UK

Labour MPs face backlash for mean and unjust Winter Fuel cut – Simon Fletcher

12th September 2024Leave a Commenton Labour MPs face backlash for mean and unjust Winter Fuel cut – Simon Fletcher

“In the process of getting its way on one universal benefit, the Labour government has done real harm.”

By Simon Fletcher

It is, according to the Guardian’s editorial, ‘mean, unjust and politically inept.’ Labour’s decision to abolish the universal provision of pensioners’ winter fuel payments in favour of a means tested allowance that will automatically exclude millions of hard-pressed older people is the government’s first major controversy. Labour MPs face a huge backlash in their constituencies. It is no overstatement that for many this will set in stone how many people view the still-new government.

To means test the winter fuel payment will save just £1.4 billion. It is estimated that the number of people receiving the payment will fall from more than 11 million, to about 1.5 million, including many who are clearly in no sense well-off. The Chancellor’s decision will affect 86 per cent of pensioners – not just wealthiest but those on the basic state pension rate of £11,500 a year. In the North East local authority area of Gateshead, for example, it is estimated that over 31,000 pensioners are set to lose the allowance.

The winter fuel payment was a universal policy introduced by Gordon Brown that survived under the Tories. But it took Labour under Reeves and Keir Starmer just weeks to announce it will be means tested. 

What is particularly insidious about the government’s imposition of a means test for winter fuel payments is that it has naturally and automatically opened the door to arguments against universalism. Having announced the policy in July as a measure to cut costs, the government has inevitably fallen into a narrative that ‘targeting’ – means testing – is preferable to universal provision. Keir Starmer himself said on Kuenssberg on Sunday: ‘the Winter Fuel Payments, are now to be targeted. They were untargeted before and I think everybody thought that wasn’t a particularly good system. So it needed to be targeted.’ On this he is wrong – very many people support a universal payment. At the meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party on the Monday night before the vote, Rachel Reeves was reported as arguing that to vote against the government’s change was to reject the notion of means testing it. One MP was said to believe this line had traction, since ‘everyone in that meeting agrees it’s not right that millionaires get this payment.’ One new MP, Shaun Davies, has argued that the motion to reject the government plan would allow ‘rich pensioners like Alan Sugar to get the winter fuel payment.’ Across social media, supporters of the government are willingly using anti-universalist arguments. Ultimately that line of thought is of most use to the right of politics.

The problem with the narrative around ending the universal provision of the winter fuel payment is that the very same argument can be applied to any other universal benefit or service. If millionaires should not receive x benefit or service, what is the argument in favour of them receiving y or z? Logically, the same thing can be said about healthcare or concessionary travel exemptions like the Freedom Pass. The reason for universal provision is that it is the simplest mechanism to maximise a benefit for the largest number of people, binding in support for the welfare state and public services in the process. It eliminates the problem of people failing to claim for means-tested benefits and likewise avoids the trap of just failing to qualify for a benefit or service. The question of the rich in society is addressed in a different way, through progressive taxation. Universalism has been fought for by generations of labour movement activists and social reformers. The completely unnecessary ditching of the universal mechanism in this case – and the conscious use of ‘targeting’ and ‘means testing’ arguments – sets a dangerous ideological precedent for future debates as the government pursues its ‘tough choices.’

All of this comes at a time when quite contrary arguments have been building. For example, in London, Sadiq Khan has delivered universal free school meals in all primary schools, as has the Welsh Labour government. But through its actions over the winter fuel payment, Labour at a national level is legitimising the very arguments that are used against successful schemes like free school meals.

When a party of social democracy goes down the road of tearing up universal benefits it is bound to strengthen multiple damaging arguments. In the case of the winter fuel payments, a second insidious line of argument has broken out: many pensioners now feel pitted against those public sector workers who have recently won pay rises. It is now commonplace on the media and social media to hear the argument that workers have gained whilst pensioners’ universal payments have been targeted. The two have been counterposed in sections of the public debate, instead of a coalition being built. Again, that ultimately aids the right.

Given the government’s actions and its warnings about future choices in which things must get worse before they can get better, a broad campaign in defence of universal benefits and services is necessary.

In the process of getting its way on one universal benefit, the Labour government has done real harm.

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• This article was originally published by Simon Fletcher’s Modern Left on Setpember 10th, 2024.
• You can become a subscriber of Modern Left to receive exclusive content and support the platform here; and follow Simon Fletcher on Twitter/X here.

 

I cannot support austerity – Ian Byrne on the Winter Fuel Payment Cut

12th September 2024Leave a Commenton I cannot support austerity – Ian Byrne on the Winter Fuel Payment Cut

“I cannot morally support austerity when I see the damage it has done to my class and communities.”

By Ian Byrne MP

I have received more correspondence from worried pensioners in West Derby regarding this vote than any other in the last five years and this week I was their voice in Westminster, as I promised to be when elected.

The anger and fear among my constituents over the proposed changes to the winter fuel payment is unprecedented in my time as an MP, and the calls, letters and emails I have been receiving certainly reflect this, many from those already plunged into poverty because of the unfair pension changes by the Tories in 1995.

Labour has a massive job to build back our public services and communities, but this cannot be done on the backs of the poorest in society, continuing the inhumane work of the former Tory chancellor George Osborne. Let us not forget that Sir Michael Marmot’s research found that around 148,000 excess deaths are directly attributed to the impact of his austerity measures. 

As the elected voice of my constituents in Parliament, I have a duty to reflect their views in Westminster. Here is a quote from just one of the pensioners I heard from before the vote – and one of several I included in my recent letter to the Chancellor, urging her to change her mind on means testing the Winter Fuel Payment:

“I am messaging you because the fuel allowance has been cancelled by the Labour government. It’s a disgrace and very vindictive and hurtful. My wife and I are pensioners… it’s not OK at all when the allowance goes to our winter bills. Please can you help? It seems pensioners are easy pickings, we have no voice. I do hope you can help.”

This is simply devastating.

But there is another way to rebuild our country back in a fairer and more equitable way. The Common-Sense policy group recently published a detailed set of alternative proposals to austerity which is eminently achievable – and not on the backs of those already struggling.

The ending of the winter fuel payment for so many people is something I would have fought if it had been proposed by a Conservative Government. I am genuinely so sad and sorry that it is a Labour Government choosing to implement this policy now.

This significant policy change was not in the manifesto of change I stood on and I am very aware that the pensioners who voted for me in West Derby feel bewildered and deeply betrayed by this political choice.

I cannot morally support austerity when I see the damage it has done to my class and communities.

I cannot choose to wilfully harm some of our most vulnerable people in my constituency – so many of whom have contributed so much to our communities throughout their lives.

I remember, too, the words of Gordon Brown, who introduced the winter fuel payment after the 1997 election, because he was “simply not prepared to allow another winter to go by when pensioners are fearful of turning up their heating, even on the coldest winter days”.

I have also signed an Early Day Motion in Parliament, laid down by the Labour MP for Poole, Neil Duncan-Jordan, which called on the Government to undertake full impact assessments and give full consideration to those just over the Pension Credit entitlement threshold before making the proposed changes to the Winter Fuel Allowance. 

