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German Communists banned from standing in the general election

This is a bureaucratic manoeuvre which could be used in the future against Muslims and the Left

Phil Butland
14/07/2021

On 8th July 2021 it was announced by the Federal Election Commissioner (Bundeswahlleiter) that the German Communist Party (DKP) will not be allowed to contest the coming national election in September. The reason given for this was that the party had repeatedly handed in its financial report too late. As financial reports have to be compiled following a lot of time-consuming work by accountants, it is not surprising that small parties often find it difficult to follow the timetable.

This bureaucratic problem could lead to a full ban of the DKP. In 2018, the German law on parties was amended. The new law – which takes effect retroactively from 2015 (or 2016, the exact date is disputed) – contains the following passage:“An organisation loses its legal status as a party when they do not take part in a national or local election with their own election proposals for six years.”

This means that if a party decides not to take the expensive step of contesting local elections, it only needs to miss one general election to lose its legal status. If the DKP challenge to this decision fails, they will lose their legal status on the 29th of July. This has several implications.

In an interview with the newspaper junge Welt, DKP chair Patrik Köbele explained: “the loss of party status has two implications: that, like every random association, we can be banned by a decision of the interior minister, and that it is no longer possible to issue a certificate that would enable donations to be written off against tax. The latter is an attack on the financial base of the DKP.”

Increase in state bans

The ban of the DKP is not an isolated case. At the beginning of this year, Germany’s main anti-fascist organisation, the VVN-BdA (Association of people persecuted by the Nazis – Federation of antifascists) had its charity status removed, as did the anti-globalisation organisation attac. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz) has put the junge Welt newspaper under observation.

Flags of the Kurdish organisations PKK and YPG are banned in Germany, and a recent ban has been issued on the non-existent flag of Hamas. Bans on Palestinians and their supporters go much further than Hamas. We have reported on several instances of how organisations and individuals giving a platform to Palestinian voices have had concerts cancelled and funding removed in recent months. Even the Jewish Voice for Peace (Jüdische Stimme) has had its bank account closed.

This is not just a matter for the Left and supporters of Palestine. In the run up to the election, and under the name of “fighting Islamism”, a working group of MPs from the governing party, the CDU, is considering “if and how the introduction of a mosque register is constitutional.” The CDU/CSU fraction in the Bundestag is demanding surveillance of mosques by the security services. Many mosques have been under surveillance for quite some time.

Meanwhile, the German State seems to be a lot more sanguine about the far right. A Thüringen court recently rescinded the decision to view the AfD as a “test case” and a possible danger to democracy. This at a time when the growing Nazification of the AfD is becoming increasingly clear. This is before we get to the Nazis who are organising in state institutions like the police.

Meanwhile the number of right wing extremists in Germany who are sanctioned to own weapons is growing. The “NSU Complex”, which led to the trial of five Neo-Nazis has shown an astonishing level of state support for the Nazis. It does seem that the state is, as the saying goes, “blind in the right eye”. This means that any bans will be used disproportionately against the Left and religious minorities.

An attack on us all

I am not a member of the DKP – but of another party, die LINKE. I have significant political differences with the DKP and believe that it is a mistake for them to stand in elections and to split the Left vote. However, they are part of the wider political Left, and such debates should be resolved through comradely discussions and not state bans.

This is not least because any strengthening of the state’s ability to decide which parties are “legitimate” – and which are not – could be used against all of us. The German state has already banned left-wing organisations. One of the first acts of the Nazi government in 1933 was to Enabling Act which banned the KPD. A similar ban was issued by Konrad Adenauer’s CDU government in 1956. In both cases, the “fight against communism” was used to justify wider repression and attacks on civil liberties.

When push comes to shove, the state is not neutral. Black Lives Matter has made clear what many of us already knew – there is a high level of racist police violence, both in Germany as well as the USA. Demonstrations against racism are often heavily policed, particularly those containing a significant number of young Muslims. Meanwhile demonstrations of Corona deniers – often with a strong Nazi presence – are generally allowed to run rampant.

Ultimately, the people who would ban the DKP would be the same people who prevent serious investigations into the AfD, who allow a serious Nazi presence in the police and security services, and who are maintaining a neo-liberal racist state. They are not our friends. Any ban on the DKP will only strengthen the power of this state.

As LINKE MP Niema Movassat says

“with the loss of their party status, the DKP loses the specific protections for parties – such as against banning orders. The interior minister can ban the DKP relatively easily. With the history of the persecution of Communists in this country, this all has a politically unsavoury taste”.

A ban on elections is not the same as a full ban of the party, but it is a distinct possibility, depending on how we react.This means that the starting point for any serious socialist is not to question whether the DKP followed their bureaucratic obligations to the last detail, nor to bring up specific differences we may have, say, on the nature of the Chinese state. This is not why the DKP is under attack. If they are successfully removed, right wing forces will be coming for socialists, Muslims and other minorities next.

But if we stand together, we will all be stronger.

