The Left Berlin News & Comment

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Month: October 2022

News from Berlin and Germany, 6th October 2022

Weekly news round-up from Berlin and Germany


06/10/2022

NEWS FROM BERLIN

Gas shortage: Berlin Bäderbetriebe’s saunas remain cold

The saunas of the “Berliner Bäderbetriebe” will remain closed this autumn. “This is the Bäderbetriebe’s reaction to the impending gas shortage and the requirement to save as much fossil energy as possible,” said its spokeswoman Claudia Blankennagel. Customers are asked for their understanding. Already in Spring, the Berliner Bäderbetriebe took first measures to reduce the energy demand. Initially, the water in the summer pools was only heated to 24 degrees. In the indoor pools, the water temperature has been 26 degrees since opening in August/September. Exceptions to this are therapy pools, where it is warmer. Source: Berliner Zeitung

Criticism on repeating elections in Berlin

Because of numerous electoral glitches, the coalition government wants to have the Bundestag elections repeated in about 300 of the nearly 2,300 polling stations in Berlin. The chairperson of the Bundestag’s electoral review committee, Daniela Ludwig (CSU), criticized the proposal of the traffic light coalition to have the Bundestag election in Berlin repeated in only 300 polling stations. “We actually parted company in the summer with the proposal by the traffic light coalition to have over 400 polling stations repeated. Now this will be reduced further,” mentioned Ludwig. Source: rbb

Senator of Justice: Berlin’s neutrality law discriminates against Muslims

The Berlin Senate wants to take stronger action against anti-Muslim racism. It is a matter of recognizing and eliminating the “structural discrimination” against Muslims, explained Justice Senator Lena Kreck (“die Linke”) in the House of Representatives. “An important step towards this is the abolition of the neutrality law.” Berlin’s neutrality law largely prohibits the wearing of religious symbols in parts of the public service, especially in the police, judicial service and education. It is the most far-reaching regulation in this area in Germany. In 2020, the Federal Labour Court declared the blanket headscarf ban for Muslim teachers unconstitutional. Source: islamiq

 

 

NEWS FROM GERMANY

Germany sends arms to Saudi Arabia

The German government has approved arms exports to Saudi Arabia – despite Riyadh’s war in Yemen. The decision is said to have been made shortly before Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) travelled to the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and to the United Arab Emirates. The two leading members of the war coalition against Yemen are receiving arms worth a total of 37.4 million euros from Germany. Although Angela Merkel’s cabinet officially stopped all arms exports to Saudi Arabia in 2018 after the murder of exiled journalist Jamal Kashoggi, exceptions for European joint projects were made from the beginning. Source: jW

Inflation in Germany at highest level in 70 years

Following the abolition of the nine-euro ticket and the petrol discount, consumer prices in Germany rose massively in September. Inflation in Germany has jumped to its highest level in about 70 years. Driven by rising energy and food prices, consumer prices increased by 10.0 per cent in September compared to the same month last year, the Federal Statistical Office announced in a first estimate. According to a survey by the German Retail Association (HDE), 60 percent of consumers are already cutting back on shopping, and, as many as 76 per cent of respondents are preparing to shop more sparingly in the coming months. Source: DW

Reunification anniversary – Protest instead of party

The anniversary of the annexation of the GDR to the FRG has always aimed at countering social division with a black-red-gold celebration. But some people just don’t want to be in a jubilant mood. “We don’t feel like celebrating, we feel like protesting,” said Uwe Hiksch of the Naturefriends Germany. He was one of the organisers of the demonstration “Heating, Bread and Peace – Protest instead of Freezing!”, which marched through Berlin on 3 October. Meanwhile, a look at the statistics is enlightening: after 45 years of contributions, pensioners in the east received an average of 1,329 euros a month in 2021, while in western Germany it was 1,527 euros. Source: jW

Eurowings: pilots’ union calls strike for Thursday

The pilots’ union Vereinigung Cockpit has called for a full-day strike at the airline Eurowings on Thursday. The VC announced the negotiations on the collective wage agreement at the Lufthansa subsidiary has failed. It was not initially known how many flights would be affected by the strike, but a spokesperson said the strike would affect the flight operations of Eurowings Germany, but not those of Eurowings Europe. A central demand is the relief of the employees, for example by reducing the maximum flight duty times and increasing the rest periods. Source: jW

Will there ever be a nine-euro successor ticket?

