Like any other successful capitalist society, Germany sports some of the highest inequality rates in the world (according to the Gini Inequality researchers Julia Friedrichs and Jochen Breyer have also made a documentary for the German ZDF channel – sadly it is not yet available on English translation, but I felt it was important to post about it here to complete the last series of dedicated posts. Currently, as of 2023, Germany has 237 billionaires (China has 969 and US has 691 resident billionaires). This is a really insightful look into the special tax counseling the rich get. A majority of the secretive richie rich refused to be interviewed but a few accepted – so Jochen Breyer goes on their private jets and yachts to get their opinion on several key issues. So even if the others seem especially camera shy, we still get to meet Hans-Peter Wild (majority holder in Wild Flavors – maker of Capri Sun and leading manufacturer of so-called natural flavors for the food industry) and one of the richest people in Switzerland (he left Germany long ago for the Swiss tax and banking heaven). Billionaires are also a highly volatile transnational bunch, so in order to satisfy their tax phobia, states or rather their governments are constantly lowering taxation and establishing special Economic Zones beyond the purview of democratic regulatory means of control. They also exert incredible influence on policy for a so-called social market state that prides itself on its social welfare programs and democratic values.
“When it comes to monitoring elite wealth, the sources are much scarcer. Forbes magazine counted 117 individual German billionaires in 2023. But since large wealth is organized in family holdings, it is more meaningful, as Germany’s Manager Magazine does, to count billion-euro “fortunes” (Vermoegen). The Magazine in 2023 counted 226 such fortunes. The list, however, is clearly incomplete. And the magazine has acknowledged that it has been subject to behind-the-scenes legal pressure to omit several notable families.
We know this startling fact thanks to a new surge of public interest in inequality in Germany. German activists are beginning to flex their muscles and unlock the power of expose and muck-raking. Websites like ungleichheit.info do a great job telling the dramatic story of inequality.”
The two richest German families own more wealth than the bottom half of the German population.
And if the data is to be believed, by the 2010s German wealth-holding was more concentrated than in any other European society (!!). In terms of the gini coefficient (Gini ratio= a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent income inequality, the wealth inequality, or the consumption inequality), Germany is closer to the US (wealth gini 0.81-0.86), than other European countries like France and Italy who have a gini closer to ex-socialist countries like Czech Republic or Poland.
“The Hanns-Joachim-Friedrichs-Award winning documentary film The Silence of the Quandts by the German public broadcaster ARD described in October 2007 the role of the Quandt family businesses during the Second World War.” (IMDB)
Suffice it to say the family is among the richest in the world and certainly in Germany. Its members were leading German industrialists, specifically Günther Quandt (1881–1954), a German industrialist, who founded an industrial empire that includes BMW andAltana, Harald Quandt (1921–1967), German industrialist, stepson of Joseph Goebbels, and Herbert Quandt (1910–1982), German industrialist, regarded as having saved the BMW firm plus made huge profit afterward. Germany’s role in the world economy was intimately linked to the way it was considered politically expedient to build a strong Germany after the war. One should not single out families and interest groups which is why I find it important to offer a structural analysis whenever possible of the conditions that lead to such close collaborations within the capitalist world system. Important to understand how the car industry (till the energy transition) was not only involved in war crimes but also worked hand in hand with Big Oil, there are no conflicting interests there, and were responsible for the historical emissions that have made our world hotter than in the last 100.000 years.
There is not much on the EN wiki page of this documentary and it is a pity. Somebody uploaded it to YouTube in 6 parts, and while the movie is freely available in German, I could not find any EN full version. Maybe nothing is really surprising and if we think about the pollution scandals that have rocked the German car industry, especially the Volkswagen defeat devices – their dark NS history does not come as a surprise. It seems to have been ripped of the ARTE channel. Anyway, I am thankful to the uploader. There is much to learn here – especially how the chief industrialists wanted to build the battery industry in Europe on the back of slave labor from concentration camps. Whenever driving a BMW one should always keep this documentary in mind.
