The Left Berlin News & Comment

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Category: Campaign of the week

AGIT

Achiving social movements to help future struggles


05/04/2023

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

Our work operates across three different areas;

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

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

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

Sign up to our mailing list here.

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

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

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

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

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

Go Film The Police

The Go Film The Police campaign fights for the decriminalization of recording police (brutality), for holding police accountable and to encourage others to act in solidarity with those affected by police violence.


29/03/2023

The Go Film the Police campaign is a call to film racist police violence to make police brutality as a from of organized violence visible, as well as to demand police accountability.

Police claim that they are not racist and/or otherwise discriminatory, that they only use force when provoked and/or threatened. So why do they try so hard to avoid being filmed then?

We regularly hear and see witnesses of racist police violence being criminalized when they offer themselves as witnesses or film and make the abuse of power by the police visible. They are threatened, beaten up, their phones are confiscated, video material deleted and are charged with offenses such as “resistance against law enforcement officers”. The police repeatedly invoke the so-called “eavesdropping paragraph” § 201 StGB (violation of the confidentiality of the word). This states that anyone who unauthorizedly “records the non-publicly spoken word of another on a sound carrier” commits a criminal offense. However, it also states that “it (…) is not unlawful (if) the public communication is made in order to safeguard overriding public interests.” At the same time, the police claim that filming is prohibited.

However, as many legal experts as well as some courts have also acknowledged, police actions in public spaces can never be understood as “non-public”. Therefore the intrumentalization of this paragraph by the police must be stopped, who try to use it strategically to deligitimize evidence and criminalize those affected by their violence.

We are convinced that it is time to act as an alliance against this violent practice of the police and demand the decriminalisation of filming police actions. In a democratic constitutional state, individuals must have the possibility to document unlawful police behaviour. Only in this way can the police be controlled in their work and made accountable. It must be made politically clear that video recordings of police actions are admissible as evidence in court. They serve to make racist police violence visible and to identify and convict violent police officers. Filming must not be prevented. We also demand that any confiscation of cell phones and/or the deleting of videos by the police is prohibited.

Goals of the campaign include:

  • Informing and raising awareness in the public about police brutality
  • Collectively making racist police violence visible
  • Decriminalizing the recording of police actions for witnesses as well as victims
  • Banning confiscation of cell phones and banning the deletion of video recordings by police
  • Accepting video recordings as evidence in court
  • Police oversight and accountability
  • Identification, legal prosecution and conviction of criminal police officers

The campaign also encourages people to record police violence on video themselves. Go Film the Police!

Read our Open letter, and we have just published a guide about filming police in the German legal context. The guide is currently available in German, English, French and Arabic.

Klimaneustart 2030 – Volksentscheid!

Change the Law! Berlin Climate Neutral 2030


22/03/2023

On Sunday, 26 March, Berliners will head to the polls to determine our hometown’s climate future. This “Volksentscheid”, or referendum, has been brought about by us, the citizen’s initiative Klimaneustart Berlin. We worked tirelessly for 18 months to collect a total of 300,000 signatures and thereby force the Berlin senate to hold this referendum, and we are now spearheading the “Yes” campaign.

If 25% of Berlin’s population, or 608,000 people, vote Ja on 26 March, the target date for Berlin to be carbon-neutral will change from 2045 to 2030. This will be a legally binding change to Berlin’s existing Climate protection law. In addition, the law will be changed to safeguard social justice in the transition to a net zero city, and there will be a 95% reduction of all greenhouse gases, not just CO2.

As shown by studies from the Frauenhofer Institut and the Energy Watch Group, 2030 carbon-neutrality is an ambitious but achievable, and above all necessary and worthwhile, target for this historical city. We believe Berlin will be healthier, more future-orientated and better off financially in the long term if the referendum is passed on 26 March. We are also convinced that a resounding Ja! will re-establish people’s faith in the Volksentscheid as a tool for direct democracy, especially given the dire warnings about the climate issued in the last few days.

