The Left Berlin News & Comment

This is the archive template

“Western Decline Is Not the Decline of the So-called Rest of the World”

Interview with Henry Urmann, co-author of Poetic Justice of the Global South: An analysis of the Scandal Picture People’s Justice by Taring Padi

Phil Butland
18/11/2024

Hello, Henry. Thanks for talking to us. Could you start by introducing yourself?

My name is Henry Urmann. I live in Frankfurt. I am married to an Indonesian woman and that’s how I took an interest in Indonesian culture. As many others, I was outraged by the—I have to say—xenophobic media and political response to the documenta fifteen. With a dear friend, Hans-Jürgen Weißbach, we started to do some research and published our book last year. We also started a blog, www.peoplesjustice.de. And hopefully next year we can hold an exhibition to show and explain the painting to the German public.

The so-called “documenta scandal” has suddenly come back into the news in Germany, after the government justified pushing through an antisemitism resolution because of “antisemitic scandals like those of the Berlinale and documenta”. For people who haven’t been following this, what happened at Documenta?

At documenta, Indonesian artists, the Indonesian curators and organisers were accused of antisemitism, and it was claimed that several pieces of art contained antisemitic visual code. The explanations of the curators and artists were not taken into full consideration.

The painting that caused the outrage was created by the Indonesian art collective Taring Padi 20 years ago. Members of Taring Padi were participants in the democratic overthrow of the last dictator of Indonesia in 1998. At the documenta they were pressured to remove this huge painting of 100 square metres which was in the middle of Friedrichsplatz in Kassel. In the documenta exhibitions before, the artworks which were placed in Friedrichsplatz became part of the art canon so this was really significant. Removing works of art is something that authoritarian governments do. It was a blatant act of censorship that we had to wrap our heads around.

How did German media and German politics react to the mural?

Without further investigation, they repeated the most superficial and raw accusations against People’s Justice. This was to be expected from the notorious Bild Zeitung, but what was fascinating and shocking was that the allegations were also expressed by the left liberal media, like taz, Frankfurter Allgemeine or Süddeutsche Zeitung.

People who would usually be seen as moderate and even very progressive participants in the debate, like Meron Mendel, took a hard line against this painting and accused the whole of documenta of having an antisemitic atmosphere.

Specifically, the accusation was that part of the mural had antisemitic content. What was your answer to that accusation?

It remains a tricky thing to depict a Jewish character with the insignia of the SS. I am convinced that it was painted with a very provocative intention to display the realities of a nasty world where victims like Henry Kissinger who lost a big part of his family in the Holocaust can become monsters while they fight their monsters.

What happened next was that not just Taring Padi were banned—there was also censorship of other artists who were exhibiting at Documenta. How did that happen?

Taring Padi were not completely banned. They still held a big exhibition in the Hallenbad Ost. But other artworks were also criticised. There were demands to end the documenta completely and demands to remove other pieces of art for being antisemitic.

And there was a public hostility towards the community of foreign artists from the Global South fueled by German politicians. In his opening speech, [German president Frank-Walter] Steinmeier said that there are boundaries, and that these boundaries were crossed. [Author: Steinmeier accused documenta of “thoughtless and reckless approach to the State of Israel.”]

The artists and other participants of the opening event were appalled by this initial statement and the climate it helped to create. The British artist Hamja Ahsan expressed this when our chancellor, Olaf Scholz refused to visit documenta.

How did you get personally involved?

Our friends in the German-Indonesian community in Frankfurt were quite upset about the behaviour of the artists themselves. They criticised the artists for not defending themselves in response to the media coverage. They found the artists’ response to be too weak and also dishonest. This viewpoint is also shared by some people who were working at documenta. They said there was a lack of contextualization and of explanation.

They were also outraged, of course, at the accusations of antisemitism. These accusations did not only relate to the artists and the artwork, but also to the whole community. My friends were shell shocked by the turn of events, the statements of Steinmeier, and the defamation of the artists and the artwork.

After we talked about it in our circle of German-Indonesian friends, I started researching a little bit deeper into Indonesian history. I looked at the People’s Justice painting, and I had an idea. The painting depicts concrete historical figures, like Henry Kissinger, Muammar al-Gaddafi, and Queen Elizabeth. That helped me to understand the painting, but also the strange reaction of the artists.

In the book, we first focus on everything that is depicted in the painting. It contains so many references to art history, Pop Culture and the Indonesian understanding of their history and world history after World War Two.

So we explain what’s depicted in the painting, the whole narrative. We explain the historic context of when the painting was made, following 9/11 and during the war on terror, which began in Afghanistan. We explain how this played out in Indonesia at that time. We also talk a little bit about the artists, the Taring Padi collective and their friends and the whole art scene there.

We also give an interpretation of how this weird kind of coalition developed that we see now, between the Springer Presse and the ‘woke’ Left came into being.

Do you see a parallel between what happened at documenta and the current discussion about ‘cancel culture’?

Definitely, it’s part of cancel culture. I think Salman Rushdie explained very well in his speech last year about the cancel culture that comes from the Left and from the Right.

Do you think it’s the same thing? Do you think the Left and Right are as bad as each other?

I think that while the right-wing cancel culture is an authoritarian response to the current crisis, this left-wing cancel culture which has a bit of a Kamala Harris vibe, but is also fueled by this specific German arrogance and sense of superiority. We call it politisch-korrekte Fremdenfeindlichkeit in our book, ‘woke xenophobia’ you could say, stereotyping people from the Global South with misogyny, authoritarianism and antisemitism.

This all happened in 2022. It was a long time before October 7th. How do you think attitudes in the art world have changed since?

I think it’s very clear now to more people than before, that the charge of antisemitism is weaponized against opinions and art that does not fit into a certain narrative.

Surprisingly enough, even Stefan Ripplinger, one of the early anti-Deutsche who was co-founder of Jungle World, shared our interpretation of the painting in his new book, Kunst im Krieg. He clearly says now that the charge of antisemitism is weaponized—I know that even people in the Green Party see that this is happening in the parliament, and it’s happening everywhere.

