Alexander Reid Ross posted on his Facebook page a link to this article by Ktrtki Tkachenko, How Right is the Left? The German radical Left in the context of the ‘Ukraine crisis’ Eurozine 05/15/2018. Tkachenko argues that there is a de facto "red-brown alliance," i.e., an alliance of the far left (red) and the hardline right (brown).
Tkachenko's article left me scratching my head. A reader not at all familiar with German politics might easily conclude that there is active political cooperation between the far left and far right. But while his piece points out the overlap between far-left and far-right criticisms of Germany's and NATO's Russia policies, I'm not convinced that's anything beyond the usual politics-makes-strange-bedfellows situation. Germany has a parliamentary system at all levels. And I'm not aware of even a county or city government whether there is a coalition between the AfD and the Left Party, which are the "far right" and "far left" parties that sit in Parliament. At the national level, the Left Party has tried for years to persuade the center-left SPD to consider a "red-red-green" coalition of the SPD, the Left Party and the Greens. But there's no strategic political alliance between the AfD and the Left Party.
The German political discussion around Russia has been very different from that in the US. The German unification issue was a central one prior to 1990. The Ostpolitik of Willi Brandt's government was arguably a left-right policy, the SPD being the senior (left) partner in his governing coalition and the "classically" liberal FDP the junior (right) partner. German policy from the 1970s to 1990 was based on the idea that business, cultural, and personal interactions with the GDR (East Germany) and other Eastern bloc countries would be more likely to ease tensions and preserve peace. Even the family of Franz Josef Strauss, the embodiment of authoritarian conservatism, did profitable business in East Germany.
I followed the footnotes in Tkachenko's criticism of a claim by Sahra Wagenknecht of the Left Party about the US spending $5 billion on regime change in Ukraine. The article that he cites as a refutation is a piece by Alice Bota und Kerstin Kohlenberg from the thoroughly respectable Die Zeit. (Sahra Wagenknecht, "Die agilsten Gegner Europas sitzen heute in Brüssel" 07/07/2018; Alice Bota und Kerstin Kohlenberg, Haben die Amis den Maidan gekauft? Die USA gaben in der Ukraine über Jahrzehnte Milliarden aus. Wohin floss das Geld? Zeit Online 13.05.2015 (English version: Did Uncle Sam buy off the Maidan? The United States has spent millions on Ukraine over the past few decades. Where did the money go?)
Wagenknecht's claim that he links was, "Die USA haben 5 Milliarden Dollar in einen Regime-Change in der Ukraine investiert." ("The USA invested $5 billion in a regime change in the Ukraine.") It's legitimate to say that's an incorrect claim if it is taken to apply only to the 2014 events, as the context implies. But it was a line in a parliamentary speech in response to a heckler from the CDU. As the "Zeit" article notes, "Victoria Nuland, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, spoke of $5 billion, or €4.5 billion, for Ukraine in a call to the American ambassador in Kiev on January 28, 2014." Bota und Kohlenberg explain that Nuland's number would apply to the period from 1991 to 2014 from the State Department and USAID, including support for "civil society and NGOs" (USAID spokesperson quoted). It's not clear whether Bota und Kohlenberg are validating the $5 billion number, although that's implied. How partisan the USAID project may be is, not surprisingly, an ongoing dispute. But they note that even über-Realist John Mearshehimer regards it as at least in part as attempts to determine political/partisan outcomes.
But Tkachenko's piece leaves the impression that Wagenknecht just pulled that $5 billion number out of the air, or from some Russian bot. At least in that instance, he seemed to be trying a bit too hard to make the point. (Full disclosure: I'm very skeptical of the wisdom and practical utility of American "regime change" efforts. And I think it was reckless to expand NATO in the way we did. But I'm not a fan of Steve Bannon or the poor persecuted folks on Bari Weiss' "Intellectual Dark Web." Whether or not they might agree with me on those judgments, which they would be basing on very different criteria than mine in any case.)
Showing posts with label german left party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label german left party. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 16, 2018
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Does Germany need a new party of the left?
The German SPD has made an initial agreement in exploratory talks for a new coalition government with Angela Merkel's CDU and the CSU. Such a new coalition would continue the current one, which resulted from the 2013 elections. The 2017 parliamentary elections were in October, but a new government has not yet been formed.
A continuation of the Grand Coalition (GroKo, as it's called for short) has been very controversial within the SPD. A party convention on Sunday approved the concept by a substantial but not overwhelming vote, 56% of the delegates supporting it. Although the convention also demanded further negotiations on the coalition pact. According to the analysis of Max Ferstl und Jasmin Siebert in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Wie es nach dem Ja der Genossen weitergeht 21.01.2018), negotiating the new agreement will take at least another four weeks. And it has to be approved by an SPD convention again.