The Racialization of Anti-Semitism in Post-Holocaust Germany

Outsourcing a History of Racism to the Muslim Other

Noor Blaas
13/07/2021

“The charge of anti-Semitism becomes a strong projection of the history of the Holocaust onto the bodies of ‘outsiders’ like myself, those not directly interpellated by that history, as a classic form of psychoanalytic disavowal; I accuse you of doing what I am afraid I might be doing myself, what I very much so fear doing, what I don’t want to do myself” (J. Puar).

In Spring 2020, Felix Klein, the federal government commissioner for “Jewish life and the fight against anti-Semitism” in Germany, urged the organizers of the German Arts Festival ‘Ruhrtriennale’ to revoke their invitation of the renowned postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe. Klein asserted that Mbembe was ‘unsuitable’ to speak at the Ruhrtriennale and legitimized his political stance on a cultural festival by accusing Mbembe of anti-Semitism and of ‘relativizing the Holocaust’ as Mbembe had equated the state of Israel with the apartheid system of South Africa in one of his academic writings.

Similar things happened that year to rapper Talib Kweli and the band Young Fathers who had their concerts cancelled after they were accused of anti-Semitism due to their support for the BDS-movement, and to Palestinian journalist Khaled Barakat who was denied a renewal of his residency permit in Germany because he constituted ‘a security risk’ for his ‘anti-Semitic’ viewpoints on the situation in Israel and Palestine.

Most recently, peaceful demonstrations in several German cities in response to the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Jerusalem –attracting thousands of protestors– have been condemned by popular German newspapers, such as Der Bild-Zeitung, as “Judenhass-Demos” that, according to Die Tagesschau, illustrate the “Problem mit Islamischem Antisemitismus in Deutschland”.

Mbembe’s disqualification from the right to speak in public for being judged as an anti-Semite, then, is not an isolated event in Germany, but part of a long list of cases in which primarily minority background Germans and non-Germans have been accused of promoting anti-Semitic sentiments.

In practice, then, one could argue that the interconnected commitments of German leaders to fabricate a redeemed ‘post-racial’ society through an almost obsessive and unidirectional focus on fighting anti-Semitism and remembering the Holocaust –now constituting a source of ‘German pride’ and a ‘new’ post-war German identity– increasingly work to project anti-Semitism onto racialized ‘Others’. Meanwhile, the constructed centrality of the Holocaust as the paradigmatic experience of racism and German and European racial history effectively works to sideline Germany’s colonial past as constitutive of German identity and to disavow the continued application of colonial instruments of racial rule in German and European post-colonial societies.

Hence, while I certainly do not wish to understate the seriousness of anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish attacks, whether perpetrated by Muslims or by right-wing extremists, this article sets out to discuss the outsourcing of anti-Semitism as a new field of racial governance that attributes to Muslims supposedly culturally transmitted psychopathologies that allegedly make them inherently prone to ‘intolerance’, subsequently driving a wedge between a ‘revitalized’, ‘redeemed’ and ‘color-blind’ Germany and minority, primarily Muslim, populations that have ‘not yet’ internalized the values of the post-Holocaust inclusive ‘Judeo-Christian’ society.

The Holocaust as ‘Screen-Memory’ and the Disavowal of Colonial Violence

The Holocaust against the Jews of Europe is internationally recognized as a modern genocide that changed the world. It has become a universal moral paradigm in democratic societies and its remembrance continues to have a significant impact on world politics and international law . The importance of remembering and ‘working through’ the Holocaust is, of course, particularly acute in contemporary Germany, where historical responsibility and “a primal scene of guilt and shame” for the crimes committed against the Jews by the National-Socialist regime have become the core around which German national identifications and self-consciousness are organized. Indeed, Moses notes how, after the end of the Second World War, German foreign policy officials were acutely conscious that “the world will carefully watch the new Germany and one of the tests by which it will be judged and allowed reintegration into the ranks of ‘civilized nations’ will be its attitude towards the Jews and how it treats them”.

In 1949, the US High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, spelled out to Germans that: “What this Jewish community will be, will be watched very closely and very carefully by the entire world. It will, in my judgement, be one of the real touchstones and the test of Germany’s progress toward light”. Hence, ‘stigma management’ became Germany’s main occupation, leading to what Nolte has referred to as a ‘theater of remembrance’ in which the memory of the Holocaust became reified into a ritualized narrative of social transformation.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, then, Germany’s ability to confront its dark past served to legitimize Germany’s reappearance on the world stage, transforming the act of coming to terms with the past into a positive attribute of German society, a moral ‘uplift’ story of the human spirit against intolerance, and a mark of special moral qualifications.

By performing an explicit break with and a ‘moving on from’ the Nazi state legacy, however, Germany effectively positioned the Third Reich as the paradigmatic example of racist practice, effectively freezing racism in a very specific period in history. Lewicki & Schoolman rightly note how this narrative is highly selective in its sole focus on only one of race’s many incarnations and in its disavowal of colonialism as part of an ‘enlightened’ German history. Indeed, El-Tayeb notes how German colonial activities were often neglected as irrelevant to German society and to colonial history in general. This perception, according to El-Tayeb, requires correction, as German colonialism, and particularly their genocidal intent to annihilate the Herero in Namibia in 1904, put the race theories already dominating the public mind into practice on a broad scale, breaking down previously effective taboos with regards to racial massacres.

