Radio Berlin International #8 – Liberation Day / Russian Antiwar Resistance / The Nakba
Florian Gutsche from VVN-BdA on the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat. Feminist activist Sasha on opposition to Putin’s aggression within Russia. Palestine Speaks members on Israeli occupation.
In this episode, Florian Gutsche from the antifascist group VVN-BdA explains why the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat still isn’t a national holiday. Sasha from Feminist Antiwar Resistance tells us about opposition to Putin within Russia. And Asmar and Joujou from Palestine Speaks describe the ongoing Nakba (catastrophe) for Palestinians and events coming up this year in Berlin. Dillon Drasner is in the presenter’s chair.
Cartouche – Chant des partisans Yiddish
Trio Scho – Der Hafen von Odessa
Arkadiy Kots Band — Who Shoots At Workers
alyona alyona — Відчиняй
Ahmad Kaabour – A’daffa
Daboor & Shabjdeed – Inn Ann
This episode is presented by Dillon Drasner. The studio engineer for reboot.fm is Noémie Cayron. The producer is Tom Wills.
Don’t miss our next show live on reboot.fm 88.4 MHz in Berlin, 90.7 MHz in Potsdam and online at http://reboot.fm at 7pm on Sunday 22 May. Our next show will be a special broadcast in front of a live audience at theleftberlin.com’s Day School on Left Journalism, which is taking place in Kreuzberg. If you’d like to get involved in producing this show or learn about interviewing, video making, photojournalism and much more, join us there on Sunday 22nd May.
Please tell us what you think of the show by emailing radio@theleftberlin.com. Don’t forget to include your name and where you’re listening from, and we’ll read out as many messages as possible on the air.
May-June is conference season in Berlin. The weather encourages people to leave the house, and most people haven’t started their summer holidays yet. Most importantly, there are a string of public holidays which enable you to take a long week-end off work. This year is no exception, and I’ve noticed that more conferences than ever before are offering at least some workshops in English.
This article is a summary of some of the conferences coming up soon, with a particular focus on the meetings you can attend if you don’t trust your German.
What it is: Over three days, the festival will open up resonant spaces for feminist debates and movements – multiperspectival, intersectional and diverse
Where it is: Pfefferberg, Schönhauser Allee 176 and Sophiensaale and Sophienstraße 18
Meetings in English:
Feminist Resistance through the Arts (with Urvashi Butalia, Aram Han Sifuentes, Sabika Abbas, Farzana Wahid Shayan, Carola Lentz and Nabila Horakhsh)
Intersectionality and Its Critics (with Nikita Dhawan, Mario do Mar and Castro Varela)
Feminicide and Violence against Women (with Meena Kandasamy, Hannah Beeck, Aleids Lujan Pinelo and Valeria España
What it is: Conference around the subject of expropriation and the nationalisation of the real estate companies
Where it is: TU Berlin, Straße des 17. Juni 135
Meetings in English:
How can non-Germans get involved in the fight against gentrification? Sunday 29th May, 10 am (Organised by the DWE English-language working group Right2The City)
What it is: one of the largest left wing conference in Germany
Where it is: Franz-Mehring-Platz 1
Meetings in English:
Imperialism Today (with Alex Callinicos)
Perspectives from Sudan (with Muzan Alneel, Think Tank for People-Centered Development, Khartoum)
Can Israel’s Left be part of the liberation of Palestine? (with Ilan Pappe (historian), Michael Sappir (Jewish Israeli Dissence, Leipzig) and Mays Ashash (Jewish Bund))
10 years Arab revolutions (with Hossam El Hamalawy and Anne Alexander)
What it is: A week-end of networking, fun and political discussion on the edge of Berlin
Where it is: Naturfreundehaus Hermsdorf, Seebadstraße 27
Meetings in English:
The War in Ukraine: Voices from Eastern Europe (with Sasha, Russian Socialist Movement and Oksana Dutchak (Deputy Director of the Center for Social and Labor Research (Kyiv))
Palestine and the German press (with Palestinian journalist sacked by Deutsche Welle)
Reading from WTF Berlin? Expatsplaining the German Capital (with Jacinta Nandi)
This book provides a helpful and eminently readable overview of ‘health’ and how a government with a ‘health justice agenda’ might effect meaningful change. ‘The left’ (a troublingly amorphous concept that casts the Royal Colleges in the role of key institutions of the ‘health labour movement’) is castigated for being romantic and defensive rather than innovative and visionary, placing a narrow focus on health services rather than the more important social determinants of health.