The party base has very good reasons to worry about the future of the SPD in a new edition of the GroKo. After the 2013 election, the three parties SPD, the Greens and the Left Party had enough parliamentary seats to form a majority for a red-red-green coalition. Merekel's CDU/CSU had the largest vote, so they got the first shot at trying to form a government. The SPD didn't even make a weak attempt to hold out for red-red-green. They were almost pathetically eager to become a junior partner in another GroKo headed by Merkel.
In 2017, the three parties didn't win enough seats together to even have a possibility of forming a red-red-green government. Merkel tried but failed to reach an agreement for a "Jamaica" coalition (CDU-CSU-Greens-FDP). So even after party leader and Chancellor candidate Martin Schultz initial rejection of any consideration of a new GroKo, he soon came around and reached an agreement which he and his supporters attempt to sell to the party base as including big improvements in the social-democratic direction. But the claim isn't entirely credible to voters. As ORF reports (Klare Haltung von Schulz 21.01.2018)
The SPD is experiencing its own version of the crisis of social-democracy in Europe. The center-left was at a high point at the end of the 1990s. But at the same time, the European social-democrats started embracing the neoliberal gospel of reduction of government, deregulation, weaker unions and lower wages, and support for corporate-deregulation treaties staged as "trade" treaties. Once the center-left parties took major economic questions off the table for the neoliberal TINA (There Is No Alternative) position and the 2008 economic crisis hit, followed by the malfunction of the eurozone in the subsequent debt crises, a political crisis followed for social-democratic parties from Greece to Italy to France to Britain to elsewhere and, increasingly so now, in Germany.
Currently, that crisis for the SPD is manifesting itself in the low poll numbers, the deep divisions in the party over a new GroKo, and a new proposal from Left Party leaders Sahra Wagenknecht and Oskar Lafontaine for a Sammlungsbewegung (collective movement) on the left aimed at a new kind of unity movement or party for the left factions of the SPD and the Greens and (most of) the Left Party. ("Links Unten" Der Spiegel 4/2018 20.01.2018)
Albrecht von Lucke makes the case for the SPD agreeing to new GroKo in Die gärige Republik Blätter 1/2018. Essentially, he argues that being in government would give an SPD that was focused on building its image a chance to prove itself as a center-left party again by fighting for left ideas, programs, and positions. It's telling, though, that even in an article advocating for SPD participation in a GroKo, Von Lucke displays some pragmatic doubts about whether the SPD can actually pull that off. For instance, he notes that Martin Schultz has been blaming their participation in the current GroKo for the decline in the SPD's vote since 2013. Which raises the obvious question: what can voters expect different from the SPD in a new one?
He mentions that in the context of what even the Spiegel "Links Unten" piece flags as a critical turning point, the decision of Gerhard Schröder's red-green coalition to adopt his "Agenda 2010" program which included the now-infamous Hartz IV reforms, which have become a synonym for low wages, loss of union protection, and precious employment ("McJobs"). The Spiegel article gives it the obligatory praise for neoliberal dogma, saying that the "economic data" increased and "the number of unemployed sank." But:
Nelson Lichtenstein gives an insightful description of how that process played out during the Clinton Administration in the US (A Fabulous Failure: Clinton's 1990s and the Origins of Our Times The American Prospect Winter 2018, currently behind subscription):
So, on the one hand, participating in another GroKo would give the SPD a chance to have direct effect on government policy and give them public prominence in the form of ministerial positions. On the other, in this political moment, the election results and opinion polls seem to indicate that the SPD needs reframe its image. Not only in terms of policy but in showing their willingness to fight. The latter didn't happen very much when the SPD headed the opposition to Merkel's government of 2009-2013. They had served as the junior partner in a Merkel-headed GroKo 2005-2009. During the interim, their leadership was apparently focused on a new opportunity to become Merkel's junior partner in government again. Thus, the lack of any pretense in 2013 that they were even interested in a possible red-red-green government.
Albrecht Müller discusses both the current GroKo dilemma and the idea of a left Sammlungsbewegung in Linke Sammlungsbewegung – eine Schnapsidee oder die richtige Konsequenz aus der erkennbaren Ausweglosigkeit? Nachdenkseiten 15.01.2018. He argues that in the former case, it would be a bad idea. But he thinks the latter is a good idea. Because, in his judgment, all three of the left parties look to have poor political prospects for the near future.
A continuation of the Grand Coalition (GroKo, as it's called for short) has been very controversial within the SPD. A party convention on Sunday approved the concept by a substantial but not overwhelming vote, 56% of the delegates supporting it. Although the convention also demanded further negotiations on the coalition pact. According to the analysis of Max Ferstl und Jasmin Siebert in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Wie es nach dem Ja der Genossen weitergeht 21.01.2018), negotiating the new agreement will take at least another four weeks. And it has to be approved by an SPD convention again.