As early as 1942, Korsch, a German philosopher wrote: “The novelty of totalitarian politics… is simply that the Nazis have extended to ‘civilized’ European peoples the methods hitherto reserved for the ‘natives’ or ‘savages’ living outside so-called civilization”. In his Discourse, Césaire famously described Nazi brutality as a “crime against the white man” that applied to Europe already existing and widely applied colonialist procedures, and, in a similar vein, Hannah Arendt wrote that African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what later was to become the Nazi elite and opened the door for “a totalitarian government on the basis of racism”.

A number of scholars have pointed out, in this regard, that the designation of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism as the paradigmatic historical experience of racism, and the designation of ‘the fight for liberal tolerance’ as the ultimate benchmark for the ‘new’ German identity, not only salvages the ‘white mythology’ of contemporary Europe’s universalist claims to moral exemplarity, but paradoxically also ‘buries’ race. It fails to acknowledge that racialization and racially based inequalities are of a period that far precede the Holocaust and that its permutations continue to persist today.

The Externalization of Anti-Semitism to the Muslim Other

Bashir and Goldberg note how this ‘sorting operation’ is reenacted in the increasing use of the term ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ which, according to Topolski, is a “post-Shoah by-product of Western Christian dominance that serves as a symbolic apology for Christian anti-Semitism” and has been so normalized and naturalized as ‘long-standing’ that it is often mistaken as ‘secular’ . This normalized ‘secular’ stance, however, very much forms the dominant norm by which other groups are symbolically judged, classified, categorized and excluded from the ‘European project’. Indeed, Bashir & Goldberg note that in an immense act of negation and denial, the Jew suddenly stands by (secular-)Christian civilization against Islam, leading to a situation in which responsibility for the Holocaust is gradually shifted to a very specific Other: that is, the Muslim immigrant (2019, 87).

Indeed, in today’s plural European societies, the construction of a ‘racism without race’ by ascribing to certain bodies a combination of perceived unsurmountable cultural attributes that excludes them from what is constructed as an exclusively civilized realm, is, according to El-Tayeb, Mbembe and Wekker, particularly visible in the externalization of Muslim populations. Ozyurek notes how a public discourse now dominates in Germany primarily concerning the Muslim ‘importation’ of anti-Semitism and it is in this context that Alice Weidel, a German politician in the Bundestag for the right-wing ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ could contend that “of course we have a problem with racism; but it is not the [problem of] German citizens, but of those Muslim migrants that do not want to integrate and do not accept our values”.

Germany’s commitment to human rights and tolerance implied in the phrase ‘Never Again’ is now widely perceived as being besieged by alleged ‘Islamic fundamentalists and Muslim anti-Semitists’. The choc en retour of the disavowed lineage of Orientalist projections, then, is the violence embedded in the naturalization of Islamophobic sentiments under the banner of ‘the fight for tolerance’.

Romeyn and Younes note how in the new geopolitical realities after 9/11, the idea of Muslim anti-Semitism fitted perfectly with the scenario of a ‘clash of civilizations’: the discourse around the War on Terror was merged with the parallel idea of a ‘War on Anti-Semitism’ in the body and psyche of the Muslim Other. Indeed, at the anti-Semitism conference in Vienna in 2005, it was argued that “at the root of [today’s] anti-Jewish efforts is the same kind of extremist [i.e., Islamist] thinking that lies behind the international terrorism that is threatening our civilization” .

The Vienna meeting was followed up with another conference in Berlin. There, European governments agreed to allocate funds to combat this ‘new’ form of anti-Semitism, effectively leading to a situation in which anti-Semitism training for white Germans was being replaced –in monetary support, number and scope– with state-sponsored civil-society projects and educational programs for youths with a ‘Muslim background’ . It was alluded that anti-Semitism was brought over from unresolved conflicts in the Middle east –primarily the Palestinian liberation struggle– and thriving on the “social frustrations of new minorities established through migration into the many member states of the European Union”.

It is noteworthy, and even profoundly ironic, that in Vienna and in Berlin, birthplaces of the worst modern form of anti-Semitism, Muslim immigrants were accused of bringing anti-Semitism to a Europe imagined to be otherwise free of it.

Similar to the workings of ‘homonationalism’ and ‘femonationalism’, then, in which the alleged sexual freedom of queers and women is juxtaposed to the alleged oppression of these groups among the Muslim Other, the trope of a ‘new anti-Semitism’ has become a convenient way of projecting blame onto the Muslim Other for complex social issues that might blemish the mainstream’s self-image ).

Each charge –the charge of homophobia, of sexism and of anti-Semitism– characterizes Muslims as immoral perpetrators and excludes them from the fold of the ethically normative European/German community, under the banner of the defense of the universal ‘cultural values’ of freedom and equality. This effectively produces “an experience of intimate communal aversion against the barbaric, uneducated, and savage practices that we as a civilized nation cannot allow to occur within our borders”.