Do you think this is a specifically German thing?

No. It’s also happening in the Anglo-Saxon world, just look at what Donald Trump plans with the universities.

What do you think the role of an artist is during a genocide?

The painting People’s Justice is dealing with the anticommunist genocide of millions of innocent civilians that happened in Indonesia in 1965, 1966. A mass murder programme with the complicity of the western powers and under the cover of the western media. Does that sound familiar?

Reflecting on this trauma the Indonesian artists of Taring Padi created a strong message about the state violence in the last cold war. The painting emphasises the transnational character of the perpetrators and therefore the necessity of transnational solidarity and remembrance, it’s warning the spectator of complicity and also shows a path towards reconciliation and a future where victims and victimizers can live together peacefully again.

Going back to the question about what the artist should do, art is never simplistic and does not contain only one message. Art is the effort to turn something bad into something good. I think what always changes in times of crisis is that in good times, an artist sees life through the lens of art. And In a time of crisis, you see art through the lens of your life. You may come to different conclusions.

Documenta is a long running institution. The event in 2022 was the 15th documenta. Do you think the festival can survive the scandal?

There was a struggle about the code of conduct, and it ended with a compromise, which everyone can live with at the moment. The artists are not supposed to sign anything or give a big declaration that they will do this or not do that. It was on the verge of collapse, but I hope the next documenta in 2027 will go smoothly.

Will all artists take part? There’s been talk of boycotting both documenta and Germany.

I’m a very optimistic person in general. Since the Ampel-coalition started, we’ve seen a lot of well intentioned, badly executed things going on in Germany. I can’t yet imagine that things will continue like this much longer. But of course there is a realistic danger that artists will turn away from Germany.

Although it looks like we won’t have an Ampel-coalition for much longer

For me the bigger context is what documenta and the Ampel-coalition stood for. Look, I am from Frankfurt and there we achieved to become this cosmopolitan, progressive and prospering city not with, but of immigrants. My hopes for Germany to get there are diminished for some time to come and that has to do with this xenophobic climate that the documenta scandal helped to produce.

To finish off, could we go back to where we started? Documenta was cited as a reason for the antisemitism resolution. What does this resolution mean for the progressive immigrant country that you’re talking about?

Like I said, it’s just another well-intentioned, badly executed piece of politics. I don’t know what it will bring. We had a BDS resolution that did not have a very strong influence in Germany. You can’t push out the reality of mainstream opinions in other countries for too long. It doesn’t work. Like you can’t have a Linke that is the only socialist party in the world that does not express solidarity with Palestine.

We are still excluding the world, and excluding the mainstream opinions of other countries. But people consume media from different countries. This has to be part of the German debate again, and I’m sure it will. It’s going to happen after the war and the violence come to an end, and this will come to an end.

You have said a couple of times that you’re hopeful. With everything that’s going on, how can you keep hope?

Understanding the Indonesian perspective, studying and deciphering this painting was an incredible pleasure and I was just in Indonesia, not only the weather, but also the political and economical outlook is so much brighter than here. They had the best 20 years of their last 500 years. They are looking at a bright future.

We are having so much trouble coming to terms with the fact that while, of course, the Holocaust was the most terrible event of the 20th century, decolonization was the most important one. One event makes you incredibly pessimistic, the other fills you with hope. And this is still an ongoing process.

So optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect?

No, it’s like a double vision. Western decline is not the decline of the so-called rest of the world which is now the majority of the world. There is a prosperous world out there. We have to accept that there are not only amazing artists in Indonesia, in Africa, in Latin America, China and in the Middle East. But there are also more scientists, doctors, managers and pilots in all these countries than in Europe and USA.

We can’t unmake the past, but the future for the global majority is bright. That’s also what I see expressed in the painting.

The DNC had a lousy Strategy for countering Trump

How could Kamala Harris lose the election so badly?

Luke Hosford
17/11/2024

One week on from Trump’s win over Kamala Harris, the dust begins to settle around the American election and explanations are becoming clearer. With a loss this embarrassing, there are thankfully plenty of reasons to go around. Most obviously rising to the top is that the Democratic party gave working people no reason to believe they will ever change their material conditions, but also that they actively act against and do not respect those people they are supposed to represent. They also cannot be trusted to do so in the future.

Starting with the old truism in American elections, the economy played an important role. Many voters from important swing states stated this as an important reason for their dissatisfaction with the Biden administration. And Harris was unable to distance herself from this record. How could she? Undemocratically hoisted to the top of the ticket once Biden’s decline became too obvious for his aides to conceal any longer, she was obviously the establishment pick. This was exacerbated by her extreme un-likability as a candidate. At the start of her term as vice president, her likability ratings were below 10%. Back then, the administration limited her public appearances to the point where people were wondering where she had gone. This was also evidenced by her uncharismatic public appearances. In an appearance on “The View”, she was unable to think of any way she would deviate from any Biden administration policy. This was grist to Trump’s mill, and his campaign plagued swing state voters with this clip. This article does not suggest that a Trump administration has any answers to inflation, but his campaign did understand the power of these genuine grievances.

This is the most obvious distinction between Biden’s 2020 campaign and Harris’s. The Biden campaign recognised the impact that populist economic messaging got from the popularity of Bernie Sanders. Sanders’ messages were clearly seen in the Biden campaign. This time around, there was not even an opportunity for these messages to penetrate the party. There was neither a competitive primary nor an open convention. This was substituted by an orchestrated propaganda event for wealthy donors who sought stability. Even Tim Walz, who gave hints at a more populist messaging when he first arrived, was soon relegated to the sidelines. Harris went back to the 2016 tack of trying not to alienate mythical moderate Republicans by highlighting endorsements from similarly unpopular vice presidents, their offspring, and celebrities. As Jonathan Pie pointed out, unless Leonardo DiCaprio has a movie to promote, no one really cares what he has to say.

