Support SPD over PDS in the East

Submitted by Anon on 7 October, 2005 - 5:42

David Broder takes a strongly critical view on Die Linke.PDS

Most of the British left responded with uncritical celebration to the German Left Party’s strong election results. While it cannot be doubted that their tally of 8.7% of votes was a huge achievement, we also need to examine whether we actually call for a vote for such a group.

The Left Party, a lash-up between the ex-Stalinist PDS and the WASG, an SPD split, had what was in many ways a flawed agenda for the 18 September election. Often populist, in tune with WASG leader Oskar Lafontaine’s quasi-racist comments about foreign workers, their campaign had very little of what we might see as a positive socialist programme. Nevertheless, theirs was the only manifesto to stand up to Schroeder’s attacks on the welfare state, and the WASG element is formed largely of trade unionists and ex-SPD lefts. At a time of mass unemployment, it was unsurprising that so many workers rallied round the Left Party to defend Germany’s “social welfare state”.

However, I’m not sure that the WASG comrades were right to break away from the SPD. In order to win seats in parliament, a party needs 5% of the national vote. Since WASG could never achieve this, they ended up running on the list of the PDS, renamed as the Left Party for the election. Rather than fighting within the SPD, which could well have allowed the left to have an important role in government, they stood with a reformed Stalinist party.

The PDS not only stands in the tradition of the SED, the party which ran the old GDR Stalinist regime in East Germany, but has many of the same members, including thousands of ex-bureaucrats, and much of its vote derives from nostalgia for the GDR. The PDS has very poor roots in trade unions, particularly given that merely 14% of its members are employed workers — Socialist Worker claims that this is only as many people as the number of small businessmen in the party.

So the WASG stood together with a party which not only lacks working class elements, but sullies their credibility by associating the demands of the German left with the fundamentally anti-working class regime of the GDR. Associating the WASG with Stalinism — seven Left Party MPs were recently outed as Stasi collaborators — only adds to the association with fascism made by the bourgeois media when Lafontaine attacked foreign workers.

If leaving meant aligning themselves with a current like the PDS, rooted in Stalinist and reformist oppositions to working class politics, the WASG comrades should have continued to fight in the SPD, allowing them to take on the government from within and work in the party of the huge majority of rank-and-file trade unionists. We should therefore not blindly cheer the Left Party’s success, but say that we only call for a vote for the WASG candidates, while encouraging the militant trade unionists and left of the SPD to take the fight to Schroeder within the SPD.

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