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Month: April 2022

Play Review – Red Ellen

A new play about British socialist in the pre- and post-war years has clear parallels with today’s discussions.


20/04/2022

A UK Labour party avoiding association with street protests lest it undermine their electoral chances, timid in the face of a rise in Fascism but labelling anti-fascists as extremists, paranoid about infiltration and chiding a genuinely socialist candidate for being too radical? The current state of the parliamentary left in 2022? No, the year is 1933 and all this is laid out in the first ten minutes in a brilliant new play called Red Ellen which opened at Northern Stage in Newcastle earlier this month and tours till late May to Nottingham Playhouse, Edinburgh Lyceum and York Theatre Royal.

The titular character is Ellen Wilkinson for whom this was just one nickname, The Mighty Atom, The Fiery Particle, Elfin Fury being others. All four characteristics of diminutive size, red hair, dynamic energy and authentic commitment to socialism are captured and superbly portrayed by actress Bettrys Jones in the last 14 years of Ellen’s admirable, astonishing and tumultuous life.

The parallels with today’s Labour party are clear as a bell. Ellen believes the left is a spectrum, broader than just the “broad church” that some would say, extending beyond parliamentary confines into the streets and workplaces. Those with more party status, such as Herbert Morrison (played with nuanced precision by Kevin Lennon) believe in irreconcilable rival camps that threaten each others existence and certainly should never work in tandem, even against Nazism. Ellen is grassroots to the core but also an avid internationalist telling Morrison “Our first constituency is the world, as contradictory as it may be.“

All the major characters in the play were real people and include Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill. Aside from these big names, some of the most compelling exchanges take place between Ellen and probably lesser known real-life figures such as Otto Katz (a Czech Jew) and Isabel Brown (a Geordie Brit) both Communists. Ellen was also a Communist for a time, and a co-founder of the British Communist Party.

The dialogue here, as well as between Ellen, her sister Anne and Morrison, is needle sharp and entertainingly articulate. When Ellen pleads that “Labour isn’t the ruling classes.”, Isabel counters “Then they should stop acting like it”.

That Red Ellen opened in Newcastle is appropriate given one of her best known actions was organising the 1936 march from Jarrow (just down the Tyne) to 10 Downing Street in an attempt to illustrate the dire straits of her constituency’s 80% unemployment.

In co-ordinating the march Ellen is beset on the one hand by more of Morrison’s caution: “Hunger marches are associated with Communism” and on the other by Isabel’s wish to “drum up necessary revolutionary zeal” and her Stalin banners.

Although Ellen sincerely hopes and believes that the march will convince the government to change course, Isabel’s outlook on the possibility of prime ministerial compassion was proven right by history: “The problem isn’t that they don’t understand pet, it’s that they do understand, they just don’t care.”

As the action moves to Spain in 1937, the consequences of a divided left are shown to be darker than before. Grim infighting and summary executions show how doctrinaire the charming Otto and astute Isabel have become. Ellen estranges herself from the CP and throws in her lot more fully with Labour.

But the compromises become more apparent. Given responsibility for air-raid shelters in Churchill’s war cabinet, she is met with hostility by bombed out citizens who see her as responsible for the government’s inadequate provision. Later she laments to Isabel that she has made herself even smaller by “curtseying to the Queen”.

True to real events, the play does not just chronoligise facts. It is also a visually captivating piece of emotionally engaging theatre covering subjects like the difficulties for women in politics and family conflict about the care of an ailing parent.

This is the story of one woman’s tireless dedication but it also asks urgent questions of what we should expect from the left. It is simply a superb piece of writing by Caroline Bird, vividly directed by Wils Wilson and if you get a chance to see it between now and the end of May, do. Watch out for retours and revivals too.

Remaining dates in April and May for Nottingham and Edinburgh are here and the current tour ends at York Theatre Royal from 24th May – 28th May 2022.

Carol McGuigan is a socialist who stopped her subscription to the UK Labour Party this month, more about that later. She lives and works in Berlin.

How borderless is European solidarity?

Reports on Ukrainian war refugees show the role racism and Eurocentrism play in the Global North.