A successor for the nine-euro ticket remains vague. After a direct follow-up solution to the million-selling ticket failed at the end of August, the new planned start date of 1 January is now also in danger. It is still completely unclear what the ticket will cost and what it will achieve – but above all, who will pay for it: the “Länder” only want to agree to it and pay half of the total costs of three billion euros if the federal government also increases its local transport funds substantially. Meanwhile, city states like Berlin and Bremen are presenting new local transport tickets. Source; Süddeutsche

Refugee Movement / OPlatz.Net

Refugee News from Inside


The OPlatz.net website was created as the voice of the Refugee Movement based at the protest camp at Oranienplatz (“Oplatz”) in Berlin, which was set up in 2012 to protest against the disfranchisement of refugees by the German state. Since the eviction of the camp in 2014, the website as well as the structure of refugee protests have changed and developed. Various groups with different focuses have emerged, including the Oplatz Media Group, which is continuing to fill this website with news about protests of refugees in Berlin, throughout Germany and beyond. It also publishes the newspaper by and for refugees – “Daily Resistance”. You can find a list of protest groups and links to their websites here.

Our Demands

  • Abolish Residenzpflicht (mandatory residence)!
    Rooted in colonial policies, Residenzplicht obliges refugees to stay in a certain area and clearly violates our basic human rights. We reject any restrictions of our freedom of movement and demand the complete abolition of Residenzpflicht-law.
  • Abolish all “Lagers” (refugee camps)!
    Refugees in Germany are forced to stay in “Lagers” (camps) mostly completely isolated from society, under inhumane living conditions and constant surveillance by authorities and Lager-guards. We refuse to live in those prison-like Lagers, we break this isolation and demand the right to choose where and how we want to live!
  • Stop all deportations (also Dublin III)!
    Deportations are an inhumane practice and have to be stopped immediately. Everyone leaving her_his home country has good reasons to migrate – may it be war, political persecution or because of the economic situation – all of these reasons are political in its core. We refuse any categorization of migrants and demand the acknowledgement of the legitimacy of any kind of migration, no matter where people come from.
    The Dublin III regulation is nothing else than a network of human trafficking between European countries and has to be abolished! Germany and the European Union have to accept that the right to move is not negotiable.
    Because freedom of movement is everybody’s right!
  • Right to work and study!
    We dont want your social benefits. We need the right to work and study to provide for ourselves independantly.

10 years ago the Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg and later also the Gerhart-Hauptmann School in Ohlauer Straße were occupied. To mark this anniversary, we want to gather at Oranienplatz from 5.10.-9.10. and celebrate the history of the rebellious refugee movement. With a five-day open-air art “construction site”, we will show the history of the Refugee Resistance Movement and the many facets of the struggles on and around O-Platz.

People who were active in the movement then and now and were present on O-Platz are creating a programme with theatre, graphics, painting, literature, photography and film, in which we trace the stages of the resistance in a variety of artistic ways: From the long march to Berlin to the shameful eviction of the camp by the Berlin Senate and the district.

Ten years after the beginning of the occupation of O-Platz, however, we not only want to celebrate our history, but also make a proposal for a society that sees itself as diverse, postcolonial, grassroots democratic and post-migrant. See the full programme here.

Between Colourful Balloons and The Riot-Police

Last November, thousands took to the streets against the PKK ban


Berlin – Yellow, red and green balloons float over Hermannplatz in Berlin. It is the 27th of November, 2021. Some thousands of people gather on the square to protest under the slogan “Cancel the PKK ban! End the war – find political solutions!” They plan to march through Berlin. The date of the protest was no coincidence. Exactly 43 years earlier was the founding of the working class party in Kurdistan (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê) – abbreviated PKK. Also not a coincidence was the date of the party’s ban, on the 26th of November 1993. To protest against this, people had gathered at Hermannplatz.

Many of the protesters appeared with paper signs, banners and flags. Most of them
were painted in the colours of the Kurdish freedom movement: yellow, red and
green. Alongside the main demand of an end to the PKK ban, there were also calls for the release of Abdullah Öcalan, one of the founders of the PKK. Already at the opening demonstration, the the police started their first advances against a few activists. The police alleged that the protestors had some flags with the symbols of YPJ and YPG on them, which are the self-defence units of the Kurdish freedom movement. Also, all pictures of Abdullah Öcalan amounted to “a bankruptcy declaration for a democratic state like Germany”, said Martin Dolzer. He is the director of the demonstration and the one who registered it.