By the time that the calls for a ‘war’ on this ‘new’ anti-Semitism were made, however, Germany had already witnessed a decade of racially motivated attacks –including killings and manhunts– targeting other than Jewish minorities. Indeed, Younes shows how the incitements to public policy actually stood in direct contradiction to police and intelligence statistics: between 2001 and 2005, there were around 43.6 anti-Semitic physically violent attacks per year in Germany.

In 2016, there were 30 attacks and in 2017, there were 28 physical attacks, with around 95% of them committed by right-wing white German individuals. In comparison, there were almost 2000 attacks on refugees in 2017 alone, around 900 attacks on German Muslims, along with more than 100 attacks on refugee aid workers. Furthermore, in 2017, there were 205 politically motivated criminal acts against parliamentary politicians and aid-workers who worked to achieve a more egalitarian society. Given the statistics, then, the threat to democracy or Western tolerance and civilization is numerically located in the attacks on refugees, Muslims and people of color, rather than in Muslim anti-Semitism.

I concur with Ozyurek, then, that understanding anti-Semitism as a malignant ideology supposedly ‘brought back’ to Europe by Muslims merely works to produce perpetrators out of marginalized, racialized, and disadvantaged people, while preserving a ‘redeemed’ and ‘innocent’ German identity. The implication is that the origin of, and solution to the marginalization of minorities lies with their ‘failed integration’ and ‘deficient’ cultural values, rather than with racial, social and economic segregation and spatial containment at the hands of German authorities. When it is established that Muslims are anti-Semitic –and worse, refuse to atone for it– it becomes difficult to recognize their position as victims in relation to European racism.

The charge of anti-Semitism, then, is instrumentalized as a way to turn the gaze away from historically informed Orientalist projections and more continuous patterns of violence as it depicts Muslim Germans as dishonorable and undeserving residents (Topolski 2020, 313). In line with the argumentation of Yaspir Puar, then, who argued that the incorporation of queer and gay subjecthood into the biopolitical regime of the nation has been ‘condoned’ by multicultural, liberal societies only in so far as the establishing of the regulatory norm of “queer, liberal secularity” allows for a “parallel process of demarcation from populations targeted for segregation, disposal, or death”, the figure of the Jew has been retrogressively instrumentalized to externalize racialized minorities on the basis of presumed cultural incompatibilities; to erase historical and contemporary racisms; and to subject minority populations to disciplinary securitization.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the outward projection of anti-Semitism to the Other enables the fabrication of an egalitarian, pure and post-racial self-image that stands in direct opposition to the violent and discriminatory actions that it justifies. In Germany, there is a growing confluence between the charge of anti-Semitism and the culturalization of race, in which colonialist racial categories persist, but are disguised in culturalizing rather than in biological terms. This process enables state actors, who embed Jews retrogressively in the European project, to externalize racialized minorities on the basis of presumed cultural incompatibilities; to erase their own historical and contemporary racisms; and to subject minority populations to disciplinary ‘integration’ techniques).

Racism is projected outward onto immigrant and primarily Muslim populations who are depicted as never having learned the right lessons from the Holocaust and thus remain external to the post-Second-World War ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilization, while the significance of German racist crimes is effectively played down in the fantasy of multicultural societies as tolerant, hospitable, open-minded and innocent. This is the effect of the collusion between the figuration of the Holocaust as the monumentalized and standardized object lesson in intolerance with the disabled and disavowed history of colonialism and (continued) colonial violence.

I agree with Romeyn that if the Holocaust should continue to provide the moral compass of the ‘new’ Europe, its lessons need to be universalized and extended beyond the specificity of Jewish suffering to include all forms of exclusion, discrimination and intolerance. What we need is an emancipatory move that redirects attention from Muslim anti-Semitism to anti-Muslim xenophobia and to the exclusivist (white, Christian) strains within Europe’s dominant ‘secular’ and ‘inclusive’ self-image, subsequently providing an immanent and vital challenge to the core of European self-understanding as ‘tolerant’, ‘raceless’ and ‘colorblind’.

News from Berlin and Germany: 10th July 2021

News from Berlin compiled by Ana Ferreira

The Left Berlin
09/07/2021

Berlin Interior Senator sued for assault

The eviction of the squatters from Habersaathstraße 46 in last October is taking an unusual legal aftermath. Two of the squatters announced they would file charges against Interior Senator Geisel for assault and coercion in office. The accusation is that Geisel, by evicting the squatters shortly before the second lockdown, deliberately risked a Corona infection of the formerly homeless squatters. Other squatters who lived in camps in Rummelsburg or Frankfurter Allee have also been evicted and now face nothing again with the end of the cold aid programmes. “A society cannot treat people like this,” said Valentina Hauser from “Leerstand Hab-ich-Saath.” Source: taz