19/04/2022

Putin’s assault on Ukraine began in late February. Hundreds of thousands of people are leaving the country to save their lives. From politics to civil society, many in Germany have sided with the Ukrainians in solidarity. In Berlin, up to 500,000 people took to the streets to demonstrate against the war, just days after the beginning of the invasion. At first glance, this may look like a sign of solidarity. And of course solidarity with the Ukrainians is very good and necessary. But it is noteworthy how strong the emphasis is in the media, debates, and political discussions, on the fact that the war is taking place in Europe and that the refugees are white Europeans. This reveals the role that racism and Eurocentrism play in how people and politics in the Global North understand the world.

“We woke up today in a different world (…) It is an attack on our peace in Europe,” wrote German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) on her Instagram page after Putin’s attack. But who is actually meant by this “we”, and in which world exactly have “we” woken up?

For whom is Europe actually peaceful?

Between 1991 and 2001, six major wars were fought in Europe. As a result of these wars, over 150,000 people lost their lives. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina alone led to the flight and displacement of 2.2 million people. In the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, over 8,000 Bosniaks were murdered, almost exclusively men and boys. The massacre is considered the most serious war crime in Europe since the end of World War II. March 24 marks the anniversary of the 1999 NATO air war against the former Yugoslavia. War has always belonged to Europe. Nevertheless, these wars have never made their way into the memory of the dominant society.

The “lack of peace” is not limited to the Balkan states: Europe has one of the deadliest border regimes in the world. According to the Missing Migrant Project, between 2014 and today, over 23,490 fleeing people have drowned in the Mediterranean alone. Until today, at least 15 people have frozen to death on the Polish-Belarusian border. A year after a fire destroyed the Moria refugee camp, some 3,500 people are still living in a temporary camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. Europe is a nightmare for non-Europeans at its border. But this nightmare is not part of the collective consciousness of Europeans.

That this war is happening “in Europe” seems to be the most important aspect of the current situation for many people in the Global North. “This is not a place like Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s happening in a relatively civilized European country,” said CBS journalist Charlie D’Agata in his coverage of Ukraine. He describes “middle-class people who look like us.”

The talk of “civilized Europe” is deeply rooted in the European-colonial tradition. The so-called civilizing missions served as political justification for military interventions and colonizations intended to “modernize and westernize Indigenous peoples” and “spread higher culture.” These terms often appeared in colonial propaganda to justify the violence of colonial conquest.

Postcolonial critique describes how the Eurocentric gaze creates a universal definition of “us” and the “other.” “We,” that is, Europeans: with white bodies, civilized, with a capitalist economy, and in contrast to the “others”: “backward,” with Black, Indigenous, African, or Asian-Indigenous bodies and a bazaar economy. “Thus, all non-Europeans could be considered pre-European and at the same time on a certain historical chain: from the primitive to the civilized, from the irrational to the rational, from the traditional to the modern, and from the magical-mythical to the scientific. In other words, from non-European/pre-European to something that is Europeanized or modernized over time.” (Aníbal Quijano)

At the same time, what and who belongs to “civilized Europe” and who does not is fragile and changeable – the history of the German rage of conquest and extermination in Eastern Europe especially testifies to this, where millions of Jews fell victim to the Shoah and millions more “Slavic subhumans” were murdered, starved, expelled and exploited as forced laborers.

Whose tears deserve compassion?

The current emphasis on the European-ness, whiteness and supposed Christianity of the people fleeing from Ukraine, who are now selectively and temporarily “Europeanized” by some as part of the current solidarity, shows how the majority of Europe perceives people whose suffering is considered painful and who deserves European solidarity. Conversely, this explains the simultaneous silence about other human catastrophes in other parts of the world and European migration and refugee policies.

Since European integration, the definition of national identity has changed, expanding from nation-state borders to EU borders, thus creating a new European identity. Today, many identify themselves as Europeans. This so-called pan-European nationalism is shared by parties of the bourgeois center as well as some right-wing parties.

At the same time, the continuity of colonial power structures is reflected in current events: African students fleeing war in Ukraine were turned away at Poland’s borders, black people and people of color fleeing war were taken off trains by the federal police. There is talk of “real refugees”, of people from “our cultural circle”. In order to create capacities for newly arriving refugees from Ukraine, the Berlin Senate cleared housing container facilities in Reinickendorf.

