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Reductionism and Epigenetics: The Lysenko Debate

Both Morgan and classical genetic theory, as well as Lysenko’s theories on genetics were one-sided and reductionist. Dialectics more aptly describes current thoughts on evolution


18/06/2022

“Nature versus nurture“?

Controversies about heredity pit classical gene-theory against environmental-developmental theories. The former invokes an unchanging gene and is associated with Mendel, Weismann, Watson and Crick – and later with Dawkins. Environmentalists see heredity as malleable to the ‘outside’ world, and are linked to Lamarck, Lysenko and the modern Epigenetic school – and the Marxist Lewontin. This controversy continues to be intrinsically and intensely political.  This article has three aims: To synopsise Engels on ever-changing nature; to outline briefly modern epigenetic (developmental) knowledge against classical genetics and Lysenkoism; and to consider the political rise of Lysenko. This complex area is more fully detailed here: Marxism and Science January 2022.

Engels on Nature and Dialectics

Marx and Engels disparaged ‘mechanical materialism’, or ‘reductionism’. They conceptualized an ever-changing world. As Marx delved into society, Engels systematized their joint views on philosophy and nature.

Engels argued that two principles imbued nature — universal change (coupling transformation and negations); and ‘holism’ (an interpenetration of opposites). These underly a universe where ‘laws’ play out. Change was a fundamental principle in nature:

“The whole of nature, from the smallest element to the greatest, from grains of sand to suns, from protista to men, has its existence in eternal coming into being and passing away, in ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and change.” (Engels 1987)

Just as was it in society, which Marx described as ‘an organism’:

“present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, constantly changing.” (Marx 1976)

Engels’ second principle opposed rigid ‘hard and fast lines’, by applying laws of  ‘interpenetration of opposites’, and ‘negation of the negation’:

“Dialectics.. prevails throughout nature … Hard and fast lines are incompatible with… evolution. Even the borderline between vertebrates and invertebrates is no longer rigid… Dialectics knows no HARD AND FAST LINES, no unconditional, universally valid “either”- “or”.”

Opposed to foisting theories onto nature, Engels insisted:

“As in historical science, one must proceed from given facts, in natural science the interconnections are not to be built into the facts but discovered in them, and… verified as far as possible by experiment.”

This parallels Marx’s view of society:

“By studying each of these evolutions on its own, and then comparing them, one will easily discover the key to the phenomenon, but it will never be arrived at by the all-purpose formulae of a general theory.” (Marx 1989)

Unsurprisingly, Engels could not specify specific genetic theory as basic grounding discoveries were still awaited. But his startling insights of change and interpenetration of opposites were borne out later, in genetics.

Early theories of genetics

By the 1800s heredity was seen as a blending of characteristics from two parents.  Already ‘preformationists’ argued for a prefigured outcome; against ‘epigeneticists’ who pointed to development. In 1802 Lamarck presented his theory where evolution incorporated ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics‘.

This envisaged animals responding to changed environments, with new habits and bodily functions, which passed on to progeny (e.g. the giraffe’s long neck). But Lamarck offered only a “brilliant anticipation”, said Engels, because scientific details were still insufficient.

Gradually, largely influenced by mechanical materialist developments in other sciences (eg physics), a ‘particulate‘ theory of hereditary prevailed over ‘blending’. Darwin hypothesised in 1875 a ‘gemmule’. Meanwhile Mendel reported ‘discrete units’ or ‘factors’, later to be called ‘genes’. In pea experiments, he found the segregation (separation) of characteristics.

Contemporaneously, Weismann removed tails in mice, whose offspring had normal tails.  For Weismann, these simple experiments proved Lamarck wrong. He now invoked ‘protection’ for ‘germ cells’ (sperm or eggs), locating heredity in/on newly discovered chromosomes in the nucleus. Weismann’s dictum became hereditary information goes from the nucleus to cytoplasm, never in reverse. Germ cells remained ‘unchanged’ over generations (Keller 2000). Sutton extended this, saying chromosomes formed the “physical bases of the Mendelian law of heredity.” (Sapp)

Chromosomes were conceptualised as mappable chains of genes. When Morgan caused visible chromosome mutations in the fruit fly, he associated them to phenotypic (i.e. externally seen features) changes. Yet his Nobel Lecture acknowledged:

“There is no consensus of opinion amongst geneticists as to what the genes are, whether they are real or purely fictitious […] it does not make the slightest difference.” (Morgan 1934).

Fictitious or not, gene theory became ever more determinist and mechanistic. Geneticists spoke of ‘‘a gene for this and a gene for that,” as they still do. Some countered this position: C.H. Waddington (England) and I. I. Schmalhausen (USSR), aimed to integrate environmental pressures and genome. They balanced continuity-stability forces (nucleus) with disruption-adaptation forces (cytoplasm). They argued that natural selection (proposed by Darwin) not only gave a direction (new adaptations to new circumstances) but it also stabilized the genome. Hence if a well adapted characteristic , took on random variation in that characteristic, this only reduced ‘fitness’ to the environment. Natural selection prevented disturbances, because physiology was canalized, becoming ‘insensitive’. (Lewontin and Levins 2000)

Many such voices against a purely ‘nuclear monopoly’ were ignored (Sapp). Ironically, an English Marxist,  J.B.S. Haldane helped the rout of environmentalists, mathematically underpinning a ‘Modern Synthesis’ of gene and evolutionary theories. Genes were proclaimed the motor of evolution, driven by random nuclear-gene-chromosomal mutation. This relied on ‘blind chance’ leaving natural selection to funnel ‘superior fits’. Till recently even Marxists in modern biology agreed, including Lewontin:

“The organism […] bears a significant mark of random processes.” (Lewontin 2000).