And earlier this week I wrote to the Chancellor on behalf of my West Derby constituents, urging her to change her mind. You can view this letter below: 

I urge the Government to have a rethink even at this late hour and withdraw this plan.

The End Fuel Poverty Coalition has warned that there could be fatal consequences from the scale of those economising on heating and the risk of a record increase in excess deaths as a result. Likewise, National Energy Action argues that many people were too scared to turn their heating on, for fear for of getting deeper into debt, no matter the impact on their physical or mental health.

Furthermore, I agree with Age UK when they say it is “alarming,” that more than 1.5 million older people are already cutting back or stopping their social care across the UK because they cannot afford the cost. This is “potentially disastrous” for an older person with care needs as cutting back or stopping care in this way increases the chances of serious ill health and injury.

I also understand that an Age UK petition launched in August 2024, calling to save the Winter Fuel Payment, has already received in the region of 500,000 signatures. 

I agree with the range of campaigners in advocating for a substantial comprehensive package to help address pensioner poverty, including fuel poverty, and will continue to call for urgent Government action – including measures to bring down energy bills through public ownership of energy (as per the recently announced Great British Energy Bill as a first step).

Further to this, I believe we need to reform social security and establish a new social care system that is fair, free at the point of use and available to everyone when they need it.

I will continue to advocate, in Parliament and beyond, that everyone deserves a decent retirement free of financial stress and insecurity.

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• Ian Byrne is the MP for Liverpool West Derby.
• You can follow him here on x/twitter.
• If you support Labour Outlook’s work amplifying the voices of left movements and struggles here and internationally,  please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon.

“The Myth of Our Disposability”: Reflections from an Amazon Warehouse Worker on Prime Day

On July 16 and 17, Amazon made $14.2 billion off the backs of its workers during its annual Prime Day sale. The “holiday” means extra hours, increased rates of injury, and sweltering temperatures for workers like me. But Amazon workers have been uniting this summer to fight for the wages, conditions, and autonomy that we deserve.


Pola Posen 

August 29, 2024
LEFT VOICE


On July 16, fire hydrants were open on every block, and the streets were empty, cleared by the heat wave that swept over New York City that week. Inside the Amazon warehouse where I work, it was just as hot.

July 16 and 17 — some of the hottest days recorded on the planet — were also Amazon’s 2024 Prime Days. The brutality of the temperatures was matched by that of the record-breaking profits Amazon made off its workers during the sale, which for customers lasted two days, and for workers, two weeks.

Amazon created Prime Day, its own commercial holiday, in 2015. The holiday reflects Amazon’s global ascendency and the increasing centrality of the logistics industry in the United States. Other companies, like Walmart, Target, and Temu, have been forced to create their own sales in July to compete with Prime Day. In the United States, there are about 170 million Amazon Prime members, or about half of the country’s population. Amazon Prime is enormously popular, but our warehouse labor is invisibilized—the hours, stress, and life force that this mammoth industry extracts from us and relies on to feed its own rise.

The company made $14.2 billion in profits during Prime this year, an 11 percent increase from last year. That same week, I earned $900 for working a mandatory 60 hours.

Most of us work the overnight shift, from 1 a.m. to 11:50 a.m., which is Amazon’s most common shift schedule, and which makes possible its characteristic same-day and next-day shipping. During Prime and Peak season (around Christmas time), we work forced overtime hours for two weeks — this year, we were scheduled to work 60 hours, or 12 hours a night for five days straight. This forced overtime is implemented to account for the sharp increase in volume that our warehouses process during Prime and Peak — the number of packages that my warehouse processes doubled during Prime week. The daily number of packages that we unload and sort jumped from about 20,000 to 40,000 packages overnight, meaning that not only did our site force us to work longer hours and hire more workers for Prime season, but we were also pressured through a variety of tactics to work harder.

During this period, we are not allowed to take time off. The mandatory extra time (known as MET) exhausts everyone, and is especially difficult for workers who are single parents or have second jobs that they depend on. If we miss time during MET, this time is subtracted from our paid or unpaid time off — time that we rely on for emergencies, since we do not have sick days. If we run out of our allotted unpaid time off hours (UPT), we can be fired.
On Being Disposable

This dynamic underlies Amazon’s employment model. We are at constant risk and live in constant fear of being fired. This disposability is a practical mechanism for the company: it serves the double purpose of keeping production high and facilitating company control of the shop floor. Amazon employs about 1.5 million mostly young workers around the world, uses up our bodies, and drives us to exhaustion and burnout. Then they throw us out, either by firing us or pressuring us, through the intensity of the work, to quit. The high levels of turnover at Amazon are entirely by design. By guaranteeing a constant flow of new hires who have energy and are not yet injured, the company has an easier time demanding high rates and fast work — in other words, making us do more work for the same low hourly wage.

The disposability model can be seen most acutely during Prime and Peak. The highest numbers of people hired by Amazon are hired right before Prime, and the highest numbers of people fired are fired right after Prime. Amazon, like UPS, has tier systems to instill false and arbitrary divisions between workers who do the same job. Most of these new hires are “white badges,” who are technically seasonal workers, and who do not receive the same benefits (such as vacation hours) or minimal job security as the full-time “blue badge” workers. Their employment status means that they could be fired at any time. The company is supposed to convert white badges to blue badges after three months, but the policy is inconsistent and unenforced. Several of my coworkers have been waiting for nearly a year to get blue badge status. Furthermore, favoritism and, conversely, the targeting of specific people based on bias or if they are seen as a “troublemaker” means that rules are enforced discriminately — one person may be fired for a minor offense that another worker would not be. This is another of management’s attempts to divide us.

The reality and feeling of being disposable is one of powerlessness. Amazon uses disposability to keep us down: the real risk of being fired for next to nothing discourages workers from organizing and forming unions. Amazon’s tools of disposability make us, sometimes, suspicious and resentful of each other. They make workers afraid to speak up against the injustices that we witness every day. Amazon wants us to believe that they easily can, and will, replace us. We get secret write-ups and are constantly surveilled for breaking the smallest, most meaningless rules (like checking our phones). This means our livelihoods are always on the line.

In this way, management seeks to control the shop floor. They use fear and discipline to control how we work, down to the smallest details: when we talk, how many minutes we use the bathroom, how fast we move. Our risk of disposability and material precariousness also facilitate manager harassment, which intensified during Prime. Many of my friends at work have been driven to tears or overcome by blind anger by the disrespect with which we are treated by the managers. There is very little appreciation given to us for breaking our backs 10 hours a night.

Managers will purposefully harass workers on the basis of their gender, race, and language/immigration status. They will mask discipline behind a phony facade of concern, and only later will you discover that when they asked, “Are you OK?” they wrote you up afterward. They will yell our names across the warehouse to get our attention and tell us to move faster. They will use passive-aggressive comments to dismiss and invalidate the hours of hard physical work that we do daily. These types of insidious incidents complement and strengthen the more material forms of disrespect, such as low pay and few benefits, that we face.

Amazon’s tactic of disposability, however, perpetuates a fundamental lie: that we are unimportant. When we are made to feel small and precarious, it helps the company in its quest to make us think that they, the managers and omnipresent Corporate, have the power, and that our role in the company is negligible. But the true balance of power is precisely the opposite. They move nothing; we move the boxes that make Amazon all of its profits and the managers their salaries. Without us, there would be no Amazon.