This strategy has failed twice now. Instead of bringing new voters into this coalition, it serves to alienate those who are supposed to be part of it. The biggest cause of this defeat was not a Trump victory because he lost 1 million votes from 2020, rather it was a Harris loss, where she lost over 10 million votes from Biden in 2020. This resembles the recent UK election, where Starmer’s Labour won a comprehensive majority with fewer votes than they got under Corbyn. They just weren’t as unpopular as their opponents. Hardly a thrilling victory for democracy.

This apathy was most obvious when asking voters about the pummelling of Gaza using US-made weapons and US taxpayer money. Then voters expressed disbelief that money could be spared for international wars in Gaza and Ukraine, but not to fully fund FEMA through the hurricane season. A YouGov poll found that a weapons embargo was more popular than unpopular in both Pennsylvania and Arizona. The later hearty congratulations offered to Trump by Netanyahu makes you wonder what political benefit Harris thought this genocidal policy would grant them.

It was, in one way, promising to see US imperial policy finally getting attention at the ballot box. Because many voters from the Blue Wall justifiably reasoned that they cannot express support for a president currently funding genocide and with no likelihood of stopping this policy. These voters had already made this clear before, as over 100,000 voted ‘uncommitted’ in the Michigan Democratic primary instead of voting for Joe Biden. That in a state that Biden had won in the Presidential election by only 150,000 votes against Trump. The reaction to this apathy by the Democrats was truly appalling. There was no place for Palestinian-Americans at the DNC, those protesting genocide at Harris’s rallies were shouted down. Her notorious put-down – “I’m speaking” – was ceremoniously turned into merch. Then voters in these states were lectured at by former war criminals or their relatives Bill Clinton and Liz Cheney. In the south end of Dearborn, Michigan, an area which is over 90% Muslim, and which voted for Biden by 88% in 2020, Trump won with just over 40% of the vote.

As if this record was not horrible enough, the reaction to this loss should be enough of a reason for working-class voters to vacate the Democratic Party. Those not voting for Harris were classed as sexist by some commentators. This take does not hold up, unless we assume these people took a break from their sexism to vote Democrat in 2020, and also voted Democrat in this cycle’s Senate and House races. As well as also supporting abortion ballot measures, but without casting a vote for Harris. Voters have also been labelled as racist and young men have also taken a share of the blame.

Professional spin doctors claim the progressive era is over, and that the Democrats need to go more conservative. I would like to know when this progressive era began. What do these spin doctors think a progressive agenda looks like? How much more conservative could the campaign get? The Democrats had already adopted the same border policy as Republicans and promised to put some of them in their cabinet.

The Democratic Party serves the interests of the wealthy. They prompted the decision to force Biden to step aside and the influence of wealthy donors was seen in the days and weeks leading up to election day. While these wealthy elites benefit from the fiscal austerity of a Republican government, they operate in social circles that would make that position untenable. The Harris campaign raised and spent over $1 billion on this campaign, with the biggest SuperPAC raising over $700 million. Where did all this money go? They were so desperate to spend some of this money they were even sending shocking text messages on election day. In reality, most of this money will flow back to consultants, with one of these companies earning $48 million over the past two years supporting Democratic PACs.

These people do not have working people’s interests at heart, and it is long time that Americans search for and create a socialist alternative.

“I believe that there is going to be a wave of deportations coming soon.”

Interview with Nadija Samour, Senior Legal Advisor for the European Legal Support Centre about Germany’s new Antisemitism Resolution and its implications

Phil Butland
16/11/2024

Hi, Nadija. We’ve spoken to each other a lot recently, but just one more time. Can you introduce yourself?

Yes. My name is Nadija Samour. I’m a lawyer specialized in criminal defence law, and I am also the Senior Legal Advisor for the European Legal Support Center (ELSC), an organization that supports Palestine activists in their rights and in their organizing.

Today we’re talking about the new antisemitism resolution. What is it that’s just been passed in the Bundestag?

It is called “Never again is now—protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany”. It’s a non-binding motion in the German parliament, the Bundestag, which has been brought forward by all the parties. I believe that Die Linke had their own resolution, but it wasn’t accepted. The majority of all the parties voted for the resolution. The BSW [Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht] voted against, and there were some abstentions from other parties, but the majority voted in favour.

The content of this motion says that it aims to protect Jewish life, but what it actually does is, yet again, conflate antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and sees all criticism of Israel as being antisemitic. It instrumentalizes the struggle against antisemitism to forward very problematic, almost fascistic elements, such as allowing certain violations of constitutional rights like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the arts, and academic freedoms.

It says that anything which allegedly has antisemitic content should be banned, it should lose funding, it should be outlawed, it should be persecuted, and more.

In the justification for the resolution it says that it is trying to stop antisemitic acts “such as those at the Berlinale and Dokumenta 15”. Can you explain what that’s about and why?

That’s a very good question, because that’s also part of the problem. This non-binding motion aims to cement a certain narrative that is very far from what has actually happened—not only referring to the Berlinale or Dokumenta, but also to the entire history of the occupation of Palestine, and specifically about what happened on 7th October 2023.

The case at the Berlinale was an absolutely ridiculous incident. If it wasn’t so serious, it would really be laughable. Two filmmakers from Palestine—one anti-Zionist Israeli journalist and one Palestinian—came to present their film, No Other Land, for which they got an award. They gave a very good speech which drew attention to the genocide in Gaza and to the to apartheid that is suppressing Palestinians.

The Israeli journalist said that when he goes back he can move freely in the territory, whereas his companion, the Palestinian filmmaker, will be suppressed by checkpoints, by the wall, by the unlawful and discriminatory permit system, and more.

This speech, as it deserved, got standing ovations. Claudia Roth, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media also stood up and clapped. Later, Bild Zeitung picked this up and wrote that Claudia Roth and all the others in the audience applauded an antisemitic speech.

Of course there was nothing antisemitic about the speech, just as there’s nothing antisemitic about drawing attention to Israeli violence against Palestinians in all its forms. Genocide is the most severe form, but there is also the permit system, the wall, the checkpoints, the occupation, the siege, and house demolitions. All of these are well-documented violations by the Israeli authorities against the Palestinian people.

