The Left Berlin News & Comment

This is the archive template

Category: Uncategorised

The choice is not between social movements and workers’ rights. We need both

The politics of Sahra Wagenknecht revisited


18/04/2021

In this year’s general election Sahra Wagenknecht will be the #1 candidate (Spitzenkandidatin) for die LINKE in Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW). Sixty-one % of the delegates decided this at a meeting last week-end. Some see Wagenknecht’s candidature as a victory for the left. Others – in particular People of Colour and LGBT people – both inside and outside the party, are not so sure.

I have already written at length about aufstehen – the movement that Wagenknecht launched after she failed to win the party to a position more hostile to refugees. Fortunately, this project was stillborn, and despite all the initial hype it is now largely irrelevant. But Wagenknecht, and her politics, have not gone away.

It’s not just about the elections. This week also saw the release of Wagenknecht’s new book “Die Selbstgerechten” (the self-righteous). In case you’re not sure what it’s about, the subtitle she writes is “My counter-programme [PB: presumably to the LINKE election manifesto] for community spirit and cohesion”.

The timing cannot be accidental. With her book and her candidature, Wagenknecht is using her celebrity status (she is a regular guest on chat shows) to offer a challenge. Like her earlier positions on refugees – she has not been able to win that challenge at party conferences.

The press reacts

So, what is this challenge? According to Stefan Reinecke in the taz, Wagenknecht argues that: “poisonous neo-liberalism and ostensibly humanitarian left-liberalism are almost the same”. Reinecke goes on to say that “Wagenknecht’s Arcadia is a republic without mosques, gender politics and quotas and it bears strong similarities to the Republic of Germany 50 years ago.”

In der Freitag, Bastian Reichardt remarked that: “One look at Wagenknecht’s books shows that she has both economically and culturally alienated herself from her party”. Reichardt notes that Wagenknecht: “propagates Ordoliberalism a variety of neoliberalism that characterized the post-war German economy.” Reichardt asks “why such an economic programme should be pushed into the centre of a socialist programme?” (italics in the original).

Reichardt notes that “the fact that Wagenknecht has received so much support in a LINKE region like Nordrhein-Westfalen reveals a clear shift to the right in the party. A few years ago the bourgeois press called the Nordrhein-Westfalen region the ‘refuge of madness’”, that is the home of the dangerous radical Left. Yet now, Reichardt thinks this “refuge of madness” could soon becoming “nothing more than an ‘SPD against war’, and would be just as ready to make compromises with the SPD and Greens as the right wing of the party.

Pascal Beucker in the taz reported that “while she pulls her own party to pieces, she testifies for, of all people, the nationalistic and clerical-reactionary orientated Polish governing party PIS, which stand ‘for a courageous social politics which one would wish from social democratic and left parties in Western Europe.’”

Not everyone was critical of Wagenknecht. The AfD in NRW took a brief break from flirting with neo-Nazis to post a tweet saying: “Sahra #Wagenknecht hits the nail on the head. Note: Leftists love their victim status, that they don’t want to give up at any price, because it provides their benefits and audience. Its not about real equal rights but about personal advantage.”

Similarly, in Saxony the AfD produced an election poster: with the text “Sahra is right: limit migration.” Local AfD leader Daniel Roi justified the poster, saying Die LINKE in Saxony-Anhalt is fighting an election with Wagenknecht, although her views do not correspond with their programme. They fit better to us.”

Response from within the party

Many LINKE members also responded quickly, and I don’t think that its an accident that most of these initial responses came from victims of racism and homophobia. Many were particularly angry with this passage on page 102 of the book:

“Identity politics comes down to focusing attention on an increasingly small and peculiar minority, who find their identity in some sort of fad, by which they differentiate themselves from the main part of society, which leads them to claim that they are a victim. It has not bothered anyone that few poor people or low earners take part in discussions of identity politics. Sexual orientation, skin colour or ethnicity always count against this …

Also religious convictions, as long as they are shared by a minority in the country can make you a victim and therefore unassailable.”

Links*Kanax, the network of party members and sympathisers with a “migration background” issued a statement. This noted that: “2 years ago, we set up our group of a network of migrants in and around die LINKE as a reaction to the anti-migrant positions and the attack on our left-wing party by Sahra Wagenknecht and her supporters”

.

The statement goes on: “She writes that she stands for a left conservatism. Sahra Wagenknecht’s solution for a better society is not a joint struggle against capitalism and its forms of oppression. Instead she propagates a national identity with a Leitkultur to which everyone should integrate. This national society should on the one hand be social for everyone who finds themself in it, and on the other be sealed off from immigration.”

Niema Movassat, the NRW MP who is no longer standing for office this year told the taz that “in her book Wagenknecht attacks any emancipatory movement to which the Left party feels associated. From ‘Fridays for Future’ via ‘Black Lives Matter’, the ‘Seebrücke alliance’ up to the ‘Unteilbar’ demonstrations.” Seebrücke and Unteilbar are both movements which have mobilised hundreds of thousands of people in support of refugees and against racism.

Movassat commented elsewhere: “It makes me shudder. So, Oury Jalloh had a fad when he was murdered by policemen because of his skin colour. Is it a fad when I mention racism? My father, who because of his background could not get a job as a qualified engineer and became a taxi driver and had to muddle through for years … a fad that he must experience? Are experiences of racism or of homo- or transphobia only fads of people, self-chosen victim roles? How can she so disqualify people who experience racism and homo- and transphobia. I am so angry.”

Elif Eralp, member of the Berlin LINKE executive added: “You have written an alternative version to the election programme which has just been decided by the party and to the engagement of thousands of comrades. In your book, you are settling with us all, with die LINKE, with the left in society, and with all people daily exposed to racism, hostility to queers, homophobia and discrimination … according to Sahra Wagenknecht, I and my parents who fled torture and violence are ‘peculiar minorities’ with ‘fads’. That is simply hate and rabble rousing!”

