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Germany: Left Party stands, but will it fight?

With two weeks to go before Germany’s snap general election, the mass media, and the established parties have started a slander campaign against the newly formed Left Party.

Although they condemn the new party as a plot by East German Stalinists and failed SPD and union officials from the West to destroy Germany’s future, the bosses are well aware that the party’s leaders are very far from being such a threat. But why are they ringing the alarm bells and what is the background of this new electoral formation?

The birth and growth of the Left Party are a response to the massive attacks on the German working class and youth, carried out by the Social Democratic-Green Party government of Gerhard Schroeder and Joschka Fischer. Mass demonstrations and important strikes (Opel and Daimler) against government policies were derailed by the trade union bureaucracies but left a legacy of anger among working class people, causing a crisis for the SPD and its relations with the trade union leaders.

The collapse of the SPD’s vote in its former stronghold, North-Rhine-Westphalia, was what prompted Schroeder to bring forward the general election in order to pre-empt the consolidation of left wing opposition. The tactic backfired. The PDS and the Electoral Alternative (Wahlalternative) joined in a common campaign, the PDS renamed itself the Left Party and opened its lists to Electoral Alternative candidates.

Initially, opinion polls gave the Left Party 15 per cent. It will certainly enter the Bundestag (German parliament) as a significant force with 8 to 10 per cent of the vote. In East Germany, the PDS heartland, it is registering 30 per cent support and may become the region’s strongest party.

The Left Party

In the coming elections, the Left Party will be seen by class-conscious workers and many more as the only way to voice their opposition to neo-liberalism and the inevitable attacks by a future Merkel government – be it a Grand Coalition or a conservative-liberal one. Against this background, the German section of the League for the Fifth International, Arbeitermacht, is calling for a critical vote for the Left Party.

The Left Party has attracted many new members from the SPD and the trade union bureaucracy. The PDS and Electoral Alternative leaderships want to fuse the two parties as soon as possible but they do not want to turn it into a fighting party, let alone a revolutionary one. They want a “good old” Keynesian social democratic party whose strategic goal is to make the SPD social democratic again and win over a section of the German employers to Keynesian policies.

So these leaderships have no intention of making the PDS ministers in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin regional governments resign from their posts or denounce the 10 per cent wage cuts these governments have imposed.

And pressure to adopt such a policy comes not only from the PDS. The “red” Oskar Lafontaine intervened to dilute the PDS-election programme, opposing the demand for a 1,400 Euro/month minimum wage. This was supported by trade union leaders like Bsirske from the main public sector union, ver.di.

Lafontaine’s immigration policy is even worse. In his regular column in Bild (Germany’s equivalent of the Sun) he has supported proposals for EU-built camps in North Africa to prevent refugees coming into Europe.

What direcetion?

A layer of union officials, and some labour aristocratic workers, want the Left Party to be a united left wing of the union bureaucracy, but the Party’s fate will not simply be decided in the backrooms of union offices. Whether the current leaders like it or not, they will come up against the hopes of rank and file workers who need a party to fight against the next government’s attacks, many of whom expect the current leaderships to lead that fight.

In spring and summer next year, we can expect a massive attack on Germany’s national wage bargaining system and on significant industrial working class strongholds. This will be when the class struggle itself will decide whether the Left Party becomes a tool for working class fight back or just another instrument for a sell-out.

The bosses’ offensive will allow little time for the Left Party to oscillate between its more radical promises and concessions to neo-liberalism, imperialist war and racism. How to prevent Lafontaine, ex-PDS leader Gregor Gysi and hundreds more old reformist functionaries leading the Left Party into another blind alley is, therefore, a burning question.

There are two main fronts on which to fight. One is inside the social movements and the trade unions for a programme of co-ordinated action against the bosses’ and the government’s attacks. Here, demands like the formation of councils of action and a rank and file movement in the unions and workplaces will prove crucial. Conferences, such as the one called by the German Social Forum, committees, and rank and file initiatives must organise to bring their demands into the Left Party and its conferences, while also demanding immediate support for concrete struggles. We must put the deputies and leaders of the Left Party to the test, replacing those who fail with fighting activists.

The other lever is direct intervention in the Left Party. Of course, the leaderships of the Electoral Alternative and PDS will try to stage-manage the launch as much as possible but there will be limits to this. The fused party will have to attract support from shop steward committees, initiatives and alliances against Agenda 2010 and, in particular, from young people.

For Arbeitermacht and Revolution, the call for open conferences to form a new mass working class party beyond the membership of PDS and the Electoral Alternative is a crucial demand. In mid-October, a first, important meeting, a national “open youth conference” (sponsored by Solid, the PDS youth organisation) will take place in Berlin.

Such conferences provide an important arena in which to rally support for a programme of action and the struggle to make the new party a truly working class party, which combines the struggle against the bosses’ offensive with the fight for the overthrow of capitalism through socialist revolution.

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