After Watson and Crick famously discovered DNA (1953), this  was hailed as the ‘Master Molecule’ (Keller 2000). The Weismann one-way traffic (nucleus to cytoplasm) now became Crick’s ‘Central Dogma’:

“Transfer [of information] from protein to protein, or from protein to nucleic acid is impossible” (Crick 1970).

Lysenko’s views

In contrast to gene-centric views, Lysenko held that heredity was a life-long physiological interaction between organism and environment, the gene was not immutable nor eternal:

“The principal error the geneticists commit is their contention that genes are immutable in a long line of generations.” (Lysenko 1936; Soyfer 1994).

Lysenko rejected the Morganist concept of chromosomes, saying heredity included environment:

“Heredity is […] the property of a living body to require definite conditions for its life and development and to respond in a definite way to various conditions.” (Lysenko 1943)

Lysenko believed that heredity (especially in plants) could be moulded in a ‘definite direction’. It followed that Lysenko rejected Weismann:

“The materialistic theory of the evolution of living nature necessarily presupposes the recognition of heredity transmission of individual characteristics acquired by the organism under definite conditions of its life, it is unthinkable without recognition of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.” (Lysenko 1948)

Hence a ‘sharp controversy’ divided biologists: Can characters and properties acquired by plant and animal organisms in the course of their life be inherited?

Lysenko claimed he utilised dialectics, and criticised Darwin, who he said:

“Based on Malthus’ theory of overpopulation…  inferred a struggle presumably going on within species” (Lysenko 1948)

Actually Marx and Engels previously criticised Darwin for importing into nature societal views from Hobbes and Malthus. Most Marxists accept this and extend it to current ‘sociobiology’ (Rose, 1984; Lewontin 2000).

Modern Epigenetics in relation to Lysenko’s theories

But Lysenko’s claims took form as a theoretical mechanical reductionism. Lysenko’s data lacked statistical and experimental rigour. However, modern data confirms Lysenko’s theory in parts. Especially on vegetative propagation (asexual plant breeding including grafting).  Inheritance by acquired characteristics clearly does occur.

  • Mechanisms to conserve life accumulated changes are described. These may arise from both environmentally directed adaptations or from genetic mutations.

  • Nuclear genes or DNA are modifiable by environment through life.

  • Nucleus and cytoplasm share responses of cell and organism.

However, against Lysenko, who argued genes did not exist:

  • It is the DNA molecule and genes, interacting with ‘regulators’ that form the mechanism by which environment affects heredity. i.e. the gene does exist.
  • Thus graft hybridisation occurs, but by mechanism called Horizontal Gene Transfer.

Lysenko came to control agriculture in the USSR for a period, but was unable to improve outputs in the USSR. However while grain production was not improved, it was not reduced (Levins and Lewontin 1985).

In summary, Lysenko dogmatically pronounced on weak evidence. However, key portions of Lysenkoism turns out by modern theory to be correct, and challenges Western classical genetic dogmas. The principle of change and inter-connectedness in the world are fundamental. Translated – both gene and environment – explain heredity.

Thus both Western orthodox genetics, and Lysenkoism were wrong in insisting on exclusive merits. Only a two-sided approach (a molecular toolbox of DNA, and environmental signalling) forms a coherent theory. Doubtless that while Lysenko was partly correct his ‘Arakcheyevism’ (authoritarianism, dogmatism, bullying) rendered USSR agronomy paralysed.

Lysenko’s capture of agricultural control in USSR 

What explains Lysenko’s rise to power? By 1945, after the Second World War, the USSR had lost 20 million people or a tenth of the population (McCagg 1978); lost a massive infrastructure and was encircled (Levins and Lewontin 1985). Cold War politics portrayed Lysenko and Morgan as political representatives of either ‘communism; or ‘capitalism’:

“Lysenko portrayed Mendelian genetics as an ‘American’, ‘imperialist’, ’racist’, and ‘fascist’ pseudoscience, the Western media presented ‘Lysenkoism’ as a ‘Soviet’, ‘Communist’, ‘Marxist’, ‘totalitarian’ pseudo-science” (Dejong-Lambert 2012).

The purges cut through Soviet life, but Joravsky differs as to its effects on Lysenkoism:

“It is widely believed that the Lysenkoites had a direct line to the apparatus of terror and deliberately used it to get rid of their opponents… though the evidence offered has been extremely weak” (Joravsky 1986).

Conventional wisdom is that Stalin was responsible for the purges and for Lysenko’s rise. Here I only discuss the latter. Stalin probably agreed with aspects of Lysenkoism, such as inheritance of acquired characteristics. Roll-Hansen commented in 2015:

“Looking back… one can perhaps add that there was a grain of truth in Stalin’s judgment.”

