Commons: Democratising Public Ownership

Prosperity: a fair share for all

No one starts with nothing. We all benefit from the work and achievements of the people around us. No roads, no Amazon. No teachers, no employees for VW. No agriculture, no Lieferando. We therefore believe that the wealth of individual companies is, to a large extent, based on social prosperity.

Our goal is for everyone, universally and unconditionally, to benefit from this prosperity. To this end, we want to introduce a European Universal Basic Dividend.

A European Universal Basic Dividend

We are committed to introducing a European Universal Basic Dividend. Such a basic dividend is the first step towards an unconditional basic income. It is paid out every year and allows all Europeans to benefit from Europe’s prosperity.

The basic dividend is paid out from a fund made up of assets, taxes on companies’ profits, and income from patents and other intellectual-property rights that are based on public funding.

Universal basic income

Everyone has the right to a dignified, free and participatory life. That is why we want a universal unconditional basic income that is not tied to any service in return and is paid to every citizen from the age of 16. A universal and unconditional basic income frees people from the tyranny of the labour market, abolishes the humiliation at the social-welfare office, and allows people to turn down exploitative employment, which is essential for a well-functioning labour market and a civilised society. An unconditional basic income secures socio-cultural participation and allows people to pursue important activities outside the labour market (experimenting in art & culture, studying, caring for others, and so on). The basic income does not replace other benefits (child benefit, health insurance, and so on), but is only one pillar of a fair social system. The level of the basic income should lie above the national at-risk-of-poverty threshold of 60 per cent of the national median net equivalised income, currently around 1,100 euros.

The financial system: breaking the power of the banks

Instead of promoting the common good, today’s financial system is above all a source of instability and insecurity. We want to reform it fundamentally. At its heart is banning unproductive, speculative financial products and prohibiting banks from speculative activities. Banking must become boring again.

Because banks can put new (commercial bank) money into circulation by granting loans, they hold enormous economic power. Their profit motive often prevents them from using this power for the common good. They take part in credit-driven price bubbles and finance deals and projects with a poor record on the common good. In the short term, we therefore want to tie lending more strongly to ecological and social criteria.

In parallel, we want to strengthen and expand public banks. Over the medium term, public banks, above all a European People’s Bank, should fully take over account management, payment processing, lending, property financing and saving options.

Establishing the European People’s Bank

To implement possible monetary-policy measures, such as a one-off helicopter-money payment or an inflation-adjusted retirement savings account, the ECB today has to take the detour via commercial banks. We want to increase the ECB’s flexibility and break the social, non-democratically-legitimated power of the big banks by advocating the establishment of a European People’s Bank funded 100 per cent by the EU states (practically implementable as a branch of the ECB), which would allow citizens to keep their money safely, and free of interest and charges, in a basic account with no overdraft. As a public competitor in the banking sector, the European People’s Bank would initially have no authority to grant loans, but would merely act as a provider of this basic account. The long-term goal of the European People’s Bank, in turn, is to expand its balance sheet to a large share of European monetary assets and ultimately to replace the private banking sector.

Introducing central bank digital money for private use

While banks and states settle their payments mainly with central bank digital money, the electronic form of cash, Europe’s citizens have to make do with commercial bank money (book money) created by commercial banks when they make a transfer or receive a digital payment. Book money is merely a promise of payment from the bank to its customers and is usually barely backed by real central bank money. We want central bank digital money, in the form of a digital euro, to become usable by Europe’s citizens and companies too. This should be achieved by automatically converting the deposits of all natural and legal persons who open an account with the European People’s Bank from book money into digital euros. Central bank money that commercial banks gain through transactions with the European People’s Bank may not, in turn, be used by them to expand book money. Payments with digital money must remain possible anonymously, for example via a prepaid money card.

Direct lending by public development banks

Over the medium term, we want to make it possible to grant loans without private banks as intermediaries. To this end, the development banks too should build up the capacity to assess and grant loans internally.

Criteria for corporate loans

Bank loans to companies that are not fully covered by equity should be steered by means of social and ecological criteria. The catalogue of criteria should be drawn up, and regularly updated, by a citizens’ council selected by lot at periodic intervals, and should define binding interest surcharges and exclusion criteria for loans that do not meet the criteria.

