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Month: November 2023

“Knowledge is not something that people have, knowledge is something that you create”

Interview with Dario Farcy and Aquarela Padilla from the Bildungszentrum Lohana Berkins


03/11/2023

Thank you so much for being here and for your time! Could you start by introducing yourself and the Centro de Educación Popular (CEP) Lohana Berkins?

Darío Farcy: Thank you very much, Andrei and The Left for the interview! I am Darío Farcy from Buenos Aires, Argentina. There I worked with the self-managed movement and was a teacher for almost 10 years in the popular education movement (educación popular). I was a teacher in the Bachilleratos Populares. They were high schools for people who couldn’t finish state high school, and so they didn’t have the possibility to go to university or to have better-paid jobs. I was also part of different left political parties and studied political studies in the University of Buenos Aires.

Aquarela Padilla: My name is Aquarela Padilla, I come from Venezuela. I have lived in Germany for around six years. I am part of the coordination team of the the Centro de Educación Popular Lohana Berkins. I have experience in educación popular in Venezuela, especially in feminismo comunitario with Mujeres por la Vida, and political education with and for workers. I also have experience in alternative or transformative communication and media work.

I would also like to present our Centro de Educación Popular. We are an educational center that was founded a year ago, by and for migrants in Berlin. Our purpose is to create a space to collectively build tools as migrants and improve our reality of life. This also means understanding our reality here, and for this we need an educational process. We implement educación popular, or we are inspired by this political-pedagogical practice, which comes from Latin America but has spread throughout the whole world and is often part of massive movements. We have different educational formats. Our goal is not only to create tools and to better understand our reality, but also to strengthen our communities.

Can you tell me more about who Lohana Berkins was and why you chose to name the center after her?

DF: Lohana Berkins was an activist. She was what we call in Spanish “a militant.” In English that sounds a bit harsh, but that is how we describe the commitment of different activists, because we think there is a difference between being an activist and doing political things, and having a full commitment for politics. That is why we call ourselves and Lohana militants.

She was part of the of the Communist Party of Argentina. She was a trans woman and one of the first trans women to have the possibility to work in the state as a deputy’s assitant. Later, she was one of the key people in developing the gender identity law in Argentina. She died in 2016, but had the possibility to see the approval of this law. Lohana was also one of the leaders in forming a textile worker’s cooperative for trans people called Nadia Echazú, founded in 2008, and one of the few spaces where trans people could have a proper job and legal work. She was also one of the first visible trans activists and militants in society, and fought throughout her life for educación popular. She was also involved in the bachillerato popular, a popular education center in Argentina, and Mocha Cellis, a high school for transgender people.

So we wanted to give some kind of honor to her life and her fight, and highlight her experiences and ability to fight both the state and against a society where trans people were totally obscure. The idea was that we wanted to connect this with migration. Since migrants play a very important role in society, but at the same time, are not visible for most German people. That is the reason why we chose this name.

Lohana was also a migrant, she was born and grew up in the northern part of Argentina, a very racialized region. She went to work during her transition in Buenos Aires, and she also suffered from a lot of discrimination because she was both brown and trans. Her membership in the Communist Party was also very important to us, because we need to have strong structures and training, organization, political identity, all while representing different kinds of identity.

AP: It is important to talk about the original idea of educación popular, both how it works but also why we use it. We came up with the idea of creating the Centro de Educación Popular Lohana Berkins due to the needs of our community and migrants, based on our experience as activists in Bloque Latinoamericano. We were confronted with not being allowed to participate in German spaces due to language. We understood that it was normal for people to want to volunteer in their own language, but it created a huge barrier for us in order to be active. That is why we understood that language is one of the main things in order to defend our rights, which is why we started with language courses. The goal was also to understand our rights and the legal structures of Germany. If you cannot participate in a democratic space in German, if you don’t understand the laws, it’s impossible to defend your rights. So we wanted to create a space which was different from formal German languages course, like Volkschochschule, but a instead was somewhere where alternative learning could take place.

The methodology is different, but so are the debates and the political approaches we discuss. We want to talk about themes and things that are connected with the real life of migrants. We want to talk about migration, we want to talk about racism, we want to talk about political and police violence.