Actually early on Stalin’s support for Lysenko was ‘weak’ says the main historian of the Lysenko Affair – Joravsky:

“as he was pushing his way to the top… Stalin’s public endorsement was comparatively weak… At a farmers’ meeting in 1935, when Lysenko stumbled in his speech and apologized for being a vernalizer (A treatment of seeds with cold supposedly to spur cold-hardiness -HK) rather than an orator, Stalin interjected “Bravo, Comrade Lysenko!” (Joravsky 1986)

But Jorasvky goes on to say:

“The highest chief, Stalin, was subtly evasive, though pro-Lysenkoite. On May 17, 1938… he proposed a toast…: “To the flourishing of science … whose people … do not want to be slaves of tradition…” Stalin refrained from a forthright statement that would have ended all disagreement and mobilized all officialdom in support of agrobiology. As a result, the chiefs of higher learning and ideology kept on fumbling for a compromise.”

It is evident that the reality was more complicated than usually depicted. Stalin was increasingly in a minority of Marxist-Leninists (McCagg 1978). Two factions within the party  – Andrey Zhdanov’s and Malenkov’s –  struggled against each other. Yuri Zhdanov, was enticed into an open attack on Lysenko, who had been intimidating classical geneticists.

This enabled Malenkov to counter-attack and stage the 1948 session on biology. Here Lysenko’s address summarised two ‘trends in Soviet biology’. Stalin had been asked to edit Lysenko’s speech. Stalin removed statements such as:

“Any science is class-oriented by nature” (Stalin wrote in his edit: “Ha-Ha-Ha!! And what about Mathematics? And Darwinism?”); and: “By its nature the modern capitalist system cannot tolerate a true depiction of natural development”, and “there is no genuine science in that bourgeois society” (Pollock E, 2008).

Conference participants demanded to know if Lysenko’s line against any notion of the gene, was endorsed by the party. Malenkov’s team ensured Lysenko could reply that the Central Committee endorsed Lysenko. This effectively stopped opposition. Under Lysenko’s domination, wide spread firing of university teachers, academicians and researchers – known as anti-Lysenkoist – ensued. This had a dire impact on USSR science.

Conclusions

Engels viewed nature as an interconnected, perpetual change.  Neither Morgan and Lysenko found a realistic mechanism to explain this in genetics. Both were reductionist, obstructing understanding of reality in nature. Battles in genetic theory based upon political ideology occurred in both the West and the USSR. Epigenetics is the ‘proof of the pudding’ of dialectics in genetics. Currently heredity and theories of evolution are being rethought. Complicating purely biological reductionism, is political reductionism that insists upon painting Stalin as the all-evil solitary dictator of all that happened. Such political reductionism masks the real history of the battles of factions of revisionist politicians inside the USSR and obstruct any real history of Lysenkoism.

References

Crick, Francis. 1970. Central Dogma of Molecular Biology. Nature 227(5258): 561–563.

Dejong-Lambert, Krementsov WN. 2012.  J History of Biology 45: 373–388.

Engels, Frederick.1987. Dialectics of Nature.  CW, Vol. 25.

Joravsky, David. 1986. The Lysenko Affair.

Keller, Evelyn F. 2000. The Century of the Gene.

Levins, Richard and Lewontin, R. 1985. The Dialectical Biologist.

Lewontin, Richard. 2000. The Triple Helix: Gene Organism and Environment.

Lewontin, Richard and Levins R. 2000. Schmalhausen’s Law. Capitalism, Nature and Science 11(4): 103–108

Lysenko, Trofim D. 1954. In Agrobiology: Essays on Problems of Genetics, Plant Breeding and Seed Growing; 1936; 1943.

Marx, Karl. 1976. ‘The Poverty of Philosophy’ 1847.” CW, Vol. 6; 1989. “Letter to Editor (Saltykov-Schedrin) regarding Marx’s Critic N.K. Mihailovsky.”  CW, Vol. 24.

McCagg, William O., Jr. 1978. Stalin Embattled 1943–1948.

Pollock, Ethan; 2008. Stalin And The Soviet Science Wars

Roll-Hansen, Nils. 1985.; Annals of Science 42(3): 261–278; and, 2015.  Studies East European Thought 67: 91–109.

Rose, Steven, Leon J. Kamin and R.C. Lewontin. 1984. Not in Our Genes;

Sapp, Jan. 1987. Beyond the Gene. Cytoplasmic Inheritance and the Struggle for Authority in Genetics; and 2009, Molecular Reproduction and Development 76: 903–911.

Soyfer, Valery N. 1994. Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science.

“We want to get to the class dynamics behind stories”

Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of socialist magazine Jacobin, on the US strike wave, the beleaguered German Left, and the role of Left journalists. Plus, should Bernie run again in 2024?


16/06/2022

Jacobin is the socialist magazine that needs no introduction. It’s become a major mouthpiece for the revived Left in the US and beyond, with publications in Italy, Brazil, broader Latin America, and here in Germany.

Last week in Berlin, Jacobin and Transform Europe hosted a conference called Socialism in Our Time, which brought together leading Left thinkers and office holders, including star speaker Jeremy Corbyn, to tackle the urgent questions facing the socialist movement. Ella Teevan from The Left Berlin sat down with Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara to talk about how US socialists should approach labor and elections, the prospects for the German Left, and how Left journalists should see themselves as political people first, journalists second.