Claudia Roth then tried to get out of this by saying that she only applauded for the Israeli filmmaker and not for the Palestinian one, which an online commenter called clapartheid. I found that very amusing.

There was also a very smart subversive action. We don’t know who this hero was, but someone who had access to the Berlinale social media published some posts in solidarity with Palestine under the Berlinale logo. It appeared that this was the official standpoint of the Berlinale. It was not, but we’re talking about artists here. Artists are very creative. And this was a form of artistic direct action.

Claudia Roth has a problem anyway, as even the Jewish-Israeli journalist involved in making the film was accused of antisemitism. It seems once more that white, Christian Germans are telling Jewish people what is and what isn’t antisemitism.

Yes, that is something unfortunate, and also something which has become a pattern. We have all these so-called officers against antisemitism, like Felix Klein and Samuel Salzborn, none of Jewish origin, trying to define, yet again, what a Jew is.

Our Jewish anti-Zionist comrades have much more to say about that, but I believe that the issue here really is that if the German state says it wants to protect Jewish life, and then deliberately excludes anti-Zionist Jews, and excludes the idea that anti-Zionism is a Jewish tradition, then it also excludes those Jews from protection.

This has happened. We’ve seen violent attacks on our anti-Zionist comrades, police violence, and the freezing of the Jüdische Stimme bank account twice. We’ve seen defamation in the media. We’ve seen the Minister for Interior Affairs trying to portray them as Islamists, when she justified the banning of the Palestine Congress, saying that it has been organized by Islamists.

We all know that the Jüdische Stimme was one of the main organizers of the Palestine Congress. They were providing the bank account, and they were the official organization that registered the congress. All of this is used to say that there are good Jews and bad Jews. There are Jews that deserve protection and Jews that obviously do not deserve protection. And if this isn’t antisemitic, then I don’t know what it is.

Let’s move on to BDS, because the ELSC wants to highlight this. We’ve already had a Bundestag resolution on BDS four or five years ago. What’s new with this one?

The wording is much more intense. It has more what I would call “carceral language”. This resolution says for example that it calls the government to ban BDS – a demand that is clearly unconstitutional. A lot of German and international civil society actors have come out against the resolution for good reasons like the ones I have mentioned already, but we at the ELSC saw that it´s important to raise awareness on the attack on BDS.

I think it’s important to amplify that by including, yet again, the aim of criminalizing BDS into this resolution—especially in the historic moment we are in now—it really shows that Germany is resolute in disrespecting international law, human rights law, and its own constitution.

In the meantime, since the passing of the BDS motion in 2019, we have won all legal cases related to the attempted banning of BDS. For example the cases related to banning or defunding certain events or refusing public locations for events, or the threat of deportation of people for supporting BDS. We won those cases because of these defendants’ activism for BDS, and that is a very important fact. The issue event went up to the European level. The European Court for Human Rights decided in 2020, that the right to BDS is protected by the European Convention for Human Rights. And several UN Special Rapporteurs have intervened and called the German government to stop its attacks on BDS.

Meanwhile, the International Court of Justice [ICJ], passed an advisory opinion, basically calling for BDS. The fact that Germany is yet again trying to criminalize BDS is now also a clear show of disrespect for international law and for the findings of the International Court of Justice.

What has also happened since the motion was passed in 2019 is that the Bundestag’s very own research and academic service, the wissenschaftlicher Dienst [scientific service], said that if you made the anti-BDS resolution into a law, it would be unconstitutional.

You cannot ban the campaign, because it’s an expression of an opinion. You cannot ban any association linked with BDS. You cannot base any form of persecution on this resolution. They must know better. And yet, here we are, once again, reading about the attempt to punish BDS. They say things that are not only unrealistic but really unlawful.

Can you say something about Germany? We have this BDS resolution, which wasn’t a law, and as you said, you have won every case against it since. Does this mean it didn’t have any effect?

That is the issue here. Some people like myself keep on emphasizing that it’s not a legally binding resolution. But that’s the problem. The problem with this resolution that we have now, but also the anti-BDS resolution of 2019, plus the resolution of 2019 which aims at implementing the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism, are all not binding. They deliberately create legal grey zones.

If it was binding, if it was a law, we would go against it. The law would be squashed. The Constitutional Court would say it’s unlawful, it’s unconstitutional, and that’s that. But since this resolution is just an expression of an opinion of the Bundestag, it’s not tangible.

And yet it’s used by ministries and the official funds for the arts, for academics, and for all projects that are dependent on public support and public funding. They will go through scrutiny, including scrutiny by the secret service to determine whether this project or this person or this institution deserves funding.

They might reject your project, and you cannot even go against it because no one has a legal claim to public funding. You will basically be at their mercy, and have to hope that they don’t find you or your project antisemitic. But there’s no binding regulation.

It’s also very intransparent. Sometimes we have cases where a project has nothing to do with Palestine, but the person who’s applying once signed an open letter in support of a BDS campaign. That makes you, as a person, the issue and not the project. And so you cannot do anything against it.

That is the chilling effect which it’s having on people. People are actually being intimidated. For those who speak out, the price they pay is very high. I wonder how many people do not speak out because they know exactly what they might face and that they cannot go against it.

In most cases, it would be difficult to go against it. You would have to have proof. You have to have money and time and resources to really fight, but there are so many cases where you are stuck in this legal grey zone and you cannot really fight back.

Is this something which just affects artists?

Not only artists. It affects academics. It affects all kinds of cultural workers. It affects teachers. It might also affect university students and school children depending on the project. It can also affect any other employee in the private sector, which is very scary because the resolution aims at addressing public institutions like ministries or foundations, but also private companies have started to scrutinize their employees.

There have been numerous reports of multinational companies trying to suppress their employees’ opinions in the intranet or wherever they communicate, with regard to Palestine. People can have their contracts terminated for no reason if they are on probation, for example.

A very worrying case is people with no German or EU citizenship, so-called third country residencies—refugees, international students, or other migrants. The resolution we’re talking about is going to cement the use of migration law as a form of persecution.

People will have to answer to the Auslanderbehörde—the immigration office—if they renew their visa. If people want to apply for German citizenship, they will have to answer questions on their positions on Palestine or on the BDS campaign.