Let’s continue talking about the German language classes. What does a German class in the Center look like? What do you do?

DF: In a normal language course, you have the owners or bosses of the school, you have the teachers, and there’s no democratic process to define the content of the course.

AP: We have a coordination group of three people that get together with the teachers to think through the whole program. We talk about the methodology, the language, the grammatical structure, how to improve the skills of the students, and also the political insight and the political perspective of the course. So since the beginning, the process is a democratic one.

The content and the theme of the course is accumulative. We don’t tend to think like, “there is this new idea, this is a perfect idea.” This is not representative of the students’ experience of the courses. We base it on the needs and experiences of the students, and also our own experiences that we have accumulated from giving these classes.

DF: Educación popular is a political perspective of education that is based on the real life of those involved in the process. Not only students, but also teachers and coordinators, workers in the space. The idea of a popular location is holistic, it is connected with the idea of the whole.

AP: That is why the beginning of each course, we try to find the level of students’ German, how they can express themselves, their needs, problems, but also the interests of the students.

DF: So if someone is interested in gender perspectives in Germany, we prepare the program of the course based on this and their needs. Not only the structural needs, like fighting against racism, but also their individual and rational needs. Housing, the fight for the right to the city, the fight for fair rents. There’s a history in Berlin of organizing against exploitation, against this housing sector. At the beginning we established a preliminary program with some draft ideas regarding the content, but in the process we realized we needed to focus the contents around the topics the community was debating.

AP: In doing that, you have the possibility to create a connection between the individual needs of the students, the structural problems they face, and their skills in German.

Can you talk more about the role of the educator and coordination team, and what they do? As well as the exchanges between yourselves and the students, while avoiding the creation of a hierarchy of knowledge?

DF: From the perspective of popular education, knowledge is not a thing. But knowledge is not something people have. Knowledge is a collective process, it is created by individuals but it’s always a collective thing. That is why we talk about learning through doing. Of course, as the coordination team, we are learning every day. Not only due to the input of the teachers, but also from the students. From a symbolic perspective, the process of doing popular education in Germany creates a new way of understanding popular education. And that is the key point of this process of creating knowledge that is connected to language and political organization.

AP: So the educator is an activist, is a militant. From the beginning, popular education is a different way of doing politics. It’s very important that the whole group understands that the first goal is not knowledge, but political responsibility. And educators need to feel this responsibility, and create this political pedagogical process.

DF: There is also the need to act in solidarity regarding knowledge and tools, which is why we share skills and knowledge. It’s not like you as an individual have some kind of skills as a teacher, and you preserve that, and use these as something you want to sell. Because in the private sector or the market, the thing that teachers sell is their ability and skills to know better. We are trying to fight against this privatization. That is why we talk about this idea of the political responsibility of being a popular educator.

AP: I also want to talk about the connections and similarities between an educator and a student, which are more important for us than the differences.

Both students and teachers need to have these democratic and active commitments in order to reach the goals of the classroom. If some of the parts are not working, or missing that aim, the process is not going to work. Because if we say we learn through doing and everyone in this process is both learning and teaching, the student also has a role of teaching and giving their skills in solidarity.

DF: So it’s not only that the teacher has an active role while the students receive, but both are receiving and giving. Of course, it should be be clear who has the responsibility for which part. But this clear responsibility does not mean that one is active, and one is passive. The idea is that we can create a dialogue between the different levels of popular education.

AP: So the shared idea is the commitment in order to transform society and in doing so, the idea of transforming themselves. This idea is the commitment that we always need to pursue and understand as a goal.

DF: Of course, that puts language and political themes in a second level. But that is the structure that we need to develop. The main goal is to transform reality. And we understand the importance of transforming the people who are going to transform reality. We want to do it through popular education.

I imagine that there are also moments where this doesn’t happen, when people would rather be passive listeners than participating. How do you convince people to participate in educación popular?