What’s your connection to Berlin?

I’ve been here about once a year because of Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung events or Transform Europe or Jacobin Deutschland events. I last came here in 2019.

What are the biggest projects the US Left should be taking on right now? And what are its biggest challenges?

I think the US Left should be focused on sinking deeper roots into working-class life. Right now in the US, you could speak really distinctively about the Left and a movement of workers, and what the working class thinks and what the Left thinks about a variety of social or cultural issues. But I think, instead of being pessimistic about the base we’ve built, we need to take this base and direct it towards either workplace actions or industrializations, but also to supporting movements as they arise.

I’m a big fan of the work done by EWOC [Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee] and around DSA [Democratic Socialists of America]. The Amazon Labor Union, I think, is a really big step. Starbucks is more like a media event, just because the shops are much smaller in scale, but I think it will make a big difference, too, potentially.

So, in essence, a lot of what we should be doing in the short term is labor movementism, while at the same time preserving our existing base of elected officials, and continuing to run in campaigns to use the bully pulpit there. But I think it’s important those elected have a much more narrow scope than they do now. One reason why I think Corbyn struggled in his election was that, at the end of the election cycle, you could say that Labour stood for four hundred things – free this, free that, free whatever – whereas one thing I thought Bernie did very well in his first campaign was repeating, “I’m just going to talk about Medicare for All, I’m just going talk about inequality, I’m just going to talk about millionaires and billionaires.” In Bernie’s second campaign, I think even messages like canceling medical debt – things that I advocated for at the time – just created too much diffusion of the left populist message.

In other words, we need to think about where the working class is and orient our work towards it, both through direct workplace organizing and through the rhetoric that we use in our electoral campaigns.

Jacobin just ran a piece advocating for Bernie running again in 2024. Do you have a take on that?

I think, ultimately, it’s up to Bernie. Any run he does in 2024 would be a symbolic run, largely. Is it going to be a net benefit? I think it would galvanize more people than it would take up energy. So yes, I think he should run. But I think it will be very different from his previous runs.

I think Bernie’s also going to be pretty careful with whoever the Democratic Party presumptive nominee is – probably Biden – and the Left needs to brace itself for that. He needs to find a way to run combatively within whatever constraints he sets, because he doesn’t want to be perceived as a spoiler in the general election. And I think that’s the big danger. Because I think Biden is the only Democrat who can win in 2024, in part because he’s already president. Once you lose the incumbent advantage, it’s a 50-50 race, and then the Democrats have a bad economy and whatever else to run on.

I want to move from US politics to Berlin. Berlin has a long and rich history of left and workers’ movements – you’ve written about this in The Socialist Manifesto. Why did you and Jacobin pick Berlin for Socialism in Our Time? And what’s especially exciting, or troubling, about German politics for you right now?

There’s nothing exciting about German politics right now, unfortunately. But we have a great base of contributors in Berlin. Jacobin Deutschland is great. And I think it’s important in general for Jacobin as it builds a bigger base in the US to not be completely US-centric and to pay attention to other things happening in the advanced capitalist world. I would say that Germany and the Anglophone world used to be out of sync with the cycles of our struggles. Now, for better or worse – mostly worse – we’re in sync, and we’re in a period of downturn, for the Anglo-American Left and also for the German Left.

I think Germany had a higher starting point to begin with, with the history of the workers’ movement, with the institutional strength of die Linke that’s been squandered, and it’s worth figuring out why or how. Obviously, as an outsider, I don’t have the best vantage point about why, but yes, I think we’re in somewhat bleak times for both. But at least there’s still a newness about the Left in the US, where here the Left has been an entrenched force but still hasn’t made a breakthrough.

A bit of a bleak assessment, but I don’t disagree. Speaking of The Socialist Manifesto, in the book, you give a 101 history of the revolutions and almost-revolutions that socialists should know. Do you see parallels between any of those historical moments and the one we’re in right now? What lessons might we act on from them?

I think the most important lesson in the book relates to the experience of social democracy and what that meant. In the book, I pose the idea that there could have been a social democratic road to socialism. I explain why that didn’t happen, what contradictions and roadblocks it faced. But I think for us today it’s important for us to embrace a day-to-day quest to construct the type of social democracy that’s not driven by bureaucrats, but actively engages ordinary people and might help encourage those people to take more ownership in their parties, take more ownership in their government, and not be demobilized by the experience of power. I do think there is a social democratic road to socialism, and I think the chapter where I discuss Swedish social democracy and its trajectory is relevant today for people, especially people engaged in politics in a country like Germany.

I want to switch gears and talk about the magazine. Jacobin is the reason we’re here. The big news on the Left is obviously the Jacobin redesign that just happened.

Right. Have you seen a copy?

I have. In fact, I shelled out an arm and a leg for an international subscription.

Yeah, especially because in Berlin, that’s, like, a month’s rent. No, I’m just kidding, it’s something like 50 dollars.

Well, you’re not wrong. Why the new look? And more broadly, why is it important to have visually compelling print media on the Left?

