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Month: April 2023

Sea-Eye Berlin

We save human lives


12/04/2023

In the deadliest flight routes in the world we look for people in distress at sea and fight against the drowning. Our action is an answer to the failed migration politics of the European Union, which refuse their responsibility for the thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean.

Our group in Berlin wants to support Sea-Eye with all local forces. We try with different ways to make people aware of the subject see rescue, to inform them about the work of Sea-Eye and to collect donations.

At least once a month we organise a meeting in different location in order to talk about joint projects, coming meetings and to plan further actions. You can also get involved if you have a small time budget. We look forward to every new face.

You are also invited to our exhibition „Jedes Leben zählt – Zur Flucht über das Mittelmeer“ (every life counts – on flight across the Mediterranean). The photo exhibition looks at civil sea rescue in the Mediterranean and its importance. The pictures were taken during operations of the organisation Sea-Eye.

Since 2015, Sea-Eye has been active with boats in the Mediterranean, which have been funded by donations. They take people in distress at sea on board, to bring them to a safe European place. The operations of the organisation are carried out over several weeks on different levels, from Crew Training to waiting at safe harbours.

The exhibition shows the different areas of a Sea-Eye operation. The photos reflect the precarious situation of fleein people in the Mediterranean, and show the need for state sea rescue, safe flight routes and the stabilisation of the situation in the countries of origin.

For more information, you can visit our homepage or contact the Berlin group at gruppe.berlin@sea-eye.de

The French Left and the Ongoing Workers Revolt

The conflict with Macron is at a plateau and can still go either way. How is the French Left responding? Latest in our reports from Paris


07/04/2023

The 11th day of action to defend pensions and oppose Macron, Thursday the 6th of April, again saw millions on the street, and hundreds of thousands on strike in a joyful festive atmosphere. This is despite police repression, and despite the refusal of national union leaderships either to organize an indefinite general strike or to give any real support to the more radical sections of workers, such as the oil refinery workers blockading oil depots with mass pickets (meanwhile the government sent in riot police and requisitioned some workers in order to force them to go to work).

Conflict at a plateau

Thursday’s day of action attracted fewer protestors, but still millions, in 370 demonstrations across France. Bosses’ representatives were complaining this week that each day of action “costs a billion and a half euros”. In Italy and Belgium there have been some solidarity strikes. Young people are far more in evidence at the demonstrations this week, hundreds of high schools and dozens of universities are regularly being blockaded, and the slogans are more radical than before. Thursday, hundreds of young people in Paris were chanting “we are young, fired up, and revolutionary” while a barricaded high school in the centre of France resounded to the chant “Down with the state, the cops, and the fascists!” In Paris last week, a bemused Norwegian pop singer, Girl in Red, cutely asked her concert audience to teach her a little French. The hall erupted with chants of “Macron, démission!” — “Macron, resign!”

There are ongoing strikes in oil, air transport, docks and energy, although refuse collectors and several key rail depots have suspended strike action, feeling isolated after three or four weeks striking. And every day there are local demonstrations or motorways or wholesale centres blockaded. A few days ago over a thousand students at the university of Tolbiac in Paris were debating the way forward together.

The conflict with Macron is at a plateau. Neither side is prepared to give in, and the movement is neither accelerating nor collapsing. As the revolt continues, considering political strategy is essential. How are the Left organizations doing, faced with a huge and very popular revolt, and a national union leadership strategy which is unable to win?

Left organizations put to the test

A historic social explosion is always a test for any Left organization. In this article I want to briefly evaluate the different wings of the French Left in the crisis. This is a delicate exercise. Many thousands of activists in all the Left parties (and many non-party people) have been doing excellent work organizing strikes and protests, leafleting and caucusing, encouraging creativity and rebellion. Most of them have done more than I have, so I do not want to appear as a red professor giving them marks out of ten. But we need to win, this battle and many more, to defend ourselves and eventually to get rid of capitalism, so strategies must be understood and criticized openly.

The political landscape in France today has been formed by decades of neoliberalism and the powerful fight against it. In 1995, in 2006 and in 2019, huge strike movements were successful in winning defensive battles against pension attacks, or against attacks on workers’ labour contract conditions. In 2003, 2010 and 2016, massive movements were defeated by the government and laws implemented to reduce pensions, and to make it much easier to sack workers.