Some arguments appear overstated for rhetorical reasons, for example: “We believe in 1948 as an ultimate victory for the left on the health agenda”. This disregards justified and longstanding criticism of the NHS by progressives that it was a ‘sickness’ service rather than a ‘health’ service, and that some elements such as mental health were never given the investment they warranted. The author also acknowledges that Bevan’s plan did not include a universal public health service.
In any case, few would now look at the current state of the NHS with its record waiting lists, staffing crisis, relatively poor outcomes and increasing penetration by the private sector, and not reflect that the ‘ultimate victory’ may yet prove to have been only a temporary respite. The Just Treatment ‘NHS New Deal’ is singled out as an exemplar of a myopic fixation on the NHS (exacerbated by Covid), and yet a glance at this organisation’s website shows it also has an international focus including vaccine equity and challenging the profiteering by big pharma. There is no mention of last year’s People’s Covid Inquiry which critically examined the government’s response to the Covid pandemic, but also explored health inequalities and in fact opened with internationally renowned Michael Marmot as an expert witness.
The book is divided into sections on the NHS, social justice, economic issues, social care, sustainability, and finally, a new deal for public health. Work on health inequalities by pioneers such as Marmot, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson is duly acknowledged. The section on social care is rightly critical of the limitations of Labour’s National Care Service (“the NCS does not sufficiently change the nature of care, the power relationships that define it, or the level to which institutionalised and paternalistic care dominates provision”) and advocates a much broader approach, similar to the campaign for a National Care Support and Independent Living Service (NaCSILS).
There are a couple of minor if surprising errors. It is stated that “Since 2010, about 10,000 hospital beds have been closed in England”, whereas according to King’s Fund data around twice this number were lost. Of less importance is the attribution of the Black Death to a virus rather than the bacterium Yersinia pestis.
The author makes a cogent plea that health improvement and health justice require looking beyond health services to a public health system as a whole. This is perhaps the key message overall for health campaigners. The issue of affordability is dealt with well, although there is little on reformation of the tax system as a way to finance public services. While the author distances himself from the suggestion that the book is really a polemic with a somnolent Labour Party in need of “a far more compelling vision”, statements such as “the leftist strategy in health has therefore become defined by maintaining the status quo”, leaves little doubt as to exactly where the barbs are aimed.
If we agree that it is conditions of social injustice that make us sick, the questions remain as to whether democratic socialism is up for seriously challenging the dominance of those businesses and corporations who profit from our ill health, and what might be revealed about the balance of power in the course of such a struggle. Even more reason to rally the troops around defending and rebuilding the NHS perhaps, while setting this in the context of a much broader vision of public health as outlined in this book.
Christopher Thomas. ‘The Five Health Frontiers. A New Radical Blueprint’. Pluto Press, London, 2022
Repealing Roe vs Wade is part of a far more sinister plan
The attack on abortion rights in the US is about more than just reproductive rights. It is an attack on democracy itself
The leak itself is a major headache for Republicans, since it has occurred before a set of mid-term elections that they hope will secure them control of the House of Representatives and even the Senate. This outcome would absolutely sabotage whatever slivers of reform Biden intended to deliver. Taking a longer view, it is not immediately apparent what the benefit of repealing Roe vs Wade would be.
After all, Republicans have not explicitly made overturning Roe vs Wade a pillar of their strategy. They are fully aware that abortion can be made de facto illegal if not de jure. Several Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed draconian laws to severely limit or outright prohibit abortion. Furthermore, explicitly attacking Roe vs Wade burnishes their opposition with political ammunition. We on the left need to think a little deeper about the intentions behind this attack on not just the rights of women, but on democracy.