The party base has very good reasons to worry about the future of the SPD in a new edition of the GroKo. After the 2013 election, the three parties SPD, the Greens and the Left Party had enough parliamentary seats to form a majority for a red-red-green coalition. Merekel's CDU/CSU had the largest vote, so they got the first shot at trying to form a government. The SPD didn't even make a weak attempt to hold out for red-red-green. They were almost pathetically eager to become a junior partner in another GroKo headed by Merkel.
In 2017, the three parties didn't win enough seats together to even have a possibility of forming a red-red-green government. Merkel tried but failed to reach an agreement for a "Jamaica" coalition (CDU-CSU-Greens-FDP). So even after party leader and Chancellor candidate Martin Schultz initial rejection of any consideration of a new GroKo, he soon came around and reached an agreement which he and his supporters attempt to sell to the party base as including big improvements in the social-democratic direction. But the claim isn't entirely credible to voters. As ORF reports (Klare Haltung von Schulz 21.01.2018)
In den Umfragen rutschen die Sozialdemokraten unterdessen ab. So sieht etwa die überwiegende Mehrheit der Deutschen die SPD als Verliererin der Sondierungsgespräche mit der Union. Eine Umfrage des Meinungsforschungsinstituts YouGov im Auftrag der dpa ergab, dass nur neun Prozent der Auffassung sind, die SPD hätte sich durchgesetzt. 29 Prozent meinen dagegen: die CDU.The low numbers on both sides in that poll are probably a reflection of that fact that the details of the initial agreement are "inside baseball," as American political commentators say. More seriously, the poll also found that in a new election, which would be the most likely result of a new failure to form a coalition over the next month, the SPD would get 3% less than they did in October.
[Meanwhile, the Social Democrats have been slumping in the polls. So, for example, the overwhelming majority of the Germans see the SPD as the loser in the exploratory talks with the Union {CDU and CSU}. A poll by the opinion research institute YouGov for the dpa {news agency} showed that only 9% were of the opinion that the SPD had succeeded. 29% thought the opposite: the CDU.]
The SPD is experiencing its own version of the crisis of social-democracy in Europe. The center-left was at a high point at the end of the 1990s. But at the same time, the European social-democrats started embracing the neoliberal gospel of reduction of government, deregulation, weaker unions and lower wages, and support for corporate-deregulation treaties staged as "trade" treaties. Once the center-left parties took major economic questions off the table for the neoliberal TINA (There Is No Alternative) position and the 2008 economic crisis hit, followed by the malfunction of the eurozone in the subsequent debt crises, a political crisis followed for social-democratic parties from Greece to Italy to France to Britain to elsewhere and, increasingly so now, in Germany.
Currently, that crisis for the SPD is manifesting itself in the low poll numbers, the deep divisions in the party over a new GroKo, and a new proposal from Left Party leaders Sahra Wagenknecht and Oskar Lafontaine for a Sammlungsbewegung (collective movement) on the left aimed at a new kind of unity movement or party for the left factions of the SPD and the Greens and (most of) the Left Party. ("Links Unten" Der Spiegel 4/2018 20.01.2018)
Albrecht von Lucke makes the case for the SPD agreeing to new GroKo in Die gärige Republik Blätter 1/2018. Essentially, he argues that being in government would give an SPD that was focused on building its image a chance to prove itself as a center-left party again by fighting for left ideas, programs, and positions. It's telling, though, that even in an article advocating for SPD participation in a GroKo, Von Lucke displays some pragmatic doubts about whether the SPD can actually pull that off. For instance, he notes that Martin Schultz has been blaming their participation in the current GroKo for the decline in the SPD's vote since 2013. Which raises the obvious question: what can voters expect different from the SPD in a new one?
He mentions that in the context of what even the Spiegel "Links Unten" piece flags as a critical turning point, the decision of Gerhard Schröder's red-green coalition to adopt his "Agenda 2010" program which included the now-infamous Hartz IV reforms, which have become a synonym for low wages, loss of union protection, and precious employment ("McJobs"). The Spiegel article gives it the obligatory praise for neoliberal dogma, saying that the "economic data" increased and "the number of unemployed sank." But:
... zugleich führten die Reformen zu einer massiven Ausweitung der Leiharbeit und erhöhten die Zahl der prekären Beschäftigungsverhältnisse.This has been a widespread pattern for the center-left parties in Europe and in the United States, as well. Their traditional base was working class and "middle class," although that term is defining in various ways. When the center-left parties started adapting economic policies fundamentally similar to those of conservatives that resulted in increasing hardship and decreasing security for their traditional base voters. And they got hurt badly.