What’s with Europe’s ultra-wealthy high-spending fossil fossil-burning elite, beyond the Arab sheikhs and crazy nouveau-rich Asians?
This DW (Deutsche Welle) documentary in English is one of several documentaries and reports being commissioned by very mainstream German media channels (ZDF, DW, ARD etc). Since a few years, the discussion about growing inequality in Germany (or what is termed “inequality studies” in Picketty’s famous update). We enter a world of unwanted and expensive gifts given by the German ultra-rich to their communities or small towns were they live a life of anonymity and how refusing such gifts is becoming harder and harder.
This is also the murky world of “taxation designing”, of Steuern Gestalten basically a German term or euphemism for the high payed fiscal professionals and legal eagles who sometimes work for the government (finance ministry) AND also give advice to the super-rich oligarchs on how to legally avoid taxation in their own respective countries (if they didn’t already leave for the fiscal paradise of Switzerland). As always the best analysis of how the rich keep getting richer in Germany (and elsewhere) – in one of Adam Tooze’s last substack posts (highly recommended!).
While we are all aware and fulminate about the outrageous antics of Russian, Ukrainian (or say Romanian) or US billionaire for that matter – plutocrats, the German super-rich are a shifty lot. They actually stay out of the limelight and are much more elusive – even paying (or suing) to be taken off the lists of the global super-rich. Several of the richest family fortunes (do not get any illusions it is all a family business) owning chains such as Kaufland, Lidl or container shipping liners such as Hapag-Llyod in Germany do not appear listed in the annual who’s who of largest profits and incomes. When education or state services seem less and less reliable – charity capitalism is stepping in, but there are many tie-ins. Not to mention the silence and implications of such foundations with their nazi past (check out Nazi Billionaires 2022 book).
What we still have to learn today is that we cannot trust or employ the super-rich to save the planet (it is more the other way around, saving the planet from them and their private jets), what is less clear is that the Social Market Economy (Ordoliberalism) has been consistently enriching them during the last years, while the vast majority of Germans scrapes by a living from day to day, and the number of homeless people in Germany has doubled the last year.
What better counterpart to a decade where the rich won (2020s) and quantitative easting (short QE) seems to rule them all than to watch a documentary on how it all began. And also to understand what bugged free market libertarians like Milton Friedman’s than to watch the documentary that ‘triggered’ his response. Today we speak of ‘triggering’ in terms of what right wing is good at (Fox News etc) – and how easy it is to push their critics into ridiculous postures and very predictable behaviors, basically in what became a Pavlovian show. Who is going to make his opponent react in a knee-jerk way? And even better, who will make the other adopt one’s own tactics and meme first?
Well, before all that, we can place these two documentary series. Both very personal, with two key players. Big influencers supr in terms of statal policies and ideas. Do not get me wrong, these documentaries are about one of the most hated subjects around: economics (prove eme wrong!). Who does not hate the history of economics or the principal ideas deriving from that? A majority seems to suffer and endure under economicsl hardships even if money amd investment or financial system seem tok haunt us. What os a recession, what causes it, what are the class politics behind austerity measures? Who gets tok pay for inflation?
Maybe this will also answer some of the curiosities and questions regarding the 1970s when the great Golden Age of Capitalism in the West came to an end after a series of shocks. Several counter-measures culminating with the switch from liberal democracies where Big Government Keynesianism (both left or later on right-wing brands of Keysianism) finally gave way to the Austro-libertarian school of Economics represented by Friedman and the Chicago boys. While some may feel emboldened to say that today in the midst of the polycrisis we have a Keynesian moment coming around and neoliberalism is on the wane, I would rather say (with Quinn Slobodian and others in mind) that neoliberalism has mutated itself in the time of decoupling, de-risking and ethnopolitics. Maybe it is capitalism as usual – an upside down world that cannot get the right side up and will only get more lopsided.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was perhaps one of the most interesting characters and appreciated social scientists of his time. There are echoes of Galbraith everywhere today, even in his admonishment of militaristic Keynesianism where the military-industrial-entertainment complex simplex in Washington begins to use all the levers of power to transform its Big Tech into a national asset amd industrial policy. Frmerly free-trade radicals feeding on nationalism start to recast themselves as anti-Chinese US stalwarts. All this is put into stark contrast by a new generation of Keynesian economists (Gabriela Gabor and Isabella Weber come to mind). Forgotten lessons seems valid again. To prevent inflation after WWII JK Galbraith was recommending strategic price controls (anathema to the free market radicals!)