But the racist-selective behavior does not end here: Eastern Europeans also often belong to the category of the racialized in Germany. Anti-Slavic racism and anti-Semitism (for example, about 45 percent of Jews in Germany have Ukrainian roots) have a long tradition in Germany and were particularly strengthened by the ideology of the Nazi era.

In recent decades, hard and poorly paid jobs have been reserved for people from Eastern Europe – in the asparagus fields, in the slaughterhouses, in home care; suddenly they are considered white Europeans who must not, under any circumstances, be put in accommodation with refugees from Syria or Afghanistan.

The anti-Slavic racism that justifies the extra exploitation of Eastern Europeans is now also increasingly directed against Russians: Supermarkets are removing Russian products from their shelves, Humboldt University in Berlin is no longer cooperating with its Russian partners. The German Academic Exchange Service is stopping all scholarships to Russia, and people of Russian origin are receiving hate messages.

All of this speaks to the relevance of intersectional and international solidarity that works across national borders and sides with the oppressed and marginalized. This means recognizing the simultaneity and interdependencies of different power relations. Out of nation-state thinking, against war everywhere in the world, on the side of civil society and above all the working class, which is hit hardest by sanctions, against racist-selective “solidarity” and for open borders for all refugees.

This article first appeared in German in Analyse & Kritik. Translation: Dillon Drasner. Reproduced with permisson.

The ‘SOS NHS’ demands are still urgent and relevant

A combination of Covid and underfunding means that the National Health Service in Britain is at breaking point. The government must show the political will needed to save lives.


17/04/2022

These are the SOS NHS demands:

  • Approve emergency funding of £20 billion to save lives this winter
  • Invest in a fully publicly owned NHS & guarantee free healthcare for future generations
  • Pay staff properly: without fair pay, staffing shortages will cost lives

The demands were designed to put pressure on UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak to do something in his spring statement that would go some way to ameliorate the current crisis in the NHS. While Sunak remained deaf to the cries of distress from healthcare workers and the public, the call from ‘SOS NHS’ remains highly pertinent. The momentum of the day of action national protests on 26th February should not be lost.

The cracks in the NHS are now there for all to see

Chronic underfunding and understaffing exacerbated by the Covid pandemic are putting NHS staff and services under intolerable strain. The short-sighted government strategy of relying only on vaccination and anti-viral medicines to control infection, coupled with an absence of basic public health measures and coherent messaging around mask wearing and air quality in buildings, has led to an uncontrolled resurgence of infection. The response to this has not been to step back and take stock, but to continue to promote the dangerous myth that Covid is over, reduce the availability of testing, and cut back on surveillance programmes that have provided vital information about progress of the pandemic and effectiveness of vaccination.

The reality is that you cannot make Covid go away by closing your eyes, but you can heap further suffering on an exhausted workforce, massively increase waiting lists and negatively impact on all other aspects of routine NHS care. There is also a much wider impact from rising rates of infection on society as workers go off sick, 179,000 children are absent from school and Britain suffers a new pandemic of disruption.

Devastating Impact on NHS staff and patients

By the end of March 2022, 1 in 16 people in England were infected with coronavirus, hospital admissions with Covid were running at 2,000 a day and deaths over one week had gone up to 988 (a 35% increase). In addition, 23,000 NHS workers were off sick with Covid, 86% up from previous weeks.

Heartbreaking stories have been emerging from some units such as the emergency department at the Royal Preston Hospital with professional staff pleading to the Trust Executive Team for help. Over the past few months there have regularly been more than 50 patients waiting for a bed, often in excess of 60 hours. Senior staff were sometimes crying with frustration and anger as they have had to resuscitate patients in the waiting room, examine people in the X-ray viewing room, pull patients out of a cubicle to allow someone more unwell to be treated in their former space, and had to watch patients dying without the dignity of privacy.

Elsewhere, a study on emergency department staff at the Royal Derby Hospital showed widespread dismay and burnout with workers past breaking point. Drastic issues with staff shortages, low morale and sickness meant that staff were regularly driven to tears from stress and exhaustion, with additional pressure being applied from the trust board. Instructions to staff had included one to only cry in private, away from the view of patients and visitors.

Ambulance chaos

Hospital trusts in Yorkshire have warned patients they may have to wait for up to 12 hours to be seen at accident and emergency (A&E) departments, after a sharp increase in demand. The West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts (WYAAT), which covers six hospitals in West Yorkshire and Harrogate, has issued a plea for patients to attend their local A&E only in ‘genuine life-threatening situations’.

