[Marxism] Emerging worker centered anti-capitalist Left in German and French politics?

["Lil Joe" <joe_radical@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

            http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1595658,00.html
26.05.2005

            A Threat From the Left for Schröder?



                  Lafontaine left Schröder's government in 1999



           Oskar Lafontaine, ex-chairman of Germany's Social Democrats, has
left the party to support a possible new left-wing alliance to challenge
Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's center-left government in the upcoming
election.



                  Long the bane of Schröder's political life, Lafontaine has
played the leftist gadfly since petulantly quitting as finance minister in
1999. Having flirted with the idea of leaving the Social Democratic Party
(SPD) and he clearly felt the time was right after the chancellor decided to
bring forward the next general election for this fall.



                  Lafontaine has consistently attacked Schröder's so-called
Agenda 2010, a package of unpopular welfare cuts and labor market reforms
dubbed Hartz IV that slashed unemployment benefits.



                  "I have always said that if my party went into the
election with Agenda 2010 and Hartz IV, I couldn't support it anymore,"
Lafontaine said on German television. "The decision has now been made."



                  After abandoning the SPD, Lafontaine immediate went about
trying to forge a new political home for himself. He has proposed an
alliance between the eastern German Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and
a new western left-wing party calling itself Election Alternative (WASG).



                  Trailing the conservatives



                  Already trailing the conservative opposition, a new threat
from the left could seriously jeopardize Schröder's re-election chances this
autumn as it could siphon off support from disgruntled trade unionists and
left-wing hardliners in the SPD. After 39 years as a Social Democrat, the
charismatic Lafontaine could possibly draw many people to the banner of any
new party.





                  "Such an alliance would be a clear challenge and one that
I don't underestimate," said SPD Chairman Franz Müntefering.



                  The SPD is still reeling from the crushing defeat in last
Sunday’s election in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, once a regional
stronghold for the Social Democrats. Schröder felt he had no choice but to
bring the general election scheduled for autumn 2006 forward by a year after
the conservatives won the poll.



                  Professor Jürgen Falter, a political scientist at the
University of Mainz, said a potential left-wing coalition could try to
combine Lafontaine's popularity with that of the PDS' former leader Gregor
Gysi to build a pan-German far-left party.



                  "With people like Oskar Lafontaine and perhaps Gregor Gysi
as the respective candidates for western and eastern Germany, the party will
very likely get past the five percent parliamentary hurdle," Falter told
DW-RADIO.



                  PDS unsure





                  The leadership of the PDS, which rose from the ashes of
East Germany's former communist party, is uncertain there is enough time to
try to merge the two parties. However, PDS Chairman Lothar Bisky on
Wednesday said he still thought a united leftist party would was a good
idea. "It would possibly provide a great lift for the left overall," said in
an interview with WDR television.



                  Regardless of how successful the hard left is at combining
their election efforts, it could force the SPD to swing away from the
political center. Recent attacks by Müntefering on supposedly unbridled
capitalist principles could return in campaign rhetoric.



                  That could placate several high-profile SPD left-wingers,
who, for the moment, appear prepared to stay in the party and fight for it
to turn away from Schröder's reform course.



                  DW staff (mry)




      =====================

            The Year of the Locust




                  The insect metaphor is finding plenty of resonance in
German media




           A senior politician sparked the current debate on capitalism in
Germany by comparing foreign investors to a plague of locusts. But some say
the use of such populist rhetoric masks a deep-seated aversion to
capitalism.



                  The hum started in April, when SPD party secretary Franz
Müntefering unleashed a stream of rhetoric likening foreign investors to a
swarm of insects.



                  "Some financial investors spare no thought for the people
whose jobs they destroy," he told the mass-circulation tabloid Bild. "They
remain anonymous, have no face, fall like a plague of locusts over our
companies, devour everything, then fly on to the next one."





                  Since then, the droning buzz has grown ever louder:
locusts, everywhere. A giant locust and the Union Jack flag superimposed on
the Frankfurt stock exchange in Bild. An insect with a Yankee Doodle hat and
the headline "US Companies in Germany: Bloodsuckers" on a German trade union
magazine.



                  Müntefering's "locusts" have got staying power.



                  Michael Wolffsohn, an expert on German-Jewish history at
the German Armed Forces University in Munich balked at the metaphor and
accused Müntefering of drawing on anti-Semitic propaganda used by the Nazis.



                  "Sixty years on, human beings are again compared with
animals -- a 'plague' that must be destroyed," Wolffsohn wrote in an article
published in the Rheinische Post.



                  SPD officials vehemently denied Wolffsohn's accusations,
though Müntefering himself has kept mum. Still, many analysts agree that the
locust remark has reduced the debate on capitalism in Germany to a crude
level.



                  "Problematic tradition"



                  "I would not go as far as Wolffsohn to say that
(Müntefering) deliberately used anti-Semitic language, but I would say that
there is a problematic tradition in such terms that he should have been
aware of," said historian Paul Nolte of the International University Bremen.
"I was surprised at his lack of sensitivity."



                  For Nolte, lurking behind the populist slogans is the
beginning of a larger, long-overdue discussion about what he calls the
"c-word" -- a sign of Germans' troubled relationship with capitalism.



                  "There is a deficit in understanding among the German
public of what kind of economic order we live in," Nolte said. "It's worth
some serious enquiry about why Germans react to the c-word the way they do."




                  Nolte pointed to the fact that, in the immediate postwar
years, there was a strong antipathy towards capitalism from both the left
and right of the political spectrum, the roots of which date back to the
19th century. It was seen as something foreign, not part of German culture.



                  "In the 1950s and 60s it looked as though we had overcome
these reservations," Nolte said. "With the postwar success narratives of the
1970s and 80s, there was the kind of rhetoric that said Germany had finally
arrived in the West, had accepted democracy, pluralism, and capitalism -- so
long as it was classed as a social market economy."