Neukölln United against displacement

It is Tuesday afternoon, they are about to start the demonstration against the sell-out of their district in front of the apartment building Hermannstraße 48. “Neukölln against displacement” is the motto of several housing projects. Tenants, activists and politicians make it clear in their speeches: they will not give up the fight against luxury renovations, rent increases and the sale to unknown parties. They demand socialisation, expropriation of profit-oriented landlords, protection against dismissal and “affordable and liveable housing” for all. Many housing communities want the district to exercise its right of first refusal. For this, they need partners oriented towards cooperatives, for instance. Source: nd

Turkish journalist attacked in Berlin

Erk Acarer, a Turkish journalist accused of publishing secret information on state security and intelligence activities from Turkey, was injured by several attackers in the Rudow district of Neukölln in Berlin on Wednesday evening. He suffered a wound to the head and received medical treatment. Acarer tweeted a photo of himself as late as Wednesday evening. He said he was not in danger of dying, had some swelling on his head and was in hospital. “I know the perpetrators. I will never surrender to fascism.” He said he and his family were under police protection. Source: DW

NEWS FROM GERMANY

Deportations to Afghanistan continue

The German government is planning further deportations to Afghanistan, even though the worst fighting in a long time is raging between the Taliban and government troops. All official NATO contingents are to withdraw on 11 September. This must be read as an admission of the failure of 20 years of failed NATO policy in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, a deportation from Hanover to Kabul is planned for Monday. In a press release, the domestic policy spokesperson of the Left Party in the Bundestag, Ulla Jelpke, strongly condemns the continued deportations “to the most dangerous country in the world”: “Deportation to Afghanistan means deportation to war, terror and misery.” Source: jW

EU refugee policy: activists occupy Euro sign

Activists symbolically occupied the Euro sign in Frankfurt’s banking district on Saturday afternoon to protest against the EU’s refugee policy. Climbers abseiled down and attached a banner with the inscription “EU kills” and a symbolic barbed wire installation. The action was intended to challenge the symbolism of “the EU as a place of free movement and a guardian of humanitarian values”. For refugees, the EU is far too often not a place of openness, freedom of movement and liberty. The demonstrators demanded an end to legal proceedings against sea rescue workers who save migrants from the Mediterranean. Source: süddeutsche

German company sued for illegal arms exports to Colombia

The arms company SIG Sauer must pay around eleven million euros for illegal exports to Colombia. This was the decision of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe. The court considered it proven the former managing directors of the Eckernförde site delivered more than 47,000 SP 2022 pistols to a sister company in the USA, of which more than 38,000 were resold to Colombia. In a press release, the advertisers “Aktion Aufschrei – Stoppt den Waffenhandel!” state the “conviction for this historic sum is a huge success”. “This is the highest sum ever recovered from a small arms manufacturer,” comments Holger Rothbauer, the campaign’s lawyer. Source: amerika21

East Germany remains left behind

On Wednesday, the “Federal Government Commissioner for the New Länder”, Marco Wanderwitz (CDU), who is housed in the Federal Ministry of Economics, presented his annual report for 2021. The conclusion: despite the economic crisis and pandemic, things are always looking up between the Elbe and Oder rivers, but the population is ungrateful. Before his appearance at the Federal Press Conference, the parliamentary state secretary revealed many East Germans harbour a “deepened fundamental scepticism” towards politics and democracy. This is “admittedly a minority, but the minority is larger than in the old federal states”, said Wanderwitz. His verdict: “This is dangerous for democracy.” Source: jW

Can Proportional Representation save Labour? And would that be a good thing?

Proportional Representation (PR) should not be the Left’s main demand; a “Progressive Alliance” would be terrible. But a new voting system could help the Left

Phil Butland
28/06/2021

The discussion around Proportional Representation (PR) is gathering steam among part of the Labour Left. The Independent reports that three-quarters of Labour members now support PR. 228 Constituency Labour Parties have signed a call for electoral reform. The call for PR has even been taken up by the left-wing faction Momentum. The current discussion has been provoked by two recent incidents.

First is the leadership election for the UNITE trade union, following the retirement of left-wing general secretary Len McCluskey. After leftist Howard Beckett withdrew, there are now two candidates from the left of the union – Steve Turner and Sharon Graham. This leads people to worry that the right-winger Gerard Coyne will slip through and win the election on a minority vote.

This is not the place to discuss the intricacies of the UNITE elections, but the election shows the danger of the First Past the Post (FPTP) system. The person with the most votes takes all, even if they are disliked by a majority of the voters. This is why many UNITE activists are calling for a Single Transferable Vote (a form of PR) in future elections.

Slump of Labour vote under Starmer

But the main reason for all the PR chatter is in reaction to “Sir” Keir Starmer continuing to lead the Labour Party into political oblivion. Two years ago, under Jeremy Corbyn, the party suffered unprecendented attacks from the press and sabotage from many people working for the party. Starmer supporters followed Tony Blair in sneer ing that “with any other leader, Labour would be 20 points ahead”. The results since Starmer took over have been derisory.

Just last month, there was the Hartlepool by-election, caused by the resignation of sitting Labour MP Mike Hill following allegations of sexual harassment and intimidation. Hartlepool is a working-class seat which has had a Labour MP since 1964. Any Labour candidate should have won easily – even Starmer’s choice, the Saudi-loving sexist Paul Williams.

