Simon Tisdall (The Guardian): Germany's new left upsets the applecart

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Guardian Unlimited (London)
Dated Friday August 12

Germany's new left upsets the applecart
Helmut Scholz is up for a fight - and the political establishment is running scared
By Simon Tisdall

Helmut Scholz is up for a fight - and the political establishment is running scared. The German left, he says, won't be fooled again.

Speaking in Berlin this week, the international coordinator of Germany's insurrectionary new electoral phenomenon, the Linkspartei (Left party), said the country was in crisis and the main parties had no solutions.

"We want to reattract people who have been turned off politics and get them back," Mr Scholz said. "We're trying to give all people in Germany a new perspective.

"Germany is in a critical economic and social situation. We have to face up to the task. We have to find another direction.

Read more.

Right now, the neoconservatives in Washington are looking forward to a Markel victory. This might put a crimp in their plans.

[necso]

1. Linkspartei platform.

http://sozialisten.de/politik/international/fremdsprachige_dokumente/view_html?zid=29243&bs=1&n=1

I will reserve comment, although I will mention that I dislike pdf files -- and that I think that both Ms Merkel and Gerhard Schröder have little or nothing of any real worth to offer to their people -- or to the world.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. This sounds AWFULLY familiar:

"Rising dividends are accompanied by massive dismissals and tax gifts to the representatives of big capital. The lowering of the maximum income tax rate is accompanied by growing debts of the public purse and mass unemployment. The growing productivity of those employed would allow shorter working hours and growing incomes, but in reality, we witness longer working hours and cuts in wages and pensions..."

Where have we heard/seen this before?

[hedda_foil]

3. Helmut Scholz sounds like Germany's Howard Dean!

Go Helmut!

[SeanQuinn]

4. Yeah, go Helmut go!

Is that a football Helmut or a baseball Helmut?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. Actually, it's pronounced "Hel-moot"

I had a great-uncle by that name.

[SeanQuinn]

6. Ah, thanks, Lydia.

Appreciated.

[Dirk39]

7. Hello from Germany,

I will become a member of that new party during the next days.
I left the Greens, when I was 19 in 1983. Now I'm 41.
I'm a DU member for more than 2 years and I always had that "sounds-familiar" feeling, while Americans praised the advantages of Europe's "3-way"...

The most interesting thing about the hate-campaign against the new left party is: the blairist-clintonist Social-Democrats as well as the neoliberal Greens try to label us as "right-wing populists", "antisemites" and so on and so forth.
Expect this to happen in the U.S.A. too, if a left movement that has the support of the unemployed, the Ghettos and the Working Class - unlike the Left in the sixties. This time Europe might be faster than the USA. The same happened, when France did vote against the neoliberal militaristic european constitution.
The same agenda is used against the people, who fight the NEOLIBARAL CORPORATE Globalization.
They're backward-looking Nationalists!
I'm feeling like being an Iraq Citizen: be progressive, say Hello to Mr. Bush and the Post-Nationstate Revolution...

If you understand the feelings of german people - people born here and people, who live here for long - who had the lowest paid jobs under the worst conditions, one could think off, but who are now losing these jobs, 'cause there are even cheaper workers from Eastern Europe, accepting even worse conditions, escaping the capitalist paradise in Poland, you're a racist. These workers are racists. Not the people, who are responsible for this situation.
I was really surprised. I imagined they would label us as mindblown potsmoking anarchists, who want to expropriate the family owned shop around the corner and the Deutsche Bank:-)

Maybe the family owned shop around the corner has learned, that it is the Deutsche Bank, expropriating them. And maybe there are enough people, who would like to see the Deutsche Bank expropriated. Who knows? It's really funny.
The leader of the party in western Germany - Oskar Lafontaine - was the first finance minister during Schröder's first term in 1998 and he was the chief of the Social Democratic Party until he resigned, and he resigned, 'cause he realized that he would deceive the people, who did vote for him to achieve more social justice.

In the former communist part of Germany the new left Party - it's an association of former social democrats and unionists in Western Germany and the former communist party in East-Germany - is already the strongest party.
After 16 years living in the capitalist paradise of unemployment, depopulated cities, small buisness being replaced by wallmart and the like.
No, they don't want to get back to Stalinism. They've been there. And they know what it's like. The worst of yesterday's stalinists are now in the conservative party, in the social-democratic party, even in the green party. These people will always ally themselves with the powers that be. You needed a lot of courage to remain a leftist AFTER the defeat of Eastern-Germany. The neoconservative leader - a woman - of the conservative party, Mrs. Merkel, was a secretaire for agitation and propaganda in the student organisation of the communist party, while she studied in Eastern Germany. In her official biography this is translated into selling theater tickets. These are the people, I hate.
The leader of the former communist party, Gregor Gysi, was working as a lawyer in Eastern Germany and defended dissidents and tried to support them....

O.K. I admit it: it's not a revolutionary situation. In the Polls we are between 11 and 13% since weeks now. If we get 10% I would still be out of my mind. I would never ever have expected it to happen that a party with an anticapitalist and left-wing agenda would archieve this in Germany again. BTW I live in one of the largest German cities, Hamburg, which is in Western Germany and the polls say: 10%!!!

http://sozialisten.de/images/button_sonstige/button_european_left_gif


Just imagine 15, 10 or just 5% of the voters for the Democratic Party in the USA would simply make sure: Don't count on our votes anymore. Forget about it!
As long as we are allowed to vote - I know this is a difficult task in the U.S. - WE don't need them! They need US!