Raul Zelik, member of the national executive of the LINKE summed up Wagenknecht’s book by calling it “a slap in the face…

…for the non-German workers who must work 12 hours a day to make ends meet, as they earn less because of racist migration politics.

… for members of the LINKE who are currently standing every free day in pedestrian precincts to collect signatures for the expropriation of the real estate companies

— for young climate activists, who get up at dawn to support striking transport workers.

… for health workers at intensive care units, who must pay for what Corona liars, bosses’ organisations and neo-liberals send them.”

Zelik finished his contribution by saying “opportunism is the death of the left”

Even former party leader Bernd Riexinger felt compelled to intervene. Riexinger is a long-standing trade union activist who Wagenknecht casually dismissed as someone “whose name has now been correctly forgotten”. Riexinger posted: “a tip from a former ‘leader of a German left party’: if you stand as a candidate for a party, it must be self-evident that you support and strengthen the basic positions of this party.”

Might Wagenknecht have a point?

Wagenknecht rejected these criticisms, issuing a statement which said “my book is a plea for a strong left and an analysis of the causes why most left and social democratic parties in Europe in recent years have lost their former voters. The transformation of left parties which reach fewer and fewer low earners and disadvantaged people is an undesirable development.”

Should we be so quick to dismiss the whole book as reactionary nonsense? A number of her points do ring true. Yes, working conditions have suffered serious attacks, and yes refugees have been used to undercut wages.

Even here, two points need to be made. Firstly, there is a serious problem with Wagenknecht’s insinuations that the people who gain from low pay for refugees are not the profiteer bosses but the refugees themselves. Secondly, the recent attacks on wages in Germany started under Gerhard Schröder’s Red-Green government – long before there was any serious influx of refugees.

Another area where Wagenknecht identifies a potential problem without providing an adequate solution is her attack on so-called “Sternchen politics” – the idea that rather than using traditional masculine words (the English equivalents would be fireman, postman etc.), a * (Sternchen) should be used to show that women can also take these roles.

Wagenknecht is right that adding Sternchen will not rid the world of sexism, and that this sort of politics is particularly popular among a middle-class academic milieu. But rather than proposing concrete fights that we can win, she portrays the people fighting sexist language as being part of the problem.

The truth is, that our side has suffered a number of recent defeats, and the fight for anti-sexist language is at least a winnable progressive demand. Surely it is a good thing to ensure that racists and sexists understand that many of their opinions are not acceptable in a pluralist society. Yet Wagenknecht counterposes these small but palpable gains with a theoretical radicalism that has no basis in the current political reality.

Even Wagenknecht’s apparent celebration of the PiS and far right parties is not as simple as some of her critics imply. On page 177 of the book, she argues the following:

“if a right wing party demands better social safeguards and abandoning economic liberalism, as Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, or if they have already implemented social programmes like the PiS in Poland … the right wing will receive more votes, particularly from the disadvantaged, the workers and the lower middle who are threatened with things getting worse.”

We should not deny that the PiS has gained support for their reactionary programme in Poland partly because they have also delivered real reforms. In Northern France, ‘Rassemblement National‘ (formerly the Front National) do pose as the champions of deindustrialized ex-workers. The Left should take these developments seriously. The question is: what conclusions should we draw?

Wagenknecht’s concentration on populism means that even though she does not directly suggest that the German Left emulate the PiS, she is unable to suggest a serious class-based alternative to capitalist exploitation. This leaves her open to populist solutions like those provided by the PiS, Rassemblement National and even the AfD.

Wagenknecht makes some decent points about what she calls the “re-feudalisation” of society, and yet her solution is to appeal to a “people” rather than a “class”. We have seen this before. Her previous book “Prosperity without greed” contains a chapter titled “why genuine entrepreneurs do not need capitalism.” If you see entrepreneurs as potential allies, it is not surprising that your vision for changing the world is a little askew.

Saving the planet – another fad?

Left-wing politics is not just about identifying the problems in society, but in seeing the people who have the power to change things. As an unreconstructed Marxist, my orientation is on the working class. Not just because workers suffer from capitalism, but because through strike action, we have the power to stop capitalism in its tracks, and to build the unity which overcomes the divisions sown by our exploiters.

Wagenknecht in her own way also orientates on the working class, but she has a fundamentally different interpretation of who comprises this class. Reading Wagenknecht write about workers, you feel she has a vision of an exclusive group of middle aged white heterosexual men who are resistant to any form of social change.

With one exception (which we will come to later) Wagenknecht always seems to describe social movements as being in opposition to workers. So, for example, on page 32 she notes that “at the end of 2019 young people from Fridays for Future travelled to Lausitz and made demands for an immediate withdrawal from coal confronting around 1000 residents… whose social existence depends on coal mining, and were purposefully identified by activists as coal-Nazis.”

To a degree, Wagenknecht does acknowledge some cooperation between Fridays for Future and trade unions. On page 34 she says “there are climate activists who have also stood up for social issues and supported bus drivers in their fight for higher pay.” But, she insists, “these actions are unfortunately not typical for the movement.”

Little mention is made of the fact that many workers in the unsafe and environmentally damaging coal industry would prefer to have other options. Despite any initial suspicions, trade unions and environmentalists have a common interest in uniting against a capitalist system which is damaging both our planet AND our working conditions.

If environmentalists and trade unionists are currently divided, a left wing answer would be to try to bring the two movements together – to encourage environmental activists to generalise and unite with workers. This is indeed what Fridays for Future – and in particular LINKE activists inside the movement – are currently doing. And only last week, the German trade union federation, the DGB published a paper examining how trade unions and environmental activists can work together.

Yet Wagenknecht appears unable to conceive of this happening. Looking at the way that she dismisses the environmental movement, it is unclear whether she would even see this as being a good thing.

Black Lives Matter – but how much?