It is very unusual for a ruling party to win a by election in a constituency that it lost in the previous general election. By elections tend to show protest votes against the incumbent government. Before Hartlepool, the government party had only ever retaken a seat in a by election 17 times – and only 5 times since the Second World War. Yet Labour still managed to lose Hartlepool to the ruling Tories.

Hartlepool was followed by Chesham and Amersham. Starmer’s apologists had said that Labour could not possibly have won Hartlepool, because prime minister Boris Johnson was benefiting from a “Covid bounce”. Yet the Liberal Democrats won Amersham with a 25% swing. Labour won only 622 votes – reportedly 2 more than the number of Labour party members in the constituency. It may be worth noting that in 2017, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, Labour won 11,374 votes.

Since the election debacles, a number of people who should know better have been gleefully welcoming the defection of former Tory MP John Bercow to Labour. It should be pointed out that while Bercow has criticised Boris Johnson, he has not issued a single statement to say that his own politics have changed.

At the same time, these same people wilfully ignore the facts that: some Labour activists are leaving the party; others are staying in for the while but are withdrawing from activity; while other socialists are still being expelled on trumped-up charges. Even Jeremy Corbyn is still not allowed to sit as a Labour MP.

Time for a “Progressive Alliance”?

This is the background to a swath of articles in the left-leaning media, calling for a “Progressive Alliance”. This is where Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens and maybe the SNP agree to stand down in elections, to enable a single anti-Tory candidate. Neal Lawson from Compass wrote in this week’s Guardian “there is no other way to stop a record fifth straight Conservative election victory, and the slide into a one-party state, than through a progressive alliance.”

Lawson’s example of a successful Progressive Alliance is the “remarkable relationship” (his words) between Tony Blair and former LibDem leader Paddy Ashdown. He also argues that “the societal challenges we face – of climate, culture, care, technology, ageing and inequality – simply can no longer be met by any single party.”

The campaigns for a Progressive Alliance and for PR are closely connected. In an editorial supporting a Progressive Alliance, the Guardian argued “Proportional representation is a way of redistributing power more fairly and encouraging consensus to be built across party lines.” Similarly, the organisation Reboot GB argues that PR “is an anchor for any Progressive Alliance”

A Progressive Alliance seems to have two main types of supporter on the Left. First there are the deluded, who believe that Lib Dems will break with the habit of a lifetime and support a full socialist platform. There is absolutely no reason to believe this. Remember that as recently as 2010-2015 the thoroughly neo-liberal Liberal Democrats were eagerly propping up a Tory government. And yet they would have the power of veto over any Progressive Alliance.

As for the social democratic nationalist parties, it is not long since Labour joined the Conservatives in the Better Together campaign aimed at preserving the Union and blocking Scottish independence. There is little evidence that Labour has moved from this position. Why on earth would the SNP or Plaid Cymru sign up to that?

Wouldn’t anything be better than Boris Johnson?

Then there are the desperate, who believe that Boris Johnson’s Tories are so qualitatively bad that anything must be better than this, even neo-liberalism lite. This view has the advantage that it acknowledges the reality of who the Lib Dems represent, and what they stand for. Note that it is no coincidence that Amersham is the 531 st least deprived of England’s 533 parliamentary constituencies.

How things have changed since the heady days of Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 election manifesto was both radical and popular. Labour Party membership tripled to 550,000 and between 73% and 83% of voters supported his plans to nationalise water, electricity, gas and the railways.

Even this manifesto was only possible in the face of opposition and even sabotage by a large number of Labour Party workers and a majority of Labour MPs. The idea that the Lib Dems would campaign for such a manifesto, or even allow it to come into being is a fantasy. Any Progressive Alliance depends on Labour having a programme which promises no fundamental change.

So what we are left with is a set of bland statements promising nothing more than “at least we’re not Boris Johnson”. In other words, the unsuccessful policies that Starmer has been following since he became party leader. This has not just led to a haemorrhaging of support for Labour. It also means that the many activists who were keen to campaign in 2017 will not be inspired next time round.

A “Progressive Alliance”, which handed power to the Tory enablers in the Lib Dems would reproduce the worst experiences of Starmerism, without offering voters any positive reasons to vote Labour or even giving party members a good reason why they should campaign. This will damage Labour’s vote even further.

Why now?

The current obsession with PR and “Progressive Alliances” is, at least in part, a hangover from old discussions about Brexit. A large part of the liberal-Left believed Brexit to be the most important political idea of the day. That meant that their conversation shifted away from the progressive demands in Corbyn’s manifesto.

It also caused many Labour members to seek alliances with a Liberal Democratic party, whose leader was not sure whether Gay sex was a sin, and whose 2019 election manifesto was described by the BBC as being more austere than the Tories’. This may have gone down well in the middle class clubs attended by Labour’s movers and shakers, but appalled working class voters, particularly in the North of England.

