The Left Berlin News & Comment

This is the archive template

Category: Campaign of the week

Stop Deportation! Protest Camp

Join the Protest Camp against Deportations!


31/05/2023

At the Berlin-Brandenburg Airport, the government plans to build a massive deportation prison. Already now, mass deportations via charter flights silently take place there every month. We want to break the silence and are organizing the “Stop Deportation! Protest Camp” in Schönefeld from June 1-6 2023.

Get your tents and sleeping bags ready! Only a few more days before the Stop Deportation! Protest Camp starts ✊✊

We expect around 500 people to sleep at the camp:
⛺️ 6 days full of workshops, trainings, panel discussions that focus on the daily realities of anti-deportation struggles
🎤 an evening schedule with live-concerts, films and theater
🍽️ 3 meals per day are taken care off
✨ there’s a kids programme, sports, library & exhibitions
🏕️ sleep in your tent next to the airport
📢 and at the end we will take to streets in protest against the planned deportation center at BER airport

The Camp will be a place for:

  • Workshops & Skillsharing
    So many people and groups are already doing great work to fight and resist deportations and structural racism. Let’s share our knowledge and learn from each other.
  • Raising Awareness
    The camp will show presence in the Schönefeld area and raise awareness about deportations, deportation detention and the perspectives of affected people.
  • Connecting Movements
    We believe it is necessary to build a broader movement against deportations and for the right to stay. At the camp we can get to know each other better and connect.

Join the Camp from June 1-6 2023! To make our planning easier, please sign up for the camp at signup-stopdeportation@riseup.net (not mandatory, it is also possible to join spontaneously). In the sign-up email, please let us know how many people you will be, if you are organized in a group, if you can help us with translation or need translation for our workshops, or if you need support with anything.

Participation in the camp is of course free of charge. We will ask for donations for the food at the camp. Having little economic resources should not stop you from attending the camp. If you can’t donate anything, that’s no problem!

If you need financial support for travel expenses to the camp, please contact finance-stopdeportation@riseup.net as soon as possible. You will need to bring your printed ticket/receipt to be reimbursed. In order to reduce costs, please purchase your tickets as early as possible and consider using the “Deutschland-Ticket.” If you have the possibility to financially support the camp, please consider donating via our crowdfunding–

WE ARE HERE, AND WE WILL FIGHT! FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT IS EVERYBODY’S RIGHT!

Stay updated on:

DEMO: ABOLISH DEPORTATION Monday, 5 June 13:30 | Rathaus Schönefeld

During the Stop Deportation! Protest Camp, we will march together upon the infrastructure of deportation that is spread around Berlin airport. Let us take this time to express our verbal rage against this racist system, against this whole architecture of deportation at the airport and let it inspire us to turn Schönefeld into a regular place of anti-deportation resistance! After days of camping together with workshops and networking on how we can resist the system of deportation, we will take to the streets and loudly demand: Stop All Deportations! Abolish the racist machinery of deportation!

Instagram Repost Link

 

Marxismuss

Socialist Conference in Berlin


24/05/2023

On Whitsun week-end (26th – 29th May), hundreds of activists from throughout Germany and beyond will come together in Berlin to discuss and network.

The Marxismuss conference begins on Friday with seminar day. Here, we take a full day to introduce different aspects of Marxist theory. On the following days, the conference offers over 100 meetings – a diverse and exciting programme of presentations, debates and panel discussions.

The conference is organised by the marx21 network. We want to contribute to strengthening the Left and die LINKE, so as to build an alternative power to capitalism.

You can find the full programme here. Most meetings will be in German, but the following are in English, or with translation into English:

  • Friday 11am, Marxist Content in Social Media withTarek Shalaby

  • Saturday 12 noon, Sudan – Between Revolution and Counterrevolution with Sara Abbas

  • Saturday 12 noon, Economic Crisis & Inflation – Analysis of the Global Economy with Michael Roberts

  • Saturday 3pm, Kurdistan: How can the Struggle for Freedom be successful? with Burak Demir and Azad Hawrami

  • Saturday 3pm, Philosophy and Revolution: What is the Dialectic? with Richard Donnelly

  • Saturday 5pm, The Struggle for National Liberation – a Step on the Way to Socialism? with Alex Callinicos

  • Saturday 7.30pm 75 Years Nakba: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine with Ilan Pappe

  • Sunday 10am Israel‘s (Fascist) Government: What does it mean for Palestinians? with Hebh Jamaland Rob Ferguson

  • Sunday 10am The story of the occupation at GKN in Florence. On the status of the conversion project with Lukas Ferrari & Francesca Gabbriellini

  • Sunday 12 noon Between Catastrophe and Revolution – the Legacy of Mike Davis with Alex Callinicos

  • Sunday 12 noon Turkey after the Earthquake and the Elections with Burak Demir

  • Sunday 3pm Mass Strikes and Crisis in Britain and France – a Review with Ian Allinson & Joseph Choonara

The conference takes place in the Neues Deutschland building, Franz-Mehring Platz 1. You can register here. Tickets are also available on the door.

European Trade Union Network for Justice in Palestine

Trade Unions fighting for Palestine


17/05/2023

The European Trade Union Network for Justice in Palestine (ETUN) was established at the end of 2016 to bring together unions across Europe to campaign for an end to European and corporate complicity with the occupation of Palestine. It has grown to become a network of approximately 35 unions.

The network has campaigned for the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, worked to highlight European corporate complicity, published important research on the impact of European complicity on decent work and run webinars and conferences including focusing on the situation from a workers’ rights perspective.