Wagenknecht’s lack of solidarity with most social movements is even more clear in relation to Black Lives Matter. On page 115 she approvingly cites the US-American political scientist Mark Lilla when he said “Black Lives Matter is a textbook example of creating no solidarity”. Lilla elsewhere argues “we need no more marchers. We need more mayors“– an idea of change only coming from above which is often reflected in Wagenknecht’s stances.

On page 22, Wagenknecht analyses the development of BLM after the police murder of George Floyd: “in Europe, Black Lives Matter activists now also began to dismantle the statues of slave traders from the colonial time. They did this with zeal and conviction, as if this was the key to escape the modern slavery of bullshit jobs, humiliation and poverty.”

Once more she seems to make a distinction between ordinary workers and dilettante middle class Black Lives Matters activists. And yet the BLM demonstrations in Berlin last year were dominated by working class people. Normally when you get the U-Bahn to a demo from the working class district of Wedding you see a couple of familiar faces from the left scene and that’s it. That day, the train was full – largely of young Black girls. From other reports that I’ve read, this experience was repeated throughout the world.

Wagenknecht’s statements on Black Lives Matter are made more problematic by a long-standing mistrust shown by Black activists about her positions on race and racism – Jacinta Nandi, for example, accuses her of “victim blaming oppressor off-hooking bollocks”. In 2017, an open letter was issued accusing her of racism. Thomas Seibert explained why he signed it, saying “Wagenknecht deliberately amplifies the mood in which the dismantling of the rights of non-German people is pursued.”

The aforementioned statement by Links*Kanax explores the ideological background to Wagenknecht’s ideology: “her ideas are not particularly new. She rejects genealogical racism, but practises a cultural racism à la Huntington’s ‘Clash of Cultures’. This implies an anti-materialist interpretation from her that its not capitalist relations that exclude people, but the marginalized themselves, who isolate themselves and live in “parallel worlds”.

I could go on, but will leave it here for the moment. If you really want to pursue the argument, I wrote much more about the racist implications of Wagenknecht’s politics in my earlier article about the formation of aufstehen.

A movement worth supporting? Wagenknecht, the Yellow Vests and the Querdenker

There is one movement (and only one as far as I can tell) that is unscathed from Wagenknecht’s ire. On pp36-37, she devotes a section to the French “Yellow Vests”.

She argues: “unlike the demos of the Lifestyle Left the Yellow Vests put social issues in the foreground – initially the withdrawal of the petrol price increase introduced by Macron and then a general improvement of living conditions”. As if the “Lifestyle Left’s” demands for a sustainable environment and an end to the police killing black people would not consist an improvement of living conditions.

Wagenknecht notes approvingly that “the yellow vests considered themselves neither right nor left. This was above all because they associated the label ‘left’ with the Lifestyle left. As the Yellow Vests courageously ignored the left-liberal world view they were immediately suspected – in particular from German Lifestyle lefts – of extreme right wing sympathies.”

Could I just pause for a moment to note that although there was an attempt by fans of Marine Le Pen to take over the Yellow Vest movement, they were quickly rejected – and that the German left media regularly reported on the Yellow Vests’ outstanding resistance to Macron – not least in the reports from Paris that John Mullen wrote for theleftberlin website.

This is, however, secondary to the next pernicious step that Wagenknecht makes, eliding the French Yellow Vest movement with the much more dubious Querdenken movement in Germany. Immediately after berating the German Left for dismissing the Yellow Vests as Nazis, Wagenknecht writes the following:

“Also during the large anti-Corona demonstrations, for example in August 2020 in Berlin, the executive of the same party saw only ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘Nazis’ on the streets although anyone who saw the pictures of these rallies impartially could not overlook the large number of relatively unpolitical but dissatisfied ordinary citizens.”

At the time, the criticism from the left was never that everyone on the demonstration was a Nazi, but that Nazis were invited to march (and sometimes to address rallies). This meant that everyone on the demos was clearly and consciously marching alongside Nazis – the same Nazis who would later storm parliament with right wing banners, after being invited by the AfD.

As Niema Movassat notes: “the demonstrators, who Sahra doesn’t want to be describe as Nazis are the people who tried to storm the German Bundestag”

How do ideas change?

Non-Germans regularly ask me 2 questions about Wagenknecht: “does she really believe what she’s saying?” and “is she a racist?” The questions are related, as some of her utterances are indeed pretty racist. It can be therefore more convenient to think that she’s playing a trick – appealing to racist prejudices just as a means of winning votes.

I do believe that Wagenknecht is genuinely shocked when people accuse her of racism, but her world view is trapped inside a white German Leitkultur that is itself intrinsically racist. Like a good Marxist scholar, she looks to the working class, but she only understands a working class which is not just white and male but also irrevocably racist and homophobic. This has little to do with the real existing working class in Germany in 2021.

And yet, there is a small grain of truth in Wagenknecht’s assumptions. Leandros Fischer writes:

“Neil Davidson wrote of how the identity of male white workers under Keynesianism was tied to forms of racialized white identity formed in opposition to the unskilled Gastarbeiter, Punjabi or Caribbean worker. This was most accentuated in Germany owing to the more generous welfare state, the ideology that ‘Deutschland ist kein Einwanderungsland’, the prevailing victim mentality post-1945 of German being ‘divided people’ etc.

This feeling must have been particularly strong among those ‘unrepentant communists’ from the GDR like Wagenknecht after reunification. I see Wagenknecht’s rants as the confluence of leading an electoralist party, which is stagnating amidst a crisis characterized by trade union complacency and German hegemony within Europe. She consciously seeks out fragments from another era, in this case Keynesianism, hoping to weaponise them as tools of opposition.“

Whether or not most white German workers are racist, Wagenknecht appears to have no conception of the Marxist understanding of how ideas change in struggle. As Marx and Engels argue in the German Ideology:

“the alteration of people on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.“

In other words, most of us, for most of the time, carry the burden of defeat. We do not believe that change is possible, and some of us use that pessimism to blame other people and ethnic groups. But the alienation that causes such reactionary ideas is challenged by the emergence of vibrant movements like Fridays for Future, Black Lives Matter which bring us together and show that both unity and change are indeed possible.

