Weekly Worker 611 Thursday February 9 2006 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Left merger still on hold

“An absurd fratricidal war” - this is how the political magazine Der Spiegel describes the current difficulties hampering the creation of a new left party in Germany. But the root of the dispute is not absurd at all, says Tina Becker: it centres on the important question of government participation. By employing a range of bureaucratic manoeuvres, the WASG leadership is now trying to silence its own opposition that demands the party take a principled stand against accepting ministerial posts - while the SWP’s German section sides with the right

Der Spiegel has, of course, got a point when it comes to the ways in which disputes in the still unformed united Linkspartei manifest themselves. Looking at the various websites that chronicle the ‘debate’ is like watching a car accident in slow motion: you know the result won’t be pretty, but it is highly unlikely that the cars can be stopped in time. The process to merge the Linkspartei.PDS (formerly Party of Democratic Socialism - PDS) and the Wahlalternative Arbeit und Soziale Gerechtigkeit (WASG) is, if not fatally wounded, then at least seriously in trouble.

At the root is this contradiction: the whole Linkspartei.PDS leadership and the overwhelming majority of the WASG executive want a fast merging process, without any preconditions. The same people are also in favour of the joint new party taking up government posts in local, regional and national government.

However, the WASG membership is not playing ball: a majority - or at least a significant minority - wants the Linkspartei.PDS to end its disastrous participation in the regional governments of Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern before a merger takes place.

In both federal states, the Links-partei.PDS has overseen draconian cuts in social services, the implementation of the anti-unemployed legislation, Hartz IV, the cancellation of wage agreements in the public sector, etc. “The foundation of the WASG has been almost a reaction to the politics of the Linkspartei … The WASG is the precise manifestation of the critique of the Linkspartei’s record in government,” writes Thies Gleiss, one of the few members of the WASG national executive who oppose the unconditional merger (www.w-asg.de/1154.html).

He is right, in my opinion. It is not so much the Linkspartei’s past as the Socialist Unity Party (the former ruling party of East Germany - SED) that puts many people, including lefties, off. It is very much its present incarnation as a realpolitische Volkspartei. It recently changed its programme to adapt to its practice and now crucially “accepts” that “the market economy does not necessarily need to be overcome”.

The WASG, on the other hand, is a very new organisation, though it has grown to over 12,000 members. It was set up in 2004 by a number of middle-ranking officials of the IG Metall union after they were expelled from the Social Democratic Party for publicly criticising it over attacks on the unemployed and the welfare state. It has yet to start a discussion on its own party programme - all it so far highlights is its commitment to ‘rescue’ the German welfare state. It has certainly not debated the question of reform or revolution (see Weekly Worker September 22 2005).

Government participation

It is no wonder then that so many WASG members openly resist a quick merger that would not even criticise that half of the new party that is involved in highly controversial government coalitions. Very few WASG members are against a merger as such (though some people on the right and the leadership of the WASG make that accusation in order to silence and ridicule the opposition).

Not that you would be aware of much opposition if you just looked at the WASG’s website (www. wa-sg.de) - minority positions are either hidden well away or do not feature at all, even if they have been put forward by members of the national executive (see below). Just like the Linskpartei.PDS, the WASG has no regular newspaper or magazine and therefore members have no official avenue to put forward different points of views. Quite a disgrace, especially if one considers what an important role party newspapers and magazines have played on the German left in the past: publications like the Spartakusbriefe of Rosa Luxemburg’s organisation or - later - the Communist Party’s Die Rote Fahne were important tools to reach the masses and educate party members.

But two very lively websites have sprung up which chronicle the discussion and bring together reports from various parts of the country. One of them, www.linkspartei-debatte.de, has been helped along by the Socialist Party’s German section, Sozialistische Alternative (SAV). I am not sure who is behind the second one, www.linkezeitung.de. But they represent the level of debate you would expect in any real working class organisation - the fact that there is not anything remotely like it in or around Respect speaks volumes.