Shut them down,
Dirk

[Kellanved]

8. There is no such thing as a new "left party"

The party is identical to the SED, their plattform is pure populism, by comparison the other established parties (OK, the conservatives produced one that might count as comedy) are downright honest. And a certain member is indeed not ashamed of using far-right pseudo-arguments. Granted, he is becoming a loose gun already and thus won't last in the party long after the election.
Well, anybody who doesn't see the idiocy in splitting the left is hard to understand for me.

What galls me about these so-called "leftists", is that they run with the full intention to cause grieve for their voters: they submitted invalid lists for a few western states to the federal election manager and they know it. With luck nobody will bother dragging the case to court, but if anyone does, the votes for the "left party" might get annulled. That will go down well - not.

[Dirk39]

9. You're really funny Kellanved...

About two years ago, you posted here that there will never be any kind of left party growing out of the risistance against Schröder`s neoliberal agenda.
Now it's here and it's soooo "populistic". Populistic things like human rights, like peace, like health care, like wages, that allow you to pay your rent. Like dignity. Someone has to do something to bring these populist idiots with their sick ideas back to human, pardon: corporate reasaon.


I understand everything: Two years ago, it would never ever happen. Two years later, it will not last long after the election.

Pardon me, I forgot: it's not new. Athough two years ago, it couldn't even happen.

Dangerous Stalinists along with Honnecker did hide in the deserts neoliberalism has caused in the former >communist< parts of Germany. Now these ghosts of the pasts, these zombies leave their hiding place again to seduce little children and easy-minded workers into this same old story again: workers rights, a party that represents the people, not corporations and their corrupt whores like Schröder. Uhhh. It's becoming dangerous in Germany. We need some depleted Uranium to come to reason again and a free market system. And if anytime anyhow within the next decade some Schröders or Clintons or Blairs should come up with the idea that we should shoot 1 out of 10 unemployed to reform the social-welfare state: I cannot wait for your statement here that we shouldn't split the left about this issue.


Dream on Kellanved, dream on,

Dirk

[Kellanved]

10. Yup, I am a comedian

By now it should have communicated that many people are actually better off than before Hartz.

The SPD has defended worker's rights; whatever the "new" party wants: they will be unable to do it. A split left will be unable to do anything. You might just as well join the CDU. Or the FDP.

Also: there is no "New" party. The SED is fond of changing names. They did so before and will do it again: what is new about it?

[Dirk39]

11. What's new about it?

The Social Democrats did vote for the war-credits in 1914 and doing so enabled the 1. World-War and the killing of 10 million people.

After World-War 1 the Social Democrats did unite with the Junkers and Corporations to prevent a real democracy and a social revolution in Germany.

They were at least involved in the killing of the only two social democrats, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who rejected to vote for the war-credits and who wanted a real socialist democracy after World War One and who where the first - as revolutinairies, to critizise Lenin for the undemocratic path, the russian revolution took.

When the communists did say: If you vote for Hindenburg, you vote for Hitler. And if you vote for Hitler, you vote for the war: the Social Democrats did vote vor Hindenburg. The rest of the story is well known.


After Hitler did come to power, the leadership of the Social Democrats tried to collaborate with the Nazis, warned the Socialist International that they should stop to criticize Hitler and the Nazis, otherwise the German Social Democrats would leave the Socialist International and warned the ordinary members of the Social Democratic Party to travel to the meeting of the Socialist International. That's so much like Schröder, Clement, Münteferring and the other assholes, who lead this party now...

I just leave the years after the defeat of Hitler out, it is too boring with one exception: Willy Brand. The only true Socialdemocrat after WWII. But he was pretty soon replace by a former Nazi-Wehrmacht-Officer, Helmut Schmidt.

In 1998 the corporations and banks of Germany along with a right-wing-extremist newspaper decided to let Gerhard Schröder do the dirty neoliberal work for them for two reasons:

1: the conservativ party would have been challenged by the Unions and the Social Democrats, if they would have tried to do the same, and

2: if a corrupt whore like Schröder would do the dirty work for them, the moderate social-democratic Party would be destroyed and would no longer be credible for anyone, the Unions would have been weakened along with the social-democrats and:
3: a Thatcher/Reagan/Bush like party would remain to do the rest in destroying social rights, what has been left of the welfare state and the little little rest of democracy, Schröder didn't allready manage to destroy.
This is what is not exactly new, but even more vulgar than what this party managed to do before.
They just didn't expect a large amount of people, to recognize what is happening and to resist. And the most absurd thing is: the Social Democratic Party did destroy itself. If they don't manage to get rid of all the people, who did lead the party during the last 10 years, they will become history. And I hope the same thing will happen to the party of massmurder Blair in Britain.



Dirk

[Kellanved]

12. *yawn*

So Schröder is a corrupt whore, but Lafontaine isn't. *snarf*

The SPD always was a party rooted in the real world. Do what is doable and don't promise the high heavens. The SPD was ill-prepared in 1918, but so was everyone else. Mistakes were made, other things did work out.

Your accusation of "collaboration" is laughable. If the communists had even the slightest bit of common sense, the tragic course of history might have been averted. And just remember: the choice 1932 was Hindenburg OR Hitler. In hindsight, the whole 1932 election was foul.

Schmidt is a funny example: thanks to him, we have to deal with the greens today. However in the early 80s, the SPD was far right from today's SPD.


Where you lost me is the claim about "destroying the social systems". Where please? What has been destroyed?
Where is the Thatcherite agenda? What makes Schröder a "whore"? If you see that, then why do you endorse the destruction (as if the SPD hadn't weathered worse in the past) of the moderate SPD?

Had you ever the joy to deal with the PDS? Any ideas about that party? slight hint: conservative. They have no interest in building a left utopia; unless a left utopia means a stagnating nation with walls all around.