1968 – a movement of prosperous dilettantes?

Another such exemplary movement is that of 1968. which Wagenknecht also dismisses in her book as “a movement primarily led by prosperous children of the middle class and upper middle class” (p297). Although she concedes that some of the radical students came from working-class families, she believes that the movement as a whole was divorced from the working class:

“The spokesmen of the 68-movement were however children of the prosperous middle classes, who were culturally protesting against their parents’ generation. Many came from the bourgeoisie, in which the rejection of “suburban narrow-mindedness” and the “provincial values” had a tradition of separating themselves from those below and was in no sense an expression of a rebellion in the name of the oppressed.” (p96)

In truth, the 68 movement was in part the result of the proletarianisation of higher education. Until the 1950s, universities in most country were exclusively institutions for the sons and some daughters of the rich. For example, only around 2% of the German population went to university. Increased access to education for working class people contributed towards the radicalisation of the late 1960s.

This is partly why the 1968 movement did not just fight oppression, giving birth to the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements. It also developed an organic link with working class struggle. In May 1968, students rioted alongside young workers on Paris’s Night of the Barricades, precipitating the largest strike in world history – when 10 million workers struck the following week.

This was not just a French phenomenon. In Germany, many of the wildcat strikes of 1969 were led by Gastarbeiter. This was the moment in which the German student movement abandoned its Adorno-inspired “reflective” outlook at this point, and to relate to real-existing struggles that Critical Theory thought belonged to another time.

In his book The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After, Chris Harman comments on the aftermath of 1968 in Great Britain:

“This began with a revolt against wage controls in 1969, suffered a lull after the defeat of the postal workers’ strike early in 1971, then revived with a vengeance that summer when shipbuilding workers on the Clyde ‘worked in’ in opposition to a scheme close the shipyards with large scale redundancies. In 1972 there was a wave of factory occupations, the first national miners’ strike for 46 years, and national strikes by builders and dockers, while 1973 saw the first ever industrial action by civil servants and hospital workers.”

According to Harman, “the climax came in the winter of 1973-74.” with a miners’ strike which brought down the Tory government (Herman, The Fire Last Time p223).

Later in his book, Harman talks about the gains made by workers across Europe in the aftermath of the student protests:

“the wage increases granted in May and June 1968 in France, the concessions made by the newly elected Labour government to the miners and others in Britain in 1974, the 30 percent increase in the minimum wage in Portugal in the same year, the grant of automatic cost of living increases in Italy in 1975” (Harman op cit, p352).

The 1968 movement proves above all else that social movements and workplace activism belong together, reinforce each other, and should not be played off against each other.

Whither die LINKE?

The selection of Wagenknecht as electoral candidate is a significant step backwards. It has been estimated that in the few days following the vote, 50 people left die LINKE in NRW, with 20 of these clearly saying that they left the party because of Wagenknecht’s election. I have had several discussions with friends – mainly Black people or those with Black children – who have said that they can no longer vote for this LINKE.

For others, a LINKE with Wagenknecht has not been attractive for some time. This comment is typical: “I dropped out years ago, because of her vile “Gastrecht” talk … she accords as much blame to left liberals as to the right for the desolate state of society. And maybe [you should] put more emphasis that her market capitalist vision is inherently nationalist, violating the left principle of internationalism and international solidarity.”

I also feel this pain, but would like to emphasize what die LINKE is and what it isn’t. Die LINKE started as a compromise. It was an attempt to build a Left political opposition to the Red-Green government which bombed Yugoslavia and brought in the Hartz IV “reforms”. It was never meant to be a small sect, ineffectually planning the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, but a mass organisation which unites the best militants who organise social and workplace struggles.

Such an organisation is always going to contain tensions between those who believe that all we need is a left hand on the tiller of capitalism and those who want to sink the whole bloody ship. Indeed many of Wagenknecht’s beliefs in change from above are shared by prominent people on all wings of the party. But the party also contains many others who are central to social movements which are actively fighting for social change.

Politics from below

Wagenknecht’s belief that change can only come from above is not new and not confined to Germany. Her appeal to crude nationalism based on her belief that workers are necessarily nationalist and racist is not radically different to the flag-shagging of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in Britain, or the French social democrats who believed that the nascent fascists of the Front National (FN) could be countered by repeating their racism.

But, as FN leader of the time Jean Marie Le Pen said “people prefer the original to the copy”. Adopting right wing racism ultimately means making these ideas socially acceptable and enabling their main propagators. Racism is not fought with concessions but by challenging every instance in which it appears. Movements are built by uniting people in a common struggle not in pandering to the prejudices of the most reactionary part of the class.

Sahra Wagenknecht’s “old woman shouting at clouds” act does not represent the whole of the Left, or die LINKE. It most certainly does not reflect our potential. I don’t think that Wagenknecht belongs in the party, certainly not as Spitzenkandidatin, but there is much more to die LINKE than just her.

Having said all this, Wagenknecht does seem to be on a mission to liquidate the left within die LINKE and to regroup the party on a nationalist basis. Precisely because of her capital both as a (former) radical and a regular talk-show guest, she is winning support from some people who should know better. These people may distrust her politics, but see her as “the only face that wins elections.”

And yet it is not clear that her strategy will result in more votes. And even if it does, are the votes worth the wholesale abandonment of our principles? We are better than that.

As they said on the Parisian barricades, La Lutte continue.

Many thanks to Chris Cheeseman, Leandros Fischer, Georgina Darcy and Hari Kumar for their comments on an early version of this article

Rent Control overturned: we will not be divided

We must fight the court decision to protect big landlords


16/04/2021

“The Mietendeckel wurde gekippt!” Shouted my housemate from his bedroom.

What? Verdammt. I really thought that Berlin could be different.