Dolzer has many years of experience with the registration and direction of large demonstrations. He said that the cooperation level from the police on that day was one of the worst he ever experienced. The ex-politician (2015-2020 Mayoralty in Hamburg) said that the police aggravated the protest from the beginning. But the state troops didn‘t set special conditions for the situation at the Hermannplatz, according to Dolzer. Nevertheless, they forced him to start the rally directly. At that moment the police already threatened him with the dissolution of the rally, Dolzer told us afterwards.

FLINTA* Block declares: PKK means feminist revolution

Only a few meters further, as the rally reached Sonnenallee, the demonstration was halted by police. Near the tip of the self-declared FLINTA*-Block (Women, Lesbian, Inter-, Trans-, A-Gender) , around 30 police officers get ready. A few moments later, they ran into the demonstration to rip the front banner away from the demonstration block. It’s one of two banners that the police would seize over the course of the day. By the time the demonstration reached its end at Oranienplatz, they would add three paper signs, snatched from the rows of demonstrators to the total. The reason for their interventions was that “the imprint had criminal content according to the Freedom of Assembly Act”, the police of Berlin stated later. The text of the front banner of the FLINTA*-Block showed in big letters „Weg mit dem Verbot der PKK“ (“Down with the PKK-Ban”) on the left and the right side of the banner showed a star in the style of the Kurdish freedom movement.

After the stop, the rally continues further along Sonnenallee. From the FLINTA* Block come chants of”Jin, Jiyan – Azadi”, which means “Women, life – freedom”. On a banner high over the crowd “The defence of life is not illegal” can be seen. Next to the text it shows a woman from the Kurdish resistance fighting units, behind her, colorful flowers. All around the raised banner were Ialso a lot of signs holding the words,: “PKK means feminist revolution”.

Around 5,000 people showed up at the rally despite a steady drizzle and the corona pandemic, according to Dolzer. The police stated there were around 2000 people. All in all, the rally was very creative and colourful. But there was also a massive presence of the black-clothed riot units of the Berlin police. Afterwards, the leader of the rally criticised the massive amount of police units around the demonstration. Publicizing the meaning of the demonstration to the streets of Berlin was made nearly impossible, according to Dolzer.

The big number of police units is a normal thing at pro-Kurdish rallies in Germany, the activist Mazlum S. Bavli told us in a background conversation. Especially at the rallies against the PKK ban, there is always a massive police accompaniment. This year, as in many others, the North Hessen native was on the streets of Berlin. The demonstration against the PKK ban has became a tradition for him, the 33-year-old told us. To him, it is very important to “show a symbol against the PKK ban, even if it is grueling.” But it’s not only the demonstration that has a long tradition. The police presence and and tough methods against protestors are also an annual procedure. Bavli, who is also personally affected by the PKK ban, told us about violence against protestors that happens every year “in one way or another.” The state is investigating Bavli in a 129b-case, meaning he is suspected of being part of a terrorist organisation outside of Germany – a claim that is baseless, he says. The hardline methods of the police would still be seen this year.

As the rally enters Oranienstraße, some activists lit fireworks and distress flares from a roof. Below they unrolled a big banner with the symbol from the forbidden PKK on it. Everybody except the police found this measure of solidarity to be in goodwill. During the last part of the rally, hostilities against the pro-Kurdish demonstration also arose. While many people leaned curiously out of their windows to watch the mass of people go by, some of the residents of Oranienstraße showed the so-called ‘Wolfsgruß’. The hand gesture is the symbol of the ‘Gray Wolf’, a militant fascist Turkish organisation. In Austria, they have been declared a terrorist organization, and this sign is forbidden – making it is a criminal offense. But in Germany, there is no such ban to this day. The crowd reacted to the right-wing radicals with chants of “up with international solidarity”. Also, one banana peel found its way in the direction of the window from where the “Wolfsgruß” came.

The march reaches the endpoint at Oranienplatz, the place of the last demonstration. During the last few meters, some people inside the demonstration were lighting some smoke flares. As the rest of the crowds entered Oranienplatz the activists lit some bigger flares in the Kurdish colours of yellow, red and green.