As John Kenneth Galbraith explained “the role of price controls” would be “strategic.” “No more than the economist ever supposed will it stop inflation” … “But it both establishes the base and gains the time for the measures that do.” 4/
John Kenneth Galbraith is a representative of classical liberalism that also enjoyed tremendous influence & honed his skills & experience being active at the center of the US establishment. He was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. He also had relations to the Global South – being an ambassador to India (the biggest democracy on Earth) during the JFK administration. At the same time, he was red-baited by his opponents and considered by conservative think tanks the man who “made socialism mainstream“. So when he is saying that the powerful US Farmer lobby is still hailing back to the physiocrat thinkers in France, he knows what he is saying from direct experience. He pokes fun at everybody, especially at the privileged members of the ‘leisure class’. He does not miss an opportunity to constantly question the very thinkers he mentions according to their own principles or tax them when they employ theories or easy justifications in their own favor.
Yeah it looks oldskool and peak boomer in a way, at the same time all episode 1 The Prophets and Promise of Classical Capitalism is a tremendous effort to stage the history or economic ideas, the larger background, or the assumptionsof behind it all, including all the major thinkers. The stage is set by unsettling the stage – in a Brechtian manner, all the illusionist art, all the stagecraft, and the scaffolding of history is shown to be a BBC studio. He quotes John Maynard Keynes(Galbraith himself is regarded as a post-Keynesian) at the very beginning:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
What can be blander than pretending to be free of any influence or any previous antecedent thinker or just acting according to practical reason, bootstrapping yourself? Then we risk like Kant’s dove to think that we can fly faster and more frictionless if we would prefer a vacuum instead. Yet this vacuum strikes back. Many intellectuals prefer to ignore schools of thought that have spawned the economics and politics that they prefer to think is the result of practical decisions & spontaneity. On the other end, you have professional economists being absolutely adamant that you have to stick with what works. They are eminently disinterested and ignorant of the history of their trade. Well, then maybe that is why we need historians of the economy.
Other than most Galbraith recovers those very fragments from the texts cherished economists that are not usually quoted or followed. This makes us see how fragmentary and prejudiced our reading of them is. The ideas and abstractions he visits are constantly pulled from their pedestal – with historical examples that seem to show the way they were misused. If he gets us to visit Adam Smith and the writing of the Wealth of Nations, at the same time notices that Smith in his self-interest and critique of tenured academics have also chosen private tutoring as a more profitable income over his university career. Eps 1 is a journey through the Scottish Enlightenment and Smith’s friendship with philosopher David Hume who woke Kant fromhis dogmatic slumber! Galbraith stops at French markets to talk about the theories of the French physiocrats or observe that not even Smith’s disdain could make us dismiss the Tableau économique of Quesnay sonde the input-output analysis later developed by Russian economist Wassily Leontieff (1905-1999) or the planned economy of the Soviet Union is a direct descendent of that very table. Principles such as laissez-faire and free trade are paraded, while the importance of the division of laborgets exemplified with the help of a pin-making process.
David Ricardo (1772 – 1823) advanced a Labor Theory of Value that was also going to have a long history ahead. In this climate of the British Empire, you had the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution and the experiments in social responsibility atNew Lanark cotton mills in Scotland established by industrialist David Dale. Capitalist charity (which was not charity at all), since children and women became the first recruits and disciplined workers of the new era, worked just 1h less than in the other mills. Socialist Utopian experiments in collective living such as New Harmony, Indiana established by Robert Owen also get mentioned – an episode that rests in my heart because of Marguerite Young’s magnificent literary rendition of that in An Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (1945).