Alone, we may be disposable, but together, we have the power to decide our futures. In the moment that we are organized enough to all lift one foot in sync and take a step toward freedom together, Amazon’s myth of our disposability will dissolve. As the Wailers famously sang, “You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
Earth’s Safest Place to Work

In a 2020 letter from Jeff Bezos to Amazon’s shareholders, he pledged Amazon’s commitment to be “Earth’s safest place to work.” As an Amazon employee in 2024, it is clear that nothing could be further from the truth.

On Prime Day 2022, Amazon worker Rafael Reynaldo Mota Frias died in a fulfillment center warehouse in New Jersey. Under the immense pressures of working conditions during the sale, Mota Frias had a heart attack.

Coworkers attested that they believe that he was “overworked and overheated.” Mota Frias’s warehouse, like my own, did not have air-conditioning on the warehouse floor. Throughout the summer, it is as hot inside the warehouse as outside, a condition that only worsens each year with the climate crisis. While management’s offices are air-conditioned, the shop floor, where we sweat and exercise for 10 to 12 hours each night, is not. My coworkers joked throughout Prime week that management would wait for someone to pass out from heat exhaustion before they would give us AC.

Indeed, throughout the heat wave that lasted the week of Prime Day this year, management expressed consistent disregard for our heat safety. After an associate complained about the heat, a manager told us that the fans they set up were “sufficient” and that, if someone had a complaint, they should just write again on the useless “Voice of Associates” board. Many of my coworkers told me at different points that they felt overheated and lightheaded. In another instance, I paused work to drink water, and a manager approached me. “What’s going on?” they asked disapprovingly, as I was mid-sip. In coded language, they told me to get back to work.

On July 15 of this year, the U.S. Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Senate Committee released an interim report entitled “Peak Seasons, Peak Injuries: Amazon Warehouses Are Especially Dangerous during Prime Day and the Holiday Season — and the Company Knows It.” In its investigation, the committee found that far more Amazon workers are injured each year than are reported to OSHA, the federal occupational safety regulator. They also found that the company tends to overlook safety procedures during peak periods; when safety requirements inhibit productivity and profit, they are pushed aside. As in an example given in the report, the company commonly floods the conveyor belt with boxes beyond any reasonable capacity, such that they fall off the belt and often hit workers. We are discouraged from turning off the belt to ensure our safety.

According to OSHA, only injuries that are treated beyond first aid must be reported to the agency. This leads to a vast discrepancy between the total injury rate (TIR) and recorded injury rate (RIR) of Amazon warehouse workers, which the Senate committee analyzed using worker testimony and internal Amazon data. Through its RIR, the company artificially manufactures injury rates for the federal regulator that are far lower than they really are — the company often discourages workers from seeking aid beyond first aid and does not provide information about how we can seek outside medical care and workers compensation. As the report notes,


When Amazon workers are injured, they typically visit an on-site first-aid clinic called AMCARE. If their injuries are minor and require only first aid, they are usually treated and sent back to work. But if their injuries are more serious and require additional attention, they are often still only given first aid and sent back to work instead of being sent to a doctor. The result is that their injuries can be rendered not recordable, regardless of severity.

Further, the report demonstrates that injury rates spike during Prime and Peak seasons.

Graph excerpted from the Senate report, originally sourced from a 2020 Amazon Workplace Health and Safety report.

The committee report, while progressive in its orientation and useful in exposing Amazon’s systemic maneuvering, has two important limitations.

First, most injuries at Amazon go unreported. I know this from firsthand experience; one of my coworkers gets injured nearly every day. Often, they choose not to report the injury, for an array of reasons. They fear that they could get in trouble for the injury — managers often blame injuries on the victims, or even reprimand them for getting injured because of what they identify as unsafe practices. Workers are often shamed and harassed after sustaining injuries, even when they receive medical accommodations. For many of my immigrant coworkers, there is a significant language barrier that leads them to avoid reporting injury. In other cases, workers feel that AMCARE, Amazon’s on-site resource, will not help them. Nearly all that AMCARE can prescribe is ice, a heat compress, or ibuprofen; what many workers need is rest, and in more severe cases, physical therapy or more intensive medical treatment. But the process for accessing this treatment is obscured by the company. And, regardless, many workers cannot afford to take unpaid time off.

Second, the report places its trust in OSHA and implores action from Congress as a solution to the injustices perpetrated by Amazon. But this trust is misplaced — Amazon workers have a more accurate understanding that Amazon is not bound by federal laws and regulations. It operates, in a practical sense, outside the law. Though its union busting and abusive occupational practices can be challenged in court, only the organized power of Amazon workers can confront the company.
Amazon Workers Fight Back

Across the country and around the world this summer, Amazon workers are fighting back and growing the movement to transform our working conditions.

On Juneteenth, 600 Amazon workers across five warehouses in the New York area signed petitions, demanding Amazon recognize Juneteenth as a paid holiday, as well as $25-an-hour base pay, time-and-a-half pay for Prime Day (“Prime Pay for Prime Day”), and automatic conversions of seasonal white badge workers to regular blue badge workers in 30 days. Workers marched on their bosses together to deliver the petitions. These warehouse workers are organizing in coordination with what they call the “Amazon Workers Summit, a loose network of workplace committees across New York and New Jersey.”

The Amazon Labor Union at JFK8 on Staten Island is also entering a new era of more militant and renewed struggle against Amazon. The ALU formally affiliated with the Teamsters in June, and in July, the ALU Democratic Reform Caucus slate won the first leadership elections within the union. For the new leadership board, a new chapter of democracy and rank-and-file leadership for the union will allow them to more effectively confront the company and bring them to the bargaining table.

On Sunday, July 21, several days after Prime, more than 130 workers walked out of their warehouse in San Bernardino, California.

Most recently, on August 22, the National Labor Relations Board determined that Amazon is a joint employer of the drivers who deliver its packages in Palmdale, California. Previously, the company has claimed that these workers are the sole employees of third-party delivery service partner (DSP) companies. In 2023, Palmdale drivers at one DSP voted to unionize with the Teamsters and were voluntarily recognized by the DSP management — but because they weren’t technically employees of Amazon, Amazon terminated the DSP contract and refused to bargain with the drivers. Now Amazon must negotiate with the Palmdale drivers, and Amazon drivers have a position of increased leverage against the company.

Organizing at Amazon is entering a new period. As our actions and organization grow, we inspire each other and multiply in our power and confidence. The landscape has also been influenced significantly by the Teamsters’ increased investment in organizing efforts. This influence is exciting to workers as organizing momentum grows, but also poses new problems for workers, as many organizing committees that were formerly independent choose to affiliate with the powerful business union. In this new chapter, it is essential that we recognize and uplift the need for rank-and-file leadership and worker democracy in the actions that we take.

The need for worker power is felt most acutely during peak periods like Prime, when we are most exploited and abused by the company. And the contradiction that rules our lives is felt most acutely: when we are most exploited by Amazon, the company makes the most money from us. All the billions of dollars of profit that Amazon made this year on Prime Day is wealth that we created, and that we should fight to reclaim. The more sweat that we spend on Amazon, the more injuries and sleepless hours we give, the more wealth that the bosses amass and the further we are buried in precarity. Only our united power as workers can turn this system upside down. Only together can we take back the humanity and abundance that is ours.