The police reacted. Hundreds of helmeted officers storm into the crowd at multiple points. The situation turns hectic, and people get arrested. In total 22 people were arrested on this day, police said. The number of harmed people on side of the activists is unclear. The police stated that there were no officers hurt that day.

Demonstration organizers blame the actions of the police as provocation. The police strategy at Oranienplatz seemed very similar to the strategy the police used at the G20 summit in Hamburg in the year 2017, Matin Dolzer said. At that time Dolzer was a politician in the parliament of Hamburg. He accompanied the protests against the G20 as a parliamentary observer. After the G20 in Hamburg, the police were fronted with critics from many sides because of their hardline tactics. For the 55-year-old, the police action at the endpoint in Berlin was the peak of a day with disproportionate police behaviour. “It was just a provocation against the activists. The police wanted to escalate the situation”, Dolzer commented afterwards. While some political statements and music came from the speaker van, a classic Kurdish ring dance takes shape at Oranienplatz – because of the corona pandemic, with strangely large distances between people. The police continue arresting people. Demo officials walk through the gathering, reminding people of the mandatory mask rules. All these situations together paint a ludicrous picture.

The activist Mazlum Bavli told us that a journalist got arrested, too. Some videos on Twitter underpin the allegations against her. In the video, you can see the arrest and it is clear hear that the person points out to the officials that she is a journalist, followed by a wobble and the end of the video. When we confronted the Berlin police with this case, they said that they have no knowledge about an arrest of a journalist.

Overall, he is satisfied with the rally, Bavli said. He was most pleased by the diversity of people who took part in the protest. “So many different people who are standing behind the same claim – that gives us strength”, said the young man, who is himself active in a Kurdish cultural organization. In the next years, he will come to Berlin again in November. Although he hopes for more critical relations between Germany and Turkey with the newly-elected German government, he has no hope for a change in the case of the PKK ban in Germany. From his point of view, the pro-Turkish legislation in Germany is based on economic and strategic interests. According to the political science student, a change in the parliament in Germany can‘t change that.

PKK-ban since 1993: The background

What is hidden behind the urge to overturn the PKK-ban in Germany? What brings
so many people to the streets of Berlin every November?

For Martin Dolzer the answer is quite clear: “The demand is a justified one. Because the PKK stands for democracy and peace.” In 2010 Dolzer published his book “The Conflict between the Turkish and Kurdish. Human Rights – peace – democracy in a European country?” The PKK ban is also part of the book. According to the German constitution, the PKK actually should be supported, said Dolzer. It’s in the name of European human rights. Germany is, besides Turkey, the only country in the world that is so repressive against the Kurdish freedom movement and the PKK. Such a prohibition policy is known in no other country in the world. In a background talk, Dolzer stressed the situation in Belgium. In that country, the PKK has a combatant status. That means the PKK is treated as a war party.

From Dolzer’s point of view, the PKK has this status quite rightly, because the PKK is forced to fight. In the older days peace negotiations failed because of Turkey, he stated. The last time was in the year 2013. During the rally, a group of lawyers from Berlin made it known that they wanted to start some legal actions against the PKK ban in Germany. Whether or not it will be effective, we will see over time. There was a lawsuit against the listing of the PKK on the European Terrorist List. On the 15th of November 2018, the court found that the listing was unjustified. So they took the PKK off of the list from 2014 to 2017. But there was no direct impact of the court decision.

Similar to Bavli, Dolzer also claims that the German prohibition policy is the result of pro-Turkish behaviour. From his point of view, there is a German contingent that has an interest in a Turkish military focus on Kurdish Lands. Mostly on the lands where the people try to live in democratic federalism. “In so-called ‘failed states’ it is cheaper to buy gas and oil, then it is from a stable democracy”, Dolzer said. Bavli sees Turkey as a big economic partner of Germany. The Turkish state is one of the biggest clients of the German weapons industry. In addition, around 6,000 German companies operate in Turkey, Bavli stated.

Political reactions from the traditional economic ties are just a logical step in this case. The PKK ban is one of them. The strong economic boundaries between the two states are also the main difference between other countries, for example, France or Belgium. One of the results of the PKK ban in Germany is paragraph 129b. Dolzer is convinced that the paragraph is not compatible with the German constitution. The reason for his opinion is that the decision that gets pursued, is up to ministries and the government itself. But in Germany, there is a separation between the court, law enforcement and politics. The law says: “In deciding, the Ministry shall take into account whether the efforts of the association violate the basic values of a state order that respects human dignity or the dignity of a human person or the peaceful coexistence of peoples and, when all the circumstances are considered, appear reprehensible.”

