Re: [Marxism] Ostalgie

["Lüko Willms" <lueko.willms@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 16 Mar 2008 15:35:48 -0400, Louis Proyect wrote:

> For Germany's Former Communists, a Stunning Resurgence
> By Craig Whitlock
> Washington Post Foreign Service
> Sunday, March 16, 2008; A20 

  just a few factual corrections: 


> BERLIN -- Nineteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the old 
> East German Communist Party is making a comeback.


> Most supporters of the Left live in economically struggling eastern 
> Germany, where nostalgia remains strong for the years of communist 
> rule. In the past several weeks, however, the party has won seats for 
> the first time in regional parliaments in the western states of Hesse 
> and Lower Saxony, as well as the city of Hamburg. 

  And before in the city-state of Bremen. So the party DIE LINKE (the 
left) is represented with parliamentary groups in four of the ten West 
German federal states (Länder). 

> Its unexpected strength has led to gridlock in Hesse -- home of the 
> nation's business capital, Frankfurt -- because no other political 
> party has been able to scrape together a majority coalition without 
> the resurgent Left. It's a scenario that analysts said could be 
> repeated in September 2009, when national elections are likely to be 
> held and Chancellor Angela Merkel's job will be up for grabs. 

   Actually it is just a rehash of the situation created by the 2005 
national (federal) elections, which resulted in a five-party "Bundestag" 
(federal parliament), defeating the thrust of CDU/CSU and FDP for a 
stronger attack on the working class. The social-democratic rhetoric of 
the SPD had helped to recover from the slump shown in the elections in 
various federal states -- but the "left" majority, i.e. to the left of 
the pure bourgeois parties existed only as addition of SPD, Greens, and 
PDS/WASG (the latte became the party DIE LINKE later). 

> Although the Social Democrats have pledged never to form an alliance 
> with the Left on the national level -- a reflection of how the 
> communist label still repels most Germans, especially in the western 
> part of the country -- analysts aren't convinced. 

  They alway made a big distinction: government coalitions with the PDS 
in the former GDR are OK, but in the western federal states and on a 
national level: never. The city-state of Berlin is governed by a SPD-PDS 
coalition for several years now, with a policy of fierce attacks against 
worker's standard of living, driving down wages and extending working 
hours for transit workers and other employees in the public sector, 
acting very harsh against the unemployed who fall out of the regular 
unemployment benefits into welfare. 

  In the west, where the remnants of the stalinist burocracy do not 
supply a solid social base for the PDS, the new party is dominated by 
left social democrats and assorted leftists doing "entryism" in all 
those parties being more successful than themselves. They do not have 
that solid tradition of ruling over the working people, trampling their 
rights, and so are much less reliable as pillars of bourgeois rule than 
their East German counterparts. 

> Also dogging the Left are persistent allegations and evidence that 
> some of its leaders were friendly with the Stasi, the dreaded East 
> German secret police.
> 
> The suspicions arose again last month when a freshly elected Left 
> member of Parliament in the state of Lower Saxony told a television 
> station that the Stasi had done a good job guarding against 
> "reactionary forces." The legislator, Christel Wegner, also made the 
> dubious claim that the Berlin Wall was meant to keep Westerners out 
> of East Germany, instead of vice versa. She was forced to quit a few 
> days later.

  This was a big nasty media campaign starting with the press release in 
the early afternoon about a TV political magazine show in the evening, 
claiming that the freshly elected member of parliament mentioned above 
had called for the return of the Stasi. What actually was shown was a 
piece raising hell about a purported danger that the DKP (the west 
German stalinist party) was entering the parliaments piggypacking the 
slates of DIE LINKE. A team of the TV show had interviewed Christel 
Wegner for about an hour and then used a few phrases out of her context 
in their context of red baiting. Nobody besides the people present in 
the one hour interview really knows in what context she had said what 
was quoted, and unfortunately Ms. Wegner is not really fighting hard 
against the slander campaign. She made one big error: she naivly had too 
much trust in the bourgeois media sharks. 

  

Cheers, 
L.W.

Lüko Willms
Frankfurt, Germany
--------------------------------
visit http://www.mlwerke.de Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotzki in German

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