Weekly Worker 573 Thursday April 21 2005

Who educates the edukators?

Anti-capitalist mood

Hans Weingartner (director) The edukators general release

This is not the first film that tries to capture the anti-globalisation mood. But The Edukators is by far the best. It is more human than the documentary The Corporation and artistically far better than the ranting productions of multi-millionaire Michael Moore. It is excellent in its portrayal of the desperate anger and powerlessness many young people feel in the face of capitalism in terminal decline. The increasing irrationality of the system, with its inhumanity and crass exploitation, forms the backdrop to this film.

The opening scene shows a group of young people storming a Nike shop to tell customers how their trainers are being produced under horrific conditions in sweatshops in south-east Asia. Just like Goodbye Lenin (which incidentally featured the same lead actor, Daniel Brühl), this film has no problem with exposing and accusing - while remaining a very warm and witty piece of art. “Dope destroys the revolutionary energy of the youth,” declares Jan, one of the main characters - before collapsing into giggles and smoking dope all night - and discussing with his friends how to fight the “dictatorship of capital”.

The end of the Soviet Union and German Democratic Republic has quite obviously not led to the ‘end of history’ and nobody believes Thatcher’s “there is no alternative”. In fact, in Germany, as in other countries, more and more people are starting to question the rule of capital. “Do these people look happy to you? Squashed into the tube, rushing to work, trapped in dead-end lives,” remarks Jan, looking over Berlin with its grey sky and millions of blinking adverts. “This feels like The matrix. It’s just that you can feel it - you know you can’t live in it.”

The film asks big questions about the possible political alternatives - but just like the so-called anti-globalisation movement, it cannot give any satisfying answers. It quite ruthlessly exposes how the anarcho-type activism that many anti-globalisation protesters have adopted has not only very little chance of actually changing anything - it has also been done before. Over and over again, in fact.

All throughout the film, the political activism of the three main characters Jule, Jan and Peter, reminds us of different periods in the 20th century history of the left. When they break into people’s houses and rearrange the furniture without stealing anything, they look like the nihilist neo-Dada artists of the 60s, who made a big thing of attacking the ‘holy cows’ of the establishment and fat cats. “These people are not afraid of burglars any more, but our actions really freak them out,” says Jan, fixing their trademark calling card on the tower of furniture they create: ‘You have too much money’ and ‘Your days of plenty are over’. They are signed ‘Die Erziehungsberechtigten’ (which literally means ‘legal guardians’, but has for the English version been translated into the invented ‘Anglo-German’ phrase The Edukators).

Jan tries to convince Jule to take part in his ‘direct action’: “Of course it has been tried before and we were defeated before. But from all the revolutions that have happened the best ideas survive,” he says quite profoundly. And yet he goes on to repeat some of the more silly ideas that have been tried over the last two centuries. After all, “At least we are not sitting in the pub, just talking about the big revolution.” Instead, local action and individual acts of sabotage are his thing. Jan’s big plan is to attack a remote island in the Mediterranean, from where 95% of all TV programmes are being transmitted into individual homes across Europe. “We could black out almost all the TVs in Europe - can you imagine how that would liberate people?” he gushes.

When Herr Hardenberg, the owner of one of the villas, comes home early, they end up having to kidnap him. “What are you now, the new Rote Armee Fraktion for a new century?” he asks them sarcastically.
As it turns out, Hardenberg was himself a rebel in 1968. He lived in a commune and was even chair of the infamous Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), which orchestrated many of the protests and demonstrations at the time. Now he earns £2 million a year, owns a yacht, a huge villa - and a guilty conscience. He increasingly starts to enjoy hanging out with his unwilling captors, singing revolutionary songs and talking about the good old times.

British audiences won't be seeing this scene

Just how guilty his conscience is becomes obvious in a nice little twist at the end of the film, of which British audiences are unfortunately deprived. Because the British version makes no sense, I feel it is my duty to break the iron rule of revealing the end of a film. The English version is altogether more downbeat than the original and finishes with Hardenberg having called the cops (although the three have already got away). It is only in the full German version that the note on the wall of the empty stormed apartment makes sense: “Some people never change”. Hardenberg himself has pinned it there. Film-goers in Britain are not shown the scenes in which the three heroes are seen speeding away in what is obviously Hardenberg’s yacht towards the TV island in the Mediterranean. A millionaire now sponsors their rebellion.