Für Millionen Menschen, die sich einst von der Arbeiterpartei SPD beschützt gefühlt hatten, waren die Sozialdemokraten zu Verrätern geworden.
[... at the same time, the reforms led to a massive spread of temporary work and boosted the number of precarious employment situations. For millions of people who had once felt protected by the workers' party SPD, the Social Democrats had become traitors.]
Nelson Lichtenstein gives an insightful description of how that process played out during the Clinton Administration in the US (A Fabulous Failure: Clinton's 1990s and the Origins of Our Times The American Prospect Winter 2018, currently behind subscription):
Many recall the 1990s as a moment of economic triumph with increasingly low unemployment, 4 percent annual economic growth, a booming stock market, even a balanced federal budget by the end of the millennium. Economists Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen called those years the "Fabulous Decade" in 2001, while a 2015 opinion piece in The New York Times bore the title "The Best Decade Ever? The 1990s, Obviously." Although the Republicans had seized control of Congress in 1994, it is worth remembering that Ronald Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, took only 37 percent of the vote in 1992 while that stalwart Republican, Robert Dole, won just 40 percent in 1996. Politics were clearly in flux. The Clintons therefore had the historical moment to recast not just trade, investment, and health-care policies, but the regulations, norms, and expectations that would govern a post-Cold War version of U.S. capitalism.The SPD currently faces a dilemma in which their previous base voters and many of the current ones was lost confidence in the party's willing to fight for their interests.
Their failure to take advantage of these fortuitous circumstances doomed any effort to build a more equitable economy or a political order powerful enough to sustain a dominant liberalism, a failure Donald Trump would one day seize. [my emphasis]
So, on the one hand, participating in another GroKo would give the SPD a chance to have direct effect on government policy and give them public prominence in the form of ministerial positions. On the other, in this political moment, the election results and opinion polls seem to indicate that the SPD needs reframe its image. Not only in terms of policy but in showing their willingness to fight. The latter didn't happen very much when the SPD headed the opposition to Merkel's government of 2009-2013. They had served as the junior partner in a Merkel-headed GroKo 2005-2009. During the interim, their leadership was apparently focused on a new opportunity to become Merkel's junior partner in government again. Thus, the lack of any pretense in 2013 that they were even interested in a possible red-red-green government.
Albrecht Müller discusses both the current GroKo dilemma and the idea of a left Sammlungsbewegung in Linke Sammlungsbewegung – eine Schnapsidee oder die richtige Konsequenz aus der erkennbaren Ausweglosigkeit? Nachdenkseiten 15.01.2018. He argues that in the former case, it would be a bad idea. But he thinks the latter is a good idea. Because, in his judgment, all three of the left parties look to have poor political prospects for the near future.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
The (German) politics of the (hoped-for but not really) "new Cold War" over Ukraine
... Obama was blindsided by events in Ukraine, but why the administration didn't see this coming remains a mystery. No matter what Putin says, Yanukovych's ouster was not the result of some deep Western plot, and in many ways Yanukovych deserved to go. But the United States as far from a neutral party in this process, as top U.S. officials -- including Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt -- either took actions or made statements that showed clear support for the demonstrators and a clear U.S. preference for interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Unfortunately, they intervened without considering how it might look to Russia, especially after 20 years of NATO expansion, the deployment of missile defenses near the Soviet border, and George W. Bush's 2008 proposal to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. This was geostrategic incompetence of the highest order, but that is what happens when presidents and secretaries of state are too busy with a zillion other things and stop paying attention to what their ideologically driven subordinates are up to. [my emphasis]- Stephen Walt, The Solve-Everything, Do-Nothing White House Foreign Policy 03/18/2014
Über-Realist Walt isn't making excuses for Russia's misdeeds and violations of international law in the Ukraine/Crimea crisis. Nor is he drooling like many American conservatives do over Putin's shirtless manly manliness. But he is pointing out that the United States does not control the Ukraine and that Russia has a perceived stake there and that a less provocative US approach to the political turmoil in Ukraine might well have produced a more pleasant result from the Western perspective than what happened.
This is the way grownups and serious politicians should be talking about this thing.
Little Tommy Friedman, on the other hand, in Walt's words, "thinks Obama can't decide if he's Pollyanna, John Wayne, or Henry Kissinger (as if these are the only options)." (The referenced piece of Friedman's continuing self-embarrassment is The Three Faces of President Obama New York Times 03/15/2014)
But politics is politics, as Joe Stalin said shortly before he signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact that, among other things, divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union.