Who am I? I’m a US-American by birth, and since 2018 I’ve dared to call myself a Berlinerin. Upon my first visit to Berlin, I fell in love. There were ideas here that I was never allowed to explore growing up in the state of Iowa or grinding through my graduate education in rural Pennsylvania. People here in Berlin shunned capital, the role of companies, the protestant work-ethic and thought of the access to housing and creative spaces as a basic human right. We still do. Upon moving here, I read and talked to others as much as I could about the long history of city politics, and hoped and prayed that I could participate in the popular forces that keep this city weird, alive, and vibrant.

And I did. When the rent control (German: Mietendeckel) was passed, I was intrigued, although also confused. I didn’t come from a city like New York, where rent control is part of common working-class knowledge, even where, like most capitalist cities, rents are a never-ending burden.

At the time, I was living in an over-priced, albeit beautiful, Prenzlauer Berg apartment near Mauerpark, a part of the city infamous for what academics categorize as super-gentrification. It was not that I was longing to live in ‘Penzelberg’, even though the turn-of-the-century building style has been beautified nicely for the eye (not for the pocketbook). It was the only apartment I could find in 2018 when we moved to Berlin. We paid 1600 warm a month for 89m2. The apartment was “furnished” with an old tube TV, a decaying sofa (literally stuffed with hay), and a few other miscellaneous furniture items.

Several months later, the rationale behind the dysfunctional furniture in the apartment became clear: furnished apartments were exempt from the failed attempt at rent control from the city of Berlin. We also rented for one year at a time, as the woman who owned the apartment, the resident of the ground floor, claimed that she someday wanted to downsize by moving into our apartment.

Refuge in Wedding

In effect, these one year contracts nullified the tenants’ protections we had under German law. When the new rent control was passed, it became clear that we would be unable to take advantage of it. If we asked our landlord about it, we assumed she would decide it was high time to move into the apartment herself—or simply search for another tenant. So we decided to move to Wedding.

Der Wedding kommt. True, rents aren’t what they used to be in Wedding. You can no longer find an apartment for 200€/month here. But according to the city gentrification researchers, Wedding is the last central part of the city to gentrify. In an essay from 1900, Rothj Werke beautifully writes “Im Wedding hört die Grammatik auf und das Geld auch.”

In Wedding, we found a refuge in the form of a Hinterhaus Altbauwohnung with a long-term rent contract—albeit with a sweating, macho neo-Nazi housing manager. We are certain we got the apartment thanks to our race, family status and class. We are a white, married cis-heterosexual couple with two incomes and no children, and for the application, they asked for a photo of us. Later, the housing manager commented on our need to keep our future children away from the “curly haired children” of the neighborhood.

But with a long-term rental contract, we could call the rent control into effect on our apartment, and in some small way, fight the racist, classist garbage this housing manager and his company perpetrate. And we did, through hours of letter writing, free-legal consultationprovided by the red-red-green Berlin Senate, and hand wringing, and a bit of a rush at finally having success. The result?

Today, the rent control was overruled.

We will have to pay back one year of so-called underpaid rent. Luckily for us, we saved back the sum, and it was small enough for our apartment, which has never been renovated except to add a 2m2 bathroom. Many other Berliners weren’t able to save back the money that they could potentially pay back. The rent was just too high to begin with.

I have hope that Wedding, but also Berlin, will remain red. In our Kiez, several new buildings are going up which will contain one-room furnished micro-apartments, which the sign on the building boasts are “a fantastic investment”. Although the character of Wedding may change, the exploitation of the working class here will not. Those who will move in there will likely be white students and white-collar workers moving to the city who could not find anything else before the start of the semester or their new job.

But the biggest mistake we as residents of the Kiez can make is to fall for the lie that these newcomers are the ones ruining our Kiez, moving to Berlin, making rents rise, pushing out racial minorities, and bringing a Denns Biomarkt to the corner where it was never wanted. Yes, they (or better said, we) are complicit in this system by living in it, but we did not create it and actively reject it. We, like the original residents of the neighborhood, are forced to live in it.

That is the wiley weapon of the patriarchal white-supremacist capitalists. They divide us and colonize our minds by pitting us against each other. It is how they attempt to coerce workers to believe trade-unions will not protect them. It is how they attempt to take huge real-estate companies for emminent domain are an attempt to take your family home, all the while using the same tool to steal family farms for interstates.

In reality, it is not the fault of the family which cleans up litter in the park or the vegan-feminist-antiracist artist which pastes-up her latest creation for driving prices up in the neighborhood. That fault lies alone with the failure of the city of Berlin to protect her residents from unbridled profiteering on a basic human need. Now it also lies with the constitutional court.

I will fight it with every tool I have. Granted, the tools I have at the moment are limited. As a foreigner with an Aufenhaltserlaubnis, I cannot vote in any German elections. I will influence my spouse’s vote, just as women did in the days before our suffrage was won from the patriarchy. I will go to the demonstration tonight on Hermannplatz. I will write this article.

Verdammt, I will fight.

Prince Philip has Died. So What?

Eight Days of Mourning for a Royal Racist


15/04/2021

I write this from under an obsidian veil, a solemn tear rolling down my cheek. A jet black armband encircling my bicep. The union flag is flying at half-mast and a mournful dirge breaks the bleakness with yet more bleakness. For dear old Prince Philip has died. Farewell, sweet Prince.

Just kidding, I’m not an establishment columnist! Manufacturing a mood of national mourning has never felt so contrived. At the time of writing, the BBC (UK public service broadcaster) has received at least 110,994 complaints over its fawning wall-to-wall coverage of his death, which began with a tearful announcement by a news presenter and followed with the cancellation of normal programming in favour of a non-stop Phil-fest. This unsurprisingly saw a big drop in viewer numbers.

UK cities, including London and Birmingham, replaced the adverts and COVID advice displayed on electronic billboards with huge images of the Prince’s pampered visage. Mourn, you ungrateful plebs! You might be getting fed up with all the craven ham-fisted attempts to get you to mourn the death of this old rich geezer by now. If so, read on for my republican Prince Philip obit.