DF: I think it works in different levels. For example, there’s people who are more comfortable with lectures, or with books. And so when you present some kind of new topic through a book, maybe 20-30% of the class is going, “okay, that’s great.” But 70%, maybe not, they want to find a way where they feel more comfortable. When we acknowledge that, we ask what tools we have at our disposal, in order to reach the other part of the class. Maybe theater and acting skills, so in the next class we say we will talk about the housing problem in Berlin through acting, one person is the landlord and one the tenant. And you reach 40% of the people that don’t feel comfortable learning through books.

We use different methodologies to reach students, especially when they are at different levels. Maybe one day you use a movie to talk about something, or a song.

With teachers it is more difficult. Because all the teachers, as well as ourselves, went through the formal process of learning how to teach. So with the teachers or the coordination team it’s more about formation and training. We give trainings in order to understand how popular education works. Sadly, you always have some people who don’t understand it. We need to accept that maybe popular education is not for everyone, but in most cases people understand that solidarity is a better way of teaching.

AP: In the beginning, popular education feels strange for many people who are used to silently being given knowledge. When you talk about different methodologies, people will try it feeling like it’s a game. They begin to understand that they can feel good about learning German, they can make mistakes.

You start to connect learning, political insight, inputs, and the creation of community. This is something most people say at the end of their course, that they’ve learned German without it being a painful experience. Most of the things that we do create this idea of solidarity, this idea of sharing skills and collectively creating knowledge and making it accessible for most people.

DF: Again, knowledge is not something that people have, knowledge is something that you create. This is the crucial point to understand that creation is a process which includes making mistakes. And creation is a process of making things. But these products don’t belong to one person, rather they are collective. Property does not disappear, but we get mixed property between the individual and the collective. For me, this is very important to break this privatization of knowledge.

AP: This process, of course, is a challenge for everyone. It’s important to have this commitment in order to accept the challenge, and to admit that we don’t have every answer and that this too opens up possibilities. There is also the possibility that the process doesn’t work. It is an open process, not a closed one, and like every open process there is a potential of failure.

How do you adapt this to everyone? Migrants to Germany have different experiences, different histories of migration, and different ways of being and working in Germany. How do you bring this together and include all of these different experiences in the process of education?

DF: Of course, we try to adapt the experience to the needs of the students and teachers. But this is not an individualized process of education. We try to create a common experience, a common understanding of education, taking into account the needs not as individuals, but as the experience of a collective process. Let me give an example. Say a student asks for an individual teacher. It’s not going to happen, because do not give individual classes. But if there are 15 students and 10 are saying they need a more individualized experience, than we try to create solutions for that. But it should be debated and discussed, with collective answer rather than an individual one.

I explain that because, when we talk about experiences of migration, it’s very important that we can identify the things in common, but also the differences. Our process has three phases. The first phase is before we meet the students. First, we create an ideal subject (based on our experiences as migrants and militants) of what migrants are and need, knowing that at the end this is not real. It is only a way of framing the program and the course.

After that comes the phase of having the course and working with real students. Because we base our program on this ideal migrant, we know we need to make changes throughout the classes. For example once we thought that one of the most important things for migrants is how to deal with visas. During the classes, no one wanted to talk about that. Most of the students wanted to talk about housing, identity and climate justice.

And at the end of the course, we make an evaluation of these processes. Of course, that is a process that has its own risks. We want to work with migrants that come from the periphery or the semi-periphery. But in this course, we now have a lot of people from the United States and other countries of the North. We see that as a challenge that we need to address. Because our idea was working with people that were racialized, or in precarious work.

I think that migration has the potential to be this common ground, as well as the need to talk about politics. Also it’s very important to create this common ground, this idea of being open to sharing and of being open to learn in a different way, this political and pedagogical empathy. I think that is the common ground more than migration.

AP: Migration could be the way to be more organized, or it could be the first step to achieve assimilation. We fight against that. That is something important, because not all migrants are leftists and want to transform reality. A lot of migrants want to be assimilated, they want to be German. That is why we think that migration could be a tool to organize people, but also we need different aspects, we need to bring these aspects into the mix in order to have a leftist course, with students who want to transform reality. It’s not that all the people are going to be active in politics now, they’re not all are going to be deputies of the Left Party, but we aim to create a common ground and ideological ideas to share different perspectives. Through this, and through collective teaching and thinking, we can transform reality. That is the common ground at the end, not just migration.