“It is a fatal sign for democracy when it comes to the point that people who organise protests can be charged for 129b”, Dolzer summarised. In a democracy, it should be desirable that people stand up against war.

Mazlum Bavli who sees himself confronted with a 129b charge, agreed with Dolzer’s point of view: “The paragraph was used before to criminalize Turkish leftists and Kurdish activists. For legal protests, they go to jail for years in some cases. To sell bus tickets is enough to get a charge.” On the other hand, it is necessary for Germany to fight against right-wing terrorism in Germany. But Paragraph 129b has never done anything against fascist terror in Germany because it isn’t used for that, Bavli said. It remains to be seen if there will be some movement on the PKK ban in Germany. In the meantime, the tradition of coming from the whole of Europe to Berlin in November to protest against it will probably remain.

Can we have class struggle without identity politics?

Review – Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics by Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley


05/10/2022

After decades of virulent polemics, is the tide turning on identity politics? Looking at the Pluto Press catalogue, it would seem that there is hope for that. In May, Pluto was the European publisher of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s hit book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). Pluto’s September releases include a new book that cuts identity politics some slack. Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics provides an earnest exploration of identity’s political importance, supported with thorough historical evidence and a willingness to answer flippant anti-wokeness with theoretical arguments.

Fractured is authored by Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley, co-editors of Occupied Times and its successor magazine, Base. The two want to go beyond the use of “identity politics” as a “political smear,” using it instead as an entry point into a diagnosis of the UK and US left. Refusing to accept the premise that identity politics is divisive in itself, Richmond and Charnley set off to analyze the fractures that structure societies and social movements along the lines of race, class, and gender. Identity politics does play a role in that, but against a class-reductionist common sense, Richmond and Charnley argue that it bridges more than it divides. What sets Fractured apart from the hundreds of publications on identity politics that come out every year is a commitment to take it seriously as a source of radical solidarity, in the past as well as today.

This means that Fractured is not about a vague, amorphous zeitgeist that could refer to anything from the “trans ideology” to tearing down slaveowners’ statues, depending on the target of one’s ire. Although such subjects are discussed throughout the book, the core of the argument is a close analysis of the source of identity politics: Black feminism. Chapters two and three of the book detail the development of this radical tradition in the US and the UK, respectively. The term “identity politics” itself was first coined in the 1977 “Black Feminist Statement,” authored by the Combahee River Collective. What the Collective theorized and supported was Black feminism as an autonomous tradition challenging the whiteness of feminism and of socialism, and the maleness of Black nationalism. For Richmond and Charnley, this separates identity politics from fixed “identity-thinking” from the start. Radical politics, for Black feminists, did not mean affirming individualized categories, but challenging them.

Identity politics is an attempt to confront exclusions and fractures, to trouble immutable categories, and to create an “identity of purpose,” a term that Richmond and Charnley borrow from Ruth Wilson Gilmore. In the UK, Black and Asian feminists were developing their own radical critique at the same time as the Combahee River Collective. As this took place during rapid changes in the nature of global capitalism, the book emphasizes that identity politics is not the abandonment of class politics that it is usually painted to be. On the contrary, the “Black Feminist Statement” was written in direct dialogue with socialism and Marxism. British Black feminists such as Hazel Carby were also responding to the changing class composition of Britain in the 1970s, when Black and Asian women were restructuring labor, but unions were lagging behind in their organizing strategies.

It is this idea that identity politics can help us understand and deal with class composition that drives Fractured. The other chapters in the book spell out its importance. We need a politics of identity because capitalist society is not reducible to relations of production and a homogeneous waged working class. Racism and sexism are real forces that fracture and divide people’s personal and political existences. Unfree labor, unrecognized reproductive labor, as well as direct violence along racial and gender lines have marked the development of capitalism as much as industrial exploitation. Chapter one brings this reality to the fore by detailing the importance of racialized enslavement to the British Empire and the United States. It also centers, however, Black agency in fighting against slavery and for its abolition, and the importance of this long history to antiracist movements today.