Ideas & Debates

Once Again on Palestine and the National Question: A Polemic between Révolution Permanente and Lutte Ouvrière


A polemic between Révolution Permanente with Lutte Ouvrière on Palestine and the question of national self-determination.

I LOVE THIS SHIT


Damien Bernard and Claude Piperno 

August 31, 2024

LEFT VOICE


This article is a polemic between Révolution Permanente, Left Voice’s sister group in France, and Lutte Ouvrière (LO, Workers Struggle), another French Trotskyist organization. The debate is part of a series of exchanges on the national question and self-determination.

While the authors focus on Palestine, they also discuss the national self-determination struggle of Kanaky, an island territory in the South Pacific colonized by France since 1853, also known by its colonial name, New Caledonia. In May, Indigenous Kanaks rose up against France’s plan to impose new voting rules that would weaken the Kanak vote. The uprising faced severe repression by the military and armed police, as well as social media bans imposed by the government.

The original article was published before the European elections and snap elections in France, which you can read more about in both Left Voice and Révolution Permanente.

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After a week of semi-spontaneous demonstrations in response to the Rafah massacre and massive mobilizations in France on June 1, Palestine continues to be at the forefront of the political situation. And yet, although Lutte Ouvrière mentions Palestine in its press, at its annual gathering, and in its European election campaign, the group continues to consider Palestine separately from the question of national liberation — thus failing to link it to a revolutionary perspective.

In recent months, Lutte Ouvrière has taken up the subject more directly in an article entitled “The Far Left, the Palestinian Question and Hamas.” LO’s spokeswoman, Nathalie Arthaud, revisited the issue in her speech on the international situation on the last day of the annual gathering. These elaborations and speeches clarify the debate we began last October, when LO continued to dodge the national question and equate Hamas and Netanyahu, calling workers to unite “from the sea to the Jordan River,” without addressing the need for the Israeli working class to break with Zionism.

The development of the international movement for Palestine, the spontaneity and strength with which an entire generation has raised the flag of international solidarity, as well as the resurgence of the national question in Kanaky, all compel us to continue this debate with the comrades of LO.
Just or Unjust War?

In the context of the war-genocide that Israel has been waging against the Gaza Strip and the Palestinians since October, LO has developed a position that can be summarized as follows: they denounce Israeli state terrorism and its imperialist supporters, but also denounce Hamas, whose interests they see as opposed to those of the Palestinians; they express solidarity with the Palestinian people and support their rights and oppose their dispossession; and they call for class unity between workers in Palestine and Israel. Lutte Ouvrière has used this slogan in its press and media: “Against imperialism and its maneuvers; against Netanyahu and Hamas; workers of France, Palestine, and Israel, unite!”

In discussing this position, we pointed out at the end of October 2023 that LO ultimately equates Hamas, a Palestinian national movement organization — which is indeed politically reactionary and ideologically ultra-conservative and religious — with the State of Israel, which is not only a religious and theocratic state in its foundations, but also an advanced outpost and enforcer of imperialist interests in the region. The comrades of LO claim they have never “stopped denouncing the policy of the Israeli leaders … and their state terrorism, whose violence is on a completely different scale than that of Hamas.” It would be our interpretation of Marxism, however, that poses a problem. This interpretation supposedly sweeps under the rug the fundamental question of the political independence that revolutionaries must maintain vis-à-vis national bourgeoisies and their political currents.

To demonstrate our “opportunism,” LO’s argues:


RP points out that, in Socialism and War (1915), Lenin advocated the victory of Morocco over France, of India over England, of Persia or China over Russia. But Lenin also defended the class struggle of the proletariat in colonized or semi-colonial countries against their local ruling classes and their representatives, be they sultans, warlords or maharajas.

This maneuver allows the LO comrades to avoid taking a stance on Lenin’s first assertion, which is that


if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be “just,” “defensive” wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathize with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slave owning, predatory “great” powers.

While Lenin’s assertion seems to be considered self-evident by LO, the latter’s position on the current war in Palestine is far from analogous. On the one hand, LO maintains that “Israel has been waging a war of oppression and colonization for over 70 years,” but on the other hand, it never mentions whether Palestinians are undertaking a “just” war of national liberation, which would require that revolutionaries support the military side of the oppressed nation. This ambiguity regarding the nature of the war in Palestine contrasts with the comrades’ stance on the war in Ukraine, where the LO openly states that “this war is not a just war.”

This refusal to take a position on the war allows LO to evade the question of choosing a military side, asserting that there are


indeed two sides in this war, but not the ones we are presented with. On one side, there are the leaders of Israel and the great powers, but also those of the Arab states, Hamas, and even the Palestinian Authority, who primarily seek power and each contribute in their own way to the continued oppression of the peoples. On the other side, the oppressed Arabs, Palestinians, and Israelis have no interest in this war. But they will only be able to end it by uniting on the basis of their class interests against all their oppressors.”

This abstract position of “neutrality” denies the clear opposition between the State of Israel, on the one hand, supported by a number of imperialist powers, some of which are currently critical of Netanyahu’s extremism, and the Palestinian people resisting colonization and occupation on the other, whose cause is being instrumentalized by several bourgeois states or currents in the Near and Middle East in the face of Zionist colonialism.
The Exception and the Rule: When Lutte Ouvrière Resolutely Defended the Side of Oppressed Nations

LO has not always held the same position on the Palestinian question, notably from the late 1960s to the 1970s. For instance, a few days after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, initiated by Nasserist Egypt and Ba’athist Syria in reaction to Israel’s colonial offensive during the Six-Day War in 1967, LO explicitly positioned itself on the side of the oppressed nations with an article titled “Middle East: Why Revolutionaries Are in the Camp of the Arab Countries.” As early as 1967, the comrades (then known as Voix Ouvrière [Worker’s Voice]) expressed a similar position in an article titled “The Palestinian Problem.”

In these two texts, LO adopts a clear position on the war. While the comrades sharply criticize and denounce the maneuvers and inconsistencies of the nationalist bourgeois leaderships of the Arab states, such as the PLO, they do so from a position of unconditional support for the resistance of oppressed peoples against imperialism. Several excerpts from these texts could apply to the current war. For instance, in their 1973 article, the comrades point out that “proletarian revolutionaries cannot determine their stance based on the nationalisms and national justifications at play. Nor can they determine their stance based on the nature of the regimes of the states involved in this war,” before adding that without harboring any illusions about “the anti-imperialist or, even less, revolutionary character of the conflict,”


proletarian revolutionaries must support the Arab countries. They must support them unconditionally, despite the reactionary anti-worker nationalist policies of the regimes in place, because imperialism is on the other side. Because imperialism would be strengthened by an Israeli victory, because Israel, in defending its own interests in this part of the world, also defends those of global imperialism.