Guaranteeing responsible lending

To ensure responsible lending, loans that have been granted should not be allowed to be resold, but must remain on the bank’s balance sheet. We want to prohibit the buying and selling of credit default insurance. Financial assets such as shares should not be allowed to be accepted as collateral, because of their volatility.

Banning speculative business for private banks

Private banks should no longer be allowed to take part in speculative business, but should concentrate on granting loans. Trading in real estate, shares or financial products such as derivatives should be prohibited for them as a matter of principle.

Unbundling (international) banking

To ensure transparency and control, we want to prohibit banks from setting up subsidiaries or branches operating outside Europe. Existing subsidiaries and branches should, by a cut-off date, be integrated into the parent company or fully spun off. In the event of violations, the bank in question should have its licence revoked.

A debt brake for banks

To improve banks’ resilience and prevent them from becoming systemically important (“too big to fail”), we want to gradually raise the non-risk-weighted capital ratio (leverage ratio) to at least 10 per cent and to limit banks’ assets.

Capping overdraft interest

Overdraft interest is too high in Germany. To protect people from over-indebtedness, we want to cap it at a maximum of two percentage points above the central bank’s base rate.

Regulating shadow banks better

Financial-market actors outside the regulated banking sector, so-called shadow banks, must be better regulated. We want to prohibit funds from granting and taking out loans. We want to ban guaranteed buy-back values for securities.

A ceiling for BlackRock & Co

We want to limit the market power of asset managers such as BlackRock, in order to prevent monopolies and conflicts of interest and to enable competition. That is why we want to cap the amount of assets managed per company. We want to deny asset managers that exceed this limit access to German and European financial markets.

Curbing high-frequency trading

To curb unproductive high-frequency trading and speculation on the stock market, we argue for the introduction of a watertight Europe-wide financial transaction tax of 0.5 per cent on the sale of securities that have been in the seller’s possession for less than a year.

Preventing commodity speculation

We want to prevent speculation in commodities. To be allowed to take part in commodity trading, every actor should therefore have to prove that they have the necessary storage capacity for the commodities acquired.

Digital commons: public services and open standards

The infrastructure of the digital world is largely built on, and dependent on, the services of private-sector providers. Both the physical hardware, in the form of internet cables and connections, radio masts, cloud and data centres, and its software components, in the form of proprietary, data-extracting applications and programs, are largely the work and property of private IT companies. The digital market, with its characteristic of demanding high fixed costs and low marginal costs from the companies participating in it, favours the emergence of monopolies and oligopolies, with negative effects on pricing and privacy.

We understand the internet as part of an unconditional basic provision for citizens. This means the state must be active in the digital market. Our goal is to offer everyone a competitive public-sector IT-services offering.

By developing open standards and guidelines for the interoperability of online services, we also want to ensure that citizens have maximum control over their data and can switch smoothly between digital providers.

Providing internet for all

Germany is the land of mobile-signal dead zones. In both mobile coverage and data rates, Germany performs miserably by European and international standards, while mobile contracts are disproportionately expensive. The fixed-line internet connections based on DSL technology are outdated and obsolete. Rural areas are often not reached, or only poorly, because closing the gaps would not be profitable for private network operators. Our goal is therefore to bring the existing network infrastructure in Germany into common ownership, in order to guarantee all citizens, independently of the profit logic of the private sector, a free, wireless broadband internet basic service up to a certain data rate. We will push through a massive state programme to expand the fibre-optic network, so that we can ensure households and companies in Germany an internet offering appropriate to the 21st century.

Creating digital commons

Established IT companies often dominate the digital market with their products. This dominance, where it remains largely without competition in a particular area, is problematic not only from a competition standpoint, but also creates a network effect that makes it difficult for users to do without a given service. This can be changed by the state appearing on the digital market as a service provider with its own open-source public alternatives (digital commons). We call for public alternatives in the areas of instant messaging, internet-based video telephony, internet search engines, and the cloud storage and retrieval of image and video content.

Enabling data aggregation for the common good

We are committed to providing all citizens, on a voluntary opt-in basis, with a free data allowance in a publicly operated cloud store (data commons). The data stored in this way can be analysed algorithmically in anonymised form by licensees and the public administration, in order to optimise management processes.