These immigration offices are already going through people’s social media accounts. They are already gathering information on people’s opinions online, and this is already the law and the normal procedure. They are already asking the police and the secret service and the prosecutor’s office for information about this person. It is very likely that people will have to go through security checks with questions related to BDS and Palestine.

And this is against the background where all the main parties from the SPD and Greens to the AfD are already calling for mass deportations

Absolutely, exactly. They’re paving the way for that. My colleague, Alexander Gorski calls Faeser’s migration policy the most right wing and authoritarian one since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany. The SPD Minister for the Interior is responsible for the most severe, the most authoritarian, backwards, reactionary migration policy of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The Palestinian as a figure—anyone who looks like a Palestinian, or is in solidarity with Palestine, or comes from a country where Palestine solidarity is the norm, basically the entire global South—serves for these anti-migration, anti-asylum policies and laws as a figure which is scary, dangerous, antisemitic, misogynistic, and homophobic—all of these features that they try to portray us with. This reminds us of the older, colonial idea of the barbarians. That´s what is meant when they discuss so-called imported antisemitism.

I didn’t look at the Bundestag debate about the resolution, because I really have no nerve to listen to all of these racist speeches. The AfD basically thanked the Green Party for this resolution. This served them on a silver platter the ability to deport people and feel good about it.

What is your advice to people who don’t have secure residency and are active on social media? Should they be scared, or is deleting everything you post giving into the pressure?

I do understand the importance for some people of social media presence, but honestly for me this isn’t political organizing, and it really doesn’t matter what you personally think. It is really not important. I think it’s better to be organized in an organization, and that organization uses its public appearance on social media for political education and for mobilizing.

It’s not giving in, but it’s a form of clever protection of you as an individual. You don’t have to put yourself at risk because the price is high and it’s real. It’s really real. We’re not exaggerating. I believe that there is going to be a wave of deportations coming soon.

The question is not only a matter of Germany’s politics on Palestine, but how they will move forward with the Syrian refugees. A lot of Syrian refugees are faced with these forms of intimidation by the immigration authorities, but they cannot be deported because we all know that the situation in Syria is awful. The regime is still arresting people and oppressing people, and the army is still harassing people at the checkpoints

So people aren’t currently being deported to Syria. But what about people with other citizenships? People from other Arab countries where you don’t get refugee status so easily. I wouldn’t risk it, honestly, because it’s also not worth it.

Sorry, this is my general social media bashing. I really just don’t believe in it, and I don’t see the value of people as individuals sharing these kinds of things. It’s always better to organize and be part of a bigger collective. It protects you, and it has much more power.

Although people should share this interview on social media.

[laughs] Well, I am the one who could be deported if I didn’t have German citizenship.

One of the things about the latest attacks by Germany is that they are going for more than just a small number of Palestinians and their close friends. More people are being attacked, which means that more people can be brought into the resistance. On the other hand, the level of active opposition, even to this law, is relatively low. How can we change that?

First of all, I think we should really share this observation that more and more major civil society organizations are speaking out, such as Amnesty International. I am positively surprised about this, and I support this development. We shouldn’t forget that. This is the result of work and solidarity and pressure. People have been working on these institutions to open their mouths.

I also believe that it’s important to underline that a lot of public figures have spoken out against this resolution in particular, but also university professors, lecturers, and academics who are supporting the students. They may not be using the exact wording that we would have liked to see—they didn’t even mention Palestine, for example—but they said that students should be protected, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly should be protected, and the police shouldn’t be called on students by their own university administration.

Public lecturers are also now targeted by this resolution, and yet, these people have spoken out again. There are a lot of researchers who have provided a lot of insights about how the IHRA resolution should not be implemented, about its shortcomings, and how it is in violation of the Constitution. I want to shout out to all of these people who still do this, who still speak out, knowing that they will face backlash.

When you ask me what can be done, I think one more aspect is: don’t underestimate international pressure. I think international pressure on Germany is something that could work. In the past year, Germany has already been downgraded in an EU-wide civil liberties report because of its treatment of climate activists and Palestine activists.

I also think that international campaigns, together with comrades in countries where we know that Palestine solidarity is the norm, can help, for example, in Ireland, perhaps Spain and Belgium, but also internationally, like South Africa. In the end, they all sit together with Germany in certain institutions like the UN or other international bodies. Germany should be put under international pressure, because I don’t think that pressure here alone is working.

And when you ask me how we can bring more people into taking action, I would say make the movement bigger. When we talk about that repression, we should discuss it under the framework of the general right wing shift in this society. Palestine isn’t an isolated issue. We’re talking about attacks on refugees. We’re talking about attacks on constitutional rights. We’re talking about police violence and the ever increasing mandates of the Secret Service and the army.

They’re discussing preparing for war, and reinstating the draft. Germany is on its way to becoming, yet again, this grand nation with a Platz an der Sonne—a place in the sun. It’s this colonial idea of being among the big imperialist nations in this world. This resolution, alongside the discussion on so-called Staatsräson, is nothing but building a nationalist identity of Germany and normalizing imperialism and militarism.

We have to connect these thoughts, and see Palestine within the bigger picture. And at the same time we should not stop talking about Palestine or about Gaza and the genocide. Repression mostly has the aim of distracting us and intimidating us. We cannot allow this while we see the genocide unfolding. I know that people are very brave and very courageous and very much in solidarity, and I know they see exactly those points that I mentioned, but I believe we should keep on reminding ourselves.

What can you say to the people reading this interview? They are likely to be living here in Germany. Some will have a German passport, some won’t. What’s the next thing they should do?

Organise. I say this every interview. It’s almost boring, but I cannot accept us to despair and to be afraid, because then fascism has won. I do see that everyone has different things to give and different prices to pay, and this should be absolutely considered. This is why I keep on underlining that the collective has the power and the collective serves as a protection.