So I was intrigued to see this polemic by Fabian Reinbold against the German Left Party's position on the crisis, Linkspartei in der Krim-Krise: Die Putin-Versteher Spiegel Online 17.03.2014, which blast the Left Party for taking what sounds to me a position a lot like Walt's.
A bit of background. The Left Party evolved over time since the fall of the German Democratic Republic (Communist East Germany). It started off as the "postcommunist" successor party to the old East German Communist Party. It merged with a left group from western Germany to form the current Left Party.
The state of the euro crisis has put the Left Party in what is potentially a qualitatively new situation in German politics. The center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) is a junior partner in Angela Merkel's Grand Coalition (GroKo). And with minor and mostly cosmetic differences, the SPD is totally on board with Angie's brutal austerity policies that are laying waste to the economies of the southern eurozone countries.
In last year's German Parliamentary election, it was only the Left Party among the real contenders for Bundestag seats that both offered a Keynesian critique of Merkel's economic policies and also had opposed them in the Budestag. The Green Party also offered such a critique but had voted for Merkel's austerity policies in the Bundestag. If the Greens and the Left Party form a working alliance, they have the chance to jointly benefit politically over the next few years. With the center-left (the social-democratic parties) in countries like Italy and Spain having badly discredited themselves by embracing ruinous neoliberal economic "reforms," it's entirely feasible that a Green-Left alliance could occupy much of the political space the SPD currently does, similarly to how the Five Start Movement surged in Italy in last year's elections.
Reinbold's polemic tries to portray the Left Party as pro-Putin. There's a couple of key points on this. One of which has to do with his insult phrase "Putin-Versteher," literally "understanders of Putin." For anyone of a mental age older than Tommy Friedman, i.e., older than elementary-school age, knows that understanding something or someone is not the same as sympathizing with or supporting them. So when someone tries to make it a stigma to understand a potential adversary nation, that's a very good sign they're up to know good. In the real world, understanding adversary countries may be even more important than understanding friendly ones. Especially when one of those potential adversaries is a nuclear power, which Russia still is.
Second, the fact that the Left Party has some historical roots in a party that possessed a reverence for the Soviet Union is a whole different thing than admiring Vladimir Putin's political model in the Russia of 2014. I mean, if you reason like a FOX News pundit or David Gregory, you might think, "Well, uh, the Soviet Union was headed by Russia, or maybe they were the same thing, and they were Communists and that's left and now Putin heads Russia so he must be a Communist, too, like Obama or something."
But in the post-elementary-school population, that would be a pretty sad assumption for people to make. Because if there are people who consider themselves "left" who also admire Putin's kleptocratic-oligarichal half-baked version of democracy or consider it a goal to strive for, I'm not aware of it. And I think that it's fair to say that in the German Left Party, neither those who judge Putin's Crimea maneuver more harshly nor those who are more focused on the EU's and the United States' mistakes in the crisis consider Putin a "left" model or an ally to be defended.
It's like the old "red-baiting," except it's more like Russia-baiting.
I doubt the Left Party will be inclined to bow and scrape and try to show their foreign policy belligerency by denounced and double-denouncing Russia and Putin. I doubt that approach works much better in German politics than in the US. (See Digby, Objectively Pro-Putin Hullabaloo 03/18/2014)
The larger question is how the Greens will play this. If they let stuff like this drive a wedge between themselves and the Left Party that prevents making a combined political effort as the opposition in the Bundestag, that would likely prove to be a self-defeating course.
There are some dubious signs so far on the Greens' response, such as the Greens' Bundestag caucus head Katrin Göring-Eckardt portraying Left Party leader Sahra Wagenknecht as a Russian today. (Göring-Eckardt Twitter post 14.04.2014; Michael König, Grüner Streit um Anti-Wagenknecht-Kampagne Süddeutsche Zeitung 17.03.2014)
And some hopeful ones, like this petition signed by Robert Zion and other Greens declaring, "Wir Grünen stehen auf der Seite des Friedens und der Freiheit. Unsere Seite ist nicht die des Nationalismus, weder die Seite Putins, noch die der Gruppe der Rechten in der Ukraine." ("We Greens stand on the side of peace and freedom. Our side is not that of nationalism, nor that of Putin, nor that of the rightists in Ukraine.")