Establishing standards for interacting with websites

We want to establish technical and legal standards that guarantee certain qualities for interacting with social-media platforms and other websites. Clear guidelines should prevent “dark patterns” such as hiding costs or the unnecessary passing-on of user data, or at least make them unattractive for companies. Users must be able to consent explicitly to how their data may be handled. Companies must not pursue an “all or nothing” approach by making valuable services available only if unattractive, non-essential conditions are accepted as well.

Enabling secure communication between platforms

We want to promote the interoperability of private platforms and online services. For a user of one messaging service, it should be possible, for example, to send a message to a user of another messaging service, similar to the way sending a text message between different telephone providers is possible. We will work with the providers of such services to define technical standards that enable communication between the services of different companies while protecting users’ privacy.

Temporary access to personal data

We want users to have maximum control over their personal data. Users should be able to interact with online platforms without handing over their data to them permanently. That means that when a user does not currently use a platform, or generally no longer uses it, the company may not use the data and must delete it.

Storing personal data in a decentralised or local way

Companies may only store data for as long as necessary and must otherwise support some form of decentralised data storage. Users should be able to store personal data locally, that is, on their home computer or a server of their choosing. Decentralised storage can also take place via “data commons”, that is, through a publicly accessible database. This decentralisation will allow users to switch between platforms without losing their previously stored data.

Education policy: the youth who carry the future

Education shapes people. The essential purpose of this process is often understood to be people who are able to find their way in (working) life and to hold their own in the (labour) market. Education, however, can and should contain more: people who do not merely get by in the world, but are willing and able to actively help shape it. People who grasp connections and meet the reality of which they are part with intrinsic interest. Education means imparting potential, and perspectives for using it in many ways.

For this, fair and discrimination-free education is essential. We want to keep examining whether forms of discrimination exist, how they manifest, and what effective counter-measures should be proposed. We want to minimise the dependence of educational success on factors of social background. Accordingly, educational justice should be addressed proactively in schools, the education system and society. We want to promote inclusion and, where necessary, expand it.

Beyond this, we think of education as a lifelong project that does not end with the highest qualification. It should not be thought of only in relation to young people, but also concerns adults. It must be continually examined whether and why people are excluded or “left behind” when they have “missed” certain educational thresholds. We are therefore committed to strengthening adult education and to society-wide support for literacy and basic numeracy and science education.

We want to break down educational barriers and disparities. We are striving for uniform educational standards and the widespread recognition of qualifications: within Germany and, in time, across Europe. Education must take place in global exchange, in keeping with the guiding idea of “teaching and learning from one another”.

We are committed to critically evaluating and redesigning existing educational structures from these standpoints. The incentive and goal here is what the Dresden artists’ group Die Brücke put as follows: the “belief in development, in a new generation of creators and of those who enjoy, (…) as the youth who carry the future!”

Comprehensive provision of all-day schools

We want to create comprehensive provision of all-day schools (including meals), because children should have the opportunity to be looked after regardless of their family situation. School education must be open to all.

Promoting alternative schools and educational research

We tend to want to promote and support alternative forms of schooling, but also to regulate them appropriately. The same applies to educational research: we want to investigate which insights can be derived from alternative school concepts and integrated into the mainstream school system.

Free education and training

Education and vocational training must be entirely free of charge. This includes abolishing the “tuition fees” that are common in some training professions. We want to critically evaluate and, where appropriate, reform the existing public education funding and the BAföG (student-support scheme), in order to give everyone educational opportunities and a free choice of educational path.

Strengthening adult education

Especially in the context of digitalisation, we want to expand further-education and coaching programmes for all age groups and make them easily accessible. As the basis of so-called “lifelong learning”, we are committed to promoting new and alternative approaches to fostering self-directed and autonomous learning. We want to orient school education towards imparting not only knowledge and skills, but also the ability to acquire them later.

Networking educational institutions across Europe

We want to promote networking and exchange between different educational institutions and structures. This applies within Germany, at the European level and, in time, globally too. We want to evaluate existing offerings and, where appropriate, expand them or rethink them.

Expanding European exchange

We are committed to a universal Erasmus programme and an improvement of the European Youth Guarantee programme. Through a European apprenticeship agreement and the strengthening of the European Teaching Corps, we want to promote the European exchange of teachers. We also want to develop the “Structured Youth Dialogue” (engage, connect, empower) further. Outside school, we want to support regional and supra-regional youth associations and club work and, in addition to the classic student exchange, also promote travel programmes such as those offered by, for example, the Franco-German Society and the German War Graves Commission.