The center has been active for a year, and now you have a fundraiser until November 7th. So what are your plans for the future? Where do you see the center going?

AP: Yes, we have a crowdfunding campaign at the moment, and this comes from the difficulties we have to self-finance. Projects like these, built both by and for the migrant community, are very difficult to finance. It is also very difficult to explain what we are doing precisely. That is why we need financial resources to strengthen our structures, to pay our teachers, and to rent our space. We are a self-administered project, and that is naturally a challenge. This crowdfunding runs until the second week in November.

The projects for the future are varied. But the first and most important is that we need a better structure. We need more people in our coordination group, but also in our pedagogical team and for communication. We cannot work precariously ourselves. We also want to expand our educational spaces for the community, as well as expanding our cooperations.

And we have begun a beautiful and important project to systematize our experience. Educación popular also has the goal of reflecting, at some point, on what we have done and how we can do better. This is also to identify possibilities: what they are, how our goals have changed, and why. We must reflect on the whole process, and for this we need a systematization. This takes a lot of hours from people. This is important not only for us and to improve our own work, but also for other initiatives. We would like other people in this country to have the chance to create similar centers, and for our experiences to serve as an inspiration for other projects.

DF: Popular education is a process that is alive. And I think that throughout this connection and these new experiences, new processes, this idea of popular education could be enrichened and strengthened not just here but in the Americas, too. That is why we wanted to do this text about methodology and political perspective based on our experience, to spread and expand the tradition of educación popular.

And next week we are going to present an investigation about extractivism, crisis, and debt and how these processes in Latin America affect migration or create new ways of understanding migration. This was a collaboration with an NGO called Movement Hub. We are very proud of creating more academic or theoretical knowledge. We are not afraid of doing that because we approach this from our experiences as activists and militants.

Support the fundraiser for the Bildungszentrum Lohana Berkins here.

Bildungszentrum Lohana Berkins is organising a series of meetings in Spanish in the first half of November.

In Berlin, Jews and Palestinians Are Demonstrating Together

This Saturday, Jewish and Palestinian groups are organizing a demonstration against the war


As bombs continue to rain down on Gaza, with several thousand children killed already, there will be a demonstration this Saturday at 14:00 at Alexanderplatz. In a time of chauvinistic hatred, this action is in an internationalist spirit, organized by Jewish Voice, Palestine Speaks, and leftists of countless nationalities.

When I published my last column two weeks ago, every single pro-Palestinian action in Berlin had been banned. Now, police continue to harass people on the streets of Neukölln, yet two demonstrations have been allowed to take place. On October 21, 5.000 people marched through Kreuzberg, and last Sunday, it was well over 10.000.

The bourgeois media only published the most superficial reports, repeating what police had said. Credulous readers might picture a mob of Hamas supporters chanting »death to Jews«. Said readers would have been shocked to see such a young, lefty, relatively queer, and extremely international crowd. English and Arabic were the main languages I could hear, with no more than a sprinkling of Deutsch – in fact, I heard more people speaking Spanish than German. Many demonstrators identified themselves as Jews with handmade signs objecting to attacks being carried out in their name.

Berlin’s Palestinian diaspora includes tens of thousands of people with diverse and complex views, as nd showed in this triple profile. (This is, incidentally, why we need left-wing media: virtually no one is letting Palestinians speak!)

An union sacrée of the German establishment, from the AfD to Die Linke, supports Israel’s »right to defend itself«. The government, a self-proclaimed »progress coalition«, is providing weapons, while opposing calls for a cease fire. On October 22, all the parties, alongside both state churches, NGOs, capitalists, and union bureaucrats, called for a rally in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Just 10.000 or so people showed up. While the AfD was not officially included, Israel’s ambassador gave the speech that the AfD would have liked to hold. This rally, supposedly about human rights and democracy, included calls for more deportations.