Allying with the Lib Dems was always a mistake. When Brexit was being pushed by the media as the only story that mattered, it was at least understandable. Now that Brexit no longer dominates political discussion, Labour has a chance to return to the class-based politics which caused people to enthusiastically campaign for a Corbyn government. Or, on the other hand, it can continue to cozy up to the Lib Dems.

Notwithstanding any criticism we may have of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, tens of thousands of people were enthused to go out on doorsteps to campaign for a manifesto which promised to change the world. Could we seriously expect similar excitement for an election campaign which has been approved by the Lib Dem’s hapless leader Ed Davey?

Does this mean that PR is a bad idea?

I used to be a fervent supporter of the FPTP system. We were living in slightly different times then. The Conservatives were clearly the party of Capital and bigotry. Labour – in part through its links with the trade unions, and often despite its political practice – was the party of the working class. The other parties didn’t stand for much at all, and rarely had any serious link with progressive politics, let alone class struggle.

This meant that it was generally a ‘Good Thing’ that elections were contested by the parties which represented – however vaguely – the two sides of class struggle. Even though Labour rarely implemented serious change (and when they did it was more likely to be restricting immigration than fighting racism), a Labour victory was seen as a win for ‘Our Side’. This was something which positively affected workers’ confidence to fight back.

Then a number of things happened. Perhaps most important is what has been called the Pasokification of European Social Democratic parties. This was most noticeable in Greece, but was a trend in most European countries. “Pasokification” involved social democratic parties like Labour shifting to the right as a reaction to falling votes.

In Britain and Germany we saw the Blair-Schröder paper attacking the rights of workers and the unemployed. Britain also experienced Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for the Gulf war. That led to a decreasing number of working class people identifying Labour as being “their” party. Even my mother – a lifelong Labour member – asked me who she should vote for now.

Partly as a result of this, some nationalist parties – like the SNP and Plaid Cymru – which had traditionally had fairly right wing programmes, started positioning themselves as social democrats. They overtook Labour on the Left. Other parties – like Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party or Respect – emerged, leading to the hope for a serious left-wing challenge to Labour. A main reason for their lack of success was FPTP.

Will PR save Labour? I hope not

The main argument currently used for PR seems to be that it is necessary to revive the Labour Party. Only under PR, the argument goes, will we have a chance of a Labour government – albeit in coalition with the Lib Dems. Without PR, Labour will never govern again. As Polly Toynbee argued in the Guardian, “If Labour doesn’t fight our broken electoral system, it could be out of power for ever.”

My argument for PR is quite the reverse. I want PR because I want to destroy Labour and replace it with something better. The last year under Starmer has proved the party to be unfit for purpose. Even under Corbyn, there were too many unelected functionaries who were able to block progress. Even the great 2017 manifesto was seriously flawed, with promises like 10,000 extra police.

I want a party that is more democratic, more anchored in social movements, more socialist. The problem is that, because of the electoral system, it has proved impossible to create such a party from scratch. The closest we have come to this was with the formation of the Respect party, and the election of the first MP left of Labour since 1950.

There were 2 problems with these developments. First, that MP was George Galloway, whose politics can be politely described as inconsistent. He made some great speeches against the war, but has more recently been seen palling up with Nigel Farage and urging Scottish voters to vote Tory to preserve the Union. His defence of Julian Assange against rape charges was that “not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion”.

Second, there was no serious break from Labour. Galloway was the only leading figure who moved from Labour to Respect. Most other people who opposed the war either stayed in Labour or moved into inactivity (often both). Respect aspired to be more than an electoral party. And yet its inability to win elections (with one exception) meant that it lacked the basis to become a mass party.

PR alone is insufficient

Under PR this could be different and we might see the basis for the emergence of a British SYRIZA, Podemos, or even die LINKE. We must attach several caveats to this statement. Firstly, the recent experience of all these parties shows that the formation of a new Left party is not a cure-all. Radical formations can still quickly descend into parliamentary cretinism and compromise.

Secondly: PR will not automatically benefit the Left. There is a reasonable argument that one reason that the next French President may be an outright fascist is the PR system. And in Britain, Ell Foran from Stats for Lefties estimated that UKIP, which won just one seat in the 2015 general election, would have won 79 seats under PR.

So, it would be a great mistake to advocate PR as a way of solving all our problems. PR opens an arena in which the Left can gain exposure and support. But it opens the same arena to more pernicious and dangerous forces. Merely changing the voting system is insufficient without political change at the basis.

A new party which unites the people who joined Corbyn’s Labour with the radical Left outside the party would be a massive step forward inside British politics. Yet, while I believe that parties are important for bringing activists together, without activity at the basis of society, Left parties are impotent. This means that any campaign for a different voting system must be secondary to action from below.

How can we change society?

The key thing lies in understanding how we can change society. Only this week, we have seen the unprecedented conviction of policemen responsible for the racist murders of George Floyd and Dalian Atkinson. This is testament to the ability of movements like Black Lives Matter to effect change. Similarly, the fact that the environment is on the political agenda is the result of the international mobilisations by Fridays for Future.