There are two key points here. One is that all these struggles, like the one going on right now, are defensive struggles, to stop the neoliberals taking stuff away from us. They are inspiring, but nevertheless they are defensive. Secondly, they involve a high level of political class consciousness. Millions of older workers went on strike and protested in 2006, when the government threatened a worse work contract for employees under 26. Millions of workers not affected personally by the present Macron attack on pensions are enthusiastically taking part in the movement anyway. The idea that “an injury to one is an injury to all” and the understanding that if they beat us in this battle they will be all the stronger for the next is extremely widespread.

Finally, we need to understand that even when the explosive movements lost on their immediate defensive demands, governments were generally obliged to shelve a whole series of other attacks they had been planning (as this month they shelved a racist immigration law, and also suspended a plan to reintroduce 2 weeks of national military service for all young people).

After the Socialist Party destroyed itself

It is this energetic class struggle which has formed the political landscape today. The Socialist Party was electorally destroyed after the Socialist government introduced new labour laws in 2016, smashing national union agreements, reducing payment for overtime, etc. In the 2022 elections the party got 32 Members of Parliament — ten times fewer than in 2012!

But the millions of people involved in the mass movements I have mentioned, sometimes victorious, sometimes defeated, were looking for a political expression to their opposition to neoliberalism. They didn’t become millions of Marxists, because Marxism was still very solidly linked to Stalinism and Soviet imperialism in people’s minds, and because the Marxist organizations were not big enough or smart enough to grow much. But people were looking for a radical Left insurgent option, and that is what made France Insoumise (France in Revolt) possible. If you imagine that, in Britain, Jeremy Corbyn had left the Labour Party and built a radical Left alternative, which then went on to get seven million votes, that is France Insoumise.

France Insoumise calls for “a citizens’ revolution”, which is meant to happen by sweeping away the presidentialist fifth republic and putting a sixth republic in its place, while implementing a very radical programme. Retirement at 60, a turn to 100% renewable energy 100% organic farming, a big rise in the minimum wage, a billion euros for measures to fight violence against women, and so on.

The FI movement and its 74 MPs have been playing a positive role in the present revolt. When Prime Minister Borne announced that the attack on pensions would be forced through by decree, all the FI MPs held up signs for the cameras saying “See you in the streets!”. When the national union leaders called a day of action ten long days after the previous one, the FI called for rallies in front of all the regional government headquarters in the meantime. The FI’s strike fund has raised 900,000 euros. And this week, FI leader Melenchon is being taken to court by the Paris chief of police for “insulting the police”. He had declared that one particularly violent police squad should be dissolved and the “young men should be sent off for psychological help” because “Normal folk don’t volunteer to get on a motorcycle and beat people with batons as they pass by”. These few symbolic examples show the radicalism of the FI.

It is unsurprising that Macron is launching a major campaign against France Insoumise. He accuses it of “wanting to delegitimize our institutions”. His hardline interior minister Gérard Darmanin is denouncing the “intellectual terrrorism” of the radical left. The entire left must be ready to defend the FI against right-wing attacks, whatever other disagreements subsist.

There is still much missing, however, in the FI approach. In many ways a traditional reformist organization, seeing parliament at the centre of its medium-term strategy, the organization accepts a “division of labour” by means of which it is the role of union leaderships to run the strike movement, and political parties should stay out of debates about strategy. This is disastrous when the union leadership’s strategy is so woefully inadequate. In addition, many among the FI leadership are keen to win this battle so that political life gets “back to normal” and politics resumes through traditional channels. We Marxists, in contrast, are hoping that this battle will build up consciousness and organizational capacity which will make our class refuse to go “back to normal” political life, but rather start exploring how capitalism can be overthrown.

The rise of France Insoumise and its successful occupation of the radical Left space has left the French Communist Party squeezed out. It still has 50,000 members, of which nearly a third are elected local or regional councillors, and it has twelve members of parliament. Under its leader Fabien Roussel, it is trying to occupy a space clearly to the right of France Insoumise, to capture some of the people the Parti Socialiste lost but who were not tempted by Macronism, or even some of the far right voters. Roussel has shown this by declaring his support for nuclear power, by attending rallies organized by hard right police trade unions, and, right now, by prioritizing the campaign for a referendum on the pensions law (a process which would take months and require almost five million signatures).