Many Germans, perhaps a majority, do not agree with the government on supporting war crimes. They are scared, however, that opposition to the war could be perceived as antisemitism. Internationals, of course, feel no such historical compunction. The German state demands that every immigrant accept responsibility for the unprecedented crimes committed by this country’s ruling class less than a century ago. This is a cynical demand, given that the vast majority of Nazi capitalists, Nazi bureaucrats, and Nazi judges were never asked to accept responsibility.

Germany’s ruling class remains rife with antisemitism – just look at the recently reelected Hubert Aiwanger – yet they give themselves a Persilschein, a bill of clean health, by declaring antisemitism to be an »imported problem.«

Does the repression protect Jews? In an open letter hundreds of Jewish intellectuals explain that what scares them is the »prevailing atmosphere of racism and xenophobia« and not a child wearing a Palestinian scarf at Sonnenallee. Udi Raz, a leading member of »Jewish Voice«, was fired from his job at the Jewish Museum because he described Israel as an Apartheid state (the same position as Human Rights Watch). Other critical Jews have been arrested or assaulted by police. For the German government, Jewish voices are only worth protecting if they are right-wing.

While hundreds of thousands of people across Europe and the United States are taking to the streets, German leftists remain largely silent. If your ears are burning, then in the name of your non-German neighbors, I call on you to join your immigrant friends this Saturday. This reminds me of a protest nine years ago: As I reported for »nd« at the time, more than 100 Israeli leftists demonstrated through Kreuzberg calling on German leftists to do something – anything. »Good morning, German left«, they chanted, “your silence is our death.”

This is the latest collaboration between theleftberlin and Neues Deutschland (nd) mirroring Nathaniel’s Red Flag column in nd. You can read the original here.

Letter from the Editors, 2nd November 2023

Hello everyone, As Israeli bombs continue to rain down on Gaza, there are several solidarity events with Palestine this week. We urge you to support them as much as you can. On Friday, there’s a Soli-Evening for Palästina Spricht. In efforts to continue to growing anti-repression costs for Palestine Speaks, the S€x Worker Action Group […]


01/11/2023

Hello everyone,

As Israeli bombs continue to rain down on Gaza, there are several solidarity events with Palestine this week. We urge you to support them as much as you can.

On Friday, there’s a Soli-Evening for Palästina Spricht. In efforts to continue to growing anti-repression costs for Palestine Speaks, the S€x Worker Action Group Berlin is hosting an evening of solidarity at the Failing Femmes House. Join us for an evening of community conversation, performances, breaking bread together, and being in community. The event promises a Soup Küfa and Bar, Community Conversation, and Performances and Music. The address is Karpfenteichstraße 13.

On Saturday, there’s a demonstration Free Palestine will not be Cancelled. Since 7th October, Israel has killed more than 5,000 people in the besieged Gaza strip. In one week, Israel dropped as many bombs on Gaza as were dropped on Afghanistan in a year. Half the population of Gaza are children. Experts warn that Israel’s behaviour fills the definition of genocide in many ways. The demo is called by the Jewish Voice for Peace, Palästina Spricht, and our Campaign of the Week, the Palestine Campaign. It starts at 2pm at Neptunenbrunnen on Alexanderplatz. You are welcome to join international activists, who are meeting at 1.45pm at the Marx-Engels Forum.

Also on Saturday, the Jüdische Stimme – the Jewish Voice for a just Peace in the Middle East – is holding a festival for memorial and hope to mark its 20th birthday. The original plans for a celebration have been changed to reflect the current situation. Alongside music by JS members, there will be spoken contributions and food in the tradition of the Jewish Shiva. The meeting will be accompanied by an art exhibition with pictures by Mohammed Al-Hawajri (Gaza) and Adi Liraz (Israel). It starts at 6pm in oyoun. Order your ticket by sending a mail to mail@juedische-stimme.de.

On Monday, the Berlin LINKE Internationals will be holding an open internal discussion on die LINKE and Palestine. Following a discussion about the coming Events that the group is organising, Palestinian activist and LINKE member Ramsy Kilani will kick off a discussion. We welcome everyone to join this discussion, whether you are a member of die LINKE, the Left Internationals, or just someone who is interested in the debate. It starts at 7pm at Schiercker Straße 26 (Ferat Kocak’s office).

