Germany

Wagenknecht’s link with far-right organiser

On 10 January, the investigative outlet Correctiv revealed details of a “private encounter” last November, at which politicians of Germany’s far-right AfD, neo-Nazi activists, and some supposedly “respectable” Christian Democrats and business people, discussed a “masterplan” for mass deportations of foreign nationals and foreign-born German citizens. According to Correctiv’s report, a leading AfD parliamentarian spoke about the need to change the “streetscape” of towns and cities by putting foreign-owned restaurants “under pressure”. The reaction to this report has been dramatic: over a...

Boycott Germany is a nonsense

French writer and Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux, US academic and writer Judith Butler, and deputy director of the French National Museum of Modern Art Catherine David are the most prominent of the 1,500 signatories to have put their names to the “Strike Germany” statement to date.

Enthusiasm for red-brown Wagenknecht

The German politician Sahra Wagenknecht has surprised no-one by announcing a new party. For the time being she has modestly given it the name “Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht — for Reason and Justice”. Wagenknecht has tried this before: in 2018 she formed Stand Up, an outfit based upon vague anti-globalism, denunciations of finance capital and nostalgia for both East German Stalinism and West Germany’s 1950s social market economy, with support for small and medium businesses. Wagenknecht and her partner the former SPD leader Oskar Lafontaine were by then well known for their hostility to...

The Fight Against Section 219a

In Germany, abortion is covered by section 218 of the criminal code. It stands as an “offence against life”, alongside murder and manslaughter. It is only exempt if it is carried out during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and if the woman has received counselling from an authorised advisor and has waited three days before the procedure. Until July 2022 a significant legal obstacle to abortion was section 219a of the criminal code. This law prohibited publicly offering, announcing, or advertising abortions. In practice this meant that doctors were prevented by law from informing patients that...

Notes from Berlin: what we can learn from the hospital movement

In September 2021 thousands of healthworkers launched an indefinite strike at Charité and Vivantes, two of Berlin’s large municipal hospitals. So began the Krankenhausbewegung - Berlin’s Hospital Movement. After a month, they won. A year later, nurses in the UK underwent their own industrial awakening, as the Royal College of Nursing balloted for nationwide strike action over pay. The differences between the disputes could not have been more stark, as a series of obstacles — some erected by anti-union laws, others by their own union — combined to defeat the UK nurses, despite overwhelming...

Letter: Neither "October" was a coup

Eric Lee (Solidarity 681) is right, I think, to say that the Bolsheviks thought the 1917 workers' revolution had to spread to more advanced countries or be crushed

Germany: "people are joining unions more and more"

Clea and David from RSO , a revolutionary socialist organisation in Germany, spoke to Solidarity S: Is there a strike wave happening in Germany at the moment? C: There was, but it is decreasing now. Wage negotiations happened at the same time, first for the public services and the post, and then the trains came in. Not only train drivers, but also infrastructure. So there was this moment where the whole public service and the trains were striking at the same time. A few weeks ago they did a strike together on the same day. That was hospitals, regional trains and train infrastructure: they...

Letter: Red-brown in Britain

Jim Denham’s column chronicling the despicable politics of modern day Stalinism continues to provide valuable ammunition to socialists who oppose tyranny in all its forms. The column in Solidarity 660 was particularly instructive, highlighting the drift of some leading people in Die Linke towards far right German nationalism. “Liberalism” is apparently the new “social fascism” for Stalinists today. He says that “no red-brown current of any significance yet exists in the UK”, and I’m not going to quibble over the word ‘significance’. However, the self-styled Workers Party, a project of the...

Morning Star and the red-browns in Germany

Sahra Wagenknecht The editor of the Morning Star , Ben Chacko, has been at a “Rosa Luxemburg Conference” in Berlin and hob-nobbing with the Die Linke (“The Left”) Bundestag member Sevim Dagdelen, whom he interviewed for the paper’s 20 January edition. Dagdelen rages against sanctions on Russia and claims that “The US wants to destroy the Russian-German relationship for good”. She adds that delivery of “more powerful” weapons (but she clearly means any weapons) to Ukraine must stop and warns of a “third world war” if Putin is not conciliated. She complains about Die Linke not opposing Leopard 2...

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