Ambulance services too are stretched beyond the limit. People are literally dying in the back of ambulances and up to 160,000 coming to harm in a year because they cannot be transferred into A&E departments. The West Midlands Ambulance Service admitted that it was causing catastrophic harm to patients through delayed transfer and the knock on effect of reaching patients too late.

Appalling waits for ambulances in England leaving lives at risk

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) estimated that there were at least 4519 excess deaths in England in 2020-21 as a result of overcrowding and stays of 12 hours or longer in emergency departments. A report by the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives showed that the monthly average number of patients with handover delayed >60 minutes in 2021 had almost doubled to 15,500 (the target for handover time is less than 15 minutes). Discussions about how to prevent such delays has gone on for many years while things have got steadily worse.

The recent plans to put ambulance patients in tents outside A&Es was described by Katherine Henderson, the President of the RCEM, as ‘a bad, borderline immoral bodge job to treat the symptom rather than cause’ and a ‘danger to patients’ health and dignity’. Dr Henderson has also said the pressure on the NHS was now so severe that it was breaking its ‘basic agreement’ with the public to treat the sickest in a timely way, commenting ‘the true barrier to tackling this crisis is political unwillingness; the current situation is breaking the workforce and breaking our hearts’.

A&E – the canary in the mine

Gridlock in A&E highlights problems in the system at large. The reality is that reduced hospital bed numbers (more than halved over the past 30 years), together with poor community services and lack of social care support preventing patient discharge, mean that when A&E is full, patients can neither be moved out to wards nor in from waiting ambulances; ambulance crew (put under incredible pressure) are not equipped to provide the care needed by sick patients stuck in their vehicles, and cannot answer other emergency calls. It is estimated that in Scotland alone, an additional 1,000 beds are needed to tackle the bottlenecks in A&E, and meanwhile, ambulance crews suffer severe stress and anxiety resulting in sickness absence.

Politicians are misrepresenting the situation and refusing to take responsibility

Conservative politicians and much of the media like to blame the current situation on the NHS itself instead of owning the problem and accepting it has come about as a consequence of deliberate policy decisions. As Toynbee points out, while ministers may mock the ‘magic money tree’, they have no problem with their own ‘magic efficiency tree’ as they double impossible ‘efficiency savings’ targets to 2.2% for the NHS to squeeze out this year. Chronic underfunding and poor pay and conditions have contributed hugely to understaffing – the major factor preventing the NHS from working effectively for the benefit of patients.

What the public think

Public satisfaction with the NHS has recently been shown to have fallen to its lowest ever at only 36% of those surveyed. Most respondents were dissatisfied with the length of time for a GP or hospital appointment, but almost half were also critical of low staffing numbers and inadequate government spending.

Notably, only 16% expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of care received. The graphical representation of the figures from this survey over years shows clearly that discontent relates to overall funding, with a steady rise in satisfaction from around 2005 peaking at 2010, and then falling to its current low over the years of austerity. From 2010 to 2019 the NHS received the lowest annual increase in real terms funding since the 1950s.

However, it is striking that a study by the Institute of Public Policy Research in March this year showed that public support for the core principles of the NHS remains strong. Most people – from across regions, demographic lines and party-political allegiances – support a universal (88%), comprehensive (88%), free at the point of need and tax-funded health system (88%).

Clearly those in power are failing to give the public what it wants, while negative consequences of failure to invest in the NHS drives those who can afford to pay to use the private sector. This is a core element in government policies aimed at reducing public services and eroding the social wage.

Workforce

A prolonged funding squeeze combined with years of poor workforce planning, weak policy and fragmented responsibilities mean that NHS staff shortages have become endemic. With around 100,000 vacancies, there has been no workforce strategy since 2003. The number of General Practitioners has fallen every year (down almost 1,500) in England since government pledged to increase them in 2015. The NHS Operating Framework for 2022/23 merely says that NHS England and NHS Improvement ‘will work with systems to develop workforce plans’.

As some have observed, we don’t need more pledges or rhetoric, nor more analysis and consultation – we need a relentless focus on implementing solutions, resourcing them properly, and reporting progress. Bizarre then that the government has consistently opposed an amendment to the Health and Care Bill calling for publication of independently verified assessments every other year on current and future workforce numbers needed for health and social care services.