To be eligible to vote, you must be a German citizen, a resident of Berlin, and above 18 years of age. If you are all these things, we urge you to vote YES/JA on March 26th at your local voting station, which you can find here: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1FRlbyP-SN4Kr2HBlVbeyVa-b7-zdL0Q&ll=52.513194324415124%2C13.45246430136719&z=11.

If you can’t vote, there is still a lot you can do to help us mobilise support so we can reach 608,000 Yes votes. Please come along to our Demonstration with Live Music at the Brandenburg Gate on Saturday (2pm-8pm, more info here), and also to our Mass Bike Tour of Berlin on Sunday, the day of the vote (more information on the Telegram groups below). Also, before the weekend you could do us a huge favour by posting about the vote on LinkedIn, or any social media network you use, with the help of this fantastic document courtesy of Leaders For Climate Action.

You can also support the campaign

To find out more, please head here, or message Klimaneustart’s International Outreach Officer at +4917686096878.

Nakba75

Freedom of speech is a universal human right


16/03/2023

2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”), the violent expulsion and ethnic cleansing of 750.000 Palestinians from their hometowns between 1947 and 1949 in the course of the founding of the State of Israel. Palestinians commemorate the Nakba every year on the 15th of May.

Last year however, from the 13th to the 15th of May 2022, all public commemoration of the Nakba was banned in Berlin, harming basic democratic rights of freedom of speech and assembly. Whoever seemed to be demonstrating was arrested, which came to a total of 27 arrests and fines of over 8.000 euros in total.

The ban on assemblies around their day of mourning is not only a matter for the Palestinians. This precedent is an alarming door opener for further restrictions on freedom of expression and thus a matter for all democratically minded people in Germany.

That is why the #nakba75 campaign is calling for the defence of the basic democratic rights to freedom of expression and assembly on 75th anniversary of the Nakba. Together with all people who stand up for democracy and freedom, we want to commemorate the Nakba on Saturday, the 20th of May 2023, with a nationally mobilized, central large-scale demonstration in the capital Berlin.

Commemorating the Nakba is a right that should not have to be fought for. Freedom of expression and assembly are universal human rights!

You can find the campaign

  • on Instagram @nakba_75
  • On Facebook under the name #nakba75
  • on this Telegram channel for Updates:

to find out more about the last years Nakba Ban and if you want to support the campaign, you can do so under www.nakba-ban.org.

BerlinZusammen

Stop the Coalition of Regression


BerlinZusammen (Berlin together) demands: no coalition led by the CDU in Berlin, no right wing conservative regression for our City!

BerlinZusammen is a growing alliance of progressive actors from civil society who engage themselves in different areas for a liveable future for our city. Many have been active for years. Given the real prospect that Berlin could be once more governed by the CDU, we have come together to stop a coalition of regression. Berlin needs a social and participative politics, free of discrimination and for climate justice.

For this reason, BerlinZusammen is organising a Demo this Saturday with the following demand: no CDU-led coalition in Berlin, no right wing conservative regression for our City! For an open, diverse and social city for everyone!

During the preparation of the demo, several initiatives have also shown a broad Berlin-wide network or alliance, We also want to work together in the future and unite our forces.

We have numerous issues which connect us, from racist security politics, unaffordable rents, speculation in housing, the trend to privatisation of the health service, right up to insufficiently affordable or sustainable mobility options.

City politics needs a massive change of direction in many areas, where the CDU will not be helpful. For this reason, we demand as a group from initiatives and organisations from civil society a clear NO from members of the Berlin SPD to a Black-Red coalition. We are taking to the streets for a different city politics, centred on the joint vision of an open, social and sustainable city for everyone who lives in it.

Join us:

Support the demo call Stop the coalition of regression.

Join us on the Demo on Saturday 18th March, from 12 o’clock at Hermannplatz

Mobilise the people you know. Let us together send out a clear singnal for an open Berlin.

All initiatives, groups and individuals are invited to join us. Organisations which sign the call to action can say that they are interested in taking part in the formation process after the demo of a broad network extra-parliamentary alliance. These possibilities and the ways in which we achieve them can be explicitly discussed together and from the basis upwards.