Philip Who?

Prince Philip, who has died aged 99, was the husband of Queen Elizabeth II. He was also known as the Duke of Edinburgh. Royals tend to hoard titles. Born into the Danish and Greek royal families, his is a story of riches to riches. With a sprinkling of Nazis. Three of his four older sisters were active Nazis, there is an embarrassing photo of Philip at the funeral of his sister Cecilie flanked by uniformed Nazis. Although Philip did not become a Nazi, he minimised his sibling’s Nazism and consistently expressed racist opinions throughout his ‘career’ as the Queen’s consort.

Philip first met his cousin Elizabeth when he was 18 and she was 13 and they started writing to each other. After a stint in the Navy during the Second World War, on the non-Nazi side unlike his sisters, he married Elizabeth, who was crowned Queen a few years later. It’s the posh sort of inbreeding so it’s socially acceptable.

After marrying his cousin, his job was to be married to the Queen. It pays quite well and is fairly light on actual work. Amidst all the media fawning and mourning, there have been a couple of truly bizarre articles that have argued that he “turned traditional gender roles upside down.” A stay at home father who was happy to take a backseat to his wife’s career. Yes, really. He was apparently an unlikely feminist hero who “allowed his spouse the spotlight”. Well yeah, she’s the bloody Queen in a hereditary monarchy. I remain unconvinced by these painfully laboured portrayals.

Ah Him. Didn’t he say loads of dodgy stuff?

Philip spent much of his time as the Queen’s consort making rude and often racist comments. These are now being repainted by the unctuous media and political class as hilarious gaffes, charming quirks and attempts at humour. They probably were deeply unfunny attempts at humour, as well as instances of pointedly getting away with being a racist tosser.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson excused them in this manner saying that his “politically incorrect” remarks were his way of “trying to break the ice, to get things moving, to get people laughing.” This is unsurprising given Johnson’s own reputation for saying racist things.

Here are a few of Philip’s racist remarks:

  • “If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes.” To a group of British students in China.
  • “You managed not to get eaten then?” To a British student who had visited Papua New Guinea.
  • “Do you still throw spears at each other?” To an Aboriginal leader in Queensland, Australia.
  • “It looks as though it was put in by an Indian.” About a fusebox, during a tour of a factory.

And here are some more crass remarks:

  • “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.” In an interview to the Deutsche Presse Agentur in 1988.
  • “If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?” After the Dunblane school shooting in 1996 in which 16 primary school children and their teacher were shot dead.
  • “Young people are the same as they always were. They are just as ignorant.” At the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme 50th Anniversary.
  • “You could do with losing a little bit of weight.” To a 13 year old child with ambitions to be an astronaut.

There are numerous other examples, demonstrating that as well as being an extremely rich and privileged old man, he was openly racist, reactionary and unpleasant in his public interactions. We can only imagine what he must have been like in private. Remind me why we’re mourning him again? Oh, the Queen’s husband/cousin thing. Right.

Don’t Mourn Shirkers, Organise Workers!

Eight days of official mourning have been declared in the UK. When ordinary people lose a loved one in the UK they often get less time off work than this. National Rail turned their train information and ticket buying website grey “as a mark of respect”. This caused accessibility problems for visually impaired users, but mourning an old bigot was more important than such trivial considerations. A public backlash made them reconsider this odd decision after a couple of days. Must we all make similarly embarrassing public displays of sorrow? Must we tug the forelock as the politicians have scrambled to, even those in the so-called Labour Party?

Labour leader Keir Starmer was in such a hurry to lick the royal boot that he ‘breached royal protocol’ by offering his condolences before the Prime Minister and got a ticking off from the tabloid Daily Mail. The House of Commons (the democratically elected house of the UK Parliament) devoted seven hours to tributes to the Prince. Seven hours of cringing deferential speeches from our democratic representatives. Political parties suspended their local election campaigning as a ‘mark of respect’. When it’s a choice between monarchy and democracy in the UK, clearly monarchy comes first. It absolutely should not.

The Prince’s dreadful paedophile-adjacent son, Prince Andrew, was wheeled out to tell us that old Philip was the “grandfather of the nation”. That was probably a bad idea in terms of getting the public onside.

The attempt to create a national mood of collective mourning serves a purpose. It reinforces the unequal status quo; these people are important, it says. This Prince who died of natural causes at the age of 99 is more important than the 127,000 people who have died of COVID during the pandemic in the UK. They don’t get eight days of public mourning. The rich bigot does, because he’s a Prince and they’re not, they’re just ordinary beautiful people. Don’t look at them, look up at the glitzy gems and palaces and identify with that. That is British, it says, and so are you. Be proud of your racist Prince. He was ‘traditional’ and you like tradition. He was ‘of his time’; a euphemism for racist. Embrace the rose-tinged nostalgia. Embrace it.

The ruling class attempt to get us to ‘buy in’ to the system that oppresses us with this over the top royal pantomime. Know your place subjects, celebrate and mourn your betters! God Save the Queen (and her husband). Or let’s scrap the whole charade and remember those who are worth remembering. Our nurses, doctors, bus drivers, shop workers, bartenders, baristas, carers: thousands and thousands of our loved ones. Organise and fight for the things worth fighting for and ignore the royal distraction.

I hope the over-the-top coverage of Prince Philip’s death leads to an anti-royal backlash. The viewing figures for the coverage and much social media commentary suggest that the establishment media may have pushed it too far. Forgive me if I break the eight days of mourning early, I have things to be getting on with.

My final thought is, if this is the media reaction to the death of a 99 year old notoriously racist Prince, when the Queen snuffs it, I’m throwing my phone and telly into the sea.