There are two components to the redesign. One is just the cosmetic change. I think the branding does make Jacobin more distinctive, and it also lends itself to different brand applications. But content-wise, in the issue, every spread has an article, it has a list, and it has events or it has infographics. So it’s made to be a little bit less linear than a traditional issue of Jacobin, where you start at the beginning and you go to the end. This is more like a regular magazine that you can pick up, read any article or skim.

In a way, I think it’s us finally getting the resources to fully go from a Marxist journal to a socialist magazine. And I think that’s a positive development. We also publish Catalyst, which is a more traditional journal, if you really want unadorned writing. But the idea is not just to create more value for existing subscribers but to help reach a wider base, even if we’re in a tough year politically, because if the magazine is good and interesting, it’s something you’re more apt to give to a friend, or to spread around. At some point we just believe the quality of the magazine will reflect itself in its subscriptions over time.

Speaking of the mission of having a mainstream or accessible socialist journalist project, what would you say to someone who wants to start doing Left journalism right now?

I would say they should consider themselves political people first, or even auto-didactic scholars first, even if they have no university affiliation, then journalists second. It’s really useful to have a speciality, and often that comes from some sort of academic background, but a lot of that could be learned outside of academia, like through policy. I think that everyone should have a baseline understanding of history, but besides that, if you live in a place like Berlin, you could become a specialist, if you will, through reading white papers and academic literature on housing, and on debates about densities and zoning and rent controls and the way public housing has been effectively employed in the past. I think that gives you more background to tackle, even if you’re doing it journalistically, something like a rent strike or a referendum on rent controls and stabilizations. It also helps immerse you in a world view.

I think a lot of quote-unquote bourgeois journalists are hyper-focused on the craft of journalism, which just involves setting the scene, describing events, and taking both sides. But we want to get to the class dynamics behind stories. Sometimes you can use the former approach and get to those class dynamics. But often – I know this makes me sound very dogmatic – it takes looking at the objective dynamic, for instance, that renters all basically want a certain thing, and landlords all basically want a certain thing. We can complicate it a little bit more and say landlords are under certain constraints because of the market and state regulations and how these things interact with each other.

I think everyone should be able to do journalism. It’s not something you have to go to school for. The reasons people go to journalism school are either to give themselves time to hone their craft, or for networks that come out of it. But my own approach when I started Jacobin was that I worked as a secretary at Brooklyn College for many years to earn an hourly wage. I found a job that gave me enough mental space and time to be able to work on Jacobin and other pursuits. And I audited a few classes at NYU, for free, with socialist professors like Vivek Chibber and others during that time. So you’re taking the work or task seriously, without necessarily thinking you have to grind away as a copyeditor because you need to be full-time in the profession; meanwhile you’re copy-editing material you couldn’t care less about. I think that we might need to take one step backward to de-professionalization to get a firmer grasp on certain issues.

So I don’t think people on the Left should necessarily pursue professionalized journalistic careers. I think a lot of them should pursue jobs that they find rewarding, that can remunerate them and offer them enough spare time that they can be amateur journalists who take the truth and scholarship very seriously, which I think is slightly different. Then, hopefully, there can be outlets like Jacobin who can pay for that work. But these outlets will probably never be able to pay for full-time bureaus the way that newspapers can. It needs to be a political act.

How can we bring Palestine Solidarity in Germany forward?

Palestine Solidarity in Germany may look bleak. Nonetheless I think we have more chances than ever to build something substantial


15/06/2022

This is going to be a positive contribution, so I won’t say much about the problems we have here, which we all know well. But I do want to start with one remark. I have lived in Germany for 27 years. I know the discussions with people who have said to me “you can’t say that in Germany”, or sometimes “you can say that, but as a German, I can’t”.

The most reent of these discussions was just last week with a comrade from my LINKE branch in Berlin Wedding. She’s been to Hebron. She’s seen the streets where only settlers and tourists are allowed to walk. She knows from personal experience that there is racial segregation – that is Apartheid, in Israel.

But at the same time she says, we can’t call Israel an Apartheid state. At the very least, not in German. You know the reasoning – because of German history, Germans must be careful when they speak of Israel.

The Silence of the Left

In Israel, there is an organisation named “Breaking the Silence”, made of former soldiers who say that they can no longer be silent about the crimes of the Israeli state. We need something like this in Germany. The biggest problem here is not the mainly irrelevant Antideutsche (pro-Israel “anti-Germans”). The main problem is that the silence of Germans, and in particular the German Left, means that the Antideutsche seem much louder and more powerful than they really are.

After the bombing of Gaza in 2014, there was growing discontent in Germany with Israel and particularly with the Israeli government. A study by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung found “rising criticism of Israel from the German side, particularly against ‘Israeli politics’.”

In 2014, the Berlin demo for Gaza was 1% the size of the equivalent demo in London. In 2021 it was about one tenth as big as the London demo.

But discontent does not mean active opposition. What we are experiencing at the moment is that support for the Israeli government is becoming internationally untenable, while silence and general passivity prevails within Germany.

And Yet it Moves

But it is not true that nothing is changing on the streets. Let’s go back to the Gaza bombing of 2014. I was one of the main organisers of the Berlin demonstration where Palestinians, Israelis and Germans came together to demonstrate against the slaughter. We had great help from a demonstration through Kreuzberg organised by Israelis with the slogan “Deutsche Linke Wach Auf!” (German Left wake up!) with the demand that the broad German Left finally take a position.

