12.04.2000

Opportunity for PDS left

When Gregor Gysi, the charismatic leader of the German Party of Democratic Socialism, stepped down from his post last weekend, the bourgeois press was quick to declare this "the biggest crisis of the PDS in its entire existence" (Daily Telegraph April 10).

Together with Lothar Bisky, the PDS's second in command, Gysi was responding to the clear defeat they suffered at the party's national congress in Münster on April 9-10. Delegates voted by a 3:1 majority against the leadership's proposal to "judge in each case whether the PDS should lend support to UN peace-keeping troops". A long and very heated saw the majority argue that there should be no support to the UN in any circumstances, especially in the aftermath of the intervention in Kosova.

True, Gysi's announcement that he will also not seek re-election to the German Bundestag at the next general election in 2002 will cost the PDS a considerable number of votes, primarily of people who supported the PDS despite its anti-capitalist stance. Nevertheless, this crisis of leadership presents an opportunity for the left of the party. The PDS leadership has been keen to get involved in 'big politics': that is, it aims for a coalition partnership with the Social Democrats in the long term. Gysi and Bisky have been working hard to transform the former 'official communist' party of East Germany into a mainstream party "fit for politics". This was the point they tried to prove to the governing Social Democrats and the bourgeois media with the vote on UN 'peacekeepers' at the weekend.

Unfortunately, however, the fact that their plan failed so badly was not the work of a principled opposition in the PDS. It is explained by a 'pact of convenience', where green-left pacifists united with members of the Kommunistische Plattform. The Communist Platform is a loose group of a few hundred former Maoists, anarchists and members of the West German Communist Party (DKP), rallied around their dull monthly Mitteilungen der Kommunistischen Plattform der PDS.

The membership of the PDS is becoming more assertive and has "emancipated itself from the leadership", as Gysi himself put it. This is undoubtedly a good thing. As the witty and intelligent public face of the party, the reformist Gysi has long led Germany's biggest leftwing party from one compromise to the next - all in the name of Realpolitik. However, the membership's congress coup might not be enough to change the rightwing course set by Gysi and Bisky.

The anarcho-bureaucratic system of party organisation has resulted in city and town organisations being virtually autonomous from the Berlin centre. Only at election time does the leadership take any real interest in the branches - to ensure that they do not come out with platforms that differ too much from the party line. Apart from this they are free to go where they like. The base is more leftwing than the top, with local areas sometimes supporting relatively principled positions. But because of the undemocratic and Berlin-centred structure of the party, these critical views are not concretised in any coherent PDS-wide faction. Often, a branch in one area does not know if there is another in the next city, let alone what its opinions might be.

Clearly the PDS needs a coherent German-wide left opposition. With no obvious new party leader waiting in the wings and a power vacuum, there is a real opportunity. The various groups and left branches can start to coordinate politically for the first time. To be successful, however, there must be genuine communist politics and the painstaking study and development of Marxist theory.

Without this, the rightwing course of the PDS will continue. A new party programme is to be discussed in the summer, but the left did not criticise its likely contents in any organised way at the Münster congress. The commission charged with working out the new draft announced that the programme will stress the need to "get away from our fundamental opposition to the capitalist system" and acknowledged that "the time is not ripe to talk about socialism".

The left needs its revolutionary alternative.