Chapters four and five turn their attention to borders and to the nationalism of early labor movements. If British socialists at the turn of the 19th century defined themselves against Eastern European Jewish immigrants, American workers at the same time were also organizing against, not together with, precarious Chinese laborers. Chapters six and seven focus on 1919, a year of “race riots” in both the US and the UK. The authors again show that labor was more often on the side of the aggressors than on that of the attacked. All this is peppered with references to contemporary examples of anti-identity politics, from racist reactions to Black Lives Matter protests, to Britain’s new Police Act, to trans-exclusionary “feminism.” In these histories, Richmond and Charnley seek and find examples of alliances and solidarities built through the labor of organizers and activists. But the fact that these solidarities take work and effort supports the larger point: showing that divisions are real, not superficial impositions on the working class by scheming capitalists. As such, leftist politics must work with them through identity politics, and not simply dismiss their existence.

The theoretical and historiographical breadth of the evidence that Richmond and Charnley bring in support of this argument is impressive. But while it is necessary that any serious discussion of identity politics relies on such concrete examples, the scope of the book also burdens what could have been a much more streamlined argument. Take chapter three, for instance. The discussion of British Black feminism is interrupted by a six-page detour into the complexities of labor and suffragism almost a century earlier. The point that “Black and Asian feminist critiques of ‘white feminism’ in the 1970s can be understood as a revision of earlier critiques of imperialist suffragism” is well taken. But the chapter already draws out debates about gender, race and class, Marxist historiography, carceral feminism, patriarchy and reproductive work, sectarianism, and a few other concerns. I cannot help but wonder whether this historical excursion added anything to the point being made. Indeed, in the theoretical and historical thicket, it is sometimes easy to lose track of that point.

The same is true for the whole book, as the authors slalom through the turn of the 19th century, the 1970s, and the present day in the US and the UK. While these contextualizations are needed to nuance polemics about identity politics, expecting just one book to cover all this ground is an ambitious task. This is perhaps due to the wide scope of the “hatred of identity politics.” Richmond and Charnley rally against all forms of antiwokeness, be they from aggrieved white reactionaries, colorblind liberals, or class-reductionist leftists. That ostensible socialists, conservatives, and white supremacists end up propagating the same anti-diversity talking points is something that we have not reckoned with enough. Confronting all of them in just one book, however, comes at the expense of a clearer target.

Richmond and Charnley write, for instance, that Tory appeals to the “white working class” and the class-reductionist left are predicated on “the same oppositions between ‘identity politics’ and class.” But do Vivek Chibber and the Conservative Party really share an analytical basis? And, more importantly, can they both be addressed in the same way? Criticizing racist labor movements and showing that identity politics is a generative response to changing class compositions might be proper arguments for economistic leftists. But the same strategy does little against those who premise their hatred on the belief that change in class composition itself is the problem and that nationalism is the natural answer.

Nevertheless, Fractured’s merit is to have found a common thread throughout these different hatreds, one that clarifies and contributes to progressive debates. Anti-wokeness, on the left, center, and right, deals in false and exclusionary universals. It papers over real differences within liberal societies and within the working class. Reactionaries might embrace such exclusions, but for leftists this should be a wake-up call. The takeaway is that “calls for the ‘unities’ of unspecified pasts, contrasted against today’s betrayals of class universalism” are not only empirically dubious, but also actively harmful. Categories such as “working class” or “womanhood” have never been pure universals. They are fractures solidified as reactions to capitalist violence and division – fractures that identity politics, despite the reputation it has gained, wants to overcome.

Richmond and Charnley refuse to simply continue the polemics in their book, and bring in histories, examples, and theories. They show that Black feminism and identity politics have already been fighting to defeat empty, nostalgic categories, and that we all need to learn from them. As overwhelming as Fractured’s historiographical trajectories may be, they make an impact as examples of “revolutionary times” and “experiments in radical universality.” This impressive book brings badly needed concreteness to debates that too often consist of sweeping generalizations. In doing this, it points toward radical possibilities in the here and now. Because, even though Richmond and Charnley tell histories of racist violence, hardened borders, and exclusionary identity categories, they do not wallow in defeats. Rather, they want us all to learn the lesson that Black feminism teaches: “We have only this world, a wrong world, with which to work.”

Fractured is available from the Pluto Press website.

Brazil 2022 elections: Part 2- What would a Lula victory mean?

It is important to defeat Bolsonaro, but the Left – in Brazil and beyond – must stay vigilant.


