Crumbling stock market rates, collapsing banks. And the USA are with over 11 trillion Euros in debt. A chance for a new beginning under socialist sign – says Sahra Wagenknecht of the Left. In a stern.de interview she demands a more human economic system – and wants to tax the rich.


Ms. Wagenknecht, in New York, Frankfurt and elsewhere, the stock market rates plummet. Do you experience something like a secret joy about that?


You can't experience joy already for the simple reason that the crisis is paid for ultimately by the taxpayer. It is no solution after all that we buy their scrap papers from the banks. That also applies to Germany, where the private bank IKB was kept from bankruptcy by 10 billions in tax money.

Is it not also a crisis of capitalism?

It is more than a financial market crisis. What is failing here is a basic model. The USA for decades have pushed wages downward, in a similarly brutal way as happens these days in Germany. Normally, something like that would destroy the domestic market, but the USA kept up their consumption by replacing wages by debts. As long as nothing changes to this perverse income distribution, the problem is simply postponed. The current intervention by the US government costs 700 billion Dollars. That is financed mainly by new debts. That way the credit bubble gets ever bigger.

In Germany, debts are usually eliminated by saving after all.

Debts can also be cancelled by raising taxes from those, where money is accumulating. The dividend and speculation craze of the last years has clear profiteers after all. How about, for instance, a tax on millionaires that would charge private incomes of over one 1 million Euros by 5 percent. That could bring the state budget in Germany 150 billions annually, and only the upper 10,000 would pay.

(German finance minister) Peer Steinbrück in his inaugural speech talked about a failure of the US government. Did not – if at all – all governments of the big industrial nations fail?

Of course, they all failed. It is quite cheap that Peer Steinbrück now wants to pass
the whole blame to the US. By way of its legislation, the German federal government has also pushed ahead financial market liberalisation, legalised hedge-funds and explicitly supported trade with guaranteed credits. That way the red carpet was rolled out for the financial gamblers.

What needs to happen now?

We need to re-regulate the financial market. All the dubious derivatives and the guaranteeing of credit risks must be prohibited. Hedge-funds the same way. Their wild financial bets are extremely dangerous. Capital traffic must be controlled again. Yet, what is just as crucial: we need a new distribution of income. And that requires a different economic order, where people are more important than yield percentages.

How should this redistribution happen?

By way of the reconstruction of the social net. One first consequence must be: Hartz IV has to go. Moreover, the whole privatisation craze needs to be retracted. At least in core sectors of the economy, we need public property.

After all, capitalism is in crisis: why does nobody at the moment call for social alternatives?

There are after all more and more people who want alternatives. A majority today refuses privatisations. Or take the VW law. Thousands of workers demonstrate, because they know that by way of this law also the last bit of public influence will be eliminated, and they then will be exposed without any defence to a shareholder value philosophy that will fire and close without restraint if the maximum profit is not correct.