LO then made it clear that “support for the Arab countries in no way means alignment with nationalist leaders,” thus distinguishing between military and political camps, a distinction we ourselves draw in our texts on Palestine, which our comrades consider “opportunist.” While acknowledging the reactionary aspects of Arab leaderships, whether it’s the collusion between Nasser, Hussein, and Faisal 1 or “the anti-Jewish propaganda of a Choukeiry,” 2 LO believed that “all this is not enough to equate Israel and the Arab countries.” According to the organization at that time,


in the event of a conflict between Israel and the Arab states, we stand with the latter, because the policies of Arab leaders may be contrary to the interests of their people, but Israeli leaders are fighting for imperialism. In a war between American democracy and the Sultan of Kuwait, we would not look at where the Republic is and where the Monarchy is, but where imperialism is.

Although the LO likes to emphasize the consistency of its politics and strategy, these positions sharply contrast with its positions on the current war. Unfortunately, these positions from 1973 have been more of an exception than the rule in the history of the organization, likely influenced by the (healthy, in our view) pressure of the 1968 revolutionary spirit. In any case, this period allowed for the development of texts that are light-years away from the rigid stance LO now presents as proof of orthodoxy. Nevertheless, LO’s analytical framework on the national question fundamentally differs from the theory of permanent revolution and Trotskyism, despite the organization’s claims to uphold them.
Rhetoric and Abstractions: LO’s Trotskyism and the Negation of the National Question

Throughout its history, LO has tried to establish a framework for understanding the tasks of revolutionary Marxists in semicolonial and colonial countries, and in doing so, it has often derided the errors and deviations of the other two major Trotskyist currents in France. On one side, there’s the “Mandelite” current — formerly the Unified Secretariat, now the International Committee associated historically with the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR) and today with various currents within the NPA and Ensemble [See “Permanent revolution, as defended by the Unified Secretariat.”]]. On the other side, there’s the Lambertist current 3. LO has focused its critiques particularly on the LCR, with which LO has occasionally collaborated, such as in shared interventions and activist groups. LO has consistently criticized the Mandelite stance of following bourgeois nationalist or Stalinist leaderships that have led revolutionary processes in the latter half of the 20th century, from Maoism to Sandinism and Castroism, among others.4 We partially share these critiques, which form the basis for our profound strategic differences with this current 5; however, they do not vindicate the LO’s incorrect strategic analysis of the national question, the tasks of national liberation arising from it, and their connection to the perspective of social revolution.

LO’s positions on this question indeed rest on denying the national question. LO advocates a stance presented as “class-based”: the only thing that ultimately matters is that the working class can overthrow the dictatorship of capital. This truth is expressed abstractly, overlooking a range of other struggles that, while ultimately subordinate to the primary objective, can play a decisive role in the capacity of the working class to mobilize.

In the case of countries that LO describes as “backward” or “poor” 6, where the national question is more obvious and unavoidable, LO maintains formally anti-imperialist positions, condemning exploitation, plundering, and violence, while sidestepping the issue of national liberation. When it comes to unresolved national questions in countries or nations at the heart of the imperialist system, such as the Catalan or Basque question with respect to the Spanish or French state, LO considers them nationalist and reactionary demands — or reactionary because they are nationalist 7.

In both cases, LO never concretely addresses the link between national and social liberation: namely, as posited by Lenin and Trotsky within the Communist International, the way in which a struggle for democratic and national rights can “grow into” a fight against capital, and conversely, how only a fight against capital can ensure the real success of these democratic and national struggles, provided the working class intervenes independently and through self-organization. LO omits the first part of this reasoning and retains only fragments of the second. Thus, in its main polemical texts against the Unified Secretariat, for example, LO ridicules Mandelism’s use of the idea of “growing into” as if it were an “invention” on par with other Marxist categories that emerged in the postwar period, even though the term is one of the key operational concepts highlighted by Trotsky in the preface to The Permanent Revolution, to cite just one text.

To justify this de facto break with Trotskyism, Lutte Ouvrière relies on the real political adaptations of certain currents, suggesting that the idea of a bourgeois revolution “growing into” a socialist revolution entails expecting nationalist leaderships themselves to transform into workers’ and revolutionary leaderships. This polemical distortion is countered by LO with the notion — abstractly correct but politically revealing of its choices, hesitations, and limitations — that “only the dictatorship of the proletariat can fully resolve and guarantee the fulfillment of bourgeois democratic tasks, as it opens the perspective of world socialist revolution.” This formulation from 1967, in “The Permanent Revolution in China,” is the same one that is denied in 2024 to Kanaky, which LO continues to call “New Caledonia”: “The aspirations of the oppressed to escape poverty and decide their fate,” reads the conclusion of LO’s latest national editorial signed by Nathalie Arthaud, “cannot be realized without overthrowing imperialism, that is, the capitalist economic order, which is at the root of the relations of domination and borders it has created. Without this perspective, we are condemned to continue witnessing the inequalities and violence that fuel rejection, hatred, and racism among workers and oppressed people.”

The national question is thrown out the window — as if, before addressing the essential issue of class unity between Kanak and Caldoche workers, whites and Melanesians, it was unnecessary to defend the right to self-determination, self-defense, and independence of the Kanak people, which LO avoids addressing. This position leads to sidestepping an essential struggle in France: convincing French workers of the imperialist nature of their state by engaging them in a very concrete critique of it through support for the self-determination of the peoples it oppresses. This has historically been the position of the revolutionary labor movement, which sought to eradicate any tendency toward chauvinism and adaptation to its imperialism, and to do so not through calls for abstract internationalism but through the unconditional defense of “the freedom of political separation for the colonies and nations oppressed by ‘their’ nation.”

This position, presented by LO as the most orthodox adherence to Trotskyism, actually aligns more with Bordigism — with which LO has or has had ideological, political, and organizational connections — or with ultra-left positions that it often downplays. These positions have been influenced by the ideological contributions or cadres from leftist currents like Socialisme ou Barbarie, which have fed into the press and ranks of VO and later LO.
A Trotskyist Defense of a Class-Independent Policy on the National Question

Our differences on the national question in general, the Palestinian issue in particular, and especially the ongoing genocide in Gaza are not at all about “opportunism,” as our comrades suggest. Rather, they are theoretical and strategic differences on how to connect democratic tasks to the perspective of revolution. To support its position, LO relies on an excerpt from The Permanent Revolution:


Under the conditions of the imperialist epoch the national democratic revolution can be carried through to a victorious end only when the social and political relationships of the country are mature for putting the proletariat in power as the leader of the masses of the people. And if this is not yet the case? Then the struggle for national liberation will produce only very partial results, results directed entirely against the working masses.

The strict correlation with the situation in the Gaza Strip or the occupied territories of the West Bank is a bit crude — the only country in the region where these conditions would be “ripe,” at least from a strictly economistic point of view, is the socioeconomic complex of Israel. Analogies, however, have their limits, both in politics and theory, when referring to texts. The Permanent Revolution is an essay written from 1928 to 1931 in light of the defeat of the Chinese Revolution of 1925–27, in order to draw lessons for the communist movement from the errors and missteps of the leadership of the Third International. In it, Trotsky opposes the slogan of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry for the whole East,” which Karl Radek defended on behalf of the International. Trotsky and his supporters, persecuted and marginalized within the Comintern, fought the positions of the majority, which supported “socialism in one country” in the USSR and, after the crushing of the Chinese Revolution by the Kuomintang, persisted in justifying a policy of collaboration between the working class and the petty bourgeoisie by relying on out-of-context positions from Lenin. Behind this was the Soviet bureaucracy’s inclination to form diplomatic ties with certain bourgeoisies in the East.

