The Historic Significance of the New German Left Party1

Wann seid ihr noch Linkspartei Für die Arbeitsleute,. Tut was gegen Dienerei Gegen die Beamtenmeute? –Barbara Thalheim, Der alte Sozi, 2007 Jetzt weiß ich, was soll es bedeuten, Dass ich so traurig bin. Dem Märchen aus uralten Zeiten Fehlt heute ein Neubeginn. –Barbara Thalheim, Ich weiß nicht, was, 2004 Notes 1. earlier version of this article appeared as "Transformation des deutschen Parteiensystems und europäische historische Verantwortung der Linkspartei" in the issue of Das Argument dedicated to the founding of the German Left Party in June 2007 (Theorie und Politik einer neuen Linken, Das Argument 271: 329–47). I thank Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, Stephen Gill, Ingo Schmidt, Julian Germann, Sam Putinja and particularly Leonie Knebel for critical comments on different drafts of this paper. 2. Asbjørn Wahl, "Der Fall Norwegen," Sozialismus, October 2006. 3. The failure of all 1848 revolutions has been explained by Eric Hobsbawm (Citation1996: 9–26), following Marx's own analysis, invoking the idea of two hearts beating in the chest of the bourgeoisie. The split of the Tiers État into capital and labor – resulting from the dynamism of capitalist development – led to the first independent political articulation of the Quatrième État, the proletariat, making far-reaching demands on its former (bourgeois) partner in revolution. Leo Kofler Citation(1984) has analyzed the bourgeoisie's need to stop the revolutions from radicalizing as its conservative turn leading to the emergence of two converging ideologies, feudal liberal conservatism (in Germany represented by the Free Conservatives) and capitalist conservative liberalism (represented in Germany by the National Liberals). In Germany, overdetermined by the passive revolution which Gramsci has analyzed as the path taken by nations coming late to capitalism (Gefängnishefte [Prison Notebooks] 5, Heft 8, § 236, p. 1080; idem 5, Heft 9, § 89, pp. 1137–41; idem 6, Heft 10, Teil 1, § 9, pp. 1242–44) the economic ambitions of the liberal bourgeoisie were widely achieved in a process of co-optation (Bismarck's "revolution from above") whereas its political ambitions failed and its representatives became marginalized. In the aftermath, many of the more politically liberal and radically minded elements of the bourgeoisie (including the successors to the small sector of German Jacobins) needed to switch to the social democratic labor movement to realize their original Enlightenment goals in a new context and through a different revolutionary subject, the proletariat. The parallels to the split of the 1960s reform movement into the widely – albeit in a perverted sense – successful "critique artiste" (as opposed to the marginalized "critique sociale") should be obvious (Boltanski and Chiapello 2003). 4. Assessing whether this can be done by the German Left Party is crucial but not possible in the space available here. However, without yet being able to anticipate the party's future course, what can be said for sure is that there exist reasons for optimism (of the will). 5. The Left Party was seen by most commentators as the real winner of the national elections of 2005. It won 8.7% of all the votes, which equaled 54 seats in parliament (three of them through direct candidates: Petra Pau, Gesine Lötzsch and Gregor Gysi). One Die LINKE parliamentarian, Gert Winkelmeier, left the party in 2006, which means that currently Die LINKE has 53 MPs (out of a total of 613). The absolute number of people who voted for Die LINKE in 2005 was 4.086 million (out of 47 million valid votes and 61 million eligible voters). In all the polls from the different polling institutes, Die LINKE has been seen as the strongest opposition party since May 2007 and has been receiving between 9 and 14% support (which, based on voter participation and MP seat distribution of the national elections of 2005, would equal around 4 to 6.5 million votes and 56 to 87 MPs). 6. The Eastern sentiment for unification naturally benefited the then ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) chancellor Helmut Kohl, while at the same time Oskar Lafontaine's critique of immediate reunification and monetary union – grounded in his fear of East German deindustrialization and peripheralization – was portrayed by his CDU opponents as unpatriotic. This helped win Kohl an unexpected landslide victory over Lafontaine and the SPD. 7. Former Red Army Faction lawyers like Otto Schily and Gerhard Schröder (who had both represented RAF member Horst Mahler) were promoted to leading government posts, as were Hans-Christian Ströbele as well as former protagonists of the so-called Spontaneist scene (Foreign Minister Josef [Joschka] Fischer) or former members of the Communist League (Environmental Minister Jürgen Trittin). In terms of its personnel, this generation was diametrically opposed to the predecessor regime. 