27.11.2014
Trampling over red lines
The appointment of Die Linke’s first regional prime minister will mark a ‘historic’ day for the establishment, says Tina Becker. Left Unity should urgently learn the lessons
December 5 will be a “historic” day in Germany, as the BBC quite rightly reports. For the first time, a member of Die Linke (Left Party) will become prime minister of one of the 16 regional states. Bodo Ramelow, chairman of the party’s fraction in the East German state parliament in Thüringen, will head a ‘red-red-green’ coalition with the Greens and the Social Democrats (SPD). It is unlikely that the forthcoming membership ballots in Die Linke and the Greens will derail the coalition at this stage. Last week, 70% of SPD members in Thüringen voted for the coalition talks.
Still, both chancellor Angela Merkel and president Joachim Gauck have gone to great lengths to condemn the coalition. No surprise there: should this government ‘succeed’ (ie, play by capitalism’s rules and not burst apart within the first few years), something similar could happen on a national scale following the next general election in 2017. Despite the fact that the rightwing Christian Democrats (CDU) take by far the largest number of votes (currently a fairly stable 41%), such a coalition would keep them out of office - especially since the CDU’s ‘natural’ coalition partner, the Free Democrats (FDP), were kicked out of parliament in 2013 and are still languishing at around 3% in the polls, which makes it very unlikely they will be able to reach the 5% threshold to re-enter.
In 2013, after some heated debates, the SPD shied away from forming a coalition with Die Linke and instead opted for a ‘grand coalition’ with the right. Within this, the SPD is clearly the junior partner. However, in a red-red-green national coalition with Die Linke and the Greens (both standing at around 9% in the polls) even the 26% the SPD currently polls would loom large. After 10 long years with Angela Merkel at the helm, there would finally be an SPD chancellor once again. One can understand the attraction.
And now the SPD has found a way to get there. For many years, Conservatives, rightwing social democrats and the mainstream media had an easy time dismissing the “old Stalinists” of Die Linke. After all, its forerunner, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), came out of the ‘official communist’ ruling party in what was the German Democratic Republic. The PDS took over many of the old ruling elite’s properties, its millions in the bank - and many of its members. Its unification in 2007 with a West German electoral alliance of trade unionists and left Social Democrats was a major step in making the party ‘mainstream’. But still the past has haunted the party since its inception in 1991.
So Ramelow and his potential coalition partners devised a cunning plan to bring Die Linke back into the fold. A few months ago, after much soul searching, he gave in to their demands to declare East Germany an Unrechtsstaat (unlawful state/state of injustice). It also helps that he was born and raised in West Germany, has no Stalinist skeletons in the cupboard and says he “felt closer to Italy and France” than he ever did to the GDR.1
Obviously, that stands in stark contrast to the feelings of the 28.2% of the electorate in Thüringen that voted for Die Linke. Many of those still feel badly burnt by the 1991 unification. In eastern Germany, wages are still considerably lower than in the west, there are fewer social provisions, fewer jobs and more poor people. Many still display a level of ‘Ostalgia’ for the former system.
Step forward Gregor Gysi, leader of the Die Linke fraction in the national parliament and still the most prominent member of the party. He has publicly declared his outrage at the Unrechtsstaat formulation. Somewhat strangely, for him it implies that “the three western powers had the right to found the Bundesrepublik [West Germany], but that the Soviet Union in response did not have the right to found the GDR. Though one has to emphasise that there was injustice, even great injustice, in the GDR.”2
Clearly, Gysi and Ramelow have agreed on a division of labour - trying to keep their new coalition partners sweet, on the one hand, while also reassuring their main voting base that not everything was bad in the GDR, on the other. Gysi has, after all, been a key player in moving the party towards ‘respectability’ - with the aim of getting into power at a national level.
In government
This so-called ‘debate’, which dominated much of the mainstream media in the run-up to the September election, has been nothing but window dressing. In reality, Die Linke has already been proving itself a reliable partner. It has watered down most of its programmatic demands, most notably its opposition to the deployment of the German army abroad (which, the leadership believes, would be acceptable for the purposes of “humanitarian” intervention).
And, of course, it has proved itself over and above this by the role it is already playing. Up and down east Germany, Die Linke is involved in numerous administrations on a municipal level, including coalitions with the CDU. It also shared power with the SPD in Berlin between 2001 and 2011 and has been governing in ‘red-red’ coalitions in the east German regional states of Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern for many years.
Take the coalition in Brandenburg, where Die Linke has been in government with the SPD since 2009. There were indeed some minor reforms, like the right to vote at 16, the employment of more teachers and the introduction of a regional minimum wage (which at €8.50 is amongst the lowest in Germany, it must be said). However, the coalition government has reduced public spending, increased the retirement age of public servants and cut a large number of public-sector jobs. It has also brought back tuition fees through the back door (they are called Rückmeldegebühren - ie, students pay a substantial fee to ‘re-register’).
Things do not look much more promising in Thüringen either. Asked what the most difficult problem in the coalition talks was, Bodo Ramelow said, “There wasn’t one.”3 All three parties have declared themselves “partners of the employees as well as businesses and their organisations”.4 Even before the elections, Bodo Ramelow warned that “we can’t promise anybody that we’ll be printing money in the cellar. We were against the Schuldenbremse (‘debt brake’ - a legal commitment not to increase debts), but now it’s here.” Clearly, Die Linke is not going to challenge the logic that the books of capitalist government have to be ‘balanced’.