                  "But it might be that this acceptance of capitalism had
not progressed as far in the postwar period as we thought. Until recently,
it was part of an illusion we had, sustained by better economic times."



                  Germany's role in recent years as the sick man of Europe,
coupled with popular skepticism of the government's economic reform agenda
has finally caused Germans' unease with the capitalist system to bubble to
the surface.



                  Vote-getting





                  Speculation is rife that the capitalism debate has been
orchestrated by the SPD in order to garner much-needed votes from its core
working class members in this weekend's elections in the key state of North
Rhine-Westphalia.



                  Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats have
governed the populous industrial state for 39 years, but according to the
polls, a disastrous electoral defeat in NRW is likely. Yet so widespread is
the self-doubt created by Germany's economic downturn that not even the
opposition parties have been able to counter the SPD's capitalist-bashing
rhetoric, Nolte said.



                  "The opposition's position is moving too much in the
defensive or saying nothing at all. Maybe the situation will change after
the elections on Sunday, but even in the rank and file of the conservative
parties, there is an uncertainty, a sense that maybe Müntefering has a
point, and that we are in danger," said Nolte.



                  General election issue?



                  Depending on the outcome of the elections in NRW, foreign
analysts are already predicting that Schröder will find it difficult to
resist carrying on the populist debate on aggressive capitalism, turning it
into a platform issue in the run-up to general elections in 2006.



                  "Herr Schröder has indulged in anti-American rhetoric
before to fight elections, even at the cost of relations with the US, which
have never recovered," read a recent commentary in the British newspaper The
Times. "It is hard to see why, short of a recovery in the polls, he will
resist the temptation of making 'anti-capitalism' his motto for next year's
fight."



                  What could help him resist the temptation, according to
Nolte, is the fact that Schröder is a pragmatist who is pro-business at
heart. The debate so far has had limited capacity to damage Germany's
reputation abroad, he said -- but warned that this could change were the
government to take action to clamp down on the activities of foreign
investors.



                  "As long as it stays in the realm it's in now, the debate
is probably not as damaging as some would have us believe," Nolte said. "But
if it were translated into new regulations or restrictions on foreign
capital, then of course it really becomes dangerous."


                  Deanne Corbett, DW-WORLD.DE



       ===============

           Critiquing Capitalism Across Europe



                  The leader of Germany's Social Democrats called investors
'locusts'



           How much capitalism is too much? The debate has taken on a
particularly strident tone in Germany, but it also rages on in many other
European countries.

                  The discussion re-ignited two weeks ago when the leader of
Germany's ruling Social Democrat Party, Franz Müntefering (photo), said
international investors who buy up companies, slash jobs and disappear with
the profits were like a "swarm of locusts" besetting Germany.



                  Some charged that the incumbent politician was just using
the issue to gain sympathy from his traditional voter base, ahead of state
elections.

                  Private equity funds in focus

                  Müntefering was referring foremost to private equity
funds, foreign investment groups made up of private share capital. His
criticisms caused an uproar from politicians and the media, and started an
intense debate about whether profit-oriented companies and globalization are
at fault for Germany's own plague: frighteningly high unemployment.

                  "The uproar is noticeably great in Germany," said Henning
Klodt, who heads the Department of Growth and Structural Change at the Kiel
Institute for World Economics.



                  But the debate is also taking place in other European
countries -- albeit at a lower volume. Doubts about the capitalist system
are growing elsewhere as well, said Ronald Janssen, economics expert at the
European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC).

                  "With the threat of outsourcing or job displacement, job
seekers are forced to accept low pay and job cuts, in order to increase
profits that are already high," he said.

                  The French way

                  For the time being, the French seem to be as critical of
globalization as the Germans are.

                  "It is a debate that has been active in France even longer
than in Germany," said Henrik Uterwedde, deputy chief of the German-French
Institute, a group that studies social problems in France.



                  Critics say economic liberalism has an eve broader base in
France than in Germany, taking into account the strength of its unions, the
anti-globalization umbrella group attac and the communist party.

                  The French have also had exposure to tough subjects like
mass job cuts and globalization for a long time. In France, "of the 40 most
important companies, 40 percent of the capital is in the hands of foreign
shareholders," Uterwedde said. "In Germany, that number lies between 10 and
15 percent."

                  The economic experts say the French take on the capitalism
debate is more critical -- and more open.

                  "We don't know where it is going, in terms of the
economy," he said. "In Germany, we deal with these issues in roundtable
talks with unions. In French, these discussions take place on the streets."

                  The positive side of this is that "the growing pains are
public when any changes take place" in France, Uterwedde added. And the
French government is more likely to manipulate the economy.

                  Britain made the leap

                  In other industrial countries, the capitalism critics are
quieter. Klodt, from the Institute of World Economy, noted that rather than
fearing capitalism, Scandinavia and the Netherlands pushed reforms through
earlier.



                  In the case of Britain, the reforms were already pushed
through during the1980s under Margaret Thatcher, said Joachim Volz, Western
Europe expert a the German Institute for Ecnomic Research (DIW).

                  "Now, it's the country with the least fluctuation in
growth," he said.

                  Italy is currently having a lively public debate over
young people working for low wages and without a social net beneath them,
ETUC's Janssen said.

                  Management on the coals

                  A big point of contention in many countries is wages for
management. In Belgium, the manager of a weaving machine manufacture nearly
ran a firm into insolvency by taking such a big slice of the pie. And even
in Great Britain, capitalism has caused trouble.

                  "People are worried about service jobs leaving the
country, like banks or call centers -- although they are already making good
profits," Janssen said.



                  Rafael Heiling (jen




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