It would be stupid to simply criticise the Jans and Jules of this world for their spontaneous, impatient and often absurd forms of rebellion. The radicalisation that produces them is absolutely necessary to generate the energy needed if the global system of capitalism is to be effectively challenged. But it is those that tell us that these kinds of individualised protests are in and of themselves enough to change society who should be on receiving end of our harshest criticisms.

Those like Rifondazione Comunista in Italy, who have thoroughly studied our history, who have played their part in the defeats of our movement and who nevertheless claim that there is no need for a Marxist programme. Those like the Parti Communiste Français, who end up as founding members of Attac France. Those like the Socialist Workers Party, who tell us through their practice that working class politics is a thing of the past. Those who lead thousands of young people from one defeat to the next - and straight out of politics. Instead of new methods being tested in the anti-globalisation movement, we are witnessing the slow and painful death of the old left.

Unfortunately, there are no short cuts to human freedom - that much we should have learned by now. The genuine self-liberation of the working class and socialism cannot be achieved through the guerrilla tactics of a small minority. After all, who educates and controls the ‘edukators’? A prime example of what happens when political radicalism is not guided by a democratic Marxist programme is of course the Rote Armee Fraktion, which from 1968 until well into the 1990s fire-bombed and murdered its way across Germany with its pseudo-theoretical mish-mash of anarchism, posturing and quotes from Marx.

Today the left in Germany is perhaps even more crisis-ridden than in Britain. The desperately misnamed Party of Democratic Socialism does not even pretend to be fighting for anything resembling socialism. Having been part of ruling coalitions in a number of regional governments in the east of Germany, the party has supported draconian cuts in social and public services and unilateral annulled collective wage and labour agreements in Berlin.

While Trotskyism (and the sect-culture accompanying it) has not got as strong a foothold as in Britain, the German left is nevertheless extremely fragmented, with autonomism and anarchism more evident. The Autonome are in fact celebrating something of a revival in the current anti-globalisation mood.
Genuine communists have been having a hard time: the ban on the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands in 1956 was a mere technicality - the organised revolutionary left never recovered from the failed revolutions of 1918. From the foundation of the GDR in 1949, Realsozialismus served to control the left ideologically and organisationally. The Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (the successor of the KPD) was thoroughly Stalinist and very much under the direct control of the GDR. When I first got involved in leftwing politics in the late 1980s, I was often told to “climb back over the damn wall”.

Even after the end of the Soviet Union, no attempt has been made to explain its horrific nature or the role many of the communist and Trotskyist parties have played in supporting it. No attempt has been made to openly confront the bureaucratic methods and organisational forms employed. Instead, most of the left simply pretends it never happened, dresses up in new, ‘anti-capitalist’ clothes - and carries on making the same mistakes over and over again.

Hardly inspiring stuff - with most of the ‘revolutionaries’ themselves having abandoned genuine Marxism, it is no wonder many young people prefer to go down the DIY road of rebellion.

This film has deservedly won a good number of national and international awards, most of them voted for by the audience. It definitely succeeds in tying into this widespread mood, this search for an alternative. The director has done his homework in terms of marketing the film and its German website feels like an extension of Indymedia. There is a lively forum in which hundreds of messages are posted under headings such as ‘Build protest groups’ and ‘Politics’. One of the two links on the ‘News’ section refers to a report on the Swiss Indymedia site, which shows pictures of young people covering the entrance hall of Crédit Suisse bank with toilet paper. “Your days of plenty are numbered,” reads the graffiti on the pavement. But there are also pretty healthy debates about socialism, communism and the demise of the Ostblock.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has opened up new possibilities for the intervention of Marxist parties under the banner of extreme democracy. Reformism and Stalinism, on the other hand, are finished, no matter how many times the left tries to warm them up.

Time to break through the matrix.
Tina Becker