Ockenden Report on Shrewsbury and Telford Maternity Services

Following an exhaustive investigation, this service was found to have failed to investigate, failed to learn and failed to improve (and therefore often failed to safeguard mothers and their babies at one of the most important times in their lives), resulting in many unnecessary deaths and injuries. This is a stark reminder that the NHS, with around 1.5 million workers, does not always do things well, while the important thing is that the right lessons are learned and implemented. Examples of astonishingly poor and unacceptable practice are set out in the recent Ockenden report, problems highlighted over the years by KONP affiliate ‘Shropshire Defend Our NHS’, and by campaigners in Liverpool.

Those hostile to the NHS use such examples as evidence that the fundamental model of a publicly funded and delivered service is flawed rather than looking to address issues which have undermined a system that for many years was recognised internationally as the most cost efficient and fair in the world. There is no doubt that the maternity services in Shropshire were indefensibly poor, causing huge suffering to families. The list of failures included leadership, teamwork, failure to follow clinical guidelines and a failure to listen to patients. What is also prominent throughout the review is the catastrophic shortages of midwives, medical staff and other maternity healthcare workers and the impact these shortages have had on care. The first recommendation in the report (of which surely the government must take heed?) is for ‘a robust and funded maternity wide workforce plan, starting right now, without delay and continuing over multiple years’.

One of the many important questions raised by Shrewsbury is how the NHS can be made more accountable to patients. Measures are needed not only to rebuild and reintegrate the NHS but also to democratise it as a service accountable at local level to, and organised by staff, patients and wider community groups. Community Health Councils (CHC) were established in 1974 to give a voice in the NHS to patients and public but abolished by the Blair government in 2003; they had an important role in helping people who had complaints against NHS services. CHC were replaced first by Local Involvement Networks, and then by Healthwatch, neither of which organisations had the same resources, statutory powers or responsibilities as the CHC. Radical proposals include democratic control of the NHS by neighbourhood health committees, to which people are elected and which feed up to larger regional and national elected committees for overarching planning.

Unfortunately, the Health and Care Bill moves accountability further away from communities. The Bill will severely limit the representation of local authorities on the main Integrated Care (IC) Board where plans and decisions will be made, and relegate them to the IC Partnership, tasked with developing a strategy that is not binding on the main Board. Furthermore, the Secretary of State for Health will assume decision making power to impose local service reconfigurations, the right and power of scrutiny by local authorities of significant health changes will be weakened or abolished and the right of access by the public to board meetings and papers may also be threatened. There is little expectation that IC Boards will put effort into developing and implementing a strong and independent mechanism enabling service users to contribute equally alongside NHS and local government partners.

Conclusions

To put the NHS back on its feet, make it responsive to patients, resilient, caring towards staff and able to meet the huge backlog of work, the first things needed are adequate funding and a workforce plan that is implemented. This should include a significant pay rise to compensate for years of pay stagnation and now rising inflation and cost of living. There must also be a commitment to long term investment in the NHS as a publicly funded, delivered and accountable service. If anyone doubts this, I would refer them to Donna Ockenden’s report which stated categorically that the budget for maternity services must be increased by £200-350 million per annum with immediate effect and in line with recommendations from the parliamentary Health and Social Care Committee.

The Ockenden report noted the very significant pressures in maternity services in the recruitment and retention of midwives and obstetricians (2000 and 500 more posts needed respectively) calling for workforce planning, reducing attrition of maternity staff and providing the required funding for a sustainable and safe maternity workforce.

To those who say only culture change is needed in the NHS together on a focus on reducing waste, I would quote Ockenden: ‘the demand for better funding will ensure safer outcomes for more women and families, reducing the risk of unnecessary loss of life, injury and resultant heartbreak…… Only with a robustly funded, well-staffed and trained workforce will we be able to ensure delivery of safe, and compassionate, maternity care locally and across England’. As one member of staff quoted in the report also reflected: ‘I think the lessons from this inquiry are going to be transferable to the whole NHS’.

“It is hard to be in a government, and not to make too many compromises”

On the publication of his 200th Berlin Bulletin, we talk to Victor Grossman about defecting to the GDR, the Stasi and hopes for the German Left


16/04/2022

A US defector to the GDR in the 1950s reveals all about life in the GDR, the sacrifices of being in power and the future of the LINKE party in Germany after the 2021 elections.