In this excerpt, Trotsky does not deny, as the LO article suggests, the progressive nature of national liberation struggles in the imperialist era. On the contrary, he rejects opportunism and argues that even in the “backward” countries of the East, specifically a vast region colonized or in the process of being colonized by Japanese imperialism in the case of China, “a true popular democracy, that is, of workers and peasants, can only be achieved through the dictatorship of the proletariat.” This does not negate the communists’ obligation to support national liberation struggles against imperialism. Rather, it emphasizes that the only way to prepare for the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat or the workers’ and peasants’ government is through supporting national liberation struggles while maintaining complete political independence from nationalist bourgeois leaderships, whether secular or religious, “socialist” or politically conservative.

A few years later, in 1937, within the Movement for the Fourth International, Trotsky engaged in polemics with several non-Stalinist currents that adopted some “class against class” positions and advocated an ultra-left stance toward the early stages of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), the precursor to World War II. In a letter to Diego Rivera called “On the Sino-Japanese War,” Trotsky emphasized that “the duty of all the workers’ organizations of China was to participate actively and in the front lines of the present war against Japan, without abandoning, for a single moment, their own program and independent activity.” Within the Fourth Internationalist Movement, some currents existing within or having been part of it before breaking away accused this position of “social-patriotism,” renouncing proletarian internationalism, and conceding to bourgeois nationalism. For these currents, known as “Oehlerites” and “Eiffelites” in the debates of Trotsky and the Bolshevik-Leninists at the time, the Sino-Japanese War was either imperialist or inter-imperialist, and the proletariat had no side in it to support.

On the contrary, for Trotsky,


China is a semicolonial country which Japan is transforming, under our very eyes, into a colonial country. Japan’s struggle is imperialist and reactionary. China’s struggle is emancipatory and progressive. … If Japan is an imperialist country and if China is the victim of imperialism, we favor China. Japanese patriotism is the hideous mask of worldwide robbery. Chinese patriotism is legitimate and progressive.

And yet the Chinese resistance was largely led by the Kuomintang of


Chiang Kai-shek [who was] the executioner of the Chinese workers and peasants. We need have no illusions about Chiang Kai-shek, his party, or the whole ruling class of China. … But today he is forced, despite himself, to struggle against Japan for the remainder of the independence of China.

Trotsky thus defends himself against accusations from the Eiffelists and Oehlerites that he has changed his attitude toward the “Chinese question” and his positions from the 1920s:


During the Chinese revolution of 1925–27 we attacked the policies of the Comintern. Why? It is necessary to understand well the reasons. The Eiffelites claim that we have changed our attitude on the Chinese question. That is because the poor fellows have understood nothing of our attitude in 1925–27. We never denied that it was the duty of the Communist Party to participate in the war of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie of the South against the generals of the North, agents of foreign imperialism. We never denied the necessity of a military bloc between the CP and the Kuomintang. On the contrary, we were the first to propose it. We demanded, however, that the CP maintain its entire political and organizational independence, that is, that during the civil war against the internal agents of imperialism, as in the national war against foreign imperialism, the working class, while remaining in the front lines of the military struggle, prepare the political overthrow of the bourgeoisie. We hold the same policies in the present war. We have not changed our attitude one iota. The Oehlerites and the Eiffelites, on the other hand, have not understood a single bit of our policies, neither those of 1925–27, nor those of today.

Thus, contrary to what LO claims, Trotsky does not conclude that, based on the lessons drawn from the Chinese Revolution, revolutionaries should only support national liberation struggles on the condition that the country’s “social and political relations” are sufficiently “ripe” for the dictatorship of the proletariat.


In participating in the military struggle under the orders of Chiang Kai-shek, since unfortunately it is he who has the command in the war for independence — to prepare politically the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek … that is the only revolutionary policy. The Eiffelites counterpose the policy of “class struggle” to this “nationalist and social patriotic” policy. Lenin fought this abstract and sterile opposition all his life. To him, the interests of the world proletariat dictated the duty of aiding oppressed peoples in their national and patriotic struggle against imperialism.

In this excerpt, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to replace “Eiffelists” with “LO” and see their “class struggle” policy applied to Palestine and Israel. The bourgeois nationalist currents in Palestine, religious or otherwise, currently represent the military leadership of the struggle, and are characterized by their historical maneuvers and latch-ditch compromises. Yet the only way to prepare for confronting these bourgeois nationalist currents is precisely by unconditionally positioning oneself in the military camp of the resistance — not to support its leadership, but to contest their influence and defend a revolutionary strategy that alone can solve the national question by forming a faction that defends a revolutionary program and strategy with complete class independence. This is the condition for a stance that is not abstentionist in the final analysis, as demonstrated by LO’s weak participation in the solidarity movement for Palestine, which nevertheless constitutes a crucible of politicization, mobilization, and even radicalization for many young people and workers.
The Exception Is Better than the Rule

In their 1973 position paper, the comrades of LO very rightly explained what the policy of revolutionaries should be from imperialist countries:


The revolutionary militants of advanced capitalist countries … have the political and moral duty to support these countries when they are involved in a conflict with imperialism. And this, regardless of the leaders that the peoples choose or accept.

They then clarified the consequences in terms of internationalism:


Revolutionaries from advanced capitalist countries can only unite with the proletarians of backward countries by demonstrating their own internationalism, by unconditionally supporting them in their resistance to imperialism, even when these proletarians are still following nationalist and bourgeois leaders.

After this detour through a political position that offered a proper framework for understanding revolutionary intervention, LO quickly reverted to its political conceptions, which align more with a global workerist and economistic mindset, more akin to Bordigism than to Trotskyism and the Fourth International, of which LO claims to be the sole heir. One with this mindset cannot link the struggle against exploitation, the fight against oppression, the national question, and the democratic question, and this naturally has significant consequences on the LO’s program and politics.

The LO’s analytical framework is now strengthened by its extremely grim characterization of the current global situation. LO considers the era in which “national questions” contained “exceptional revolutionary potential” to be over. From the post–World War II period until the 1970s, this era included “the period of colonial revolutions that shook the old European imperialisms,” “the Black movement in the United States in the 1960s,” and “the Palestinian people’s movement in the Middle East after World War II, at least until the civil war that engulfed Lebanon in the 1970s.”

The international youth movement in recent months, fueled by anti-imperialism and support for Palestinian national aspirations, with its epicenter in the United States, does not seem to change the situation for LO. Seeing the situation only through the lens of the extreme decline of the labor movement and the exacerbation of militarism and state rivalries, without recognizing the contradictory dynamics expressed in sectors of the labor movement, the working classes, and the youth, LO condemns itself to passivity. While the genocide continues in Gaza and Macron plays the civil war card in Kanaky, the correct policy is to intervene in the situation using a strategy that allows the working world and the youth to take an active part in the struggles for self-determination, linked to the perspective of revolution. This is an essential issue for revolutionaries and internationalists, even more so in the context of an electoral campaign dominated by the Right, the Far Right, and reactionary one-upmanship.