8. Then Minister of Labor Franz Müntefering had likened foreign speculative financial investors to a plague of locusts and initiated a lengthy debate about the relationship of "Rhenish Capitalism" to "Shareholder Value Capitalism," the German (and European) social model, unbridled capitalism and social equality, etc.; "locust" in German refers to private equity companies. 9. Thus in 1998–1999 the left-liberal weekly Jungle World (which emerged from the editorial strike and split in the socialist news daily Junge Welt) carried a long running debate on the question of Keynesianism. 10. The German Grundgesetz [Basic Law] Article 26, Paragraph 1 prohibits waging a war of aggression and aims at prosecuting actions disturbing peaceful relations among the world's peoples. Due to history, the peace question is very important in political debates in Germany, which have been characterized by a strong popular pacifist sentiment. This sentiment is particularly apparent among East Germans and could be seen, for example, in Schröder's unexpected victory in the 2002 federal elections, due both to the way he presented himself as the "crisis chancellor" in the context of the Elbe flood and to the Red–Green coalition's opposition to the imminent war in Iraq, which caused a temporary rift in the transatlantic relationship. (American commentators, recognizing this specific German sensibility, more easily forgave German than French opposition to the Iraq war.) Interestingly enough, the strongest support for foreign entanglements, such as the war in Afghanistan, can nowadays be found among backers of the Green Party, whose original radical pacifism has almost completely given way to human-rights interventionism. According to this generation's particular perception, it is not because of the imperialist war of annihilation in the East that "from German soil there should never again emerge war," but rather because of the Holocaust that military action should so emerge (in the sense that a special obligation of German foreign policy is now to prevent "holocausts" from happening elsewhere). It is due to this paradigm shift in the German discourse on war, supported by atrocious lies about the alleged "holocaust" taking place in Yugoslavia, that German involvement in war, which nonetheless remains very unpopular among the general population, has become possible again. And yet, even among the Green Party rank-and-file the "war enthusiasm" has died down, as could be observed at the Green Party convention in September 2007, when the rank and file successfully rebelled against the party's Afghanistan policy and torpedoed the false confidence of the party leadership, which had been convinced that it could connect the decision about the uncontested proliferation of the NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mandate to the unpopular decision of sending German Tornado airplanes to Afghanistan. 11. Lowering unemployment benefits to the level of social security benefits has brought down the payments received by the unemployed after a year of unemployment (or 18 months in the case of people who are 55 or older) to 345 euros per month plus the cost of rent in "adequate" housing (which for many people has entailed having to move into smaller apartments). Prior to Hartz IV, unemployed workers had been receiving between 12 and 32 months of full "unemployment pay" (60–67% of the previous net salary) and after that "unemployment benefits" of 53–57% of the last net salary). 12. It is not difficult to imagine why Hartz IV has become a frequently used scareword for the majority of society. It is ironic that, in this case, one of the common terms meant to conceal the rolling-back of the welfare state has become a major factor discrediting Red–Green claims to social justice. It is also no wonder, therefore, that there have been demands to change the name of the welfare reform in order to put it in a better light. 13. Nolte wrote: "Thus, the considerable similarity between the complex mixes of problems faced by the two big parties has recently become quite clear. Both leaderships are committed to a reform agenda not supported by a great many of their followers or only very reluctantly put up with. Both are struggling with the loss of milieux, against frustration, political withdrawal and populist temptations, found in about a third of our population. There is hardly any alternative for the CDU but to support Schröder and Clement. Anything else would be foolish and irresponsible. However, it would also be foolish, for the sake of improved electoral prospects, to call a halt to the debate on reform that has begun in the party and to yearn for the certainties of the Bonn Republic, whether of a social-policy ('Blüm') or societal and domestic policy ('Dregger') sort" (2004). 