You can catch Ramsy again on Tuesday, when he’s speaking alongside Elisa Baş on How can we build solidarity with Palestinians? The cruel massacres of the Israeli army in the besieged Gaza Strip must be stopped immediately. While the German government supports the mass killings, the repression against Palestine solidarity in Germany is reaching unprecedented dimensions. How can we act against this and strengthen solidarity with Palestinians? The meeting, organised by the new Initiative Socialism from Below, starts at 7pm at Am Flutgraben 3, which is part of the Festsaal Kreuzberg. Translation into English will be provided.

There are many more activities this week in Berlin, which are listed on our Events page. You can also see a shorter, but more detailed list of events in which we are directly involved in here.

In News from Berlin, new study finds rents in Berlin are above average, a series of bomb threats hits Berlin, Last Generation protestors attacked by police, and Sahra Wagenknecht’s departure from die LINKE results in some people leaving the party, and others joining.

In News from Germany, Germany’s new citizenship law does nothing for over 100,000 stateless people, Bosnian author criticises discourse of Palestine in Germany, and Chancellor Scholz calls for mass deportations.

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

This week on theleftberlin, we publish a statement by Die LINKE Neukölln against the war and bloodshed in Gaza and Israel, the new Initiative Socialism from Below calls for an end to killing Palestinians and occupation,  Phil Butland reviews a 10 year old film about Gaza which helps explain what is happening now, a photo gallery of last Saturday’s demonstration, Palestinian journalist asks if we can still call Germany a democracy, and Jewish activist Rowan Gaudet speaks to Elisa Baş who was suspended as press speaker of Fridays for Futures Germany for speaking out on Palestine.

Outside Palestine, Jaime Martinez Porro looks at Sahra Wagenknecht’s new party.

In this week’s Video of the Week, we show Ramsis Kilani’s speech for Palästina Spricht at last Saturday’s demonstration for Palestine.

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 please do encourage your friends to subscribe to this Newsletter.

Keep on fighting,

The Left Berlin Editorial Board

Palästina Kampagne (Palestine Campaign)

Campaign for the basic democratic rights of freedom of opinion and assembly. For Palestine Solidarity


The Palästina Kampagne (PK) was first founded as Nakba75 in response to Berlin’s banning of Nakba Day commemorations in 2022, which led to a series of arrests. It has since reformed itself as a campaign to increase awareness about Palestine in Berlin, and push back against the growing state repression of Palestine-solidarity. It seeks to counteract the continued expulsion of perspectives for Palestinian liberation in Germany, both in the mainstream discourses and on the German Left.

PK has organised demonstrations, informational events, and soli events for people who have been arrested. This Saturday, it is organising the mass demonstration Free Palestine Will Not Be Cancelled.

PK is active on Instagram, Twitter, and linktree.

A new beginning for Die LINKE

Sahra Wagenknecht and nine members of parliament have left the parliamentary group and set up the “Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance” as a platform for launching a new party in Germany.


It was expected (and almost wanted). The suspicion that Sahra Wagenknecht and a group around her were using party funds to finance a new project had long been hanging over the airwaves. For months, and even years, deputies such as Wagenknecht herself, Dadelem or Nastič did not use the coorporate image of the party in their events and statements, but promoted it as a personal initiative, away from the party. Already in the first half of this year, Wagenknecht announced that she would think about whether to form a party and would make a decision before the end of the year. In response, the leadership of Die LINKE distanced itself from her and expulsion proceedings have since been opened. However, affairs at the palace go slowly and German bureaucracy even more so.

At a press conference on Monday, October 23, Wagenknecht made the definitive announcement of the creation of a party from the association “Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance” (German acronym BSW), a name that gives an idea of the marked personalism of the project. Its political profile is that of ordoliberalism at best, to national-obrerism at worst. It is a nostalgia for any past time which, according to Wagenkecht, was always better and to which she wants to return: the industrial Germany of the sixties, seventies and part of the eighties. She recalls the post-war Welfare State for the white German worker, sustained by an improvement in working conditions, while labor was hired mainly from southern Europe to fill more precarious jobs and with much worse working conditions.