Hi Victor, thanks for speaking to us. Before we talk about your Berlin bulletin, could you say a few words about who you are? How did a US-American end up on the Karl-Marx Allee?

I grew up in New York in the late 1930s when the depression was still on. I was what they called a red diaper baby. After Harvard I went into a factory to work, to be part of the trade union movement.

Then I got drafted during the Korean War (1950-53). This meant signing a statement saying that I’d never been in any of a whole long list of left wing organisations. I’d been in about a dozen of them. A relatively new law said that you were obliged to register as a foreign agent with the police. If you didn’t register, you could be sentenced up to a $10,000 fine and five years in prison for every day you didn’t register.

The law was already six months old and I hadn’t registered. Nobody registered under this stupid law, which was ruled unconstitutional 10 years later. I didn’t know if I should sign. But I decided I’d make myself a criminal either way. So I signed that thing and hoped they wouldn’t catch up with me.

I was lucky – I was not sent to Korea but to Bavaria. The authorities did catch up with me and they ordered me to report to the military judge and that there was a possible penalty of up to five years prison. I decided the only thing to do was to defect. That was 1952 during the Korean War.

Let’s move onto your Berlin bulletin – last week you published the 200th Bulletin. For people who don’t know it, what is the Berlin bulletin and who is it written for?

I publish the bulletin roughly once a month. It’s usually a three page essay on developments mostly in Germany. Most of the readers are in the United States, but I have readers in several dozen countries around the world. But the main readership is in the United States, people who want to keep up with German events because they’re very important.

Reports on Germany in the US are one sided and usually rather thin. I try to supply something which is readable and from a Left-Wing point of view. Not too stiff and not too hard line or dogmatic, but still from my point of view.

Why do people need an analysis about what’s happening in Germany?

Very few Americans, even those on the left, know about developments here – either in the GDR days or in the present. They find it interesting, especially in connection with the Left Party, die LINKE, because the United States has no major left party – just the Democrats and Republicans. They are curious as to what that involved here and what influence the left wing has here.

Germany is, after all, the most important country in Europe, if you exclude Russia. What it does and what it says is important for world politics.

You lived over 30 years in the GDR and have now lived over 30 years in reunified Germany. What are the big differences between then and now?

When I first came to the GDR, the social advantages were remarkable, especially medical. Everything was covered – prescription drugs, twice I had four week cures for my hepatitis, all expenses paid, 90 percent of my pay. My two sons were born. My wife got six and eight weeks, later it became half a year off, with every expense paid, including the taxi to get to the maternity ward. This was impressive to me.

Working at my first job was in a factory in the South of the GDR, nobody was worried about their financial future, because you couldn’t be fired unless you hit a boss over the head with a crowbar. People were not afraid.

Then came the question of education. You not only had free education, but you got enough to live on. I went to college for years in Leipzig. None of the students had to work alongside their studies, nor did they have a debt when they finished.

Of course, West Germany was also far ahead of the United States, but not ahead of the GDR on most of these questions. For example, abortions were free of charge in the GDR, as well as childcare and cheap holidays.

The GDR always had enough to eat, enough to wear, but much more limited that the West in terms of fashions and luxury goods. There was lots of fruit, but the kind that grew here, not from South America or Africa or someplace.

When I passed a new building in the GDR days, I felt that it partly belongs to me, even if I wasn’t going to live there. Since unification, when I go past a construction site, my tendency is to think, who’s making money on this?

Another difference was that in GDR days if you were smart, you didn’t criticize the party or Honecker, the party boss. But you had no compunctions about talking back to your foreman or the manager. Today it’s the other way around. You can say anything you want about Chancellor Kohl or whoever, but you better not talk back about your foreman or manager.

For all this, I would guess that if you ask people in the West for one word that they associate with the GDR, 90 percent will say Stasi. How fair is that?

It’s true that lots of people worked for the Stasi, both paid and unpaid. Check-ups were made all the time about people visiting the West. They wouldn’t check pensioners, who could go every year, but people going for delegations or concerts. Once they got there, they would be not only asked lots of questions, but often lured to stay and not come back.