Albrecht von Lucke writes in Die gespaltene Opposition Gegenblende 11.03.2014:
Dort, wo Linke und Grüne in der Opposition tatsächlich zur Zusammenarbeit verdammt sind, etwa zwecks Einberufung eines Untersuchungsausschusses, werden sie notgedrungen kooperieren. Ansonsten aber herrscht ein gewaltiges Distanzierungsbedürfnis – auch und vor allem von Seiten der Grünen.There have been differences of emphasis in the public positions of various Left Party leaders on the Ukraine/Crimea crisis, which seem to turn less on differences in actual policy outlook than on the degree to which they are willing to target the SPD and the Greens in their criticism. Wagenknecht has been more inclined to do so, Party Chairs Katja Kipping und Bernd Riexinger less so. (Markus Decker, Kipping und Riexinger kontra Wagenknecht Mitteldeutsche Zeitung 13.03.2014)
[There where the Left Party and the Greens in the opposition {to the GroKo} are actually condemned to work together, for instance in the need to call for a investigative committee, they will be compelled to cooperate. But otherwise a powerful need for distance reigns - particularly and especially from the side of the Greens.]
It's worth noting that one of the more notable figures expressing criticism of the EU's policies toward Russia in the Ukraine/Crimea crisis is former SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who surprising more-or-less explicitly admitted to having committed war crimes himself to defend or at least explain Russia's actions. (Gerhard Schröder, Russia and the Crimea 03/09/2014) And Schröder even has Russian financial connections that make his comments more dubious than anything Fabian Reinbold quotes from Left Party figures.
The SPD had the theoretical opportunity after last year's election to attempt to form a center-left coalition government with the Greens and the Left Party, because together they had a majority of seats in the Bundestag. The SPD national leadership wasn't in the least interested. But to reassure the Party base that wasn't entirely happy about their entering a Grand Coalition headed by Merkel, the SPD leaders promised that next time, four years from now, they would consider a coalition with the Left Party. (You didn't have to read hard between the lines to get the suggestion that it meant in four years, or when hell freezes over, whichever comes later).
SPD Vice Chancellor and loyal Angie-bot Sigmar "Sigi Pop" Gabriel; Reinbold reports that Steinmeier is grumping publicly that the Left Party is parroting "dummer Propagandalügen des russischen Staatsfernsehens" ("dumb propaganda of the Russian state television"). Sigi Pop can't distance himself from the Left Party fast enough. No surprise at all there.
Tags: crimea, german green party, german left party, grand coalition, spd, ukraine
Saturday, December 31, 2011
A Marx revival? (4 of 5) Is there actual evidence of such a thing in US and European politics?
To what extent are there parties or groups that self-identify as Marxist that have real clout in politics in the US and Europe?
For the United States, the answer if fairly simple: none.
In both the US and Europe, the protest movements of the 1960s and early 1970s produced a proliferation of small groups hoping to establish a "Marxist-Leninist" party modeled on a heroic notion of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Chinese Revolution or the Cuban Revolution. In both Europe and the US, those efforts produced mostly endless polemics that served as group identifiers for one tiny sect or the other.
There was a controversy among liberals and progressives in 2002-3 around antiwar demonstrations organized by the International ANSWER coalition, which included people who self-identified as Marxists. There were many other labor and antiwar groups who participated in organizing the impressively large antiwar demonstrations against invading Iraq. The real significance of the marches was the measure they provided of antiwar sentiment among the general public, even at a time where many leading Democrats in Congress were falling all over themselves to not have anyone suspect that they might ever take a stand against an obviously useless and unjust war.
Some of the more fastidious liberal writers found that the fact that some people associated with small leftist sects might be part of those massive demonstrations rendered the marches too impure for them to praise. I thought and still think that it was a plain silly attitude to take. It was perfectly legitimate to look at the broader political agenda of International ANSWER. War advocates would have done so in any case. But it was sad to see some liberal writers obsessing over whether some of the organizers might have impure thoughts.
Republicans now routinely call the Democratic Party and President Obama socialist and Marxist, along with a lot of other things. It's a ridiculous notion. The fact that Glenn Beck and the Republican Party's chief ideologue Rush Limbaugh can babble on about Obama being a revolutionary Marxist who hates America and white people, too, without being dismissed as the bigoted cranks they are, isn't a sign of how radical or "Marxist" the Democratic Party is. It's a sign of how sleazy and dishonest the everyday rhetoric of the Republican Party has become.
The US Communist Party reached the height of its electoral influence in 1932, and barely exists now.
The Communist Parties of Europe are now mostly renamed and are referred to as "post-communist" parties to describe their organizational descent from former Communist parties.
The "post-communist" party with which I'm most familiar is the Left Party in Germany (Linkspartei, DIE LINKE). Their website has some English pages, including their Key Programmatic Points document from March 2007. They describe their program this way:
In the fifth part of this series, I'll discuss the original, paradigmatic dispute in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) beginning in the late 1890s over Revisionism and Marxism as the party orientation. It's safe to say that the current Linkspartei program as shown in that document wouldn't have been recognizable as a "Marxist" program back in those days.
