Wladek Flakin, of the German section of the Revolutionary Internationalist Organisation, discusses opportunities and obstacles facing the German working class with Daniel Randall of Workers' Liberty.
What austerity measures is the government introducing?
On June 7, the government announced a massive social cuts programme: they plan to cut €80bn from the federal budget over the next 10 years. The cuts effect different sections of the working class in different ways. There are supposed to be 15,000 job cuts in the federal bureaucracy, combined with a wage freeze. There are also massive attacks on unemployed people: unemployed workers will no longer be eligible for “parents’ money”, combined with other attacks on the rights that unemployed people currently have. The government will no longer pay retirement contributions for long-term unemployed people.
Industrial workers have not been the main focus of the attacks so far. Partially that's because they were already subject to substantial attacks under the last Social Democratic government which was in office until 2005 – it was the SPD that raised the retirement age from 65 to 67. It also massively expanded the number of precarious jobs. The current government is hoping, though, that its attacks on the unemployed will create pressure on industrial workers by increasing fear of unemployment.
Interestingly there are also planned cuts in military spending. Germany still has compulsory national service, but this unpopular and doesn't really fit in with the interests of German imperialism – the military can't really do much with all the people who do the service for a year, such as sending them to Afghanistan. Now the Defence Minister is saying the compulsory service under threat because there might not be enough personnel to deliver the training after the military cuts.
A number of bourgeois commentators have expressed their surprise that the Social Democratic Party (SPD) haven't shifted to the left in opposition. They're not opposed to the cuts, they're just saying they need to be socially balanced. They're calling for increase of 2 percentage points in the highest tax bracket – as an addition rather than as an alternative to the cuts. The governing conservatives came under pressure on this because Germany's dominant ideology is “social partnership”, which contends that the whole of society – rich and poor, bosses and workers – should share the burden for paying for the crisis. However, the conservatives' coalition partner, the hyper-liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), is firmly opposed to any tax increases for the rich.
What's the state of the labour movement and the left?
The trade union leaderships are tied to the SPD. They're also calling for 'balance' in the cuts programmes, but there's no fundamental opposition. There isn't much of a rank-and-file movement in the German trade union movement; historically its been very dominated by large apparatuses. There are some leftish elements in the lower strata of the bureaucracy, and they generally have a more combative position.
The biggest force to the left of the SPD is the Left Party. This was founded in 2005 as a fusion of the old East German ruling party, the PDS, and the WASG, which was a leftish split from the SPD based mainly on low-level trade union bureaucrats.
The WASG was hostile to the PDS, both on the basis of old-style anti-communism but and also of hostility to their record in regional governments in the last 20 years in East Germany. The PDS is something of a mass force in the former East Germany and has participated in governments at regional and local levels. Eventually, though, the WASG overcame its differences and fused with PDS to form the Left Party.
The East Germany the base of the Left Party is made up of pensioners and local politicians. In West Germany its base is more in the trade union bureaucracy.
Their latest draft programme is fairly radical but in practise the party is involved in two provincial governments which are carrying out massive social cuts. There doesn't appear to be any fundamental opposition within the party to participation in bourgeois governments. No one is fighting for the perspective of a workers' government, even from the revolutionary left; both the CWI and the IST sections in Germany participate in the Left Party.
The two biggest groups, the SAV (which is affiliated to the CWI) and Marx21 (loosely affiliated with the IST) are both in the Left Party. Marx21 leads the left party's student group and the SAV focuses on oppositional work in their youth organisation. It is important to distinguish between these groups; the IST acts as a pressure group within the Left Party and isn't visible as an organisation. They've been rewarded for their loyalty to the party leadership with all sorts of posts: for example there are two ISTers in the German parliament! The CWI, on the other hand, is genuinely oppositional and has been the victim of witch-hunts and defamation. However, their perspective is limited to calling on the Left Party to be a “fighting party of workers and youth” rather than a revolutionary socialist party.
On June 12, there were demonstrations in Berlin and Stuttgart under the slogan “We wont pay for your crisis!” These were organised by an alliance initiated by elements of the radical left and some elements of the trade union bureaucracy. At first, the regional structures in some big unions like the public sector union ver.di backed the demo, but not at a national level. In the weeks before the demonstration it was looking as if the demonstrations were going to be very small.