I always mention this one example in the past that really shows us that so-called vulnerability isn’t always a criterion. I talk about the occupation of a church here in Berlin in 1982 where Palestinian refugees who fled the Lebanese war and the Israeli invasion came to Germany and were about to be deported. They were fighting for their right to stay because they couldn’t go back. The Israelis had occupied Lebanon.

What they did in their quote, unquote “vulnerable status” of people not having any residency rights or refugee rights, was to squat a church, with the support of the church personnel. From within the church they said we want to stay and we have rights, and you have to grant us asylum. And they won.

I mention this because I think they did the most radical action possible, and they won. They didn’t ask the question: can I afford this? What could be the consequences? What if I have a family? I have different obligations, I am very scared and very vulnerable. They were put in that situation where, you know, you have nothing to lose but your chains.

Thanks for talking to us Nadija. I hope we can talk again soon.

Who benefits from imperialism?

Joseph Choonara responds to Vinit R’s critique, and argues for an internationalist proletarianism

Joseph Choonara
15/11/2024

It was slightly odd to see my introductory, half-hour talk on whether the working class of the “global north” benefit from imperialism subjected to an extensive written rebuttal — as if it were a learned treatise on political economy. Odder still is that the author, Vinit R, fills in some of the blanks by “guessing” at my “historic motivations”.

As I’ve long acknowledged, my own strand of Marxist political economy has a way to go in theorising value on the global terrain. I am no stranger to challenges to the kind of position I advanced. There are some sophisticated versions of dependency theory, engagement with which benefits us all. Sadly, much of R’s contribution did not fit into this category. I found it confusing and illogical, but I will try to respond as best I can.

A brief note on terminology is perhaps helpful as a preliminary. R criticises me for discussing Saudi Arabia and similar states under the rubric of “global south”. Here I’ve put both that term and “global north” in scare-quotes because, as I thought I made clear, they reduce the complexity of global capitalism to homogenous blocs. Unfortunately, the framework of dependency theory, with its schema of “core”, “periphery”, “semi-periphery”, or the simplistic binary of “imperialist” vs. “dominated” countries, requires we resort to such terminology in mounting a critique. I’m fully aware that Saudi Arabia is not a poor country, for Saudi citizens at least; that was my point. For what it’s worth, back in 1975, Immanuel Wallerstein did include both Saudi Arabia and Iran in his list of “semi-peripheral” states. This helps demonstrate the limits of such frameworks.

Imperialism

Large portions of R’s response are devoted to explaining how capitalists in the “global north” might benefit from imperialism. This is hardly contentious — it is implicit in the whole theory of imperialism, going back to Vladimir Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin and many other Marxists who contributed to its foundation.

More contentious is the way we theorise imperialism. I don’t know when R thinks I argued that “Marxian analyses of the utility of colonialism were fringe tankie opinions.” I’m not even quite sure what he means. I was clear on the horrific impact of colonialism. Formal colonies are, of course, rarer today than they once were; however, I don’t think imperialism is identical to colonialism. Following authors such as Alex Callinicos, I instead view imperialism as the intersection of two forms of capitalist competition: economic and geopolitical (see for example his 2009 work Imperialism and Global Political Economy). One of the problems in Marxist discussions of imperialism is a widespread tendency to reduce imperialism to mere economic antagonism between states or blocs.

The contemporary system takes the form of a hierarchy of capitalist states engaged in these two intersecting forms of competition. This includes the major global power, the USA, and below it other imperialisms such as Britain, Russia, China or France. A little lower comes a range of regional imperialist powers, sometimes called sub-imperialisms, that seek to play an imperialist role in their own backyard — Saudi Arabia would be a good example, so too would Iran or Turkey. Finally, there are states that lack this capacity, but would probably wish to acquire it and join the ranks of powers higher up the hierarchy.

R seems to accept Rosa Luxemburg’s alternative conceptualisation, developed in The Accumulation of Capital, in which imperialism helps provide an outlet for capital, offsetting regular crises driven by deficient demand. I don’t agree with Luxemburg’s theory of crisis and hence have differences with her theorisation of imperialism. Many Marxists, including those otherwise sympathetic to Luxemburg — such as Bukharin, Tony Cliff, Chris Harman or Alex Callinicos — have produced wise and scholarly criticisms of her approach. Rather than repeating their points, I’ll leave readers to consult them for themselves.

Chinese exceptionalism

China features prominently in these debates. I have no idea why R finds my claim that China’s development is exceptional to be “iffy”. The growth of Chinese industry is without parallel in the modern world. True, other states will try to follow a similar path or already emulate elements of China’s model. Also true, China has learnt much from other East Asian states and indeed the failure of “shock therapy” in the former Soviet Union. But to go from contributing 2% to global GDP to almost 20% in four decades is exceptional. India, starting from roughly the same level, has reached about 8% while Brazil’s share has barely changed.

Contrary to what R suggests, I don’t have any problem explaining China’s growth. After all, I do not share the rigid conceptions of dependency theory, which struggle to offer explanations for the Chinese breakthrough. Within my political tradition, China is regarded as a state-capitalist economy in the years immediately following 1949. As this model ran up against its limits, from the 1970s, China’s rulers undertook a series of reforms, both restructuring the state-owned sector and driving vast rural populations into cities, ripe for exploitation. This allowed the country’s ruling class to offer China as a platform for the manufacturing activities of foreign capital — first from elsewhere in Asia, then on a global scale. The Chinese ruling class oversaw the development of a hybrid economy, blending state and private capital through which they could industrialise, eventually allowing them to establish a significant internal market and to try to rise up the “value chain”, successfully in some areas. This comes with all the growing contradictions, crises, class tensions and conflicts a good Marxist would anticipate. (Adrian Budd’s 2024 work, China: Rise, Repression and Resistance offers a fuller account.)

On this basis, China has become a major centre of capital accumulation — and is developing the military and political clout one would expect of a major imperialist power. This is entirely consistent with my approach, which, as noted, sees imperialism as a hierarchical arrangement of interlocking capitalist powers, each aspiring to improve their position in the global order — often failing, sometimes succeeding. China’s success comes because it had, partially based on earlier state-capitalist development, sufficient resources and infrastructure, as well as a huge population of potential wage labourers, as well as a powerful state-capitalist bureaucracy who chose an effective path (if the goal was the rapid accumulation of capital), and an auspicious moment in global political economy in which multinationals sought to build extensive global production networks extending, selectively, into areas of the “global south”.

