The Left Party, the SPD and the future of the German left

Introduction

The German elections at the end of September produced a new right wing coalition government of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and Guido Westerwelle’s neo-liberal Free Democrats (FDP). The Social Democrats (SPD) went down to a disastrous defeat, suffering their worst defeat for 60 years and securing only 23% of the popular vote, an 11% fall compared to the last election in 2005.

Support for the SPD, the equivalent of the Labour Party in Germany, has halved since 1998 – a result of its policy of attacking the welfare state and workers’ conditions on behalf of German capitalism. This policy, summed up in the so-called Agenda 2010, launched under SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, was continued by the party in coalition with Merkel’s CDU between 2005-09.

As the SPD’s fortunes waned the Left Party (Die Linke) has grown. In September it gained 12% of the vote and 76 MPs in the Bundestag. These included two members of the Marx 21 grouping, Christine Buchholz and Nicole Gohlke, part of the International Socialist Tendency, which includes the SWP in Britain. Die Linke has actively campaigned for the withdrawal of German troops from Afghanistan, an issue that came to the fore in the election campaign with the German bombing of hijacked petrol tankers in Kunduz, an action that killed scores of Afghan villagers.

The success of Die Linke brings its own problems. Its leadership around Oskar Lafontaine is continuing to push its orientation to link up the party with the SPD and the Greens in governing coalitions. A period in coalition with the SPD in Berlin has already led to attacks on the working class in the city and a fall in support for Die Linke. For revolutionaries and the left in Die Linke this poses the question of how to win the party to an anti-capitalist and revolutionary perspective in Germany.

In the following article Walter Held from the Workers’ International Network, explains the origins of Die Linke and the limitations of its current politics – limitations he suggests that prevented it from growing as fast as it should in a recession hit Germany.

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There have been some glowing reports of the development of the German Linke [Left] Party in the left wing press in the UK. These mostly point up some of the party’s demands for withdrawal from Afghanistan, or the party’s criticism of capitalism and of the European Union. Invariably the reader is offered impressive figures on the strength and electoral support for Linke, designed to create awe and envy when contrasted to the weak support for a left alternative party in the UK. We read of election results where Die Linke achieved 11.9% of the vote in ­September and now has a parliamentary fraction of 76 deputies compared with 54 in the last parliament.

Indeed, Die Linke have increased their share of the national vote, but only by 3.2% compared to the last general election in 2005. And they did win 1.3 million votes from SPD supporters. In the west German regional states, the party won on average 8.3% of the second (list) vote, which is a solid increase in areas where it was under 5% last time round. To put this into context, however, Die Linke enjoyed as much as 15% support in several opinion polls just over two years ago in the middle of the Grand Coalition’s rule. Added to this we have seen in the last period the most severe crisis in global capitalism causing convulsion in all economic sectors and even calling the entire system into question in the eyes of the masses. We have also seen a halving of the electoral support for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) that has lost half of its votes since 2002, six million, as well as a third of its members. So in that context the successes of Die Linke can be described as moderate or even modest.

Why is Die Linke not stronger?

Would it be excessive to expect a well-organised party to the left of the Social Democrats, with power bases in a number of east German regions, with over 70,000 members, in the context of a deep economic crisis and deep disillusionment amongst the base of the SPD, to rapidly double in size through appeals to the rank and file of the SPD who have been abstaining in droves and through building mass support in the unions and cities? With the demoralised SPD dropping to 23%, a Linke with 20% of the popular vote could have challenged the old party of the class for leadership.

So what is the reason for at most smallish gains since 2005? Linke members have been prominent in the leadership of some unions, notably in Verdi, the public services union. But even a powerful series of strikes by this union was settled with minimal improvements for members. And in the case of the Opel carmakers we witness Die Linke paying the price for its complete confusion in theory and perspectives; instead of raising a simple and clear demand for the immediate nationalisation of the firm under workers’ control, Die Linke mumbled about finding “a new partner” to take over the company and installing workers’ participation in planning new models. At the same time, the CDU/SPD government was busy nationalising the HRE bank to save it from bankruptcy!

Indeed, the general line of the Die Linke leadership is a blend of Keynesianism and illusions that capitalism can be managed and controlled, forced by laws and taxes to behave in a socially responsible manner. Gordon Brown often says similar things. Time and again, the party’s leaders appeal to the SPD to “re-social-democratise” itself. Linke co-leader Lafontaine has held up the reformism of the SPD in the boom years of the 1980s as a model to which they should return. The sub-text of this is that he would then be happy to re-join such an SPD.

Die Linke is not just its leaders, of course. Many class conscious trade unions and some left social democrats joined it early on, many coming from the small western WASG (Work and Social Justice – the Electoral Alternative) which then merged with the eastern PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) to form the Left Party. The main component of Die Linke, the PDS, had its foundations in the remnants of the German SED (the east German Stalinist party) which once had millions of paper members and functionaries and which virtually melted away after the collapse of the DDR but which still commanded local ­support, frequently in the form of local councillors who had real roots in society. These reorganised the SED into the reformed, post-Stalinist PDS and carried through a Krushchev style de-Stalinisation discussion; this PDS merged with the west German WASG to set up the new party.

Die Linke is two parties

It is this east German component of Die Linke which dominated the party up until recently. In a similar fashion to the Bavarian CSU within Merkel’s Christian Democrats, Die Linke in the east German regional states perform the function of a regional lobby party. A glance at the economic and social structure of Germany as a whole explains why this is so; in every area of life, the old DDR tells a tale of decline and neglect, of depopulation, poverty and hopelessness.