I will not bore Weekly Worker readers with all the sordid details of the various disputes (some of which are down to longstanding local animosities). Just a few examples to give you a flavour:

l After a heated, nine-hour conference at the end of January, the WASG in the east German federal state of Saxony-Anhalt dismissed its entire executive. The comrades were charged with being too uncritical of the regional Linkspartei.PDS, which is contesting the forthcoming regional elections in March with the clear aim of taking up ministerial posts.

l The WASG, both in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, has decided to stand without the Links-partei.PDS in the regional elections (September 2006 in Berlin and spring 2007 in M-V) - against the firm ‘wishes’ of the WASG leadership.

l The national party conference, scheduled for the beginning of March, had to be cancelled. The reason - the WASG executive had ruled that all delegates to conference should be newly elected - although the relevant statute (written by the same exec) states that delegates are elected for two years. The WASG executive argued that the membership had tripled since then; but some of the ‘old’ delegates feared that they might not get re-elected, especially those opposed to the executive’s current trajectory. So they appealed to the party’s arbitration committee, which upheld this view.

The conference had to be postponed to the end of April, as there was not enough time to sort out the mess. The April conference will be open to the previously elected delegates plus newly elected ones to make up for the growing membership.

l Some members of the WASG in Northrhine-Westphalia are threatening to sue the WASG executive for not giving out the contact details of all WASG members. They - rightly - claim that oppositional voices have no (guaranteed) right to reach the membership. Contributions to the website are published (or not) at the whim of a six-person editorial team appointed by the executive. However, getting a bourgeois court involved in ‘sorting out’ the internal affairs of a working class party is clearly not the answer.

l As a last example, there is the important question of dual membership. At a WASG conference in May 2005 - before the hurried merger process began - the WASG leadership tried to ban dual membership as a way of keeping lefties out (SAV, German Communist Party, the SWP’s German section Linksruck, etc). After a heated debate, the delegates clearly defeated the leadership and dual membership was supposed to be reviewed after January 1 2006.

Today, the whole situation has changed 180 degrees: now it is the leadership that pushes for dual membership while the opposition is reacting against it - where it is able with increasingly bureaucratic methods. In areas where opposition to government participation is the strongest, members of the Linkspartei.PDS have joined the WASG. What might look like a nice gesture to build bridges has in fact turned out to be an attempt to overrun the opposition and change the power relations in places like Berlin. Klaus Lederer, the new leader of Linkspartei.PDS in Berlin, openly admitted as much in an interview last year: Linkspartei members would join the WASG, he announced, so that “discussion over controversial issues can be moved forward” (Die Tageszeitung December 1 2005).

As a reaction to this, most of those WASG members opposed to an unconditional merger are now also opposed to dual membership, including the SAV. In Berlin, leading Linkspartei.PDS member Gregor Gysi joined the WASG in December 2005. The local WASG structure has now officially “accepted” him into membership, but stated that no further Linkspartei members would be allowed in after the January 1 ‘deadline’.

In the north German city of Hanover, WASG members refused anybody with dual membership access to their January members’ meeting - also on the basis that January 1 had now passed. Those kept out then went to court - apparently with the blessing of the WASG executive - and were granted an interim injunction against the “withholding of their members’ rights”. The Hanover executive then appealed against this injunction, but lost.

The next WASG conference on April 29-30 will hopefully clear up this mess - but then it has a lot of other things to deal with.

Bureaucratic response

Acutely aware of the damaging disputes, which have been dwelled on by the bourgeois media with obvious delight, the majority on the WASG executive has now decided to hurry along the merger process by bureaucratic means: it has attempted to force through a membership ballot on the question - which it aims to complete before the members get the chance of a full and frank debate at the April party conference.

