Back in the 1980s, a cousin on my father’s side gave me a memorable lesson in socialism.
Cousin Werner was an engineer in an East German vehicle factory. Like many others under Communist rule, regardless of their education and skills, he and his wife lived in one of the typically small apartments of a concrete-slab housing complex. These so-called Plattenbauten were praised as a symbol of the East’s allegedly egalitarian society under Erich Honecker.
During one of my family’s visits from our home in West Germany, Werner took us to the basement of his building and unlocked the door to a little storage room. In it was a collection of fine tools that amazed even us westerners: hammers and wrenches of all sorts, drilling machines and a turning lathe made for a professional workshop.
When we asked him how he had gotten hold of all of this equipment in an economy that was notorious for shortages, Werner shrugged. “Well, Honecker told us to get out of our factories what we can, didn’t he?” he said.
Socialism, the idea that workers’ needs are best met by the collectivization of the means of production, didn’t function for Werner. A system in which factories, banks and even housing were nationalized required a planned economy, as a substitute for capitalist competition. Central planning, however, proved unable to meet people’s individual demands, and so rule-breaking and black markets flourished. Werner’s petty theft paled in comparison to the corruption that undermined East Germany from its founding. Eventually, the entire system collapsed; as it did everywhere else, socialism in Germany failed.
Which is why it is strange, in 2019, to see socialism coming back into German mainstream politics: Kevin Kühnert, the leader of the Social Democrats’ youth organization and one of his party’s most promising young talents, has made it his calling card.
Forget the wannabe socialism of American Democrats like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The 29-year-old Mr. Kühnert is aiming for the real thing. Socialism, he says, means democratic control over the economy. He wants to replace capitalism as such, not just to recalibrate it.
In the United States, policies frequently branded as “socialist” — health care for all, a national minimum wage, and tuition-free universities — have very little to do with actual socialism. Big government, yes — but all of them fit comfortably in a traditional free-market economy.
In contrast, German neo-socialism is profoundly different from capitalism. In an interview with my newspaper, Mr. Kühnert took specific aim at the American dream as a model for individual achievement. He said he questioned a system “in which millions start a race, very few make it over the finishing line and then shout back to the others, ‘You could have made it, too!’”
Mr. Kühnert’s socialism puts needs before skills and collective well-being before individual reward. Companies like BMW would be collectivized, meaning ownership by the workers. “Without collectivization of one form or another it is unthinkable to overcome capitalism,” he told us.
The same principle would be applied to real estate. “I don’t think it is a legitimate business model, to earn a living from the living space of other people,” he said. “Everybody should at most own the living space he himself inhabits.” Everything else would be owned collectively.
Why is the idea of socialism, whether the pseudo-socialism of the United States or Mr. Kühnert’s genuine form, flourishing?
Above all, it is the seduction of countering one overreaction with its opposite. The first overreaction was the so-called neoliberal era that was ushered in after 1989. The victory over “real existing socialism,” as they called it in East Germany and elsewhere, plus globalization and digitalization, gave the free-market economy an ego boost. But that boost was distorting: Financial gains were increasingly shoveled upward, while the growing list of social risks were shoveled downward.
The Sept. 11 attacks were another distortion: Focused on the threat of terrorism, Western nations failed to see a bigger risk. As Kishore Mahbubani argues in his book “Has the West Lost It?” the most decisive event of 2001 was not the attacks, but China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. By essentially giving its imprimatur to Beijing’s unfair trade practices, the West destroyed the economic security that had undergirded its capitalist social contract.
Unrestrained capitalism was clearly not what the founders of the West German republic had in mind. “The capitalist economic system did not serve the interests of the German people,” the center-right Christian Democrats declared in 1947. That’s why West Germany was built on the idea of the social market economy — in German, the soziale Marktwirtschaft — in which individual competition was prized, but so was the obligation of the wealthy to help the worse off.
Today, though, the wealthiest are often those with the resources and skill to avoid taxes and ship jobs to China. Often they aren’t even German; Warren Buffett is a major investor in Berlin real estate. Seventy years ago, no one imagined such scenarios, and neither of Germany’s major parties has figured out to to adjust the social market economy to those new international realities.
As a result, some Germans, like Mr. Kühnert, react not with calls to fix these mistakes, but by condemning capitalism outright. What they fail to see is that socialism will not bring the change they seek. On the contrary, offering failed recipes from the past will only make it easier for the profiteers of unfettered capitalism to denounce them. Cousin Werner would have understood this all too well.
Jochen Bittner is a political editor for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and a contributing opinion writer.