It was hard work, and we were proud that we managed to mobilise 1,500 people – one of the largest demonstrations for Palestine in Berlin for years, and a demo which was organised by left-wing forces (Palestinian and non-Palestinian). Fast forward to last year, despite Corona regulations, 15,000 people marched through Kreuzberg and Neukölln. This was not the biggest demonstrations that I have experienced, but it was one of the liveliest and definitely one of the most important.

In 2014, the Berlin demo for Gaza was 1% the size of the equivalent demo in London. In 2021 it was about one tenth as big as the London demo. We still have a long way to travel, but at least we are clearly going in the right direction.

What has changed?

I want to talk about 3 factors.

First, and almost certainly the most important, a newer and younger leadership of Palestinians in Germany has emerged. This leadership represents a generation shift. It is less bound to the old Palestinian parties and is more active in the anti-capitalist movement. The size of the mobilisation last year was not possible without the existence of organisations like Palästina Spricht, and their ability to mobilise and inspire wider forces.

Ten years ago, every tenth Berliner was a foreigner. Now, 1 in 4 residents of Berlin do not have a German passport… If you walked through the Gaza demo last year, you could hear many languages… The missing language was German.

The second factor was Black Lives Matter. The Gaza demo on Berlin took place on 15th May 2021. Tomorrow, it’s the second anniversary of 6th June 2020, when 15,000 gathered on Alexanderplatz for BLM. This was the first major mobilisation since Corona. Coming down on the U-Bahn from Wedding it was clear that many of the demonstrators were BiPoc and working class people who you don’t normally see on demos.

It wasn’t a big surprise to me to see many black faces on the Gaza demo. While many white Germans have fully accepted the narrative of the Israeli and German governments, victims of racism are seeing the links between the fight of the Palestinians against colonialism and repression and their own fight against racism. This tendency is currently on the rise.

The third element was nothing new in the fight for the liberation for Palestine. In the LINKE Berlin Internationals, we regularly experience that most non-German Leftists see Palestine solidarity as being self-evident, and are completely confused by the discussion in Germany. Our support for the Palestinians is not new, but our social weight is rising.

Ten years ago, every tenth Berliner was a foreigner. Now, 1 in 4 residents of Berlin do not have a German passport. It’s not just Arabs. People from Spain and Greece, who came to Germany for “just one year” because of the economic crisis in their own country are still here, because youth unemployment in Southern Europe is still prohibitively high.

This means that there are more of us, but we are also more integrated and active in German politics. If you walked through the Gaza demo last year, you could hear many languages – Arabic of course, and Hebrew, but also English, Russian and a range of others. The missing language was German.

So what about the Germans?

I have often heard the argument that goes: if white German Leftists are not able to support the clearly anti-racist and anti-colonial fight of the Palestinians, then that’s their problem. The fight can go on without them. I find this argument sympathetic, especially now that we really do have a significant movement which is led by Palestinians. Nonetheless I think it’s politically wrong.

We live – unfortunately – in a racist society, where the opinion of migrants and foreigners can be ignored. The Black Lives Matter movement was important above all because It was led by oppressed people themselves. But it was also able to mobilise many white people behind it. Such people can demonstrate on Saturday then on Monday go to work, or the nursery, or school, and report how the cops maltreated them. These so-called “privileged” voices make it much more difficult to marginalise the movement.

The Bundestag resolution on BDS and the demonstration bans have outraged liberals and Antifa activists – people who would not automatically stand on the side of Palestinians, in Germany at least. White Germans are slowly recognising what Black Germans and migrants have always known – state censorship which is used against Palestinians will ultimately be used against us all.

Break the Silence

The silence that I spoke about at the beginning of this article is only possible because a majority of German Leftists have decided that Israel/Palestine is “too complicated” or that “Germans are not allowed to talk about it”. But even here something is changing. It’s changing too slowly, but the change is coming. In the SDS and solid – youth organisations of die LINKE – there has been some progress this year.

Here in Berlin, for example, a joint group of the LINKE Neukölln, the SDS, solid, the LINKE Internationals, but also Palästina Spricht and other Palestinian groups organised a well attended public meeting about the Nakba this May. Further strategy meetings are planned, as well as another public meeting in Autumn.

We have potential – and until now it is only a potential – to build a joint anti-racist, anti-colonial pro-Palestine movement. But this movement must still be built. By whom, if not the people in this room (and reading this article)? Today must just be the start.

This is a rough translation of a speech that I made at a panel at the Marxismuss conference in Berlin on 5th June 2022. A video of the speeches should be available soon.

The 9-Euro Ticket Reveals Unacknowledged Privileges

Train travel is too often discussed in terms of climate policy and too rarely as an issue of social justice. And yet the railroads have practiced social selection.


14/06/2022

A couple from Hagen wants to take their 16-year-old son to Cologne for some spontaneous shopping and then visit his grandmother. The railroad has a great offer for this: the Schöner-Tag-Ticket NRW. This super-saver fare for the one-hour trip costs 99.40 euros for a return trip. On Flixbus, the same route costs half as much. If the family has a car or can borrow one, they can get away even cheaper for just the cost of fuel.