US state legislatures by party control. Blue = Democrat control of legislature, red = Republican control of legislature, purple = states split control of legislature (By Sbowman123 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64708268)
The map above should be the single most terrifying map of US politics, yet its significance is understated. To explain, of the 50 states in the union, only 17 state legislatures are under Democrat control, with 30 under Republican control. To provide some context, these states account for 307 electoral college votes, whereas Biden won 306 in the 2020 election. The contrast between Republican domination at the state level and at the presidential level tells us something about their ability to win electoral majorities, despite being in a clear popular minority. The latest US census predicts that the country will become a majority-minority country within the next 25 years. This phenomenal demographic inversion poses, potentially, an existential threat to Republican political hegemony.
In this context, overturning Roe vs Wade should be seen not as a pillar of Republican electoral strategy, but as part of a multi-pronged attack on the barely functional democracy that is claimed to exist in the USA. For multiple election cycles, Republicans have entrenched minority rule through egregious gerrymandering of congressional districts, legal impediments to suppress voting among the poor and minorities, and outright disenfranchisement through criminalising those same groups. It is not accidental that people with criminal records are being stripped of the right to vote, nor is the criminalisation of the poor and minorities through vicious policing tactics. Soon poor, minority women seeking an abortion will be criminalised, too.
The manoeuvre by Republicans to attack abortion is driven in equal parts by fear and brazen confidence. On one hand, their domination of politics at the state level, their generation-long seizure of the Supreme Court, and their prophesised victory within Congress makes them feel that the time is right to deliver on their promises to their Evangelical fundamentalist wing. Yet, a fear of demographic shifts that can erode their minoritarian stronghold compels them to seek new avenues to disenfranchise as many voters as possible, while they still can.
All this is synergistic with their response to calls to defund the police: to repeat mantras on “law & order”, boosting funding for police departments and prisons, passing laws to prevent “voter fraud”, or enhancing the power of the police, while criminalising a growing list of “crimes”. To call these machinations anything other than a modern version of Jim Crow is to deny the reality of the millions of ethnic minority citizens of the USA. The scale of the problems requires something akin to a new civil rights movement that is not specific to a single issue, but to an entire apparatus of control and subjugation.
Far too many people are falling into the trap of responding to the attack on Roe vs Wade by focusing solely on arguments around the “right to choose”. Liberals have succeeded in conditioning people into self-defeating myopia. In actuality, the attack on Roe vs Wade is an attack on black people organising against police violence, on the poor, on the right to vote.
People understand that abortions cannot be magicked out of existence, and that overturning Roe vs Wade will impact poor women and anyone who tries to help them. People know that poverty is concentrated among black people in particular and minorities in general. And yet political leaders seem unable to join the dots. Instead they offer pithy slogans, fundraising emails, calls to just vote in greater numbers no matter how many hours you have to wait in line or how many forms of ID you need to show at the polling booth. As animating as abortion rights are, it is simply delusional to expect to build an overwhelming electoral coalition to merely defend an emaciated status quo around abortion.
Joe Biden has refused to countenance decriminalising marijuana; he has vocally supported police departments and treated the demands of Black Lives Matter activists with contempt. Neither he nor his coterie of sycophants has passed any legislation to secure voting rights. The PRO Act is dead in the water and neither is there any prospect of the most milquetoast economically redistributive policies on the horizon. The Democrats can scream themselves hoarse about a woman’s right to choose but until they mobilise popular forces around a full suite of interlocking issues, they will fail once again.
Of course, we on the left know exactly why the Democrats love to feign helplessness. It is the left that must join the dots between poverty, voting rights, police violence and criminalisation, and the attack on Roe vs Wade. I write these words frantically as a means to start this process. Every crisis is either an opportunity to despair in nihilism or to organise with optimism. We must craft a narrative that goes beyond issues of bodily autonomy. Just as attacking abortion is a conduit for Republicans seeking to entrench minority rule and ruling class interests, the left has to mount a defense of the working class and democracy through the defense of the right to safe, legal, and unencumbered abortion.
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