A way to remember and apply, in the current era, elements of conduct bequeathed to us by the Bolsheviks in a situation even darker than ours, when they were preparing for 1917: as Lenin emphasized, the way to address and campaign among workers in imperialist countries should be to advocate


freedom for the oppressed countries to secede and their fighting for it. Without this there can be no internationalism. It is our right and duty to treat every Social-Democrat of an oppressor nation who fails to conduct such propaganda as a scoundrel and an imperialist. This is an absolute demand, even where the chance of secession being possible and “practicable” before the introduction of socialism is only one in a thousand.

Palestine and Kanaky are both implicitly part of this strategic line, which should be embraced by the entire revolutionary Left today.

Originally published in French on June 2 by Révolution Permanente.

Translated by Emma Lee.


Notes

Notes↑1 This is a reference to King Hussein of Jordan (1952–99) and King Faisal of Iraq (1939–58), both of whom were indirectly supported by Egyptian leader Gamal Nasser, who, despite his policy of pan-Arab unity, did not wish to structurally challenge the region’s geopolitical balance or its links with its historical imperial overseer, in this case Great Britain.
↑2 Ahmed Choukeiry was the first secretary-general of the PLO from 1964 to 1967.
↑3 Today, they are referred to as Parti des Travailleurs (PT, Workers Party) and Parti ouvrier internationaliste (POI, Internationalist Workers Party), and like Ensemble, they are also part of La France insoumise.
↑4 Only recently, at the ceremony to pay tribute to Alain Krivine, Michel Rodinson, on behalf of the LO leadership, gave a vitriolic speech purporting to sum up 50 years of militancy in the ranks of the revolution, attacking in particular the league’s “opportunism” vis-à-vis “nationalist currents,” among which Rodinson listed, in no particular order, everything from the PLO to Sandinism and the French flag defended by Mélenchon.
↑5 See, among many other polemical texts, “At the Limits of Bourgeois Restoration.”
↑6 LO rejects the Marxist category of “semicolonial countries,” i.e., countries that are formally independent but in reality totally subject, to varying degrees, to the dictates of the imperialist powers, which is the lot of the vast majority of countries in what is now known as the “Global South.” In publications and speeches, LO prefers more or less vague terminology such as “backward countries,” “poor countries,” or even “underdeveloped countries.” This nomenclature is not linked to a desire for pedagogical clarity but has major politico-strategic repercussions.
↑7 We can also analyze LO’s “orthodox” premise as a way of adapting to the consciousness (real or supposed) of the least advanced sectors of the working world: Why make the anti-colonial question a political axis and oppose its “milieu” if the latter is not, a priori, any more than the union bureaucracy, for the right to self-determination of all the current French colonies, notably in the Caribbean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans?



Damien Bernard
Damien is an editor of our French sister site Révolution Permanente.

Germany’s Center-Left Government Prepared the Victory of the Far-Right AfD


The far-right AfD won the elections in the East German state of Thuringia. This wasn’t a surprise: it was a result of the fact that the center-left government has largely adopted the AfD’s program.


Nathaniel Flakin 

September 4, 2024

LEFT VOICE


On Sunday, the AfD won the elections in the East German state of Thuringia with 32.8 percent of votes — the first electoral victory by a far-right party in Germany since 1933. In the neighboring state of Saxony, the AfD was a close second with 30.6 percent, just one point behind the conservative CDU.

The three center-left parties that make up the German government — SPD, Greens, and FDP — suffered terrible losses, with all together winning just 10.4 percent in Thuringia and 13.3 percent in Saxony. Die Linke was the biggest loser. Once the “people’s party” of the former East Germany, the reformist Left Party is now on the verge of disappearing. In Thuringia, Die Linke has gone from the biggest party to fourth place, losing more than half its votes, while in Saxony it fell below the 5 percent threshold. The big winner, besides the AfD, was the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which was running for the first time since Wagenknecht split from Die Linke, and got 15.8 percent in Thuringia and 11.8 percent in Saxony.

In Thuringia in particular, the AfD under the leadership of Björn Höcke has close connections to violent Nazis. Earlier this year, millions of people took to the streets of Germany to protest against the AfD’s secret plans for “remigration” or mass deportations. Now, the AfD is putting that very slogan on posters and got almost a third of votes. Disturbingly, in Saxony, voters aged 18-24 chose the Far Right at a similar rate as the general population. This has led to a growing confidence among full-fledged Nazi groups like Freie Sachsen (Free Saxons) or Der III. Weg (The Third Way), who in recent weeks have mobilized against Pride demonstrations.

All other parties have ruled out forming a coalition government with the AfD — a policy called the “Brandmauer,” or firewall — but this will make forming a majority government extremely difficult in either state. Thuringia will need either a four-party coalition or a minority government — both almost unprecedented models in the Federal Republic. At the national level, too, the governing coalition will become even more unstable, although at this point early elections seem unlikely.
“AfD wirkt!”

At a roundtable discussion on public TV on election night, the AfD’s parliamentary secretary Bernd Baumann declared that “AfD wirkt!”, meaning the AfD is effective, because “the BSW and the CDU have adopted our central demands regarding immigration.” This is true: Every party has adopted the AfD’s program. Not only have the conservative CDU and the “left conservative” BSW been joining the AfD in calling for more deportations — the national government, the self-described “progress coalition” of SPD, Greens, and FDP, also wants to deport people.

The last year in Germany has seen a racist frenzy, with the social democratic chancellor Olaf Scholz declaring on a magazine cover: “we have to deport people more often and faster.” Anti-immigrant agitation reached a fever pitch just a week before the election after August 26, when a Syrian refugee in the West German town of Solingen killed three people with a knife at a public festival, after declaring allegiance to the Islamic State.

There were two further knife attacks in other cities in the following days. Yet since both were carried out by white Germans, they drew almost zero media attention. In fact, a state interior minister assured people that the latter attacks were different, since they were caused by mental illness — as if the Syrian refugee was acting perfectly rationally while committing murder!

All parties are now calling for changes to asylum law and even to the constitution. At a memorial service for the victims of the Solingen attack, Germany’s Federal President said that reducing migration “must be a priority in the coming years.”

The government intends to stop all payments for asylum seekers who enter Germany through other Schengen countries (i.e., almost all of them), offering them nothing more than “bed-bread-soap.” Germany’s Constitutional Court has already said this would violate Article I of Germany’s Law about the inviolability of human dignity. Yet such constitutional and humanitarian niceties are being sacrificed to the demands of performative cruelty. Not to be outdone, Friedrich Merz of the CDU wants to reject all asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan, while Markus Söder of the CSU wants to strike the right to asylum from the constitution entirely.

Just ten years ago, calls to deport “criminal foreigners” were limited to the neo-Nazi party NPD on the fringes of German politics. Today, even the Green Party wants to spend billions of additional euros to ramp up the deportation machine.

The endless appeals to vote for “democratic parties” and to oppose “extremism” were ineffective because all self-described democrats took up all the AfD’s extremist proposals. How bad can the AfD be, many voters will have wondered, if the other parties have adopted all their racist proposals?