Mobility is a question of money, and train travel is the privilege of those who don’t have to watch every euro. Everyone else often forgoes the trip to Cologne altogether or looks for cheaper alternatives. And then came the 9-euro ticket. So this is what the world looks like when everyone can afford tickets. For some regular train riders, it comes as a shock because it becomes clear that traveling by train has been socially segregated (and is only temporarily not so).

Train travel is too often discussed as a climate policy necessity and too rarely as a question of social justice. Deutsche Bahn belongs to the state and thus to all citizens. But for decades, the high, sometimes horrendous, prices have ensured that social selection has been practiced here.

The need to catch up is enormous, because fair access to the railroads requires so much more than new tracks, more trains and expansion and restructuring at all levels. It also requires ensuring that train tickets are permanently affordable for all social classes.

And certainly – there is far too little reflection on the fact that women and girls have a right to travel by regional train free of sexual harassment or assault – regardless of the time of day. The same goes for other vulnerable groups.

All of this will cost a lot of money, but other areas of public life are also subsidized by the state because they are in line with political will. Not only the Greens, but also the man who calls himself “Climate Chancellor” needs to think about climate protection and social justice together. Anyone who wants to change society must also have the courage to set new priorities.

The 9-euro ticket therefore only sheds light on what Deutsche Bahn could be: a convenient, contemporary, climate-friendly and socially-just means of transportation.

And yes, it sounds like a utopia.

This article originally appeared in German in the taz. Translator: Dillon Drasner. Reproduced with permission.

The Worst Hoax Ever

Here’s What You Need to Believe in order to Believe Johnny Depp is the Victim of Amber Heard


13/06/2022

If you believe that Amber Heard and Johnny Depp were both abusive, that it was a toxic relationship, and that they were both as bad as each other, then you have to disagree with the Fairfax jury’s finding, on 1st June 2022, that she is guilty of defamation. In order for Heard to be guilty of defamation, she has to be the abuser, and Depp has to be the victim.

And, in order to believe that Amber Heard is an abuser, and her much older, much more famous, much richer, and, it has to be said, quite a bit stronger ex-husband Johnny Depp the victim, you have to be prepared to believe the following things:

  1. You have to believe that Amber Heard carried out a hoax, setting Johnny Depp up for abuse, just so she could get a restraining order at some point towards the end of their marriage, for no benefit to herself whatsofuckingever.
  2. You have to believe that she carried this hoax out over years.
  3. You have to believe that she persuaded at least 6 co-conspirators to carry out this hoax with her, even to the extent of being prepared to support her by lying for her in court – for no benefit to herself whatsofuckingever.
  4. You have to believe that ALL the bruises she took photos of were fake, and that she ripped her own hair out.
  5. You have to believe that she faked the photos, even though surely, if she was painting on bruises, she would have no need to be faking photos. You also have to believe she faked all these photos, but didn’t bother faking more. Like she was vengeful and malicious enough to fake photos, but not vengeful and malicious enough to fake a few more?
  6. You have to believe she did all this to get “revenge” on Depp – or possibly money (even though she was actually entitled to more money than she settled on in the divorce agreement, even though you don’t actually get extra money from your ex if they’re violent).
  7. You have to believe that the other co-conspirators who supported Amber’s hoax plan would not be prepared to go to the press and reveal the truth about her evil plan – despite the fact that public opinion is so decidedly against her, and, even after, in some cases, the friendship had ended.
  8. And you have to believe that she pulled off this hoax leaving no traces of any planning or coordination with the other conspirators.

If you don’t believe this, if you think they were “both as bad as each other” “both violent” “both toxic” “both terrible people”, then you have to think the decision was a travesty of justice, and you are basically a Heard supporter.

But the thing is, in order to believe Amber Heard’s version of events, you just have to, essentially, be prepared to believe the following thing:

  1. You have to believe that a man you liked and admired might be an abuser.

That’s it.

The painful truth is that even if Johnny Depp’s paranoid conspiracy theory about Amber Heard painting on bruises and texting pretend SMS-text messages to her mother over the course of years and years and years and fucking years on end turned out to be true (do no Depp supporters question the level of sheer evil, the level of sheer vindictiveness, you would need to have in you, in order to pull this off? It would be astounding. And the only person in the marriage where I see any proof of them having had these kind of vindictive feelings – from before they even got married, actually, well, hate to break it to you guys but that would be Depp himself, who in text messages sent in 2013 fantasized about raping her burnt corpse, demonstrating, I can’t help feel, his visceral contempt for his soon-to-be wife?)

Even if this crazy theory turned out to be true, well, still the level of misogynist abuse hurled at her over the past few weeks would be cruel and disturbing. Hashtags like #AmberTurd (there is no evidence that she pooed on his bed), laughing at her for wincing slightly because she remembered her dog treading on a bee (seriously, are you fucking sociopaths or what?), sex toys being produced to replicate the weapon used in her sexual assault story, make-up companies piling on, Starbucks tip boxes, graffiti artists in Gran Canaria…even Duofuckinglingo joined in.