The revolutionary approach

What, then, of the revolutionary Left? In France, there are three revolutionary organizations with a couple of thousand of members each, one with about a thousand, and four with a couple of hundred each. One or two of these latter groups operate inside France Insoumise networks, since the FI is an extremely loose organization. Some of the most radical actions, such as taking busloads of students to join mass pickets at the oil refineries, or organizing regular grassroots inter-union meetings, have been initiated by revolutionaries. And some of the most important questions, such as how to move from a powerful defensive movement to an offensive against neoliberalism and capitalism, are put forward by Marxists.

Yet there is a crucial lack. There is no organization setting up public meetings in every town entitled “General Strike: Why and How?” There is no organization calling rallies in front of the regular meetings of the national union leaderships, pushing them to call a real general strike. Most revolutionaries are following a strategy of “pushing the movement forward as far as possible”. This is obviously essential, but leaves the general strategy in the hands of union leaderships. A clear analysis of the role of trade union leaders as professional negotiators with specific interests (which rapidly conflict with those of workers when struggle rises) is generally absent.

The 11th day of action is on April 13, but the weakness of the weekly day of action as a sole national strategy is ever more visible. Less combative organizations are suggesting the solution is to spend months campaigning for a referendum. But what is needed is an indefinite general strike.

Letter from the Editors: 6th April 2023

Left Media Academy, Cultural Intervention in Berlin, and International Roma Day


06/04/2023

Hello everyone,

This evening sees the opening night of the exhibition Wir Weben! Wir Weben! is a site-specific mural created by Hussein Mitha. The mural celebrates the multiple, contradictory and varied labour and social movement histories of Berlin. A single ‘red thread’ at the centre of the piece weaves together historical movements, from the German Revolution to the solidarity campaigns of the DDR, to squatting, and political print production in 1970s West Berlin, to contemporary housing movements. The exhibition is at Nansenstraße 2, and can be seen on Fridays and Sundays throughout April. The organisers, AGIT, are our Campaign of the Week.

On Saturday, at 1pm, the FAU union is organising a rally Happy Easter, You’re Still Fired. After promises in November 2022 of safe jobs, functional bikes, and new working facilities, the workers at ecoCARRIER AG and Velocarrier GmbH began 2023 with a rude surprise: a mass termination. The workers’ demands are simple: Management must pay for the promises they made to workers. Their failures should not be the burden of workers. Severance pay is the least they can do. The rally to support their demands starts at 1pm in front of REWE, Rollbergstr. 59 (Neukölln). It will be followed by a picnic at Tempelhofer Feld.

Saturday is also International Roma Day which remembers the worldwide emancipation of Roma* which started in 1971. The day is also intended as a counterweight to the abuses, oppression end the exclusion of Roma people from society. The 52nd ROMADAY will focus above all on the global consequences of environmental racism. To celebrate the day, there will be a Romaday Parade, which starts at 3pm at the Denkmal für die im Nationalsozialismus ermordeten Sinti und Roma Europas near Brandenburger Tor.

Tuesday sees the start of LiMA, the Left media academy. LiMA is an independent, non-profit educational association based in Berlin. They organise meetings and seminars, which since the pandemic have been increasingly online. Their aim is the promotion of critical, emancipatory perspectives in the media, and enabling media competence in social engagement, non-profit activity and journalism. As well as the online meetings, there will also be live events at the Neues Deutschland building at Franz-Mehring Platz 1.

On Thursday, there’s a party in solidarity with Greece, organised by ATTAC and Greek organisations. SoliOli organises an economy of solidarity. Once a year, it offers olive products from Greek cooperatives with the aim of supporting political and social projects in Greece. The evening will be in three parts – first an introduction to the organisation, then a sale of culinary components, and finally live music and dancing. It all takes place in the Regenbogenfabrik, Lausitzer Straße 21a.

