Letters

Warmongers

In the 1980s, the German Green Party demanded that “West Germany leave Nato”. Today, the same party speaks of “global responsibility” under the “protective shield of Nato”. Last year its think-tank, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, demanded that more tax money be spent on ‘defence’ and nuclear weapons, since it deems Nato to be the “core of the transatlantic relationship”. The Joe Biden administration is considered the best-case scenario by the Greens: according to the Böll Foundation, this government “knows that the US can only maintain its own role as a global power by closely cooperating with a Europe that is ready to act”.

Don’t compare them to the Social Democrats of 1914, though - these ‘leftwingers’ are much worse. The SPD voted for war credits under the perceived pressures of the situation, not wanting to isolate itself amid the patriotic frenzy that had been whipped up. It was a form of opportunism. The Greens, by contrast, are currently Germany’s war party number one - they’re the chief Atlanticists, agitating and pushing the coalition government to escalate matters further.

It was the Green foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, who sent the German military on its first foreign mission since World War II - namely the 1999 bombing of Belgrade. Before the Greens entered the government, together with a thoroughly neoliberalised SPD, there had been a taboo on German military intervention abroad for four decades. It was the ‘red-green’ government, with its ‘anti-fascist’ rhetoric about “Germany’s special historical responsibility”, that finally broke it. Last week, the new Green foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, announced that “we are at war with Russia” - the first such public declaration by a Nato state politician. You could say that there is at least a degree of honesty there - after all, many have been repeating the lie that ‘Nato is not involved’ for a year. More to the point though - the intention behind Baerbock’s words was one of escalation.

It would not surprise me to find that the Greens are the party with the highest share of graduates from the Atlantic Bridge/American Council on Germany’s ‘Young Leaders’ programme. We know, for example, that Cem Özdemir, national chair of the Greens until 2018, is one. ‘Young Leaders’, in case you are not aware, is a US programme designed to train up Nato-loyalist comprador politicians and media leaders for Germany. It isn’t something that is often discussed in the public realm. No comprehensive list of Young Leaders is publicly accessible, as far as I know, and much less will you find dissertations on the subject. But it is no mere conspiracy theory.

It beats me how any left-leaning German could still support this most bellicose, most hypocritical party of them all. Their record is arguably worse than that of the Christian Democrats - the difference being that the Greens lace their poison with the kind of harmless social liberalism that is used to sell people just about anything nowadays (including Drang nach Osten policies and World War III).

In the Greens, Germany has found its equivalent to the US neocons - except that these warmongers ultimately look back on a Maoist and K-Gruppen rather than Trotskyist lineage. Unfortunately, it increasingly looks as if Die Linke (Left Party) is getting ready to follow in their footsteps.

Maciej Zurowski
Italy

Military matters

We know how the capitalist class responds to defeat, when there is a growing strength in numbers and consciousness of the organised working class. If the course of events cannot be corrected either through formal political means, ‘lawfare’ or economic destabilisation, demands will arise from above for military dictatorship and attempts at insurrection to that end will take place.

Andrew Northall is correct in stressing that major theoretical differences amongst revolutionaries in Britain on the use of force in the transition from bourgeois rule do not actually exist (Letters, January 26). Even if there is not, as Kevin Bean claims, a formal ban on discussing the popular militia demand within the Communist Party of Britain (‘Taking the next step’, January 12), it will undoubtedly be enforced anyway in that organisation, as in others, by means of the shunning of individuals who spend more time than is necessary weighing up the situation. As Kevin noted, “we are not on the cusp of challenging for the conquest of state power”.

The caution with which groups will treat this issue should be viewed quite apart from the tendency for opportunistic sect-building in the midst of a strike wave. Even if the left in Britain broke overnight from the practice of trying to tail reformist illusions to opportunistically recruit new layers of people, it would not be able to find a shortcut around the overall disorganisation of our class and the need to prioritise which demands to raise to those who are organised.

While we can be sure about the actions of a ruling class resisting the loss of power, we cannot be sure of ourselves in taking power - we don’t know how an enduring proletarian constitutional order will be created. The Eurocommunists were wrong in their liquidation of mass communist parties, but scepticism about insurrection as a method for taking state power in capitalist states with liberal-democratic constitutions is probably correct.

The problem we in Britain face in the coming weeks and months is how to keep up the morale of the strike movement and sustain the broad public support which exists for pay awards to keep pace with inflation. The bourgeoisie has utterly failed to convince most unorganised workers that their organised brothers and sisters are making wild and unreasonable demands in voting to strike.

But the leadership of the workers’ movement in Britain is currently without any explicit plan for either winning ongoing public-sector disputes or expanding trade union membership across the economy.

Such victories will require a change of government to one which can pull back from continued confrontation without losing face. If the strike wave grows, the government has an obvious escape, and one which we should welcome (and indeed agitate for) - an early general election. That should become a key demand of coordinated strikes - if not from above, then from below.

Ansell Eade
Lincolnshire

Backbone

If someone asked me for a list of high-profile European politicians capable of telling the US ‘no’, only Sahra Wagenknecht of Die Linke would spring to mind.

I don’t like her occasional opportunistic inclination to play off the German working class against refugees and migrants - even if this aspect of her politics is overstated, it should still be opposed one hundred percent. But credit where credit’s due: she is the only one with the backbone to stand up to the US war drive. So, for all her faults, she’s better than 99.9% of her enemies - including those in Die Linke: ie, the liberalised left, whose bogeyman she has become.

If you asked, on the other hand, for a list of European politicians capable not only of telling the US ‘no’, but also of articulating an independent working class policy, rather than conflating the interests of workers with those of national capital - “citizens, families and ... German industry, with its strong, medium-sized businesses”, as Wagenknecht put it in her parliamentary speech of September 8 2022 - then I couldn’t name any.

Karl Dobrovic
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Governance?

In the Winter of Working Class Advance (1978-79), one central London hospital was distinguished by the role of a non-medical worker (the name, Dominic, resounds in my memory) - a ‘mere’ porter, no less, no more, I believe, who was targeted by the vile slander-mongering rag, the Daily Mail, for ensuring that the triage of medical cases of differing urgency were distinguished and the most serious were prioritised. Comrades, there are precedents!

In the John Radcliffe Hospital Silver Star maternity unit (Headington, Oxford) a Yugoslav patient asked (late summer of 1975) of a British patient: “When is the next meeting of the ward staff/patients’ governance committee?” The latter had to admit that such an idea was wholly alien to current British society, including the national health service ...

When indeed, comrades? And so on up and down the NHS! Workers and patients on the front line have an intimate knowledge of the successes, problems and failures of the NHS very largely hidden from senior staff - whether registrars, consultants or managers.

Jack Fogarty
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