Accordingly, the “four most important plans” of the coalitions are:
- a free year in nursery for all children;
- “new job opportunities for low earners” (in order to get them off benefits);
- a reduction in the number of administrative regional districts to save costs;
- only in “exceptional circumstances” will the new government use so-called V-Leute (undercover spies who are operating in political groups on the left and the right in order to “protect the constitution”). The programme of Die Linke actually demands the abolition of the whole Verfassungsschutz (similar to the MI5, it deals with ‘internal threats’).
Loyal opposition
Many in Left Unity are cheering at the prospect of Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain being elected into office - although such comrades are not quite so enthusiastic for Die Linke nowadays. With good reason. The voters in Brandenburg, who have experienced a red-red government first hand, this year punished Die Linke at the ballot box: its vote was halved from 377,000 in 2009 to 183,000 in 2014. There is a similar picture in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
Even if you assume that Die Linke (or Syriza and Podemos) is a socialist party, taking part in a government as a minority is actually counterposed to the idea of the self-emancipation of the working class. It inevitably leads the left into the position where it is forced to take responsibility for the actions of an alien class - a point made by Karl Marx on more than one occasion:
We are devoted to a party which, most fortunately for it, cannot yet come to power. If the proletariat were to come to power, the measures it would introduce would be petty bourgeois and not directly proletarian. Our party can come to power only when the conditions allow it to put its own view into practice (my emphasis).5
Clearly, that is not on the cards in Thüringen, where Die Linke represents only a small minority of the population. And, while Syriza and Podemos might both actually win the largest number of seats, this would not represent a majority of the population. In addition, the economic conditions in Greece and Spain, let alone the rest of Europe, are clearly not such that those parties can “can put their own view into practice”.
Unfortunately, there is virtually no trend within Die Linke that questions in principle this yearning for office. “If you stand in elections, you have to be prepared to take on governmental responsibility.” That is a sentence you hear a lot in Die Linke. The German section of the Socialist Party’s Committee for a Workers International, Sozialistische Alternative, seem to go along with this. However, they have been in and out of Die Linke so many times and over so many different issues, that not many people in and around the party take them seriously. They form part of the Antikapitalistische Linke, the smallest of the tendencies within Die Linke.
While the Stalinoid Kommunistische Plattform might numerically still be the largest tendency, the age of its members and the often rather wacky politics of the platform mean they do not play a particular important role (especially since chat show star Sarah Wagenknecht, its charismatic leader for many years, declared in 2010 that her membership of the platform was “resting” - it still is).
Therefore, the German fellow-travellers of the Socialist Workers Party, Marx 21, form the biggest organised trend in practice. Their problem is that they have too much to lose if they critique the trajectory of the party too loudly. Dozens of their members work for the Die Linke fraction in the German Bundestag and they even have a couple of MPs. They are in general well behaved and trusted, forming the backbone of the Sozialistische Plattform.
In the latest issue of their quarterly magazine Marx 21, the comrades sound rather radical when they call for Die Linke to “go back to being a protest party”. In a long article, they list various Die Linke sins in coalition government and, quite correctly, note that “only in opposition can Die Linke stick to its principles. Left governments in the past have either got into conflict with capital and the state apparatus or they have betrayed their principles.” Especially in the current economic climate and with the Schuldenbremse in operation in Thüringen, “there is no wiggle room for left politics. Why should Die Linke take responsibility for a situation it has not created?”6
But, instead of calling for a principled fight to keep Die Linke in opposition and out of government, as the rest of the article implies, it ends with a commitment to the wretched compromise agreed a few years back in the Erfurter Programm, to which Die Linke “should stick, particularly in government”. This is the infamous paragraph which is quoted up and down Die Linke as “red lines” which should never be crossed and are supposed to almost magically protect the party from going bad:
Die Linke only strives for government participation if we can achieve an improvement in the living conditions of people. We will not participate in a government which goes to war and allows combat missions of the Bundeswehr abroad, which advances military build-up and militarisation, which engages in privatisations of public provisions or cuts in social services, or whose policies worsen the fulfilment of public service.
Bodo Ramelow, of course, would have no problem confirming his commitment to this garbled formulation - after all, who can deny that even some minuscule reform like a year’s free nursery care might constitute “an improvement in the living conditions of people”?
Still, party chair Bernd Riexinger (who is considered to be on the Die Linke left) has reduced those “red lines” even further. For him, government participation is justified if three conditions are met: “Higher wages for employees (guaranteed by agreements), more teachers and a stronger social state”.7
Communists stick to a ‘red line’ that is shorter still: there is no way the left should enter government, unless it has majority support and can expect to implement a full socialist programme.
tina.becker@weeklyworker.co.uk
Notes
1. Der Spiegel November 20 2014.
2. Super Illu November 10 2014.
3.Die Tageszeitung October 22 2014.
4. www.sozialismus.info/2014/10/revolution-in-thueringen.
5. K Marx, J Guesde The programme of the Parti Ouvrier (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm).
6. http://marx21.de/thueringen-und-brandenburg-die-linke-zurueck-zur-protestpartei.