This week is full of activities in Berlin, so make sure you find out what else is going on by looking at our Events page. You can see a shorter, but more detailed, list of Events which we are directly involved in here.

Looking further into the future, on Saturday, 15th April, the Berlin LINKE Internationals are organising a Küfa where international activists can cook, eat, and talk with each other, while we raise money for an important cause. This month, money is being raised to provide a reception at the coming meeting 75 Years Nakba: Anti-Palestinian Racism and Repression in Berlin. The day after the Küfa. Sunday, 16th April, it will be the next LINKE Internationals Walking Tour – this time on Riots in Kreuzberg.

Remember that on 10th-11th June, the LINKE Internationals are holding their annual Summer Camp on the outskirts of Berlin. The programme will be available soon. And on 17th June, there’ll be a showing of Still the Enemy Within, a film about the British Miners’ Strike, followed by a Q&A with the film’s producer Mike Simons.

In News from Berlin, complaints about discrimination in Berlin increase, Berlin’s new SPD-CDU government wants to introduce compulsory religious education in schools, and the area around Häckescher Markt is to become a pedestrianized Zone.

In News from Germany, survey by the police union records racism, misanthropy, and prejudice against refugees, finance minister Christian Lindner opposes increases in child benefits, the shortage of skilled workers in Germany is increasing, and left wing politicians criticise the reception of King Charles in the Bundestag.

Read all about this week’s News from Berlin and Germany here.

New on theleftberlin this week, Jeroen van der Starre reports from the Netherlands about recent electoral gains for the right wing, both John Mullen and Colin Falconer report from Paris on the ongoing strikes and demonstrations, we interview the makers of a new guide to filming the police and a new organisation for cultural intervention in Berlin, and Negro Matapacos reports the unhealthy alliance between the Berlin Ostermarsch with the far right.

In this week’s Podcast of the Week, in the second episode of Delivery Charge, host Aju John looks at the Works’ Councils (Betriebsrat) elections at Flink and Lieferando. You can also listen to Rob and Mo, who were pivotal in the campaigns to establish the Betriebsrats at these companies. In doing so, we will learn a bit more about the institution of the Betriebsrat in German labour law, with some help from Dr. Eva Kocher, a professor of law at Centre for Interdisciplinary Labour Law Studies at the European University in Frankfurt (Oder).

You can follow us on the following social media:

If you would like to contribute any articles or have any questions or criticisms about our work, please contact us at team@theleftberlin.com. And do encourage your friends to subscribe to this Newsletter.

Keep on fighting

The Left Berlin Editorial Board

People Make Their Own History

Interview with Rosemary Grennan from AGIT about cultural intervention in Berlin


05/04/2023

We spoke with Rosemary Grennan, one of the founders of AGIT, about cultural intervention in Berlin. Here’s what she had to say:

Hi Rosemary, thank you for agreeing to speak with us. Could you please start by introducing yourself and AGIT?

I’m Rosemary Grennan, one of the founders of AGIT, a new organisation based in Berlin. AGIT is a residency and archiving space that examines historical movement materials to make interventions into contemporary struggles and critical questions today.

The organisation has three different focuses: exploring movement histories and contemporary politics in Berlin and beyond, developing international collaborations focused on building left history, culture, and theory, and finally experimenting with different technologies to develop ways of building and distributing open access archival collections. AGIT is organised around funded residencies where historians, activists, and cultural producers can collaborate on history and collections outside of a formal research setting.

My own background is at an archive in London called the Mayday Rooms, where we have built a substantial archive of social movement histories in London. The other founder is Jan Gerber, based in Berlin and part of an organisation called 0x2620, which builds software for large digital collections. They have worked with video collectives in Turkey and Egypt archiving audio-visual material around Gezi Park and Tahrir Square protests, and have also spent a lot of time in India building the online platforms pad.ma and indiancine.ma.

You’re doing this in Berlin, where there are many cultural and artistic initiatives, as well as lots of academia. What is AGIT aiming to offer that’s not being provided elsewhere?