04/10/2022

Jair Bolsonaro. Photo: Beto Oliveira / Câmara dos Deputados. CC3.0

Following his article on the run-up to the elections, Bernardo Jurema looks at the potentials and limitations of a possible Lula victory. While winning a majority (48%) presidential candidate Lula has failed to gain 50% of the votes, and will have to face incumbent president Bolsonaro in a second round run-off at the end of  October. 

Lula and the indigenous movement

The indigenous movement has been the one social sector that has managed to extract some sort of commitment from Lula. In April, during an event at the indigenous gathering Acampamento Terra Livre (Free Land Camp), Lula promised to create a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and revoke all the measures taken by President Bolsonaro against native peoples. That’s a welcome sign, and one of the very few concrete pledges made by former president Lula. It is also a demonstration of the strength of indigenous mobilization.

But as indigenous leader and thinker Aílton Krenak recalled in a recent interview, Marina Silva resigned as Lula’s Minister of the Environment because she firmly opposed the government’s push to “develop” the Amazon. Under Lula’s presidency between 2003-2010, hydroelectric dams such as Balbina, Belo Monte, Santo Antônio and Jirau, and other agribusiness and mining projects were greenlit, to the detriment of the forest and its inhabitants. Unfortunately, this was the approach that prevailed with Lula’s Worker’s Party (PT) in power, and continued, on steroids, after it was kicked out of power by those very sectors that benefited – and grew – under its tenure.

In another interview, Krenak acknowledges that there was some progress under the PT governments – “Something in the area of education, creation of more infrastructure in the indigenous territories, university places, recognition of cultural diversity. But these are things that only mitigate our drama.” He added, “The problem with our cause is that it doesn’t have a definitive solution. We have to fight for our rights all the time, because they are constantly being attacked. When the attack doesn’t come from the State, it comes from agribusiness. We are beaten by the left and the right. During the decade of Lula/Dilma governments 253 indigenous leaders were assassinated. We continue resisting, but also dying like bees. And two hundred dead people don’t make headlines. We want what is in the Constitution and should have been done by 1993: the demarcation of our lands.”

Raoni Metuktire, the kayapó leader, who is thought to be around 90 years old, led the opposition to the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam on the Xingu River. His people have opposed this project since its inception during the civil-military dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985. It was under the PT government that the dam was built.

Raoni said: “[Lula] started planning this idea of raising Belo Monte. We managed to stop the construction, but it was restarted with the Dilma government. Our fight against Bolsonaro is the same as the one we had against Lula and Dilma. All of them – Lula, Dilma, Bolsonaro – generated this division between the Indians and the government. That’s why I’ve been fighting for there not to be this division.” The indigenous movement was able to extract a rare commitment from Lula not by uncritically adhering to his campaign. It is unfortunate that more sectors have not done the same.

Lack of political imagination on the left

Of course, the indigenous struggles go much beyond specific demands. It is worth quoting Krenak at length here: “The planet, this living organism on Earth, is not a warehouse. And the logic of governments, unfortunately, goes in this direction. Rethinking all this requires a huge mobilisation of different layers of reality – the economic, political, educational, technological, infrastructure idea. […] If we consider that we can deepen the debate in Brazil about the re-founding of Brazil, then we would have the possibility of articulating with Latin America, in a perspective of the new Latin American constitutionalism, that conceives the idea of a plurinational state. Because this colonial state -it doesn’t admit it- but because it is colonial, its DNA is that of a pirate, of a bandeirante [a settler-colonialist], that came to eat others, to steal from others. So if we don’t re-found, it is no use changing the government… we have to question the Brazilian colonial state. I am amazed that most of the political leaders that are in the debate are so alienated that they don’t realise that if we don’t change this broad cultural matrix, we will only reproduce the disaster, including from the environmental point of view.”

This lack of political imagination in Brazil’s left is at the root of much of the current woes that the country faces. As Brazialian philosopher Rodrigo Nunes has eloquently put it: “What should be criticised in the PT governments, it seems to me, is not the fact that they did not correspond to some ideal of what a leftist government should be, but the absence of a strategy so that the changes they introduced would feed back, reinforce themselves over time, take root, and create the conditions for more ambitious changes in the future. This becomes clear when we compare the ease with which the advances of the last decade are being reversed with the long historical continuity of the Vargas era. The project had feet of clay, in that it depended on conditions (mainly the win-win allowed by the commodities boom) that could not last forever, and it did not prepare for when these would end.”