Just a few days before people went to the polls, Scholz’s government managed to deport 28 people to Afghanistan. They claimed these were all violent criminals, but at least one seems to have been convicted of nothing but drug possession. Since the Federal Republic of Germany does not recognize the Taliban government, the flight was mediated via Qatar — it’s not clear if Berlin paid money to Kabul. This is in direct violation of a German law that prohibits deportations to countries where torture, executions, or other forms of inhumane treatment can take place.

Yet as the racist competition continues, laws become irrelevant. The interior ministry, run by social democrats, worked hard to complete the deportations before the election. This was nothing but election campaigning for the AfD!

This isn’t a result of political incompetence, however, nor is it a response to a rightward shift in public opinion. All parties in Germany are in basic agreement about the need for rearmament, and this can only be financed by impoverishing the working class. The constant racist The unending racist campaign is intended to distract the population from the growing class war from above. The AfD is benefitting because they made racism their core competency long ago.
Two Terrible Lefts

Sahra Wagenknecht’s party, the BSW, now has a clear path to joining one or even two state governments. The international press still has a habit of calling Wagenknecht “far left,” and while she was a hardcore Stalinist several decades ago, she has long made her peace with capitalism. Starting in 2017, she has argued that the Left needs to oppose immigration, whereas the socialist movement has always fought for open borders.

Her hypothesis was that anti-immigrant positions would help the Left win back voters from the AfD. Yet statistics show that most BSW voters come from the SPD, Die Linke, or the CDU, with only a small portion coming from the AfD. Wagenknecht is primarily speaking to voters who seem themselves as centrists, but want permission to voice right-wing positions on immigrations, trans rights, vaccines, and other right-wing culture war topics.

The BSW is nothing like a left party. It has less than 1,000 members, and it is entirely focussed on one personality. Even though Wagenknecht was not running for office, her face was on every poster, whereas the actual candidates are almost completely unknown. The BSW leadership is made up of millionaire capitalists and career politicians from the SPD and Die Linke. Its program says very little about workers’ rights, and instead focusses on strengthening small and medium-sized enterprises. It is no surprise that the BSW is open to a coalition with the CDU, which in principle rejects coalitions with left-wing parties.

For BSW voters, the number one issue was the war in Ukraine. The push for war against Russia, which has been led by the United States and supported by German imperialism, has been a catastrophe for working-class and poor people in Germany. The EU’s boycott of Russian natural gas, followed by the terrorist attack against the Nord Stream II pipeline (presumably orchestrated by the CIA and carried out by Ukrainian forces), led to a spike in energy prices. Scholz’s proclamation of a “Zeitenwende” (changing of the times) with 100 billion euros of additional funding for the military has led to austerity, with spending cuts across the board. It is extremely progressive that many people in Germany’s economically suffering East have no interest in tightening their belts to pay for a third imperialist war against Russia. The East has a number of energy-intensive medium-sized businesses, which is one reason this region has seen particular opposition to the war. (The history of anti-immigrant sentiment in a region with few immigrants goes back to the devastating reintroduction of capitalism in the 1990s.)

Instead of ever more weapons shipments, Wagenknecht has been calling for “peace” in Ukraine via a diplomatic solution. This has earned her bizarre accusations of her being a Kremlin agent, despite her constant criticism of the right-wing Putin government. Without seconding these bourgeois denunciations in any way, it is important to emphasize that Wagenknecht is neither a pacifist nor a socialist opponent of imperialist war. Instead, she advocates militarization at home or abroad — she simply wants German imperialism to act independently of the United States. She is a German nationalist who aims to free the German bourgeoisie from several generations of subservience to U.S. imperialism — which would require good relations with Russian capitalism. This is nothing leftists can support.

That leaves Die Linke, for whom these elections represent yet another big leap towards collapse. The two party co-chairs had preemptively announced their intention to resign. One of them, Janine Wissler (a renegade from Trotskyism), tried to console supporters on election night by saying she did not regret the split with Wagenknecht: Despite the catastrophic results, the party had stuck to its principles.

If only this were true! On paper, Die Linke might defend “open borders,” but in practice, they still lead the government of Thuringia. Bodo Ramelow, the state’s prime minister and Die Linke’s most popular figure, deports people every single day. The party has been part of numerous state governments carrying out neoliberal and racist policies. Over the last year, Die Linke has also slowly abandoned their formal anti-war positions. They have been almost totally silent on the ongoing genocide, while some prominent Die Linke politicians have vocally supported the war and called for state repression against pro-Palestine solidarity. The party has also largely lined up behind the German government and NATO on the question of Ukraine.

This is why Die Linke is nowhere perceived as a fundamental opposition to the political establishment, but rather as its left wing. Voters who were fed up were most likely to turn to the AfD or the BSW.

Looking at Die Linke and the BSW, I can’t help quoting Lenin: “in our opinion, they are both worse.”
For an Alternative

There is no way to stop the Right by supporting the “democratic center” — while that very center is carrying out the Far Right’s policies. What is needed are mass mobilizations: on the streets, and particularly in workplaces, schools, and universities. Germany’s Far Right, despite its huge parliamentary representation, has little mobilization power, often bringing less than 10,000 people to what are billed as national demonstrations. Opponents of the AfD, in contrast, can bring millions to the streets. The problem with the demonstrations at the beginning of this year, however, was that they were only opposed to the AfD, and had no answer to a government that was itself introducing new racist laws. Antifascists need to create a left-wing political alternative.

The group Marx21, a post-Trotskyist network inside Die Linke, which recently went through a three-way split, had a very small victory on election day. Focussing all their energies on one district in the Saxon city of Leipzig, they were able to get one of their members, Nam Duy Nguyen, elected to the Saxon parliament.

This is, at most, a pyrrhic victory. Nguyen will be a single voice in a tiny, decimated, and very right-wing Die Linke parliamentary group. During the election campaign, Nguyen generally avoided all mention of Ukraine or Gaza, in order to avoid antagonizing his party, instead focussing on bread-and-butter social issues. For a large sector of voters, however, the Ukraine war was a decisive question. Marx21 won a seat, but will not be able to use it as a tribune of fundamental opposition — instead, they have tied themselves further to the government socialists’ sinking ship.

This is why socialists in Germany need to fight to build an independent political force: a revolutionary-socialist front based on the political independence of the working class. This is what Klasse Gegen Klasse, the sister group of Left Voice in Germany, has been campaigning for. It is clearly not enough to “stand against the Far Right” when they are perceived by a broad swath of the population as the main alternative to a despised neoliberal government. Socialists in Germany need to make sure that the revolutionary Left becomes visible as a voice of irreconcilable opposition to both the Scholz government and to its critics from the Far Right.






Nathaniel Flakin

Nathaniel is a freelance journalist and historian from Berlin. He is on the editorial board of Left Voice and our German sister site Klasse Gegen Klasse. Nathaniel, also known by the nickname Wladek, has written a biography of Martin Monath, a Trotskyist resistance fighter in France during World War II, which has appeared in German, in English, and in French, and in Spanish. He has also written an anticapitalist guide book called Revolutionary Berlin. He is on the autism spectrum.