I don’t know if we’re trying to offer something that’s completely different – more to add to the rich left cultural initiatives already existing in Berlin. AGIT wants to build on the rich history of radical publishing, libraries, and self-archiving on the left by developing new forms of archival dissemination and ways of making things public. We want to create a space for people to work specifically on these histories, to have time to research, translate, read material from past struggles, and create a public context around them. The way the residencies are formed is that people can work with us and other archives to learn how to archive their own histories and build resources and collections around that. We are a young organisation and hope that each residency will build the organisation in some ways and leave something behind.

How much of this work is voluntary, and where do you get funding for what you have to pay for?

The day-to-day organisation is voluntary, but we currently have funding for the residencies and residents can stay in the space. We received a donation to start up and have applied for other cultural funds to keep us going.

On Friday, April 7th, you’re organising your first event – the opening night of a month-long exhibition. Could you tell us a little about it?

Our first resident is Hussein Mitha, an artist and writer from Glasgow. Hussein has created a mural in the space using vinyl cutting and sign-making techniques to incorporate texts and images with vibrant swaths of colour. The idea for the residency was to use political ephemera from different social and political histories of Berlin to create the mural and add to Berlin’s strong tradition of political mural-making (such as those on the Press Cafe and the Haud der Lehrer on Alexanderplatz). The opening of Wir Weben on April 7th is the unveiling of the mural, as well as a small exhibition of historical sources that are either referenced or alluded to in the mural. This includes material from the Silesian weavers all the way up to political print culture in 1970s West Berlin. We will have on display Käthe Kollwitz’s Weavers’ Revolt, John Heartfield’s Five Fingers has the Hand from the Rote Fahne just before the 1928 election, the 1 Million Roses for Angela (Davis) campaign from the DDR and documents surrounding the court case of the Agit-Drucker in 1977.

Let’s talk briefly about the Silesian Weavers. The mural is called Wir Weben (We Weave), which is from a Heinrich Heine poem about the weavers. We also find references to them in Marx. Who are they and why are they so important?

When Hussein first came and stayed in our space, we went on a lot of different walks around Berlin and visited the bronze reliefs on the side of the Neuer Marstall opposite the Humboldt Forum. One relief shows Karl Liebknecht proclaiming the “free socialist republic of Germany” in 1918, and the other commemorates the German Revolution of 1848. Through this, we started to read Heine’s poem about the Silesian Weavers, which strongly influenced the workers’ movement in Germany. Briefly, there was a weavers’ revolt in 1844, where the weavers in the Silesian region of Prussia revolted against increasingly bad conditions and cuts in pay. They were brutally suppressed by the authorities but had a big influence on left intellectuals like Marx and Heine. Heine then published his poem in Vorwärts, which was the newspaper that Marx was editing from Paris. The poem repeats the refrain ‘wir weben, wir weben (we weave, we weave),’ and this became one of the starting points for the mural, weaving together different histories from Berlin and beyond.

What is the connection between the Silesian weavers and the more contemporary issues that are part of the exhibition?

At the top of the mural, there is a spinning wheel and from this a single red thread that goes through the mural, bringing all the material together. I did an interview with Hussein about the making of the mural, and they said that when they came to create the mural, it was interesting how some of these histories don’t really fit together and resonate, and there’s no necessary continuity between the weavers and, say, the squatters in West Berlin, but still the possibility of solidarity.

The exhibition will be held at Nansenstraße 2, which is the location of AGIT, but it is also home to Right2TheCity, the English language branch of Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen. What connections do you, as a cultural organisation, have with political organisations like Right2TheCity?

Nansenstraße 2 is also used by the Western Sahara Solidarity group and other groups that are loosely associated with those in Right2TheCity. There is also a group called the KiezProjekt, which is organising support for tenants of the buildings that would be expropriated if the referendum were to be carried out. In the evenings, people use the space to hold meetings and other events. We thought it was important to confront political history from a place that is not detached from current struggles.

What is the role of art and culture within political movements? Do you believe that art can change the world?

Although our primary focus is on preserving and archiving movement history, we do recognize the role of culture in bringing these histories back into collective memory. Therefore, cultural production has increasingly become a terrain of struggle in a context of “culture war” narratives. However, rather than focusing on that, it may be more important to consider how we can produce culture that reinforces processes of organisation, struggle, and cultural memory of our history. I always think that the workers’ photography movement is a good example of this. There, the question is posed: is photography for the workers or workers’ photography? The photographers were part of a political movement rather than trying to represent it from afar.