ETUN Palestine has also worked to strengthen the policy positions of the European trade union federations on Palestine and respond to the situation.  For this year the network is preparing a campaign highlighting the impact of Israel’s demolitions of Palestinian homes, schools and agricultural strictures on workers and their families in occupied Palestine.

MORE INFO ON our website, facebook and twitter: @EtunPalestine

ETUC Congress Fringe Meeting in Berlin

At the European TUC Congress Berlin, the European Trade Union Network for Justice in Palestine is organising a fringe Event: Building Solidarity with Palestinian Workers. The meeting will be on Wednesday, May 24th from 12.30pm until 13.50pm. It is in the Holiday Inn Meeting Rooms I+II, Wanda-Kallenbach-Straße 2. Lunch will be provided.

Representatives of various European trade unions and Palestinian speakers will present the current situation of Palestinian workers under occupation, their ongoing struggle and the role of European trade unions in building support for Palestinian freedom and rights.

We will discuss what trade unionists can do in solidarity with Palestinian workers and present ongoing and new campaigns.

Moderator: Patricia McKeown (Trade Union Friends of Palestine/Irish Congress of Trade Unions)

Speakers:

  • Samia Al Botmeh – Birzeit University (online)
  • Werner Van Heetvelde – president of La Centrale Générale-FGTB (Belgium)
  • Sharon Sukhram – Trade Unions Congress  (UK)
  • Liv Tørres – Director International Department LO Norway
  • Saif Abukeshek – European Trade Union Network for Justice in Palestine

Walk of Care

March for Health on 12th May


10/05/2023

WALK OF CARE for Health on 12th May, 3.30pm Invalidenpark

Next Friday is the International day of health workers. The WALK if CARE is taking to the streets for good and humanitarian health.

We finally need more personnel to adequately look after people needing health care. We need and end to the logic of profit in the health system, the exploitation of health workers, and the poverty spiral of people who need health care and their dependents.

● Come and show your solidarity

●  Join in. We will build a human chain and peacefully surround the health ministry.

● Dance with us. DJs and bands will be providing for a good gathering

Loud. Colourful. Unstoppable. The WALK OF Care Berlin is a political alliance fighting for a better health system in Germany. Ist activists include health workers, midwives and physiotherapists. Come to the demo on the International day of health care.

When: 12 May, 3.30pm

Where: Invalidenpark – Brandenburger Tor

More Information: www.walkofcare.org Instagram: walkofcare. Telegram: https://t.me/walkofcare

With different actions, the Walk of Care is campaigning for dignified health care and a just health system. As well as the annual demonstration on 12 May, we will be organising Health Slams, exhibitions and parties for networking.

Health finally needs recognition of health workers. If we don’t finally act there won’t be anyone left who wants to care, while increasingly more people need this care. Let us come together in solidarity, to demonstrate loudly, to dance, and to show that a besser system is possible.

Rheinmetall Entwaffnen

Demilitarize the weapons industry


03/05/2023

9th May is the shareholders’ meeting of Rheinmetall, where the war corporation distributes the blood money it has earned from the sale of weapons, deadly ammunition and other war equipment in the world’s wars. As every year, the amount of profits from war and suffering will be announced on this day. And 2022 was a good year for the managers of death. While the champagne corks are still popping, we will be in the streets protesting.

The alliance “Rheinmetall Entwaffnen” opposes militarisation, rearmament and arms exports. It is committed to an intersectional and internationalist anti-militarism. We are working to build a diverse, broad movement against rearmament, arms production and war. In recent years, we have made our presence felt with mass actions of civil disobedience and blockades against the arms industry in Kassel, Oberndorf and Unterlüß, among other places.

War is the worst outbreak of violence of patriarchal capitalism. People are exploited, injured, and killed by the industrialised war machine. Survivors are often left speechless and actionless. As the binarisation of gender and gender roles takes place, so too does increasing violence, against LGBTQI+, against women, against children, against all who cannot or will not live conformist lives.

The so-called feminist foreign policy plans military interventions in the Global South to secure resources for a few. It means that the actions of a few elite women are also responsible for the hunger of large parts of the world’s population, and no longer exclusively those of elite men. In feminist foreign policy, the law of the strongest applies. Feminist foreign policy shakes hands with fascists and laughs at extra-legal executions. It is nationalist and bellicose. In short, “feminist foreign policy” is anti-feminist.

Our feminism is anti-militarist. We are loud and creative and intervene where we are. For us, this means concretely attacking the warmongering of the German state and those who make profits from the production of weapons, tanks and other war equipment.

The Greens, who many decades ago saw themselves as a “peace party”, are now pushing militarisation ever further and fuelling the escalation of war in Ukraine. Instead of seriously seeking alternatives to a protracted war of attrition with thousands of deaths on both sides, the Greens want to “ruin Russia” (Baerbock) and proclaim “Ukraine must win. That’s it.” (Göring-Eckardt). At the same time, rearmament projects and arms deliveries cannot go fast enough for them. But even more weapons will not put an end to the dying. Quite the contrary.

Left anti-militarists, anti-imperialists, feminists, Kurdistan solidarists, people fighting against the border regime, trade unionists and climate activists – let’s betray the war together!

There are corporations, production sites, offices and other war and crisis profiteers everywhere. Join planned demonstrations and actions or visit war profiteers in your neighbourhood.

Düsseldorf, 9 May, from 11.55 a.m., Rheinmetall-Platz 1

Berlin, 9 May, 5 p.m., Platz vor dem neuen Tor 1

In Rostock, from 5 to 11 May, UDT Entwaffnen is organising a protest camp against the UDT undersea weapons fair, in which Rheinmetall is also involved.