Now, official Party programs don't always define the substance of a Party's policies. We are unlikely to see the US Democratic Party adopt a platform plank in 2012 saying that the main purpose of its economic policy is to protect giant banks and their officers and stockholders from ever suffering the consequences of their most reckless and irresponsible policies. Nor will the Republicans explicitly write into their Party platform that they are committed to voter suppression methods aimed at disenfranchising African-American and Latino citizens.
The same is true with the German Left Party and other "post-communist" parties.
But the Left Party is becoming more and more accepted as a legitimate democratic party, and has participated in local governments at the local and provincial (state) levels. Both the SPD and the Left Party are assigned the color "red" in the German partisan color scheme. A "red-red coalition" of the SPD and the Left Party, led by the former, governed Berlin for a decade from 2001-2011. The red-red coalition was defined by its ... austerity economics. ( Markus Horeld, Wahl in Berlin.Rot-Rot war gut für ein Jahrzehnt Die Zeit 18.09.2011)
Former Foreign Minister and longtime Green Party leader Joschka Fischer said this about Berlin's red-red coalition in 2008:
This article by Karl-Heinz Gräfe, Katastrophe oder Notwendigkeit? 24.12.2011, and this one by Theodor Bergmann, Politisches Buch.»Von der Parteien Hass und Gunst verwirrt« 15.12.2011, discuss the end of the Soviet Union, which officially occurred on December 25, 1991.
I keep looking for some distinctive insights from their articles on the economic crisis and the European Union. But ND's coverage of both has seemed to be pretty lightweight. A current piece by Benjamin Beutler, Mit der Krise in die Arbeitslosigkeit.Rezession in USA und Europa trifft besonders Migranten aus Lateinamerika 27.12.2011, discusses the effect of the current depression in the US on reducing undocumented immigration.
However "Marxist" or not the Linkspartei may be, so far they aren't notably benefitting politically from the current depression. The 2001 election in Berlin left them with too few seats to continue the red-red coalition. And opinion polls aren't signalling some impending shift to the Linkspartei in upcoming elections. National parliamentary elections aren't scheduled until 2013, though if Chancellor Angela Merkel's government falls through the defection of the junior coalition partners, the Free Democrats (FDP), they could come sooner.
A Marx revival? Maybe. But there's no strong evidence of it the US or Europe that I can see.
Posts in this series:
A Marx revival? (1 of 5) The Marx bogeyman 12/28/2011
A Marx revival? (2 of 5) Some intellectual luminaries of the European left 12/29/2011
A Marx revival? (3 of 5): the former Communist states as real-time challenge 12/30/2011
A Marx revival? (4 of 5) Is there actual evidence of such a thing in US and European politics? 01/01/2011
A Marx revival? (5 of 5) The archetypal left challenge to Marxism 01/02/2011
Tags: communism, marxism, german left party
For the United States, the answer if fairly simple: none.
In both the US and Europe, the protest movements of the 1960s and early 1970s produced a proliferation of small groups hoping to establish a "Marxist-Leninist" party modeled on a heroic notion of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Chinese Revolution or the Cuban Revolution. In both Europe and the US, those efforts produced mostly endless polemics that served as group identifiers for one tiny sect or the other.
There was a controversy among liberals and progressives in 2002-3 around antiwar demonstrations organized by the International ANSWER coalition, which included people who self-identified as Marxists. There were many other labor and antiwar groups who participated in organizing the impressively large antiwar demonstrations against invading Iraq. The real significance of the marches was the measure they provided of antiwar sentiment among the general public, even at a time where many leading Democrats in Congress were falling all over themselves to not have anyone suspect that they might ever take a stand against an obviously useless and unjust war.
Some of the more fastidious liberal writers found that the fact that some people associated with small leftist sects might be part of those massive demonstrations rendered the marches too impure for them to praise. I thought and still think that it was a plain silly attitude to take. It was perfectly legitimate to look at the broader political agenda of International ANSWER. War advocates would have done so in any case. But it was sad to see some liberal writers obsessing over whether some of the organizers might have impure thoughts.
Republicans now routinely call the Democratic Party and President Obama socialist and Marxist, along with a lot of other things. It's a ridiculous notion. The fact that Glenn Beck and the Republican Party's chief ideologue Rush Limbaugh can babble on about Obama being a revolutionary Marxist who hates America and white people, too, without being dismissed as the bigoted cranks they are, isn't a sign of how radical or "Marxist" the Democratic Party is. It's a sign of how sleazy and dishonest the everyday rhetoric of the Republican Party has become.
The US Communist Party reached the height of its electoral influence in 1932, and barely exists now.
The Communist Parties of Europe are now mostly renamed and are referred to as "post-communist" parties to describe their organizational descent from former Communist parties.
