Workers' Liberty

The PDS "emerged" out of the East German Stalinist ruling party SED in 1989, the party was originally called "SED-PDS", and has been moving to the right ever since. The PDS is basically a left-wing social democratic party. German political commentators often wonder how long the "artificial split in the workers' movement", as they see it, caused by the German revolution in 1918-19 and the founding of the German Communist Party, can be overcome, with the merger of the SPD and the PDS. The PDS's daily paper is "Neues Deutschland", with a large format and quite big print for the ever aging members. The PDS is literally dying away and its attempts to appeal to radical youth are undermined severely by the party's desire (at all levels) to be "realistic" and to be allowed to play the political game on the same terms as the other bourgeois parties.