There was also an eye kept on people dealing with Western people, plus anything which seemed to be in any way oppositional. Any kind of organization which wasn’t really organized from above was suspected as a possible base of opposition because the GDR was naturally full of people who were looking to the West. People had their brothers, their cousins, their aunts and uncles there.

Every evening they could see on television how beautiful and wonderful life was in the West. They made a point to get across how they have all of those things, which we don’t have. I saw that there was a constant counter-current going on in the GDR.

About 15-20% were for the GDR, about 15-20% were very much against it, and all the rest vacillated. They figured, they could live better over there in some ways, but here we had enough to eat, we had enough to drink – we lived well enough. We have a nice little bungalow where we could go in the summer and grill and maybe even have a little swimming pool of our own. What the hell? We could be satisfied in the GDR.

This attitude varied. If GDR citizens were lucky enough to get a new car, they’d been waiting for a long time, they would be more in favour of the regime. If they had an argument with a boss, or didn’t get some bonus, then they would turn against it. It was a back and forth, but towards the end, in the 1980s when the economy went downhill, a lot of those people in the middle turned against the GDR authorities.

The Stasi was there to measure what people were saying and thinking and also to stop any possible plans for any kind of opposition whatsoever. However, I also knew that in the United States, while they didn’t have as many people proportionately in the FBI, they had plenty.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, I got 1100 pages of FBI reports on remarks I had made at a picnic and how much money I had given our newspaper as a contribution. They had so much on me and not only on me. I was a nobody, really. I saw it more critically because of my personal experiences. I came from the United States during the so-called McCarthy era, where any left wing Senate sentiments were repressed.

People were in jail. The whole leadership of the Left was in jail. The entire leadership of the Communist Party and the next level too. One difference was that in the United States, the main pressures were against people who were fighting against racism, for equal rights for trade unions. Here it was the other way around.

I should add one more point. Everybody knew that the Stasi were all around the place, but people didn’t take it so earnestly as they think in the West from films like The Life of Others. People joked about it. They accepted that, whenever there was a procession down Karl Marx Allee, where I live, every hundred yards or so you saw two men trying to look inconspicuous.

People accepted. some more angrily, especially if they were in opposition, but most people’s said: ‘Naja. They’re there. What the hell do I care?’

Let’s move forward a little bit. You mentioned die LINKE. It’s now 15 years since die LINKE was formed. How important was that moment?

I thought it was very important. Die LINKE, and its predecessor the Party of Democratic Socialism, was basically the only left wing body within parliamentary rule here since 1951. They represented the opposition to the general scheme of government and rule here.

In every field, Germany has some strong monopolies. Most of them had long term roots back in the Nazi years and of using slave labor and supporting Hitler. They basically ruled the roost in West Germany until 1990, and since then they rule all of Germany.

I was therefore happy to see at least one party which basically stood for getting rid of them and to have people not give any of the results of their work to the profits of some wealthy people. This party represented changing the system so that working people got the full value of what they do.

Not only that, but die LINKE was the only party which was consistently against Germany taking part in any foreign wars. Until unification, neither German side had sent soldiers outside the borders. Only after unification did you have German soldiers going to Yugoslavia, bombing Serbia. For me, it was important that die LINKE was one force against mixing into foreign affairs from Afghanistan to Mali.

Six months ago, we had elections. Die LINKE were voted back into the Berlin government but halved its members of the Bundestag. How do you think the project is working out?

It hasn’t worked out. It’s very sad. I forgot to mention that one of the things die LINKE was strongest about was in working and fighting for the rights of working people, whether in terms of wages and hours and conditions, but also in terms of pensions and health for single parents, etc. It was the most consistent. The others vacillated. Die LINKE was a strong opposition.

Somehow, many of the leaders of die LINKE remained more or less in favor of these positions, but restricted their activity far too much to parliamentary speech making, submitting laws which couldn’t be passed because they were too few people supporting them. They were calling for these things, but not fighting for them amongst the people in the cities, towns and villages of the country.

I felt that a true left party, such as the ones I grew up with in the States should be organizing demonstrations, supporting strikes, fighting for the rights of people in all fields and helping people to realize how strong they could be if they worked together and fought together. I thought that the left failed in this,

Being in a coalition was advantageous in terms of money because a party with seats in parliament was subsidized and could have think tanks. They got a better chance to talk on television. And therefore it was seen as an admirable gain. However, this was still a shifty business. You are open to many temptations. It is hard to be in a government, and not to make too many compromises.

