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This article and some of the comments suffers from a misunderstanding about the German court system. The court did not rule anything unconstitutional - it only
by hnbad 1y ago
This article and some of the comments suffers from a misunderstanding about the German court system. The court did not rule anything unconstitutional - it only declared it as such in its ruling about the specific case. The decision can be appealed and does not set precedent the way it works in common law systems like in the US. Only the constitutional court could rule Marxism unconstitutional and it hasn't done so in the past and is unlikely to do so in the future.
The argument is also extremely dodgy, at least the way it is being presented here. The court seemingly argues that whether or not Marxism necessarily requires a violent overthrow of the government is irrelevant because the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would be an undemocratic rule to the exclusion of a demographic group (presumably capitalists) but this is paper thin.
Communism would abolish "capitalists" as a concept, not as a demographic group. It's more like the abolition of chattel slavery - it simply stopped providing a legal mechanism to be a slave owner, it didn't "discriminate against slave owners" because that was no longer a thing you could meaningfully be (or at least not more than "human trafficker").
The German constitution does not actually establish capitalism as integral to the "liberal democratic order". It's true that it includes protections of "private property" but it also contains a hierarchy of interests that allows for private property to be socialized for the benefit of the public and ultimately yields to "human dignity" above all else. It does not give special protections to capital and certainly not exceeding those offered to humans (regardless of citizenship or residence by the way - this is why German "sex tourism" abroad is still subject to concerns in Germany like the age of consent, and consent in general).
It's also worth mentioning that the constitutional court has previously ruled that some aspects of the constitution including special protections can be informed by changing cultural attitudes. Specifically this was used to argue in favor of same-sex relationships being included in protections of "family" - a change that certain conservatives also saw as a breakdown of the "public order".