For the exhibition, I was examining some of the material from John Heartfield. One of the pieces is an advertisement for an exhibition of Heartfield’s work in 1929 in Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. The title of his exhibition was “Use Photography as a Weapon,” and the inscription below read, “Only art that sees and recognizes the moving forces of our society and draws the conclusion from this knowledge has a right to life and validity: taking sides and fighting!”

What are your future plans for after the exhibition in April?

The exhibition Wir Weben, after the opening on Friday, will be open until 30th April and can be viewed Friday-Sunday 2-6pm.

We currently have another residency called Making Fists with Sam Dolbear, who is exploring queer histories and public memorialization in the GDR. We also have an upcoming residency from Bak.ma, a video collective who have created a public video archive of the Gezi Uprisings. They will come and work on their material this summer to mark the ten-year anniversary. In the winter, we will also have an archival exhibition on the Wages for Housework campaigns in Berlin and how they relate to similar international movements. That will bring together archival material from Berlin, London, New York, and Italy.

Why should people come to your opening event on Friday? How can people follow what you’re doing?

We will be unveiling Hussein’s fabulous mural, as well as a small archival exhibition that relates to elements of the mural. The documents on show include solidarity stamps, films of children climbing the statue of Kathe Kollwitz, reproductions of Vorwarts, and more! We will be having drinks together, so please come by for a chat and find out more about the space. Everyone has their own involvement in different historical campaigns or social movement histories, and we would love to hear about them.

Sign up to our mailing list to hear about upcoming residencies and events. We also have a website and a very young Instagram account. Additionally, come to our events and send an email to contact [at] aaagit.org if you have material that you want to work on.

The exhibition Wir Weben opens at Nansenstraße 2 at 7pm on Friday, 7th April. It will continue on Fridays and Sundays until the 30th of April.

AGIT

Achiving social movements to help future struggles


AGIT is a public residency and archiving space which engages with the historical materials from left and social movements to address contemporary questions and present day struggles.

Our work operates across three different areas;

  • exploring movement histories and contemporary politics in Berlin and beyond;
  • developing international collaborations focused on building left history, culture, and theory;
  • experimenting with different technologies to develop ways of building and distributing open access archival collections.

Central to AGIT is a series of funded residencies, which will explore different historical materials to make critical interventions in our present. AGIT is a nascent organisation so each residency will leave something behind to help us shape the space going forward, be that a collection of material, or something else. The residences are open to individuals, groups or collectives involved in political organising, theory, cultural, artistic or technological production.

The space is also used on an ongoing basis by a number of social and labour movement groups, and self-organised education initiatives for meetings and other activities.We are open to people running their own events at Nansenstrasse 2, where we can help resource with space, equipment and time. Drop us an email if you have something you want to run.

Sign up to our mailing list here.

We will be holding an informal launch of AGIT as well as the exhibition opening of our first resident, Hussein Mitha.

Wir Weben! by Hussein Mitha
Where: AGIT, Nansenstrasse 2 (near Reuterplatz)
When: Friday 7th April, 19h (NOT Thursday as suggested in our Newsletter. Sorry for the confusion)

Wir Weben! is a site-specific mural created by Hussein Mitha during AGIT’s first residency. The mural celebrates the multiple, contradictory and varied labour and social movement histories of Berlin and takes its name from Heine’s poem about the Silesian Weavers Revolt of 1844. Using vinyl cutting and decal techniques, Mitha combines vibrant colours and abstract forms, with reproductions of texts and images from archival sources.

A single ‘red thread’ at the centre of the piece weaves together historical movements, from the German Revolution to the solidarity campaigns of the DDR, to squatting and political print production in 1970s West Berlin to contemporary housing movements. Through these methods, Wir Weben! pays homage to the possibility of solidarity, but also playfully acknowledges the fractures and junctions between left movements particularly when it comes to building historical movements around anti-imperialism.

Central to Wir Weben! is the role that archival work has in uncovering and revealing political histories. Alongside the mural there will be a small exhibition of all the different historical material that is referenced in the mural.