Film Review: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

5 Oscar nominations – but is it any good? Our reviewer on why it works on both an artistic and political level


14/04/2021

To introduce Black History Month, Netflix aired “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” last December. It was indeed a great choice to celebrate and pay tribute to the Black heritage of the United States, as marked by the work of two exquisite African Americans: theatre writer and “Poet of Black America” August Wilson and the “Mother of the Blues” Ma Rainey – the woman who shaped the blues and influenced an entire generation of musicians as diverse as Louis Armstrong and Janis Joplin. The film was produced by Denzel Washington and is his second August Wilson play. His first was the drama “Fences” (2016), which he directed and starred in along with Viola Davis – a role that won her the Oscar prize for best leading female role.

So “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” opened to high expectations. Viola Davis plays Ma Rainey, and four African American actors, as the members of her band, carry a vital part of the plot of the film. They are session musicians who bring the musical tradition of the South to conquer the scene in the North. Chadwick Boseman is stunning in the role of inspired trumpet player Levee, which sadly turned out to be his last performance, as he passed away of cancer shortly after the filming. He was only forty four.

Behind the camera, George C. Wolfe is a guarantee for sustaining the theatricality and – in a way – the queerness of the film. After all, he is the man who first directed on stage “Angels in America” (1993), Tony Kushner’s epic play on the human condition and LGBT struggles in the aftermath of the AIDS era.

Who was Ma Rainey?

The film starts with Ma Rainey’s frenzied shows, first in her home state, Georgia and then in Chicago. Although she performs the same song, these are two different worlds. In Georgia, a humble tent on a plantation hosts a Black audience looking for recreation and comfort listening to the music of their roots. On the contrary, in Chicago one watches an impressive spectacle, with female dancers moving hedonically to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom style as well as a different audience: more urban and more affluent.

What has happened meanwhile is described by the Black and white newspaper advertisements that follow, all of them offering workplaces to Black people: Domestic servants, butlers, seamstresses, industrial workers in what was called the “great migration” of African Americans from the South to the North. They were pursuing the dream of welfare and especially of the equality promised to them by the capitalist development that was taking place in the Northern and East northern states. They carried in their baggage the blues, their music that had been born out of gospels and spirituals on the plantations of the South and fused with the musical currents emerging at the time in the urban metropolises.

Ma Rainey’s work was influential in the development of blues in its primal form. Born Gertrude Pritchett in Georgia, she became known after performing with her husband Wil “Pa” Rainey (from whom she only retained her nickname). With powerful vocal abilities and her unique style, Ma operated in several musical ensembles, which combined the mostly white folk show vaudeville (the equivalent of cabaret in the 19th century) with the Black music of the South. She acquainted the white audience with Black culture by bridging the gap between them and confirmed to the Blacks the power of their cultural heritage.

Far from being a mere performer, Ma Rainey played an active role in composition, imbuing musical pieces with the depth and richness of her own experiences as well as Black women’s stories: fear, anger, euphoria, love, sexual desire. Angela Davis in her book “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday” writes that “Rainey’s songs are full of women who explicitly celebrate their right to conduct themselves as expansively and even as undesirably as men.”

Ma Rainey challenged in practice the morals and sexual norms of her time. Her songs talk about “sissy men” and “butch” – mannish – women and she herself danced on stage incredibly provocatively in the most unashamed way. Off stage as well, she did not bother hide her sexual orientation. She organized legendary “women-only” parties, occasionally broken up by police raids on gross indecency charges.

“Prove it on me blues” is the most famous of her rich anthology of homoerotic songs and is identified as the first ever song with a lesbian reference:

They say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me;
Went out last night with a crowd of my friends
They must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men
It’s true I wear a collar and tie.
Makes the wind blow all the while.»

The poster published by Paramount to promote the song (below) leaves no space for misinterpretations. It shows Ma, also a fashion icon, wearing a suit, tie and a fedora hat, arm in arm with two cute women.

The film

How can such an exciting life be conveyed on screen? It just can’t. Not only the film, but also August Wilson’s play, makes more a wry commendation of the times of “Ma Rainey’s Black bottom” than her biography.

It’s a hot summer day of 1927 at the studio of a record company (Paramount is implied) in Chicago. The (white) producer is waiting for the diva of the blues, Ma Rainey and her band to record. In the first part of the film we watch the members of the orchestra who have arrived on time, three old school experienced musicians and the younger trumpeter Levee (Chadwick Boseman), heading for a rehearsal in the basement of the building.

Their descent into the sunless, gloomy room underscores directly the social position of Blacks at the bottom of American society and they can not help but comment on it. After all, despite their well-groomed appearance and elegant attire, they noticed the way whites were staring at them as they got off the railway.

Levee dreams of escaping living life hand-to-mouth, obscured under Ma Rainey’s shadow. The yellow fancy shoes he just bought on the money he had made beating his friends in a game of cards symbolize his ambitions. Levee wants to modernize Ma’s classic blues by adding playful solos to the introduction and between the verses and he has convinced producer Sturdyvand that this is what the (white) audience needs in order to chill out listening to the blues. This is the music he will play with the new band he has in the works and he feels confident about them being recorded.

The other musicians, trombonist Cutler, pianist Toledo, and Slow Drag on double bass, all blow him off, but Levee would not change his mind. Neither would the stories they narrate about someone who sold his soul to the devil, nor Toledo’s pessimistic monologue, which uses food and cooking as a parable for the plight of African Americans: “The colored man is the leftovers”. On the contrary they have the opposite effect.

Levee carries his own tragic story with him: he’s from the plantations of Tennessee, where he was stabbed by white racists who had invaded his home in his father’s absence and were harassing his mother. His conclusion from the experience was that there is no god, and the objective is to achieve success, money and fame.

Ma’s late arrival at the studio leaves room neither for creative renewal, nor for negotiation. Majestic and assertive, with her mistress Dussy Mae on her arm and her little nephew Sylvester at the wheel of her brand new car, they make an eye-catching trio that clearly shows Ma’s agenda.

