Martin Suchanek
In a recent demonstration 100,000 marched against the government and the nuclear energy lobby, Martin Suchanek reports on the new social movement in Germany
For hours the government quarter in Berlin was blocked by 100,000 or more demonstrators. From right across Germany they came in specially chartered trains and over 200 coaches to protest against the third extension of the duration of the licence for the nuclear power industry by the federal government.
It was the biggest demonstration for a very long time against the policy of the Christian Democrat-Liberal coalition, and it was more than justified!
According to the Ecology Institute, the “energy economy contract” will bring the nuclear power corporations a cool €120 billion in extra income in the coming years. By comparison, the additional tax income, estimated to be some 16 billion up to 2015, is just peanuts. While the extension of the licence, and the gigantic super profits it will bring, have gone through without a hitch, we can safely assume that there will be powerful haggling over every cent of tax, despite it being so minimal in comparison to the extra profits.
And “obviously” the various extra costs of the nuclear power stations, as well as all the security risks, won’t be carried by the monopolies but by society as a whole.
The politics and composition of the demonstrators <strong>
The mobilisation against extension of the license was clearly politically dominated by the Greens and by environmentalist groups close to them such as Greenpeace.
For the first time in years, the SPD has also been prominent in mobilising over the “nuclear question”. Even though there were quite a few SPD, Young Socialists and Falcon flags on the demonstration, they were no competition for the Greens who were clearly the biggest force.
Even the Left Party supported the demonstration but, nonetheless, they were even less visible than the SPD. If anything, the trade unions had an even smaller presence. A few, including entire regions of IG Metall, had certainly declared their support for the demonstration, and even had speakers on the platform, however, there was no sign of their having any organised delegations.
More important was the low turnout from the “radical” and anticapitalist Left. Apart from Gruppe Arbeitermacht and Revolution, only the German CWI section, SAV, the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany, MLPD and the German Communist Party, DKP, and some small groups took part in the demo. There was no sign of the Autonomes, either they were very well “camouflaged” or, as seems more likely, they decided to stay at home.
It is shameful, and a fatal political error, that the “radical” Left were absent. The protest movement against the extension of the nuclear power licence is part of a much broader discontent against a capitalist “environmental” policy which really only serves to secure the monopoly profits of the big corporations or the share prices of land speculators.
In the truest sense of the word, this policy threatens the lives and future of everybody. It goes alongside the cynical and unashamed disregard of the “will of the electorate”. No matter how strong the popular rejection of nuclear power or lunatic traffic projects, it changes nothing. No matter how publicly the government bends the knee to big capital’s lobbyists, they win no concessions from the big corporations.
On this issue, Merkel, Bruederle and Roettgen drive through government policy against the people – thereby providing a good lesson in the realities of bourgeois democracy in which the laws dictated by Capital are forced through with whatever increased surveillance, limitation on citizens’ rights or police violence is required.
Prospects
Instead of intervening into this already existing mass movement with an anti-capitalist perspective, the greater part of the German left has preferred to keep its distance. There is no politically rational basis for this.
It’s certainly true that the protest movement is, at the moment, largely made up of the salaried middle-class. Among the many young people on the demonstration, the majority were grammar school students and pupils. That these are the layers which have taken to the streets is not an argument against the protests but against a so-called “radical” Left and a labour movement which all too often sees the “ecological question” as a side-issue, plays down its importance and, all too often, has few, if any, arguments against the policies of the Greens and the SPD.
Politically, the movement is dominated by the bourgeois ecologism of the Greens and the eco-reformism of the SPD which are, in effect, then parroted by the Left Party and the trade unions. That explains why they play only a subordinate role.
Many demonstrators support, completely in line with the SPD-Green proposals, the reformist perspective of a “green renovation” of the market economy, a “Green New Deal”. In place of the nuclear economy with its monopolies, they want either more small-scale enterprises or to encourage the existing corporations to reconstruct themselves more ecologically in response to various “market incentives” in other words, guaranteed monopoly profits for different products.
The experience of the climbdown from the policy of withdrawing from the use of nuclear power shows that even that can’t be achieved without a decisive policy against the capitalist monopolies and without their expropriation without compensation.
But even the nationalisation of the big corporations poses the question of who will control their production, their investments and their business practices. That is why we call for workers’ control, that is, for control by the workforce and representatives of the workers in other branches of the working-class and middle-class consumers. It is only in this way that the irrational generation of energy within capitalism, which is oriented towards the profits of individual businesses, can be replaced by one oriented towards the needs of the people and the environment under democratic planning.
Without any doubt, this would collide not only with the interests of individual corporations but also meet the most decisive resistance of capital in general and of its state.
Therefore, the resistance must also take another form, away from reliance on the demonstrations and, more or less openly admitted, hopes in a “new”, that is, SPD/Left Party/Green government.
The struggle for expropriation of the energy sector under workers’ control must, like every decisive struggle, be fought with working-class methods of struggle: with strikes and occupations, with the building of self defence organs against the provocations and attacks of the police. Above all, it must be combined with the struggle against the effects of the crisis. Only in this way will it be possible to create a social movement, a force, which bases itself on the core layers of the working-class in the factories and can not only put an end to the nuclear lobby but also to the society that creates it.