Rethinking early selection by performance

We want to critically rethink and, where appropriate, reform the current system of early selection by performance at the transition between school types. In particular, we want to study and promote the concepts of the (integrated and cooperative) comprehensive school intensively.

Open education across borders

In the 21st century, the task is to overcome educational federalism as well as national preferences and borders. In doing so, the individual strengths of the German education system should be carried outward as a model, while at the same time establishing room for an honest culture of learning from mistakes. “National pride” and fear of change must not stand in the way of innovation, collaboration and cooperative learning. We want a strong, independent, European educational research and we call for the abolition of the cooperation ban. We also want to ensure that teaching materials are made available to everyone under a Creative Commons licence, in order to guarantee open education for all, regardless of income.

Improving the recognition of qualifications

In the course of mutual recognition of qualifications, we are committed to an open-ended and unbiased investigation of the real hurdles. This should cover not only differences between the various federal states, but also the artificial hierarchisation of qualifications that currently takes place between general-education and subject- or vocationally-oriented educational institutions. Not least, this is intended to advance effective freedom of movement and the exchange of skilled workers.

Orienting educational content more globally

Education should help to foster a humanistic and internationalist perspective. This includes, alongside the critical examination of historical knowledge, questioning historically conditioned prejudices and historically grown conceptions such as the nation or gender. We are committed to establishing more critical perspectives in school history teaching and, for example, to questioning and historically illuminating entrenched power structures such as patriarchy, imperialism and colonialism. There must also be the opportunity to engage with regional and family history, including critically. In addition, a global view of history must take place. Here, as far as possible, a Eurocentric bias must be overcome in assessing historical importance. For example, alongside the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution should also be considered. Recent and very recent history, in particular, must be examined internationally, in order to make continuities in imperialism and colonialism more visible.

For a living culture of remembrance

We are committed to German history being critically addressed and worked through in education, research and the media. Educational and research institutions should accordingly be supported in this task, including financially. We consider an intensive and critical engagement, both within the discipline of history and across society as a whole, with topics including colonialism, imperialism, the German Empire and the First World War, to be necessary. We see a particular need in engaging with German fascism and the Second World War, the war crimes of the Wehrmacht and other German paramilitary groups, the Shoah, the Porajmos, and the persecution and murder of LGBTQIA+ people, of political opponents, of people with disabilities and of other minorities. The post-war history of both German states must be examined and critically questioned, with the SED dictatorship deserving particular attention. At the same time, however, we also call for a critical engagement with West German post-war history, in particular with the continuity of German fascism.

Towards a holistic understanding of education

Education should impart more than just knowledge: life skills. We therefore want to drive forward a discussion of the economic-and-social canon of know-how versus individualised personal development. We think that school and education should address, foster and make the best possible use, for teaching, of the broad spectrum of knowledge and interests of young people. In doing so, we want to bring more attention to benefits that are not directly quantifiable. Numerous studies prove the relevance of music, sport and reading fiction to health, resilience, “well-being”, creativity and media and news literacy. We want to give such factors more weight.

In the school system, fostering individual abilities and resources should also go hand in hand with a move away from purely objective standards of assessment. In addition, we stand for practical relevance and exploratory learning. Corresponding approaches could be a more practical teacher training and cross-subject learning. Alongside labour-market-oriented expertise, as reflected by existing school subjects, manual and home-craft skills or other abilities for coping with everyday life should be recognised as educational tasks and taken into account in both school and out-of-school learning settings. Added to this are skills such as critical self-assessment, time management and finding meaning. We want to discuss and introduce topics such as happiness, sustainability and media literacy as school subjects.

The continually changing structures of life in the 21st century require an education system that can respond flexibly to these changes, and that imparts flexibly applicable skills. To enable design thinking, project-based thinking, independent goal-setting or further, as yet unforeseeable demands, a broadly based personal development is essential. Individual flexibility is here explicitly not understood in the liberal sense of constant professional reorientation, but rather as Francisco Ferrer expressed his ideal: “We want to create people whose greatest strength is their intellectual independence; who submit to nothing and no one and are capable of recognising the good; who strive to live a thousand lives in a single one.”