It is not so much the volume of make-up and blush on Ma-Viola Davis’s face, but her authoritarian attitude towards the musicians and the possessive demeanor towards Dussy Mae (who is flirting unabashedly with Levee) that make Ma a rather negative figure. But she is not naive – that’s how she has learned to survive.

In this way she dictates not only that the music pieces be recorded in the original version (her own), but also that Sylvester will be paid to introduce them, despite his obvious problem in articulating his speech. She is aware of his weakness as much as she knows that it’s the correct timing for her to get what she wants. Like her session musicians, Ma bears the burden of surviving in adverse conditions, and this portrayed as the root of her cynicism.

At the end of the day, after performing her pieces they way she wishes, Ma receives her salary in full, plus pocket money for nephew Sylvester. Levee is left with the bitter taste of an unjust rejection and ends up sell his scores for five dollars to Sturdywand, who will eventually record them with a swing all white orchestra.

The price of the transition from blues to swing is soon paid by Ma Rainey herself, who will be left without a record label when Paramount unilaterally terminates their collaboration. She will be left with the bus she bought with her name painted on it.

The film may not enlighten us about Ma Rainey herself and this probably disappointed those who wished to know about her fascinating life. Nevertheless, it is a dense work with deep and penetrating dialogues, and while it unfolds almost in real time, it is a lot more than a cinematic theatrical performance. It is an essay on American history, racial oppression, the power of music, and how all these intertwine and compose the mosaic of modern America. And from this point of view it speaks not only of its time but also of today.

Sunny Side of the Alps Clouding Up

Slovenia is in the Grip of a Right-Wing Tornado


13/04/2021

by Ana Podvršič and Jaša Veselinović

 

Less than a year since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Slovenia barely resembles the country that, for a long time, was seen as a social-democratic outlier in the region. The outbreak of the pandemic coincided with a major political change that brought a far-right Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS) and its leader Janez Janša to power. From the very beginning, the SDS coalition has been advancing its project of the radical restructuring of the Slovenian state, economy and civil society, in order to further the liberties of capital.

The so-called “Anti-Corona Packages” (ACP), programs of measures formally seeking to attenuate the economic and social crisis related to the epidemic, have been the main vehicle for the right-wing government’s attack on social standards and formal democratic policy-making. Some of the most blatant examples are the exclusion of environmental NGOs from construction permit procedures, and an obligation for the unemployed to take the first job on offer, regardless of qualifications.

Concealing such measures in ACPs elicited bouts of popular revolt; weekly protests that started at the end of last April and soon evolved into mass protesting on bicycles. Not even the summer and a partial lifting of the restrictions halted these protests. Environmentalists, cultural workers and activists from alternative social centers Rog and Metelkova were demanding respect for environmental standards and independent media and civil society, restoration of the rule of law and the government’s resignation.

As the “cycling protests” grew they were met with counter-protests of government supporters, including the prominent participation of neo-Nazi groups. There were also some protests of “corona-sceptics”, a motley crew of conspiracy theorists somewhat similar to the querdenken movement in Germany. With the exception of one 500-strong protest in November, they did not receive popular support and subsided quickly.

At the beginning of February this year, the protest dynamics reached new dimensions, with the so-called “protest of the parents”. After nearly four months of “distance learning” – the most prolonged period of school closures in Europe – the government’s decision to open and then almost immediately close the schools was one measure too many for parents. With protests spontaneously spreading throughout the country and high-school teachers and students joining them, the government backed off and decided to open all primary schools.

The government’s main reaction to the varied contestations was the reinforcement of repressive apparatus and disciplinary techniques. Already during the first lockdown, the police were handing out fines for absurd traffic violations, routinely requiring protesters’ identification and following up with more fines. Physical violence became an important aspect of the repression, as the police are no longer reluctant to use pepper spray on any occasion.

In fact, the pandemic was used as a cover to increase institutional repression through ACP. Police jurisdiction and powers related to public gatherings were expanded; fines for individuals organizing public gatherings were increased to astronomical levels, ranging from €1,200 to €12,000. Finally, under the new rules, outside gatherings of up to ten people are allowed only if the participants do not have the intention of “expressing an opinion” – if they do, they are to be punished.

Speaking of the reinforcement of public repression, the destruction of Rog, Ljubljana’s prominent social center with left-oriented and independent political, social care and cultural activities, by the formally center-left leaning mayor of Ljubljana, Zoran Jankovič, is worth mentioning. With no prior announcement or legal justification, this former CEO of Slovenia’s biggest retail company sent a contingent of anti-riot police, flanked by a private security firm full of Nazi sympathisers, to raze the Rog buildings to the ground. Rog has been a long-term obstacle to the mayor’s profit-oriented plans to transform the space into a “Contemporary Arts Centre.”

Soon after Rog was demolished, a highly symbolic disciplinary intervention took place at Metelkova, Ljubljana’s biggest squat and social center (featuring in Lonely Planet’s tourist guides). Offering no explanation, tens of riot police in full gear took the opportunity of the National Day of Culture to march through Metelkova and bang on the doors of bars and autonomous spaces that have been inactive for months. After one year of the pandemic, seeing robocops on the streets of Ljubljana, known for being a green and family-friendly tourist boutique town, is now becoming as ordinary as seeing people wearing masks.

The current Slovenian government, whose leader is a fervent supporter of Trump and Orbán, has without doubt a strong ambition for the (SDS-) party appropriation of the Slovenian state. Its policies have also opened a window of opportunity for other authorities interested in dismantling and demobilizing left social actions. When it comes to attacking alternative political movements and culture, Janša’s government, the police, and pro-capital-oriented local authorities seem eager to join forces and speed up the anti-democratic and anti-social tornado.

In the context of the largely impotent parliamentary opposition of neoliberal centre parties, to which the Left has aligned itself, the Slovenian government faces few obstacles on its path towards making the most out of the pandemic-induced state of emergency and establishing an SDS-Party State.

This article first appeared in German in the Austrian website Mosaik. Reproduced with permission.