but also against the People’s Republic’s most powerful partners, i.e. Russia, Iran and others. This is what I set out in the book Capitalists of the 21st Century (2018 – 2020 translation).

The US in particular cannot avoid its economic decline as a national economy. The domination, which is also political, of the capital organisers – today BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, Wellington, Blackstone, KKR, Carlyle & Co, together with consulting firms like Accenture, McKinsey, Freshfields, Price Waterhouse Coopers & Co – is deeply imprinted in the power structures. This new capital elite does not care about the US economy – any more than it cares about other national economies, such as in the EU and South America, where it has important subsidiaries – and it leaves a growing part of the population to vegetate. However, the USA remains a stronghold for this elite for the protection provided by the military, the secret service and the media. This protection is provided above all by military alliances, above all by NATO, with its 30 member states; by the 1,000 or so permanent military bases around the world; and by direct and indirect military interventions, such as in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.

The relative rationality of the US elites, which was still possible during the “Cold War” against the economically weak Soviet Union, can now be lost in the struggle for life in the West and lead to critical situations – which the West itself has provoked. A new world war, on the part of the US-led West, is possible. We must all mobilise our forces against this. But we do not have to save “humanit” – there are many powerful people we should not save, on the contrary. Rather, those who fight for human rights and the rights of peoples must come together with the goal of socialism, which is certainly more difficult to achieve, and otherwise, than was often hoped for in the 19th and 20th centuries. The People’s Republic of China shows something of this new path.

We would like to ask you to tell us the essence of these three key words: injustice at work, liquidators and… Heinrich Heine: what does he say to us today?

After the two world wars, the workers’ movements in Europe, in the Soviet Union, then in the other socialist states, and recently also in the liberated ex-colonial states, in their own way, as well as Western left-wing movements, had conquered new rights for dependent workers. Thus, as early as 1919, the International Labour Organisation, ILO, was founded within the League of Nations: an eight-hour day, a 40-hour week, paid holidays and equal pay for men and women were on the agenda. After the Second World War, the UN included labour rights, including the right to work and also to housing, social security and free trade unions in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After 1945, workers’ and trade union rights were adopted not only in the socialist states, but also in Western European states such as France, Italy, Belgium, Great Britain, as well as in the newly founded GDR. But, as already mentioned, the USA, as the bureaucracy of capital, acted against this development from the beginning, initially with the help of the Marshall Plan. The Americanisation of labour relations – oriented towards the unconditionally terminable job – was also adopted in Europe, step by step, in and through the EU, first directly, through companies like McDonalds and UPS, later through US investors like BlackRock and Blackstone, and then, from roughly the 2000s onwards, through the adoption of US-developed union busting.

In my last book, The EU Empire: Workplace Injustice, Crisis and New Resistance, I took stock of the situation of the working class in Western capitalism, especially in the US: the decline of the unions involved in social partnership, especially in network with social democracy, but also the hesitant, very difficult beginning of new forms of resistance, which may be international and internationalist.

Liquidators: Liquidators are none other than the professional Union Busters. They demoralise, destroy and prevent the collective representation of workers in companies. This know-how has been developed in the USA since the end of the 19th century. At the beginning, there was the Pinkerton detective agency. Its founder, Allan Pinkerton, had headed the Northern States Military Intelligence Service during the Civil War – after the war he set up the Pinkerton Detective Agency for companies against strikers, using armed squads, and later also provided strike-breakers. Today, these professionals have become ‘civilised’, acting as lawyers, public relations consultants, work psychologists, and company managements organise sections for Human Resources. For example, large IT companies such as Google and Amazon not only spy on their customers, but have also organised spying and control systems, in order to control especially the lower categories of employees, to dissuade them from setting up trade unions and to track them down in their work.

Heinrich Heine: I didn’t find the great world-famous poem “Germany – A Winter’s Tale” so extraordinary at all, although it is constantly quoted, also in left-wing circles. However, in the 1970s I had landed in Cologne, the city of Adenauer. I had studied the situation in this catholic-carnival city in more detail, had written the book Colonia corrupta here, which made me quite undesirable in ruling circles and got me banned from entering public places. I was also particularly pleased that Heine, in his Winter’s Tale, congratulated Napoleon on turning the Catholic cathedral into a stable on his entrance. I thought that was very good! But this is the political publicist Heine I loved. That is why his last book, Lutetia, has become the most important for me – a book that is virtually unknown in left and right-wing circles, or in literary studies. It contains Heine’s journalistic-philosophico-literary observations on the high capitalism that was developing in France. It bears some similarities to the Western capitalism that is on the rampage today.

That’s why I put together excerpts from Lutetia for the one-hour staged reading: “You have enjoined in your public preaching to drink water, and in private you have drunk wine”. This reading was performed in small theatres and other venues in Germany, as well as in private homes, often accompanied by musicians. As an epigraph to the book The Capitalists of the 21st Century, I put a quotation from Heine, commenting on the unbridled capitalism of mid-nineteenth century France (‘Enrich yourself’), which was in populistic manner headed by a ‘Citizen-King’: “Today’s society justifies itself only by flat necessity, without belief in Right, yes, without self-respect”.

Werner Rügemer, born in 1941 in Bavaria, has lived in Cologne since 1975; an interventionist philosopher, he works as a publicist, advisor and political-historical guide of Cologne. Most recently published books:

*Die Kapitalisten des 21. Jahrhunderts. Gemeinverständlicher Abriss zum Aufstieg der neuen Finanzakteure, 360 pages, 3rd edition with a new introduction on the coronavirus and China, Cologne 2021 (also in English: The Capitalists of the 21st Century (2019) and in French: Les capitalistes du XXI^e Siècle (2020), both published by Editions tredition, in hardcover, paperback and eBook, as well as in Italian (Capitalisti del XXI secolo) published by Castelvecchi. Rügemer synthesises his analysis of the capitalist class today.

*Imperium EU: ArbeitsUnrecht, Krise, neue Gewehr, 320 pages, Cologne 2020. In it, Rügemer summarises his analysis of the working class in Europe today.

http://www-werner-ruegemer.de