Thinking society and school together

Education is a central task of society. School is an important institution of education. We want to address, research and continually develop, in contemporary ways, the interactions between society and education as a whole. We want to establish and maintain out-of-school learning settings: swimming pools, libraries and clubs, for example, are indispensable. (Municipal) infrastructure and education are closely interwoven. Expanding the former means promoting the latter.

Media are a means of education

Across society as a whole, the media, alongside schools, have the greatest social influence on the processes by which knowledge is acquired and attitudes and outlooks are established. We stand for giving researchers and educators more space in the media to present relevant content, and for subjecting public-service channels not only to journalistic but equally to educational standards. At the same time, the independence of educational actors should be strengthened, specifically that of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, for instance.

Diverse economic theories in universities

Most universities teach only a very incomplete and, in parts, incorrect view of economics. We are committed to a fundamental reform of economics degree programmes. Students should get to know the full diversity of economic theories and learn to understand and critically reflect on the history of economics.

Ensuring better inclusion

To ensure better integration into everyday school life for children and people who do not speak German as their mother tongue, we want to end the pressure to integrate these children into the curriculum as quickly as possible. Instead, we want to focus on individual difficulties and progress. To this end, we want to train more special-needs and specialist educators.

Culture & art: for more spaces of freedom

As a self-reflective human practice, culture & art are a basic need and are indispensable for an open, democratic society. They offer the sphere in which the intellectual nourishment is prepared that gives critical, visionary, present- and future-oriented thinking a unique space. We therefore want to support their practice and make access to culture and art easier.

We are committed to culturally diverse spaces that are at the same time spaces of freedom, whose edges are understood as a flowing transition from one to the next, which do not merely separate but, as tension-filled in-between spaces, above all connect. They are intricately interwoven, filled with a vitality that comes to bear in every conceivable artistic form of expression, which in this way contribute considerably to social cohesion and to peaceful coexistence.

Supporting arts education

We want to ensure arts education at general-education schools and anchor it firmly in the canon of subjects. We want to provide art and music schools with better funding. Through support projects, we want to ensure that arts education is open to all.

Expanding support holistically

In the context of arts education and beyond, we explicitly stand for a holistic understanding of art and culture that does not only encompass forms of art and expression that can be objectively assessed or easily consumed and exploited. Accordingly, we want to recognise and support, to a greater extent, music, theatre and acting, painting, dance, sculpture and image editing, writing, poetry, performance, installation, (video) game development, film and photography in the most varied forms. The funding, which is oriented towards qualitative criteria but never towards content-related requirements, should be neutral and unconditional and take place without interfering with the freedom of the arts.

Cultural exchange in mutual respect

We reject a foreign cultural policy, let alone a cultural imperialism. Instead, we want to promote a cultural exchange in mutual respect that serves the peace and freedom of all people. In doing so, we particularly support translations of cultural works, in order to make them accessible to more people.

Tackling structural discrimination

We want to give particular support to groups that are structurally disadvantaged in art and culture. By means of a quota, we want to ensure that leadership positions in art and cultural institutions are filled in a balanced way. We want to counter sexual and other discrimination with awareness-raising courses.

Democratising cultural institutions

We face the enormous task and challenge of advancing the democratisation of important areas of life. Artists and cultural workers can lead the way down this path. We want to make decision-making processes in cultural institutions more participatory, in areas such as curation or the budget, in order to involve citizens in the day-to-day running of these institutions. We want to give additional financial support to institutions that organise themselves according to collective, democratic principles.

Ending exploitation

We want to end the (self-)exploitative conditions when it comes to working conditions and pay. To this end, we want to significantly increase funding for art and culture and to better monitor working conditions. We want to guarantee all artists and cultural workers, including those without institutional affiliation, access to the social-security systems.

Art into public collections

We regard art as a commons and view exclusive private ownership critically. Where possible, we therefore want to take art into public collections, with the aim of making it accessible to a broad public.

Returning colonial loot

We want to fully return colonial loot. In doing so, we want to reverse the removal of intellectual, cultural, religious and spiritual property that was taken from the countries of origin. There is a claim to the return of the looted art objects that were taken during almost 500 years of constant, violent colonialism.

Expanding European art and cultural funding

We want to promote and expand border-crossing art and cultural projects such as the EU’s European Capital of Culture programme and the nomadic Manifesta biennial, in and outside Europe. We regard increased cultural exchange as a way to develop a global culture of peace.