Even parliamentary reform is dependent on extra-parliamentary struggle. In 1974, Tory prime minister Ted Heath called a general election under the slogan “Who governs Britain – the unions or the government?” Striking miners and other social movements showed Heath that it wasn’t him. The reason that Starmer’s Labour is in decline is to a large extent because it no longer has any organic link to movements outside parliament.

So, a campaign for progressive politics should not start with a demand for PR. This is not least because the implementation of PR would depend on the votes of a Tory government which is perfectly happy to profit from the current system. The best way to challenge the Tories is not by moral outrage but by building social movements which challenge everything they stand for.

If we build up these movements, other changes will follow.

Thanks to Hari Kumar, Carol McGuigan and Anna Southern for comments on an earlier version of this article.

News from Berlin and Germany: 26th June 2021

Weekly news roundup from Berlin and Germany

The Left Berlin
25/06/2021

Compiled by Phil Butland

NEWS FROM BERLIN

Another occupied house threatened with an eviction notice

The owner of Rigaer Straße 94 wants to issue eviction orders against 3 or 4 tenants. This follows previous evictions from the same building. The house has been occupied since 1990 and is a symbol for the autonomous scene. Last Wednesday, activists erected barricades and police deployed water cannons and armoured recovery vehicles before breaking into the house. Berlin interior senator Andreas Geisel (SPD) expressed his support for the eviction. Source: Zeit

Axel-Springer group tells supporters of Palestine to find new jobs

The CEO of the Axel Springer group, which owns Bild. Die Welt and other newspapers, has said that workers who have problems with the Israel flag should find a job elsewhere. Mathias Döpfner made the statement in an international video conference with his employees. During the bombing of Gaza, the Springer press has flown an Israel flag in front of its headquarters, next to flags of Europe, Germany and Berlin. Döpfner called this “a sign of our solidarity”. Source: tacheles

Court rules that Airbnb must hand over landlord data

Airbnb must hand over data about landlords to the authorities if there is suspicion of a fake registration number. LINKE senator Sebastian Scheel celebrated the ruling, saying that “we can only differentiate between legal and illegal holiday homes if there is transparency and data requests are possible.” The case will probably now go to the higher court, and the Berlin Senate is planning new legislation to contain “touristification” of well-loved districts. Source: rbb

Nearly 350,000 votes for Expropriation

Nearly one tenth of Berliners have signed the petition for the Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen referendum. Nearly 350,000 signatures agree that private housing corporations which own more than 3,000 homes should be socialized. The campaign, which was supported by way over 1,000 active collectors has been collecting signatures for four months. The necessary quorum in Berlin is 7% of people eligible to vote – about 175,000 people. Even accounting for invalid signatures, this target has been reached despite pandemic and lockdown. Source: taz

NEWS FROM GERMANY

“We are talking about organised Nazis in the police”

The German police contains networks of right wing extremists and racists, including in the heavily armed special command troops. Philosopher Daniel Loick says that this is no surprize. Victims have been reporting such cases for decades. Right wing men are attracted to the claim that the special command troops are last battalion protecting Germany from extreme danger. Despite the attempt to recruit migrants to the Berlin police, the police is still carrying out racial profiling. Source: fr

Hamas flag to be banned in Germany

The CDU-SPD government fractions are united in the desire to ban Hamas flags from Germany. “We don’t want flags from terror organisations to be waved on German soil”, said the deputy CDU leader Thomas Frei. There are problems that Hamas does not have an official flag. Germany-based Israeli journalist Yossi Bartal also notes that even the Israeli politician Mansour Abbas has been photographed in front of the so-called Hamas flag. Abbas is a member of the coalition just elected to rule Israel. Source: taz

Rail union prepares strikes

The train drivers’ union, the GDL, announced that it will be balloting its members for strike action. Results are due on 9 August, and union leader Claus Weselsky is expecting more than 90% voting for strike action. Rail bosses have declared that drivers will receive no pay rise in 2021, and a 1.4% rise starting in October 2022. They also want to increase the number of shift changes made at short notice by up to 40%. Although the union has already lowered its demands, Deutsche Bahn is not budging. Source: nd

Corporations and politicians support LGBTIQ rights – but only when it costs nothing

UEFA banned Munich football stadium’s rainbow protest against homophobic Hungarian president Victor Orban. Rainbow flags were still flown from the town hall and posted in social media by politicians and corporations like BMW, Siemens and Sparkasse. But the CDU-SPD government is still opposing laws which will help LGBT people. Volkswagen is continuing to work with FIFA for next year’s World Cup in Qatar, despite the countries many human rights – including for LGBT people. Source: nd

The Left Berlin News & Comment

Category: News from Berlin and Germany

German Communists banned from standing in the general election

The Racialization of Anti-Semitism in Post-Holocaust Germany

The Holocaust as ‘Screen-Memory’ and the Disavowal of Colonial Violence

The Externalization of Anti-Semitism to the Muslim Other

Conclusion

Further Reading

News from Berlin and Germany: 10th July 2021

Can Proportional Representation save Labour? And would that be a good thing?

News from Berlin and Germany: 26th June 2021