The ballot will ask members if they support the Kooperationsabkommen III (the third cooperation agreement between the leaderships of WASG and Linkspartei.PDS), which implicitly sanctions government participation (see Weekly Worker December 8 2005). It also rules out the possibility of WASG and Links-partei.PDS candidates standing against each other and would therefore overrule the decisions of the WASG in Berlin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and others.

By initiating this ballot, opposed by three of its own number, the majority of the WASG national executive is acting against the wishes of WASG executive bodies in seven of the 16 federal states. Only three regional WASG executives support holding a ballot - the other six are either divided or have not yet come to official positions.

While WASG leader Klaus Ernst claims that the ballot is a “fine example of basis democracy”, the truth is, of course, somewhat different: It is a pre-emptive strike against the WASG Berlin, which in January voted through a motion for the April conference, calling for the cooperation agreement to be overruled and the process started anew. A prior ballot would make this motion irrelevant.

No doubt Ernst and co hope that by forcing through the Kooperationsabkommen III, some of their more vocal critics might simply leave WASG. In fact, by using such bureaucratic shenanigans, the WASG executive is bound to alienate many more of its members. Especially as there is still a significant dispute over a similar ballot last year. Some members claim the outcome might have been manipulated and they criticise the fact that only one member of the nine-strong voting commission was involved in counting the votes. These suspicions have certainly been given a boost by the fact that the executive has continually refused to make publicly accessible the ballot papers and the internet coding (some people voted online) that could prove that everything was done correctly.

WASG in Ostholstein has now initiated preliminary proceedings against the executive in the district public prosecution office of Lübeck because it suspects fraud. At least Germany’s lawyers will be happy with the current goings-on in WASG.

Opposition within the leadership

In recent weeks, the WASG national executive, which at one point looked very homogenous indeed, has developed some serious cracks. One of the most vocal critics is Thies Gleiss, to my knowledge a (former?) member of the Gruppe Internationale Marxisten (GIM), which used to be affiliated to the Fourth International.

He writes in one of the few critical articles published on the WASG website that “if the WASG and PDS want to be at the core of a new left party in Germany, then … government participation has to be terminated. It is completely impossible that this ‘private enjoyment’ of the PDS will become a shared experience with the WASG” (www.w-asg.de/1154.html).

Along with two other executive members, Sabine Lösing (Attac) and Rainer Spilker (regional executive of the public services and media union, Verdi), he has refused to sign the ‘Joint declaration on the party-building process’. This was published by the eight other members of the executive on January 3 (including Christine Buchholz of the SWP’s German section, Linksruck) and is a rather patronising attack on all those who have criticisms, accusing them of ‘not understanding’:

“The critics might have different political viewpoints, but they come to the same conclusion: the party-building process … should be suspended, slowed down or generally aborted. The strategic axiom that ‘more clarity is needed to reach the aim’ has in the history of the left often been used to initiate a succession of splits and self-isolation.”

Judging by the reaction of the three oppositionists, there seems to have been quite a lot of discussions accompanying the drafting of the declaration. Their own minority statement - which, incidentally, is nowhere to be found on the WASG website - centres on three main points:

l “The WASG should not just join the Linkspartei.PDS, but both parties should form a new organisation”. The fact that the comrades stress this point could well mean that the rest of the WASG leadership thinks differently.

l The joint declaration deals with its critics “in an unacceptable manner”. “Not all of those identified by the rest of the executive as “critics” are against building a new party. Drawing an equal sign between any kind of criticism and a fundamental rejection of the new party is wrong and … counterproductive”.

l The Linkspartei.PDS in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern “should declare that they will end their participation in government coalitions”. In return, the three comrades propose, both WASG regional groups should declare that “they will not stand against the Linkspartei.PDS” (www.die-welt-ist-keine-ware.de/isl/partei/weiter_denken.htm).

However, the three comrades are not generally against government participation. They call for a “frank and free debate” on the question and demand that the regional and local bodies of both the Linkspartei.PDS and the WASG should decide in future whether to participate in any coalition. If the Linkspartei.PDS were to continue its current political trajectory, the WASG should withdraw its support, the three state - but should still not stand against its official ally in elections.