Say publicly that you support Amber on social media and your DMs fill with messages from young white men letting you know that you’re too ugly to be raped – or that the sender is glad you obviously were and that the Amber Heard trial has traumatized you so much. Laugh emoji. Laugh emoji. Laugh emoji. Some of the young men sending these messages do not seem to be, in fact, young men at all – but young boys.

And let’s remember that while there is no evidence that Amber Heard pooed her own bed, there is plenty of evidence that Depp’s team not only doctored audio clips to turn public feeling against her, but also paid for bots to skewer social media.

John Christopher Depp, a man who has publicly defended convicted child rapist Roman Polanski (using the argument that he isn’t a predator, because he’s not on the streets, implying, perhaps, that raping your partner/groomed victim in the safety of your own home isn’t as much of a crime as raping a stranger outside – or even, perhaps, a crime at all. I am yet to hear how anyone who thinks Heard is the abuser and Depp the victim justifies his feelings on this topic) is best friends with Marilyn Manson, and has a new assault trial coming up next month, won this court case. He was won, and many people believe he is vindicated. It’s true.

However, during the entire court case, as Amber was being abused on social media, and walking into court being booed at by his deranged supporters every day – one woman dressed up as a poo emoji to show her support for Depp – this “victim of violence” said absolutely nothing to defend his ex-wife from the frankly sickening onslaught of misogynistic abuse she had to endure. It would have cost him nothing to say, were he truly the victim, “Look she abused me but abusing her back doesn’t make any of this better.”

But he couldn’t do that, because the truth is, the entire court case rested upon a complete character assassination of Amber Heard. To suggest she is a human being would destroy his entire legal strategy.

I ask myself every day how many of the young women who so maliciously, so gleefully, joined in with the horrendous bullying Heard has had to endure would have killed themselves had they experiences just 1% of what Amber has gone through?

There’s a reason rape trials are not normally televised. The reason is that rape is traumatic, and rape victims weirdly stigmatized in our society. This trial wasn’t actually a rape trial or a domestic abuse trial – Amber Heard has not been found guilty of abuse, but liable for defamation. However, for all intents and purposes, Depp’s legal team behaved as if it was a rape trial – one from the 80s or the 90s, when defence lawyers were allowed, or even encouraged, to emotionally destroy the victim on the stand.

Depp’s female lawyer, Camille Vasquez, used every trick out of the misogynist legal textbook to humiliate and degrade Amber Heard as much as possible, as well as aiming for some “gotcha” moments which, in all reality, would have meant nothing if they had succeeded (call me an old-fashioned man-hating feminist if you will, but I personally don’t see how why, if Depp HAD got Amber the job on Aquaman, his abuse of her would have been any more acceptable? But maybe that’s just me).

This case has shown that we still view rape victims as dirty and disgusting, stigmatize them as tainted, polluted, tarnished. We see, as a society, talking about rape and abuse as a far worse sin than the rape or abuse itself. This televised show trial was, in fact, essentially abuse itself. By forcing Heard to recount her sexual assault story before live TV cameras, Depp got to metaphorically rape her all over again – and forced all rape victims, the world over, to relive their trauma, the stigma, their pain.

And don’t let’s forget that Depp promised her this! He literally promised Amber would receive “global humiliation.” In August 2016, he wrote to Christian Carino, his former talent agent:

“She’s begging for global humiliation…She’s gonna get it.”

“She will hit the wall hard!!!”

He was right. She did. He achieved his aims – and then some.

But, despite the popular narrative, Amber Heard wasn’t actually found guilty of abuse by the jury in Virginia on 1st June 2022. In order to find her guilty of defamation, though, they had to believe a crazy conspiracy theory in which she not only was the abuser but also a hoaxer who had planned this hoax over the course of years and years and years for no reason whatsoever. It’s hard not to wonder why, if she was this vindictive, she didn’t just beat herself up more often to get more bruises as proof?

For me, personally, the inconsistency of her evidence points to the ridiculousness of the entire hoax theory. But it’s important to remember that Heard isn’t actually, legally speaking, an abuser. She has been found guilty of defaming Depp by writing – or having published in her name – the following three sentences:

  • I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.
  • Then two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out.
  • I had the rare vantage point of seeing, in real-time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse.

I find it ironic that Depp was allegedly so offended by these three sentences, that he unleashed an army of incels, an avalanche of misogyny. Amber Heard is now, more than ever, a public figure representing abuse, who felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out. And we have all now had the (sadly no longer rare at all! The WHOLE world was watching) vantage point of seeing, in real-time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse.

I am sickened and appalled by what has happened to Amber Heard. I am sickened by the way she was bullied, by many people I like and respect. I am disgusted by the way her sexual assault story was mocked and by the way Depp’s testimony about the poo incident was viewed as “proven” and her own testimony portrayed as lies. I am shocked by how easy it was for Depp to turn feminists into misogynists.

Many – or even most? – victims of violence and abuse just want to move on with their lives, but Johnny Depp not only pursues Amber through courts all over the world – he enjoys it, too. We all saw him sneering and jeering, swaggering his way through the court room. He enjoyed himself as much as he thought he would. “She will hit the wall hard!!!” How right he was. I stand with Amber Heard – and you should too.

Jacinta will be reading from her new book WTF Berlin. Expatsplaining the German Capital at the LINKE Berlin Internationals Summer Camp on Saturday, 25th June