But on the Monday before the demonstrations, the cuts programme was announced which bolstered numbers. It also led to national trade unions and the Left Party jumping on board, which helped build the demos but meant they were very dominated by the bureaucracy. These elements certainly aren't universally popular, though – at the Stuttgart demo an SPD speaker was egged!
There's no alternative strategy coming from any significant part of the labour movement. The revolutionary left is very weak and isolated. Left-wing sectors of the trade union bureaucracy are tied to the Left Party, but they won't intervene on the level of presenting an alternative strategy. There is very little agitation for political strikes, for example.
The autonomist movement is still one of the most important sectors of the far-left. Some of them are becoming more oriented towards workers' struggles, but they're more interested in influencing the left-wing sectors of the bureaucracy, rather than developing rank-and-file organisation.
The Trotskyist left in Germany has historically always been very weak. Of the small number of Trotskyist in Germany in 1933, less than half survived fascism and only a handful returned to activism. When the movement was being rebuilt after the war, there were only one or two cadre who had experience from before fascism. The Trotskyist left has never really recovered; it's always been smaller and weaker than in France or even in Britain.
Now, the biggest Trotskyist groups are all focused on the Left Party. It's a shame, because that's reduced the visibility of Trotskyists as independent revolutionaries.
Has the left focused much on the 'eurozone' aspect of the crisis? Have their been any calls for Germany to quit the eurozone or the EU?
One has to understand that the EU was fundamentally a project of German imperialism. In relation to the Greek crisis there was a lot of chauvinist propaganda referring to the 'garlic zone' of the EU where everyone is lazy and workshy. The tabloid press was dreaming about a return of the Deutschmark so Germany wouldn't have to pay for the “lazy Greeks”. But that sort of demand was never seriously considered by the ruling class.
Our view is that the EU is an imperialist bloc designed to help European capital compete more effectively with its rivals. But individual European imperialisms are no better, so we think calls for a withdrawal from the EU (as are raised by sections of the Greek left) by themselves are dead-ends.
The bigger problem on the German left is the mystification of the EU as some kind of progressive historical project designed to unite people and make wars impossible. While the freer movement of people within Europe is positive, it's tangential to the EU project – it's a bi-product rather than a direct intention.
What are the next steps?
We need to recognise divisions in the ruling class. The government has been in crisis for at least the last month; the parties within the coalition have been rabidly attacking each other.
Postwar Germany has been based on a system of social partnership which has involved a very high level of integration of the trade union bureaucracies into the state and into individual corporations. That costs the ruling-class a lot in terms of making at least cosmetic concessions to the workers' movement, and it means it takes a long time to implement things like cuts because everything has to be mediated through Social Democratic and trade union leaders.
There's a minority in the ruling class that's getting tired of this; they want to break up that relationship and give themselves more of a free hand. They're represented by the FDP, but the reality is that the only speak for a minority of the ruling class. The bourgeois press (such as the business newspaper “Handelsblatt”) is very critical of them. Development of real wages over the last 20 years has been lower in Germany than in almost any other European country, so the majority of the ruling class sees “social partnership” as a good way of containing the working class.
In this situation it is in many ways the perfect time for a working-class offensive. We need to raise the slogan that workers shouldn't pay a sent for the capitalist crisis. There have been some significant struggles recently, including actions against mass lay-offs at Opel factories and wildcat strikes last winter at Daimler plants near Stuttgart. There have also been big education strikes which have brought hundreds of thousands of school and university students out onto the streets.
But for any of this to lead anywhere, we need to create a revolutionary current in the working-class movement. That means orienting to the labour movement but also fighting within the student movement, for example, for a clear orientation towards the working class. This has got to be a rank-and-file orientation – orienting to the trade union apparatus will only lead to radical left activists being co-opted.
It's also important to understand the illusions that still exist in the SPD and the Left Party; the revolutionary left needs to relate to these parties in terms of putting pressure on them to act in the interests of workers. We don't think there are too much opportunities for revolutionary entry work in either the SPD or the Left Party but it is necessary to have a certain engagement with the workers who believe in them.