There has been a huge exodus of the youth from east to west. Whole housing estates, for example in the socialist model town of “Hoyerswerda”, were demolished following the collapse and destruction of local industries in Saxony. Die Linke acts as a tribune for such regions and is rewarded with 15, 20 or even 30% of the vote in these areas. In the west on the other hand, the party only rests on 5 to 8% support. Such lopsided social structures and the resulting lopsided political expression give a false picture of the strength of Die Linke when simplistic averages are taken.

Nevertheless, in the industrial Ruhr, Die Linke has begun to grow into a recognisable force. In the old proletarian suburbs of ex-mining communities, which in the twenties were solid KPD (German Communist Party) and SPD estates, and are still all dominated by the SPD, the party has been receiving up to 20% recently. We see a different kind of Linke as a result coming from these areas. The regional Land party congress of North Rhine Westphalia, which was held on 7/8 November in Hamm, passed resolutions calling for abolition of the tripartite education system, the legalisation of cannabis, the immediate nationalisation of the two giant energy concerns RWE and E.ON and for a 30-hour week without loss of pay. Lafontaine attended the congress and, while having to accept the decisions, warned the regional party that the party on a national level should not be made to suffer from decisions made by local parties.

Slowly Die Linke has been coming round to the demand for nationalisation, although the leaders prefer to overlay this idea with more modern phrases of socialisation and public control. Lafontaine is still the child of the old SPD in this respect, seeing workers’ participation and state supervision rather than ownership and control as the cure for the anarchy of capitalism. In the recent general election, the two prominent slogans of Die Linke were “Tax the wealthy” and “Wealth for all”. You will search for support for a planned socialist economy in vain.

Nevertheless Die Linke is a fairly democratic setup; there are half a dozen tendencies or platforms with their own publications and conferences. The condition for being allowed to function inside the party is that they do not oppose Die Linke in elections (flouting this condition, some of the German CWI – linked to the Socialist Party here – managed to get themselves prohibited from membership for a while.) The leaders are happy to leave all the tendencies more or less in peace for the time being; they are useful in boosting the image of Die Linke as the enfant terrible of German politics and as a bargaining chip for future deals with the SPD. How the leaders will jump under pressure could be seen a few months ago, when co-leader Gysi launched an attack on the “loony left which was harming the party’s electoral chances”. Some old communists have been removed from electoral slates to increase the respectability of the party.

Lafontaine’s role

At the same time as the general election in September, there were three regional Land elections. In Lafontaine’s home Land of the Saarland, where he had been First Minister for the SPD for many years before he quit the party, Die Linke did extremely well, only just failing to overtake the SPD. Lafontaine had been hoping to gain the largest share of the vote and was even toying with the possibility of becoming the Saarland’s First Minister again, this time not for the SPD but for his own creation, Die Linke. An unholy alliance of the Greens with the FDP and the CDU in the Saarland prevented a red-red regional government and the semi-victory in the Saarland. Lafontaine threw up the leadership of Die Linke and will now chair the national party instead.

To understand the dynamics of Die Linke, it is necessary to grasp that the campaign to found and strengthen the party has been to quite a large extent a result of the personal ambition and ego of Lafontaine. His motives for quitting the job of Finance Minister a short period into the Schroeder red/green coalition were that Schroeder’s group had decided on a neo-liberal economic programme. As if waking from half-slumber Lafontaine, who had accepted the ministerial post, suddenly realised the path the SPD was taking and threw in the towel. He had been quite a popular left wing figure in the leadership of the SPD up to that point. His decision to resign from post and party ended that popularity for the most part; had he chosen to stay and fight, the course of German politics could well have been very different.

The future course of Die Linke may well be decisively influenced by Lafontaine too. Die Linke is not alone in the field of politics: the social democrats held their first congress since the massive electoral defeat. Meeting in Dresden on 13-15 November, the 500 delegates saw the resignation of the old General Secretary Muenterfering and his replacement by ex-Young Socialist chair Andrea Nahles.

The defeat of the SPD has been a liberating event for the party. Delegate after delegate rose to settle scores with the defeated line of the SPD inside the Grand Coalition. Central to the attacks was the programme counter-reforms undertaken by the Schroeder coalition with the Greens and later with the CDU, where massive attacks on social security were carried through, driving millions in the poverty of unemployment onto lowered benefits or thrusting more millions into the so-called “precariat” of workers on the verge of sacking, demotion or forced “self-employed” status. Other measures criticised included the raising of the pensionable age to 67 and the attempts to privatise the railways. There were demands to improve party democracy, to go out in the constituencies and talk to the voters. Most importantly, speech after speech proclaimed that in the face of the new attacks by the CDU/FDP coalition, the “SPD wants to fight and will fight”. Even the platform of the old rightwing said we have seen “the true face “ of capitalism and demanded a curb on the behaviour finance capital.

All this means that in the coming struggles against the Berlin government, the German workers will have not one, but two voices in their struggles apart from the trade unions. The rank and file SPD members, freed from the bonds of loyalty to a rightwing SPD in government can now solidarise with strikes and local community struggles. Die Linke will be pursuing the same line. Common actions can lead to a forging of bonds at a local level, on the picket line outside Opel and the German railways and all the other factories and offices engaged in resistance throughout the land. A model of militancy is being rekindled, first by the recession and now by the threats of government cuts inspired by the Thatcherite FDP, so clearly on behalf of the rich.

And while the top leaders of the SPD may preach restraint, the ordinary members will heartily welcome a return to the old ways and the old links with the class, seeing this as the only way of boosting membership and votes. There is a possibility that the CDU/FDP coalition will crack before 2013 but if it goes the distance, the ­German working class movement could well look very different from today with a series of local and more red-red regional Land coalitions of the SPD and Linke. There is also a possibility of the two parties merging into a single mass party of the working class with a strong leavening of left reformist and centrist ideas, an ideal field for Marxists to work in. 

Mon 08, March 2010 @ 17:38