Early eviction and land-grabbing in the name of ‘agricultural improvement’ also get staged under the Highlander Clearances, where Scottish tenants were pushed out of homes to make room for more profitable (and aesthetically pleasing) sheep. The Irish Famine – and its Malthusian instrumentalization by the British State, as well as the migratory working class trails across the Atlantic, are important references. For Galbraith, it is also an example of how easy it is to abstract from the misery of others and decide to ignore their plight when one life and calculates remotely at a safe distance from their troubles. Or ordering bombs to drop on unknown others from above. The Irish had to pay with their lives and with their wheat to the landlords while the Corn Laws blocked the import of cheap corn. The Hamlet of Marie Antoinette that somehow modeled pastoral life of the education of princely offspring also gets mentioned.
Eps 2 Manner and Morals of High Capitalism – makes pretty obvious how Social Darwinism became the secular religion of the rich industrialists and robber barons (today’s oligarchs and Big Tech billionaires) of the Gilded Age. Put simply Social Darwinists embraced both racism and laissez-faire capitalism. The survival of the fittest dogma fitted their own socially privileged positions and even if they were not biologists, they used a biological language and twisted Darwin’s idea of natural selection to position themselves as the finest and most adaptable representatives of the species. The popularity of Herbert Spencer in the US is proportionate with the amount of capital accumulation and ruthlessness of the American ruling class. Carnegie and Rockefeller become thus prime representatives of this ideological thinking. Galbraith presents a bizarre series of such US apostles of Darwinism that were sometimes even predecessors of the pro-capitalist Prosperity Gospel. One of them is laissez-faire advocate and clergyman William Graham Sumner. Galbraith also illustrates the thin line separating the capitalist from the criminal, the hoodlum and rascal in the 19th century by recounting in detail the Eerie War – a bloody conflict between US financiers to control the Eerie Railway Company in an effort to corner the market. This is not very far from the current crypto kings. Galbraith also remarks something interesting – that the poor have always been a preferred subject of sociological research, with investigators going to the slums to study their existence, mores and sexual life, while the rich have not attracted this selfsame attention at the time. That was to be the task of Thorstein Veblen -that did exactly some reverse safari on them, depicting the rich as no more than Big Man, and explaining their luxurious living and excess in terms that are still familiar to us today: conspicuous consumption (think Trump, think Berlusconi, space billionaires and basically every other fat cat). There’s one of the most sympathetic views of Marx and that chapter also makes it even more clear than the internecine wars of western liberalism would make neoliberalism or even current secessionist anarcho-capitalists completly at odds with what went on for much of the post war period in the western world. There’s a lot to be desired in the series perhaps none more than the chapter on colonialism – and the anti colonial, transatlantic slavery trade, and all the current struggles and long shadow of colonialism that still ontinues to this day.
“The director films the street where he lives in St. Petersburg, for a whole year, documenting the changes caused by the celebration of its 300th anniversary.”
I have discovered the work of Russian director Viktor Kosakovskiy and hope to see many of his other features. This one was recommended a while ago by a friend in Germany and never managed to watch it till now. He is indeed one of the most accomplished documentarists alive. It is also based on the writings of E T A Hoffman who is credited on the imdb page. He made an elemental journey Aquarela into the world of high seas, of stormy oceans, huge immense city-sized icebergs crashing or the delicate and intimate lives of countryside animals such as pigs and chickens in Gunda.