This type of explanation is superior to one limiting itself to explaining the movement of capital due to rising productivity and wages in the “global north” depressing profits. Such explanations beg the question: why China? As I suggest there are concrete reasons why China, not some other country, was able to make this breakthrough. As it has done so, it has started to share some benefits of the “clustering” effect of capital I described in my talk in relation to the “global north”.

Rents, profits and capitalists

R’s central argument about flows of wealth into the “global north” lies in a series of passages in a section entitled “capital” that I found largely incomprehensible. He makes an odd assortment of points. We are told that “highly skilled workers” in countries such as Britain “generate massive profits”. However, “some” (how many…?) workers in the “tertiary sector” aren’t very productive because it is hard to automate serving coffee in cafés or school teaching. And there aren’t many people working in manufacturing in Britain (who knew…).

I think the idea here is that not much wealth is being generated internally by the British economy, so it must be coming from somewhere else. If so, I disagree. Much of the British workforce is productive in the Marxist sense. Marx himself was clear that service-sector work undertaken by capital for profit generated new value, just like labour in manufacturing. (Incidentally, it is unclear why people treat cafés as some sort of pre-industrial zone untouched by automation, economies of scale, productivity drives, etc — have they never heard of Starbucks?) High levels of historical investment, along with the development of infrastructure and institutions such as those associated with the welfare state, made “northern” industries highly productive compared to their equivalents in the “south”. Like similar states, Britain is able, largely based on its internal generation of new value, to support a relatively well-off workforce and a relatively powerful capitalist class (even if Britain is a laggard when it comes to investment compared to its peers).

R is entitled to disagree, but then he needs to explain precisely how value arrives in the hands of the British capitalist class. We are told that the third volume of Capital sorts all this out because rent-like flows are used to channel surplus value from the “global south” to the “global north”. Maybe so, but how much and through what process? R doesn’t offer data but does suggest two specific mechanisms.

One is “financial capital” operating through organisations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in order to “tether the productive forces of the Global South to Northern credit lines”, destroying “state capacity” and forcing through “endless reforms”, in R’s words. It is indisputable that IMF structural adjustment programmes, imposed as a condition for debt bailouts, have done colossal damage, devastating many “southern” economies. Certainly, financial institutions in the “global north” seek to appropriate flows of surplus value from states and from capital in the “global south” in the form of interest payments. They also seek to appropriate flows of surplus value from states and capital in the “global north”. So, some empirical data might be useful here. How important are the specific flows from the “north” or “south”?

According to a study by UNCTAD, net transfer of financial resources from 134 “developing” countries to “developed” countries in 2017 was around $500 billion, a significant amount, but not decisive in explaining the gross inequalities that have developed and persist. It’s also worth noting in passing that among the very poorest countries, a fairly significant stream of debt payments goes to China. Moreover, the amount is far from constant in recent history. It has risen very considerably since the 1990s, and fallen from extremes which were reached in 2012, begging the question of how decisive a structural factor this is in explaining global inequality. If the wealth of the “global north” depended primarily on these relatively fickle flows, wouldn’t we expect riots on the streets when they slow?

Not only does this process supposedly play a decisive role in the global economy, it also, according to R, drove the creation of a domestic bourgeoisie in the “global south”. The resulting capitalists are dismissed as a tiny “comprador” bourgeoisie, profiting from exploitation but “shuffling” even bigger profits to “northern” capitalists. The “Bangladeshi mill-owner” is presented as a figure representing the entire Bangladeshi and wider “southern” bourgeoisie. The imbalances of power in these global textile value chains are well known. However, there are also myriad businesses that mobilise capital and exploit workers to produce goods and services aimed at the domestic market. Are these all funded by foreign loans? Are most of them? Does the bulk of the surplus value extracted from workers simply end up in interest payments? If so, why is it so limited in relation to the roughly $45,000 billion in GDP generated in the “emerging market and developing economies” of the “global south”? Such questions go unanswered.

We might also question when a “comprador” bourgeoisie becomes a “real” bourgeoisie. Chinese capitalists (and state capitalists) collaborated extensively with multinationals to help generate the country’s economic expansion. R mentions a “Chinese bourgeoisie who drew massive profits from the exploitation of Chinese workers, but also drove colossal economic growth for decades, effectively turning China into a microcosm of capitalism itself”. They don’t sound like a comprador bourgeoisie, although many were as much implicated in global value chains as the Bangladeshi mill-owner, although of a somewhat different structure. Are they just like the capitalists in the “north”, benefiting from the workings of imperialism and dependency? None of this is clear.

The other mechanism identified in channelling wealth “northwards” involves intellectual property. There is no debate about the ethics of pharmaceutical giants and states in the “global north” attempting to deny people in the “south” access to patented drugs. However, I don’t shed many tears for the wealthy and powerful Indian capitalists running the country’s powerful and lucrative pharma industry. Are they compradors too? The net worth of Dilip Shanghvi, founder of Sun Pharmaceuticals, is estimated at over $25 billion. I think we’re probably safe in regarding him as a capitalist pure and simple.

The wider issue of how best to integrate intellectual property into Marxist political economy is complex. There may, for instance, be rent-like aspects to Google’s near-monopoly on web-searches in many countries and its related capacity to sell advertising. However, I would venture that the mobilisation of capital and labour on a vast scale — far greater than the various auto manufacturing giants — also has something to do with its revenues.

The overarching problem is that there is little effort to empirically substantiate R’s claims that rent-like flows of income play a decisive role in explaining global inequality or to specify precise mechanisms for this. Sadly, vibes are not enough.

Labour and exploitation

The central problem I have with R’s argument, though, is not the claim that money might flow across borders to the advantage of “northern” capital, something I never had any issue with in the first place. Rather it is his claim that dependency theory does not replace “class” with “nation”, that it does not envisage exploitation as taking place between nations/regions. Here R makes a peculiar claim: “Yes, exploitation and expropriation do exist in the Global North. But the former is often offset through the receipt of wages higher than the surplus value generated by the worker.”