In this sense, Wagenkecht and her nostalgia appeal to an older generation in Germany that lived through both that welfare state in West Germany and state protection in East Germany. However, it would be inappropriate to say that only an older generation could fall into BSW’s fishing ground. Wagenknecht also appeals to migration control policies, claiming that Germany is saturated and overwhelmed by immigration and that the communes (municipalities) have no funds for it. The latter being true, the cause is the neoliberal cutback policies of the SPD, Greens, and liberal government in the budget of the municipalities. With the exception of Die LINKE, the entire German political spectrum — from the far right to the Greens and the new BSW — hypocritically attack immigration, while at the same time campaigning to “recruit talent” from abroad in view of the lack of manpower in strategic sectors such as education, health care, and some branches of private industry. However, Wagenknecht focuses on the external threat, immigration, because it is a rhetoric that quickly connects with a German proletariat, young and old, disenchanted by the impoverishment of their living conditions.

Wagenknecht has also relativized the importance of climate change, as well as feminist, LGTBIQA+, anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles. Similarly, she came dangerously close to conspiracy theories during COVID-19 and proudly took a stand against vaccines. In this situation, the fracture had to come at some point. Die LINKE aims at building socialism, understanding the system of capitalist exploitation in conjunction with the system of sexist and patriarchal oppressions, as well as racist and within the global north-south axis. In addition, it puts at the center combating climate change from a social justice perspective, something that one of Wagenknecht’s acolytes, Klaus Ernst, labeled as “wanting to be greener than the Greens”. However, the Greens put climate policies on the shelf long ago, restarting coal-fired power plants and extending the life of nuclear power plants, cutting down entire forests to build highways, or allowing themselves to be financed by the automobile lobby as in Baden-Würtenberg. Not to mention their passion for war, which, both in the production of weapons and in the performance of war, stands as one of the most potent Klimakillers.

Die LINKE can now make a new start. The last months and almost years have been marked by internal conflict and lack of clarity in positions, with every issue being wrapped up in dispute and unipersonal statements against party resolutions. Particularly active in this have been people from the Wagenknecht circle such as Daǧdelem, Nastič and Ernst. Breaks are difficult, but, as announced by Die LINKE co-spokesman Martin Schirdewan “we can now bring clarity to party policy, once we have finished with the chess game.”

It is to be expected that the new project will be joined by some elected and organic representatives from regional and local politics, as well as party members. However, recently Die LINKE had also lost many disenchanted members due to internal struggles or the fact that Wagenknecht, with conservative positions, had an enormous prominence fed by the media, always ready to fracture left-wing projects. These positions have scared away militants who were reluctant to approach the party or have left it in recent years.

It is, therefore, an opportunity to reconnect with people who were once in Die LINKE and ended up disenchanted, but also to attract SPD and Green voters who do not share their pro-war and anti-immigration policies. Last week, Social Democrat Chancellor Scholz was quoted on the front page of the well-known journal Der Spiegel with the slogan “it’s time to deport people on a large scale”, a slogan used in the past by far-right parties such as AfD or the neo-Nazi NPD. Meanwhile, the Greens have abandoned any policy that really fights climate change, wanting to maintain the capitalist system, painted with an eco varnish, as well as shamelessly nurturing warmongering. In this situation, Die LINKE, freed of burden, can offer itself as a party of the left, anti-capitalism, and in solidarity with migrants. In this regard, the party leadership proposed in the summer the captain and activist Carola Rackete as a candidate together with Schirdewan for the European elections in 2024, something that would be ratified in one month’s time at the Federal Congress of Die LINKE in Augsburg.

These will be difficult weeks in the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, the party’s headquarters, as well as in every other party headquarters for its approximately 55,000 members. Yet, Die LINKE should now be able to set out on the road with renewed unity in a world that lives in the constant crises of capitalism, which is approaching the abyss of no return in climate matters, and in which war is taking on a very dangerous protagonism. In this context, Die LINKE is still needed in Germany and a left-wing project still has a place. The new BSW project, however, is not and will not be.

This article first appeared in Spanish in mundo obrero. Translation: Jaime Martinez Porro. Reproduced with permission