A Trip to Infinity is a new 2022 documentary film directed by Jonathan Halperin and Drew Takahashi, in their feature-length debut, which explores the concept of infinity through interviews with mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers around the world. (wiki)
God how I hated math in high school! What we all missed was this hallucinatory trip across various infinities (some larger than others) not the bad infinities of boring long ours. It is an invitation to getting pleasurably mindfucked by some of the most interesting physicists (including Carlo Rovelli) and thinkers around (talking heads) around while they get probed with silly questions by the documentary makers. Forget about daily troubles, let us discuss the bizarre and important implications and paradoxical outcomes of encountering endless numbers!
I appreciate how animation has come fully into its own with this documentary. Maths and geometry and all that are all good and fine on a piece a paper, not to mention calculus have to get out, start moving, swirling. High-level abstractions are not made for our heads and animations can give them life, make these realities tangible using all sorts of time-worn techniques from the entire history of animation. This documentary is truly the work of several studios and knowingly uses techniques ranging from stop motion, ahand-drawn paper cutout animations to motion graphics, CGI, animated medieval manuscript drawings, and even retro vintage-looking (Fleischer Bros) examples (such as the Infinite Room Hotel sequence).
It is a wonder and pleasure to watch it just to see how these various sequences work out seamlessly, all part of a larger circumference. It is also one of those rare science documentaries that go beyond the limits of current science and dabble into the metaphysical. Not only that, but such documentaries make us well aware that even if science does not have all the answers, it will not stop. We are likely to be more akin to the cat in the cartoon, trying to teach ourselves quantum mechanics under the auspices of human (or cat) finitude. A trip to Infinity makes us become more aware perhaps of what is going beyond the limits of any scientific theory or how imagination tries to come to the rescue when the experiment is not just too expensive, but totally beyond anyone’s reach.
Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone (subtitled in promotional media as What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy) is a seven-part BBC documentary television series created by Adam Curtis. It was released on BBC iPlayer on 13 October 2022. Using stock footage shot by the BBC, the series chronicles the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of capitalist Russia and its oligarchs, and the effects of this on Russian people of all levels of society, leading to the rise to power of Vladimir Putin. (wiki)
I have written elsewhere about Adam Curtis and while I definitely do not dig his “God” perspective, his overbearing voice, his simplifications, and his political position, I think it is an important documentary in the light of what has happened in the East after 1989. This is not to mean that it justifies in any way the destruction and the crimes committed in Ukraine by Russian troops at the present time or the neo-imperialism at stake. But it is important to realize that the West needs some Eastplaining since it cannot fully comprehend what it means that a world has collapsed. A world good and bad, a world certainly repressive and certainly lacking Western consumer goods, but with an aftermath that can not as easily be forgotten. What happened in the wake of this imminent collapse, as we have seen (like in other places such as South America) was full-on privatization that came undemocratically, imposed from above and more or less at the point of a gun. The rise of the mafia state, under extreme free market rule was a bounty for kleptocratic leadership. These are far from isolated phenomena that happened at the margins of the capitalist core. The best example is probably the so-called Wirecard Skandal – a German e-commerce firm whose massive level of fraud and market manipulation is a clear example of what went on during the last 30 years of financialization.
The collapse of the URSS has coincided with the collapse of supply chains, the destruction of the medical safety nets, of reduced and ailing educational and social welfare systems, and the immiseration of a great majority while the demand was now for the building markets and transforming overnight everyone into a hustling entrepreneur and rapid siphoning of funds abroad into bank account safety or feeding into financial markets speculation. One has to see this in parallel with Clinton’s administration opening up the floodgates of speculation and financial deregulation that even today affects us all.
I think that Jeffrey Sach’s career and change of mind after being called in as economic advisor to the Russian state during Eltsin is also telling. Russia and Moscow was welcome into the fold of global capitalism, and it important it has profited as much as financial centers such as London have profited from it. Russian companies were very welcome till recently and they had mixed ownerships, behind tied with foreign Western interests. Oligarchs were sponsoring private schools in the UK, and till the recent sudden superficial boycott, they were quite welcome in The City (especially London the money laundering capital of the world where a majority of the offshore firms are registered).
TimeSpace Warps 