14. We should also keep in mind "that for almost fifty years – especially given the context of the Cold War and the elimination of the KPD – to the left to the SPD began the political 'abyss', the realm of secret services, the Berufsverbote [blacklisting] and political trials." (Deppe Citation2007). 15. The adoption by the protesters of the term "Monday Demonstrations" was an affront to the West German historiography of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which saw the East German Monday Demonstrations of 1989 as a unique phenomenon whose goal was completely realized in the renunciation of the GDR and its absorption into the West. The 2004 anti-Hartz Monday Demonstrations, which started and mostly took place in the East, deliberately used the 1989 slogan "We Are the People." 16. Oskar Lafontaine (Citation2005: 49–120) has directed much of his attention to speaking in a language free of jargon and concealment. One of his main political points is that neoliberalism's success revolves around concealing social cuts through undecipherable terminology such as Hartz IV and Agenda 2010. According to Lafontaine, one of the main concepts concealing social realities is the term "globalization": "The third central term … is 'globalization'. I advocate that in the future we replace it by the term 'capitalism'. Because if we do that – and I must say that it took me quite a while, I have also made use of the term 'globalization' just as much as I made use of the term 'ancillary wage costs' without realizing how I was fooled by them – if we therefore replace the term 'globalization' by the term 'capitalism', then we realize that suddenly the context is clear again. It will become evident then that such a system presses for expansion, that it crosses national borders, that it destroys all existing traditions, and that all those things that we and so many other people have criticized as globalization's negative side effects are contained in this term. Hence, let us call globalization capitalism and then we will always be on the right track" (Lafontaine Citation2006). 17. It should be noted that the specific way in which the annexation (through the Treuhandanstalt, the National Trusteeship Office) was carried out has resulted in an enduring feeling among large parts of the East German population – especially the elderly and regardless of their attitude towards reuinification – that they were effectively robbed when almost all of the nationally owned assets were sold at token prices. This share of the population is incidentally larger than the generation of people whose careers were shattered by reunification and the ensuing loss of their state jobs (administration, university positions, etc.), which has formed one of the central building blocs of the PDS. 18. The socio-economic differences between East and West Germany are one of the causes of the dissent between the WASG and the PDS over what sensible anti-neoliberal demands would be. The conditions of the labor market in the East make it seem more than logical to demand an unconditional basic income (which implicitly concedes the "crisis of a society based on labor" and abandons an orientation towards full employment), while some in the WASG regard the introduction of unconditional basic income as the silent acceptance and codification of social division (between those with jobs and the recipients of transfer payments ) and remain oriented to the sphere of production rather than distribution, and hence to full employment and radical reduction and redistribution of working hours. 19. Horkheimer's famous dictum on capitalism and fascism might usefully be rephrased: "He who does not want to talk about the role of Die LINKE regarding the averted rise of the extreme right should also be silent about this extreme right." 20. The degree to which social justice, which in the polls accompanying the state elections of Bremen had been named as the decisive voting issue, has become a dominant, if not the dominant, discourse can be seen in the example of Hubert Kleinert, a frequent Spiegel columnist and former Green Party official in its early stages, who in the aftermath of the so-called "left turn" of the SPD at its party convention in October 2007 argued that the SPD was not going to win back the trust of those who had converted to the Left Party and wrote about the shifting discourse: "the 2009 election will probably be marked by the competition of exactly four more or less social-democratic parties, which all will prioritize the theme of social justice. In this context, how the Social Democrats can profile themselves, from their position of junior partner in the government, within the competition with the CDU on the one hand and the Linkspartei on the other (add to this the Greens) is an open question" (Kleinert Citation2007). 