One of the best things die LINKE has done was to fight to confiscate the biggest apartment owners in Berlin. Unfortunately, to get into the government in Berlin, this demand has been dropped or put on a low burner. This was a blunder that worries me, and that’s why the left has suffered.

What can we expect from the next German government?

The Social Democrats were at a low point. Hardly a year ago, they were almost disappearing. They came back because they started taking positions that die LINKE had been taking and sounding left. Their main aim was to win the vote, especially of working class people. And they succeeded. This forces them in government to more or less stand for such positions.

The Greens won partly because of their ecology. But they’ve made more and more compromises with the big companies who are not so interested in ecology at all. They are interested in making money. Now they’re also up for building armaments, as are the Social Democrats.

I think that the Left should always be in opposition to that. Whether they will give up this opposition, we’ll see, perhaps in the party Congress in June. I hope that the membership of the Left party are also opposed to Germany getting involved in foreign wars and expanding economically with big business, militarily or politically.

If we push policies to get people organized to fight for their own rights, then the left has possibilities of growing again in a healthy way. If, however, they don’t succeed and the party continues to place so much emphasis on winning elections and getting people into cabinet positions, I think they’ll continue to go downhill.

I fear greatly that there may be a party split on such issues. And if it does split, the two sections will both be out of every parliament and will probably be reduced to being minor parties instead of a real force. Until a year ago, they were the main opposition party in parliament. Now they are the weakest opposition party and they could be no opposition party if this split occurs.

Berliner Friedenskoordination (FRIKO)

Berlin’s largest anti-war alliance


15/04/2022

In the Berliner Friedenskoordination (Peace coordination – FRIKO), representatives of ideologically varied groups have met since Autumn 1980, to inform about their activities for peace, to link their work and to plan common projects: of peace groups, trade unions, churches and organisations of belief, women’s and youth groups, parties, anti-fascist groups, people working in migration and refugee work and also inddividuals.

The protest against the NATO’s called “rearmament decision” – the stationing of US first strike weapons Pershing II and Cruise missiles was the act that cause FRIKO to be formed, to bring together the numerous activities and the many peace groups which were then in West Berlin, in order to carry out joint activity. Since then, this circle has started initiatives and carried on working in times of resignation.

What we want

FRIKO gets involved, and tries to mobilise quickly when peace actions are needed. It sees its current duties as follows:

  • to develop and carry out a relevant concept for the Ostermarsch (annual anti-war demonstration)

  • to recognise 8 May, the day of Liberation from Fascism, which makes us feel duty bound to anti-fascism and anti-rassism.

  • to organise a rally against war every 1 September (“anti war day” – the anniversary of the 1939 German invasion of Poland)

One much-loved form of action is the sporadic satirical victory parade AMOK (anti-militaristic over-celebrate committee) against the increasingly belligerent militarisation of society.

FRIKO stands vehemently for a 180° turn in German politics:

  • Revocation of the decision to spend an extra 100 billion Euros on the German army

  • No agreement to the yearly military budget of around 80 Billion Euros (at least 2% of the GNP)

  • Revocation of the agreement to purchase armed drones.

  • End the “nuclear participation” in NATO. No nuclear weapons in Büchel! No nuclear bombers for the German army! Sign the treaty banning nuclear weapons!

  • Cancel the contracts for stationing troops in Germany! Shut the US central command!

  • No tolerance for stationing of US hypersound weapons in Germany or commands to use them from here!

  • Reverse the militarisation of the EU! No FCAS and no nuclear power EU!

  • Against all forms of foreign deployment of the German army

  • For a stop to armaments rather than exporting weapons

  • Against the militarisation of society

  • For an end to the stationing and manoeuvers of NATO troops on Russian borders,

  • For a European safety architecture to include Russia

  • For an immediate end to the politics of sanctions

  • For an end to the Ukraine war, and to all theatres of war across the world

  • For dialogue, not confrontation

  • For disarmament, not armament – social security not billions for war.

  • For the recognition of the United Nations Charter

  • For peaceful cohabitation of all people worldwide, irrespective of their sex, the colour of their skin, their family background and their religious beliefs.