The word “often” is doing a lot of work here. How often? Is this a minority condition or the norm for workers in countries such as Britain? If it is just a minority of British workers, the intellectual edifice R is trying to construct quickly reduces itself to the tired old “labour aristocracy” argument. I won’t say much about this because the criticisms made by other authors are, in my opinion, devastating. (See, for instance, Kevin Corr and Andy Brown’s, “The Labour Aristocracy and the Roots of Reformism” in International Socialism 59; or Charles Post’s, “Exploring Working-Class Consciousness: A Critique of the Theory of the ‘Labour-Aristocracy’” in Historical Materialism 18:4.)

If “often” here means “most” British workers, it is hard to see how this does not replace class with nation. Why? Well, if workers receive wages covering not just the cost of reproducing their labour-power, but also (more than) the surplus value they generate, in what sense are they being “exploited”? The capitalist class would be making a negative profit from their “exploitation” of this “northern” labour. This is precisely a harmonious union of capital and labour, reconciled on the national terrain! As both capital and labour are receiving more than their share of surplus value there is hardly much basis for class conflict between them. Their shared national interest is indeed to “exploit” the rest of the world, to pump unremunerated value out of the “global south”.

Indeed, here I expected to see R link this to the extraction of value from the “global south”, which would at least be logically consistent. Instead, we get something much weirder. The burden “falls squarely onto a range of insecure populations: such as migrants, held captive to migration regimes that kill their capacity to organise, and allow capital to treat them as entirely disposable workers through the very enforceable threat of deportation”. These groups do not suffer exploitation but “expropriation”, which I take to mean that their property is taken from them.

It is hard to know what to make of this argument. The sole example given is migrant workers. A charitable interpretation would be that migrants in countries such as Britain are an extension of “global south” workers into the “global north”, but I don’t want to put words into R’s mouth. If he means migrants in countries such as Britain, where almost one in five workers is foreign born, are responsible for most of the wealth being generated here, that’s clearly implausible. This is not to minimise the oppression of migrants, many of whom labour in horrifying conditions for miserable wages — issues over which many of us have fought, alongside migrant workers (who don’t seem to have got the memo about their capacity to organise being “killed”).

However, the median income of foreign-born workers in Britain is marginally higher than that of British-born workers. Undoubtedly, this excludes pools of undocumented migrants or those engaged in illegal forms of work — but those activities tend to be concentrated in “sweated” industries that are not especially high value producing, so it is hard to see how they could form the core explanation for the relative wealth of “northern” workers. Similarly, foreign-born workers may experience higher levels of unemployment, but, by definition, this would not be a source of surplus value for British-born workers.

Whichever way one looks at this, it is hard to make sense of the argument. Impoverished migrants are “expropriated”, somehow generating large sums of money. This money is mysteriously passed by capitalists to other groups of workers through their wages, forming at least as much as the entire surplus value they generate. Meanwhile, various flows of income from a “southern” comprador bourgeoisie helps enrich “northern” capitalists.

Politics

Finally, what are the politics of all this? R makes clear that, in his view, workers in the “global north” have an interest in maintaining the impoverishment of the “global south” and striking deals with their own ruling class. “Capitalism is not going to be overthrown by British workers.” The “progression” towards figures such as Donald Trump or Sahra Wagenknecht is “inevitable”. Why bother to fight at all?

There are some comments appended about the horrors inflicted on the “global south” being imposed on “northern citizens” due to a “profitability crisis”, involving quantitative easing or privatisation (which R doesn’t seem to realise has been going on for over four decades in countries such as Britain). This makes it hard to understand whether, for him, the funnelling of surplus value into the pockets of those of us in the “north” results from specific features of contemporary capitalism or a more structural imperative within capitalism or imperialism. Fortunately, it doesn’t really matter, because, we are told, any radicalism will likely collapse back into “labour-capital compromise… at the cost of the Global South”.

It is precisely against such views — and to defend the best traditions of proletarian internationalism, in which the global working class share an interest in fighting capitalism and imperialism — that I directed my comments. Rr’s confused and confusing response convinces me that I was right to do so.

Dekoloniale

Memory Culture in the City

The Left Berlin
13/11/2024

The opening of the Dekoloniale Festival will take place this year from November 14th to 17th, 2024 in the districts of Berlin-Mitte and Berlin-Wedding.

On the evening of November 14th, we will open the decentralized exhibition Dekoloniale – what remains?! in the Museum Nikolaikirche together with the Stadtmuseum Berlin. Here, the five Dekoloniale Berlin Residents 2024 will show their group exhibition “Colonial Ghosts – Resistant Spirits. Church, Colonialism and Beyond” and the curatorial team will present the historical exhibition “Inscribed. Colonialism, Museum and Resistance.” The topics addressed in each case are Berlin’s centuries-long involvement in the global history of slavery and colonialism and the interventions of resistant personalities, which have not yet been recognized here.

November 15th, 2024 marks the 140th anniversary of the historic Berlin Conference of 1884/85. The discourse event Dekoloniale Berlin Africa Conference 2024 reflects this past and its effects on the present and brings together representatives from Africa and its global diasporas. They discuss the aftermath of the historic conference, which is now reflected here. Parallel to the main program, a series of practice-oriented, mostly target group-specific workshops will take place as part of the Dekoloniale Academy 2024. We will conclude the second day of the festival with the music theater piece Ecosystem by GROUP50:50 in the Maxim Gorki Theater.

On Saturday, November 16, the Dekoloniale Festival is organizing the all-day Dekoloniale City Tour as every year with many interesting historical and contemporary stops and corresponding interventions by our invited experts at the interfaces of science, art and activism.

On Saturday evening we will host this year’s closing party of the Dekoloniale Festival at our friends and colleagues SAVVY Contemporary in Wedding.

On Sunday, November 17, we will talk to our network partners and end the Dekoloniale Festival with lunch at the Gropius Bau.