“What one should criticise is not pragmatism per se, but a narrow pragmatism that says “one must do what is possible” without understanding that the “possible” is not a fixed quantity, but precisely the object of a transformative politics. The struggle is always to modify the possible, that is, to enlarge the sphere of possible transformations. If you don’t do this, you are left to luck: when conditions change, your strategy becomes unworkable. It is obvious that nobody can afford to simply ignore Realpolitik; but it is not given that Realpolitik can only be cynical, narrow-minded, dumb. It can also be invested with desire and ambition for transformation.”

What does a Lula win mean for European leftists?

It is clear that Lula’s victory over Bolsonaro is desirable. But leftists, in Brazil and abroad, should remain vigilant and pressure Lula towards the left. It is true that in certain aspects, the new government will be better and more progressive than the current far-right government. But it’s complicated. Take the war in Ukraine. In not taking sides and staying neutral, Lula’s stance is not substantially different from that of Bolsonaro. That’s because the latter, after taking an unabashedly pro-U.S. line under his disgraced former foreign minister Ernesto Araújo, has shifted back to Brazil’s long-standing foreign policy tradition of non-alignment.

Celso Amorim, who was hailed as “the world’s best foreign minister” by the Democratic establishment-aligned Foreign Policy magazine when he headed Brazil’s diplomacy under Lula, recently said in an interview: “you only end war in two ways: a total surrender, as in the case of World War II, or by negotiation, which can come from fatigue and various factors. But by negotiation you need both sides to make concessions”. In fact, that’s a position that is largely in sync with large swaths of the Global South. Amorim is currently Lula’s main foreign policy advisor. We can expect to see Brazil take a more assertive role in international affairs, and that is a welcome development for anti-imperialists and internationalists in general.

But there will be moments when the Global North left will have a role to play. The EU-Mercosur trade deal, for example, “represents a neoliberal trade model, which perpetuates neo-colonial patterns and increases the economic and political power of big corporations at the expense of human rights, the environment and people’s health” and “would increase inequalities, worsen precarious working conditions, land concentration and disregard for indigenous rights, disrupt local food production and increase the use of pesticides in Mercosur countries – with knock on effects for EU food safety”. The deal has not been closed because the EU has decided not to sign it as long as Bolsonaro leads Brazil. This could change after the election in October, but it should be strongly opposed by the European left.

Conclusion

Lula’s foreign policy can serve as a synthesis to shed light on the potentials and limitations of Lulismo. Evident achievements (WTO, FAO, relevant geopolitical actor in multilateral negotiations, Brazil-Iran-Turkey Agreement) managed to transform the balance of power (something not even attempted at the domestic level) in a creative and intelligent way, building coalitions, trying to change the agenda of the international public debate and maintaining a coherent practice and discourse emphasising multilateralism and mutual respect.

On the other hand, domestic “accommodation” – “respect” for the rules of the game – led to the cosy relationship between PT and contractors, who were taken along on presidential trips, especially to Latin America and Africa. Thanks to the Lava Jato investigations and its derivatives across Latin America, today we know exactly the extent of what happened (even if it was politically weaponized). This compromised and jeopardized the undeniable advances that occurred in the same government. This is the complexity of the Lula government. It is not only that both aspects have occurred, but that the second one has put the first one in jeopardy.

Yes, it is important to defeat Bolsonaro. Bolsonarismo, and the conditions that led to its emergence, also need to be, if not defeated – that is a tall order, after all – at the very least tackled. Automatic adhesion to Lula by the Brazilian left and social movements may lead to an electoral victory, but it most certainly won’t lead to a political one. On top of that, it is important to face the challenges presented by the climate emergency and Lula’s platform falls well short of what the moment requires.

The reactionary forces – the agribusiness sector, the financial sectors, the military, the evangelical churches, and so on – have been pressuring and will continue to pressure Lula to meet their demands. It is crucial that the left in Brazil steps up and starts to exert pressure as well. The international left must tread a fine line and support the Lula government whenever it faces imperialist attacks, but ultimately the allegiance should be with the people of Brazil and not with any one particular individual or political party.

Ultimately, international solidarity for those of us leftists in the Global North means pressuring our own governments to take decisions that lift the constraints for emancipatory policies to be carried out in the Global South.