21. On the other hand, according to the same poll, only 11% of the population considered themselves to be on the right, as opposed to 38% in 1981 and 26% in 1993. 22. Cf. an indicative interview with the FDP chairman Guido Westerwelle in Der Spiegel: "There is too much GDR in Germany." Der Spiegel, "Es gibt zuviel DDR in Deutschland," 9 November 2007, online edition. 23. It helps to recall the reactionary role that some leading intellectuals from the European social-democratic spectrum have played in legitimizing not only the neoliberal European constitution but also Hartz IV. Thus, when it became apparent that French voters were leaning toward "No" in the referendum on the European constitution, Jürgen Habermas addressed them directly through an article published in Le Nouvel Observateur (Habermas Citation2005), calling on them to embrace the constitution for the sake of being able to challenge the neoconservative world (dis-)order. His article received much criticism including a vehement rebuttal by Lucien Sève (Sève Citation2005). However, while Habermas in his hopes for a post-national European model as a means of reembedding globalization and recivilizing international relations was perhaps idealist and naïve but at least well-meaning, there can be no excuse for the disgraceful role played by Günter Grass, who in October 2004 co-signed an ad with the President of the Confederation of German Employers' Associations (BDA), Dieter Hundt, and the President of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), Michael Rogowski, criticizing the anti-Hartz IV demonstrations and their slogan "We Are the People" The text read: "We are the people, too. The changes made to unemployment benefits and welfare associated with the frightening … term Hartz IV are absolutely vital for Germany's competitive position, [which] is plastered with the gravestones of missed opportunities. Gravediggers exist in all political parties. In the past, all governments have made promises to the voter which could not be kept. All the more painful therefore is the hour of truth. Now the only solution is a radical change of direction. Such [social] cuts hurt, as does any critical surgery, but to do nothing for fear of pain would be irresponsible. Only demagogues who are already past their prime tell the people what they want to hear. Their formulae are as simple as their motives are transparent. Therefore we are all supporting Chancellor Gerhard Schröder – regardless of our normal political preferences – in a grand coalition of reason. We are hoping that he will withstand the slogans of from left and right who are the of the people for their own October from the of state this would have to be as a on the of a political to the conditions of capital the of to in – available at the federal the CDU prime is for a electoral against the SPD and Green members and Die with the slogan of In the of Die into the state parliament of this will probably ruling the time SPD have against any of a coalition with Die whose electoral not without some directed by the former of the of the German national of However, and have started about the coalition and there are among rank-and-file calling for more towards Die the success of the Cold War slogan of has given way now to a of the Die LINKE has on this shift and to the Cold War by in of and or On 9 2007 Lafontaine published a long article the in the Müntefering in particular has been frequently that Germany never made for or that the SPD the only party of the labor movement in Germany." example of the loss of is a poll, one of to the of the The was by and with of the "locust" It found that of considered critique of capitalism Only it the same almost of the people that the SPD was not in a debate on in the German but rather in its electoral in the parliament that of the federal for the of the social in of Germans the criticism of the was Christian was a RAF who to the generation from the German Fall in to which was for the of of the Jürgen and National Federation was to which in Germany means a of but with of particularly for for a On the of a for and one of the RAF in a debate with strong took place in 2007 around the question of whether the clear of political and especially for was down by President Horst due to an had for the International in also published in the socialist national daily Junge on with the former Minister of Labor in the Kohl and a of the a is one of the most and radical conservative of neoliberal In his he as an with a and in the named on and he the question whether call themselves "The of are more important than the of The capitalist economic order the and is a committed against of people who are to in and Das German and have now begun to their on jobs and have also begun by on a which that the One are a redistribution of to the bourgeoisie. 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