It is not surprising that a politically very weak organisation - that has not even yet decided if it wants to be a reformist or revolutionary party - produces a very weak opposition. While the SAV, for example, makes in general far better points and more hard-hitting criticism, it is this opposition on the leadership level that is likely to play the crucial part in deciding the future of the whole project of building a united German left party.

SWP’s German section

Where in all this might the SWP’s German section, Linksruck, be positioned? You have guessed it: the comrades are siding unequivocally with the majority of the WASG executive. The same majority that ridicules the opposition; that tries to override the membership with bureaucratic measures and pushes for a quick merger without even attempting to resolve the question of government participation.

In Berlin, the Linksruck comrades have initiated a petition demanding that the WASG and Linkspartei.PDS should run together in the September 2006 regional elections. The “controversial issue of government participation” should be set aside, they demand. For the comrades, this is clearly no matter of principle.

Linksruck’s leading comrade, Christine Buchholz, believes that if the WASG in Berlin stands its own candidates against the Linkspartei. PDS, “this would lead to a split when there has not yet been unity”. She writes in the WASG Newsletter No3 (January 26) that the “current dilemma can only be resolved if we do not ask conditions of the Linkspartei that cannot be fulfilled before unification” (my emphasis).

This is rubbish. The comrades are against participation in capitalist governments - at least last time I checked. What then is the ideal timing for such crucial negotiations? When the Linkspartei.PDS with its 60,000 members constitutes the clear majority in the new joint party? Or is it maybe in this early stage of the negotiations between two equal partners that such a principled position would have the most chance of success?

I think the answer is clear. However, Linksruck’s motives are not quite as clear. Rather than being simply poor tacticians that have trouble identifying political opportunities like the above, I believe the comrades suffer from a far more serious condition: extreme opportunism.

Just like their mother organisation in Britain, Linksruck jumps onto every bandwagon - and then subordinates its own politics to the politics of whoever is driving it. The rationale behind it is that you have to hide your revolutionary politics if you want to build the biggest possible movement - from which you then can cream off those who might be interested in joining ‘the real thing’.

Comrade Buchholz, for example, wrote in her Theses on the WASG that the organisation “would become superfluous if it adopted a socialist programme, because it would exclude many of the people who could be won to the WASG” (www.sozialismus-von-unten.de/lr/artikel_1363.html).

But in the process of denying their own politics, the Linksruck comrades are actually strengthening the bureaucratic hand of the right - and are making it more unlikely that WASG and the new joint party will ever become a vehicle for the socialist transformation of society.

In an article in the latest edition of the bi-weekly Linksruck, comrade Buchholz positively reports on the efforts of the leaderships of WASG and Linkspartei.PDS to win over critics of government participation: She approvingly quotes WASG’s leading figure Oskar Lafontaine, who said that some actions of the Linkspartei in the Berlin senate (like the privatisation of thousands of council homes) were “grave mistakes”. She excitedly reports that the joint parliamentary faction of the WASG/Linkspartei.PDS declared in January: “There should be no more privatisations of public property, and the mistakes that were made in the past should to be rectified.” And she mentions the Linkspartei.PDS’s newly approved document Principles for communal politics, which states that “it is not possible for local politicians to do whatever they think is right - the principles of a party can otherwise get lost in the process” (Linksruck January 25).

All three examples were incidentally distributed to all WASG members in a newsletter - clearly designed to win over the critics and doubters and to convince them that the Linkspartei’s government participation is bound to change for the better. By uncritically adopting the same arguments, comrade Buchholz has made herself a tool for the right in the WASG and the Linkspartei.PDS - both of which have no desire to cease government participation, but have openly stated that is what they want.