The "post-communist" party with which I'm most familiar is the Left Party in Germany (Linkspartei, DIE LINKE). Their website has some English pages, including their Key Programmatic Points document from March 2007. They describe their program this way:
Democracy, freedom, equality, justice, internationalism and solidarity are our fundamental value orientations. They are inseparable from peace, the conservation of nature and emancipation. The ideas of democratic socialism are key guidelines for the development of the political goals of the Left.At the conclusion of Section 4, the document declares, "Together we fight to ensure that capitalism is not the last word in the history books."
DIE LINKE derives its political action from the connection between goal, path and fundamental value orientations. Freedom and social justice, democracy and socialism are contingent on one another. Equality without individual freedom ends in incapacitation and heteronomy. Freedom without equality is freedom only for the rich. Those who oppress their fellow human beings are not free either. The goal of democratic socialism, which wants to overcome capitalism in a transformational process, is a society in which the freedom of the other is not the limit but the condition for one's own freedom.
In the fifth part of this series, I'll discuss the original, paradigmatic dispute in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) beginning in the late 1890s over Revisionism and Marxism as the party orientation. It's safe to say that the current Linkspartei program as shown in that document wouldn't have been recognizable as a "Marxist" program back in those days.
Now, official Party programs don't always define the substance of a Party's policies. We are unlikely to see the US Democratic Party adopt a platform plank in 2012 saying that the main purpose of its economic policy is to protect giant banks and their officers and stockholders from ever suffering the consequences of their most reckless and irresponsible policies. Nor will the Republicans explicitly write into their Party platform that they are committed to voter suppression methods aimed at disenfranchising African-American and Latino citizens.
The same is true with the German Left Party and other "post-communist" parties.
But the Left Party is becoming more and more accepted as a legitimate democratic party, and has participated in local governments at the local and provincial (state) levels. Both the SPD and the Left Party are assigned the color "red" in the German partisan color scheme. A "red-red coalition" of the SPD and the Left Party, led by the former, governed Berlin for a decade from 2001-2011. The red-red coalition was defined by its ... austerity economics. ( Markus Horeld, Wahl in Berlin.Rot-Rot war gut für ein Jahrzehnt Die Zeit 18.09.2011)
Former Foreign Minister and longtime Green Party leader Joschka Fischer said this about Berlin's red-red coalition in 2008:
It has been shown in the Federal State of Berlin, which has been governed by a red-red senate for several years, that all fears of a return to socialism are sheer nonsense. Very much the opposite; the red-red senate in Berlin stands for a policy of budget streamlining, the reduction of government jobs, the implementation of the Hartz-IV reforms ["pro-business reforms" which reduce some of the powers of unions] and a friendliness to business that one can with full justification characterize as to the right of red-green. Of socialism, there is not a trace to be found. (From Die neuen Regeln Die Zeit 03.03.2008; my translation)Neues Deutschland (ND), formerly the paper of the ruling East German Communist Party (SED), today reflects the Left Party outlook.
This article by Karl-Heinz Gräfe, Katastrophe oder Notwendigkeit? 24.12.2011, and this one by Theodor Bergmann, Politisches Buch.»Von der Parteien Hass und Gunst verwirrt« 15.12.2011, discuss the end of the Soviet Union, which officially occurred on December 25, 1991.
I keep looking for some distinctive insights from their articles on the economic crisis and the European Union. But ND's coverage of both has seemed to be pretty lightweight. A current piece by Benjamin Beutler, Mit der Krise in die Arbeitslosigkeit.Rezession in USA und Europa trifft besonders Migranten aus Lateinamerika 27.12.2011, discusses the effect of the current depression in the US on reducing undocumented immigration.
However "Marxist" or not the Linkspartei may be, so far they aren't notably benefitting politically from the current depression. The 2001 election in Berlin left them with too few seats to continue the red-red coalition. And opinion polls aren't signalling some impending shift to the Linkspartei in upcoming elections. National parliamentary elections aren't scheduled until 2013, though if Chancellor Angela Merkel's government falls through the defection of the junior coalition partners, the Free Democrats (FDP), they could come sooner.
A Marx revival? Maybe. But there's no strong evidence of it the US or Europe that I can see.
Posts in this series:
A Marx revival? (1 of 5) The Marx bogeyman 12/28/2011
A Marx revival? (2 of 5) Some intellectual luminaries of the European left 12/29/2011
A Marx revival? (3 of 5): the former Communist states as real-time challenge 12/30/2011
A Marx revival? (4 of 5) Is there actual evidence of such a thing in US and European politics? 01/01/2011
A Marx revival? (5 of 5) The archetypal left challenge to Marxism 01/02/2011
Tags: communism, marxism, german left party
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