The right wing in the WASG executive have rewarded Linksruck and comrade Buchholz for their loyalty: not only has comrade Buchholz been re-elected to the national executive of the WASG (this time with the support of the outgoing leadership). The majority of the WASG executive also trusts her so much, they have elected her onto the Steuerungsgruppe, the joint group coordinating the merger process. She is also a member of the editorial committee that decides which articles go up on the website. There have been complaints by some that even though critical articles were sent to her (and others on the team) they have not been published.

Last but not least, she has been given the full-time job of parliamentary assistant to Inge Höger-Neuling, one of the 58 MPs who were elected to the German Bundestag after the joint candidature of WASG and Linkspartei in the September 2005 general elections.

There has been some controversy over the latter, because as both a paid employee of the WASG/Linkspartei and an elected representative of the membership, some fear she could be compromised. “What would Christine do, for example,” asks Sascha Stanicic from the SAV, “if the minority of the parliamentary faction that voted against sending the German army to Sudan became a majority, while at the same time the WASG organised a demonstration against all foreign missions of the German army?” (www.sav-online.de/index.php?name=News &sid=1486).

A valid point, but not the key problem with Linksruck’s trajectory. More serious is its outright opportunism and subordination to the right in the WASG - something it has obviously learnt from its sister organisation’s behaviour in Respect.

Prospects for the future

Clearly, WASG is in deep trouble - and with it the very important project of building a new left party in Germany. The national executive might try to avoid solving the question of government participation, but it seems very unlikely that it will succeed.

A number of scenarios are now possible in the very near future: we could see a huge split from the WASG, the collapse of the merger process and/or the setting up of a rival left party made up of members of both the WASG and the Linkspartei.PDS. Such an outcome would represent a marked setback, putting a halt to the advance of the left and the opportunity it provides communists for the kind of organisation that is really necessary.

Of course, it is also possible that the WASG will vote ja in the forthcoming ballot and that the merger will go ahead, leaving open the question of government participation. But it is not a foregone conclusion that the ballot will be held. There could well be a mass rebellion against it. If the ballot were abandoned, the opposition would have a good chance of winning the April conference to a position where ending government participation is a precondition for merger negotiations. Socialists in Germany have a duty to join the WASG and try to help move this important process in the right direction.

Of course that does not mean that communists can never be members of a party that is involved in capitalist governments. Even if the merger goes ahead and the Links-partei.PDS remains in government, the new party might well prove to be the best place to be. In Italy, we would recommend all socialists join Rifondazione Comunista, although it is set to join Romano Prodi’s bourgeois government after the April general elections.

But this would be a sign of weakness, a sign that principled working class politics have not yet won. Those parties can provide an area for struggle for such politics, but in themselves they are incapable of ever effectively challenging capitalism.

Principled opposition

Rosa Luxemburg pointed out in her 1901 series of essays The socialist crisis in France that socialist members of bourgeois governments inevitably end up betraying their principles

The circumstance which divides socialist politics from bourgeois politics is that the socialists are opponents of the entire existing order and must function in a bourgeois parliament fundamentally as an opposition. The most important aim of socialist activity in a parliament, the education of the working class, is achieved by a systematic criticism of the ruling party and its politics. The socialists are too far removed from the bourgeois order to be able to achieve practical and thorough-going reforms of a progressive character. Therefore, principled opposition to the ruling party becomes, for every minority party and above all for the socialists, the only feasible method with which to achieve practical results.

Not having the possibility of carrying their own policies with a parliamentary majority, the socialists are forced to wring concessions from the bourgeois majority by constant struggle.

They achieve this through their critical opposition in three ways:

(1) Their demands are the most advanced, so that when they compete with the bourgeois parties at the polls, they bring to bear the pressure of the voting masses.

(2 ) They constantly expose the government before the people and arouse public opinion.

(3) Their agitation in and out of parliament attracts ever greater masses about them and they thus grow to become a power with which the government and the entire bourgeoisie must reckon.

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