The Left Berlin News & Comment

This is the archive template

Category: Uncategorised

Some refugees more welcome than others

Open the borders to all refugees – from Ukraine of course, but also from the Middle East and Africa


03/03/2022

The mobilization against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been inspiring. Tens of thousands organized in solidarity with a people under attack, collecting donations or organizing the transport of refugees. On Sunday, millions took to the streets to demand an end to war and to Russian imperialism. In Berlin, 100,000 people gathered in the city center to not only protest against the war, but to also demand immediate support for those who have to flee their homes.

A few months ago, in November, I was at a protest with a similar purpose. Also gathering at Pariser Platz and going down Unter den Linden, it was attended by a much lower, though by no means insignificant, number of people. This time it was to demand the immediate opening of EU borders for the intake of the thousands of Middle Eastern refugees whom Belarus had weaponized by forcing them to attempt illegal border crossings. At least 21 migrants died in the cold forests at the Polish border. While Poland is now welcoming all those who are allowed to leave Ukraine (with reports, however, of Africans pushed to the back of the queue at “Ukrainian-first” entry points into Poland), thousands of refugees are still stranded at the Belarussian border, not allowed to enter. Polish plans to build a border wall against migrants in the Białowieża Forest are also still in place and still protested by Polish activists.

Indeed, it is difficult to even find information about them in a media landscape understandingly dominated by the invasion of Ukraine. This is one example of a tension in the left’s response to the crisis in Eastern Europe. Calls for solidarity share space with remarks that conflicts, invasions, and imperialist aggressions outside of Europe have rarely received the same amount of attention and mobilization. These should not be competing narratives. Except for a few campists who support Russian aggression as a response to American imperialism, none would argue against unconditional support for the rights of Ukrainians to defend themselves and to find refuge in other countries. As journalist Vincent Bevins wrote in a viral tweet, “Why does the world care so much about Ukraine?” is a harmful, anti-solidaristic question to ask about the current situation. A better one would be “Why doesn’t the world care more about suffering in places like Yemen and Afghanistan?”

Humanitarian aid… is offered more willingly to those who are perceived to be productive capitalist workers (“middle-class”), to those who might be better assimilated without disturbing existing hierarchies (“like us”), and to those who are not racialized as others (“with blue eyes and blond hair”)

Unfortunately, the reason for this was often made explicit in media coverage of the invasion. Reporters have expressed their astonishment at the fact that war was happening in a “relatively civilized” country on the European continent. Although the US and European states have been direct causes of wars in “uncivilized” countries, Western reporters find it difficult to comprehend that militaristic aggression starts from the core of the so-called developed world. In this worldview, campaigns conducted by Western powers in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria are justifiable because they are against “uncivilized” peoples living in uncivilized places. The ideologies covering imperialism and capitalist accumulation have in the past week taken the role of preserving a self-image of a peaceful Europe.

In the case of refugees, this historical and political exceptionalism becomes inscribed on their bodies. It is not only the places that are civilized, but also the people seeking help. They deserve support, it is said, because they are “middle-class” or “like us.” In some cases, the racism is not only implied, but said out loud, with a former deputy prosecutor in Ukraine saying on BBC that the plight of Ukrainian refugees is shocking because they have “blue eyes and blond hair.” The comparison with Middle Eastern refugees is also not just implicit. The Al Jazeera English commentator sympathetic to “middle-class” Ukrainians went on to stress that “these are not, obviously, refugees trying to get away from areas in the Middle East.” Visegrad 24, a Central European news outlet, regularly tweets statements such as “Not all refugees are equal” or, captioning a picture of a Ukrainian woman with children, “This is how real refugees look like.”

It is essential to understand that this does not mean that all coverage of the Ukraine invasion is pure CIA propaganda badly covering up the fascist reality and that Russia is somehow the anti-imperialist hero of the story. Rather, we are now witnessing, in real time and close proximity, the uneven distribution of who is considered worthy of solidarity. Judith Butler wrote about the Iraq war and about the Guantánamo Bay illegal detention center, arguing that the mechanisms of imperial aggression and the ideologies that sustain them make some lives more grievable than others.

Humanitarian aid is predicated on a liberal universalism. An exclusionary universalism that judges all lives according to the Euroamerican standard. The capacity of European states to aid others, to welcome them into the prosperity created by imperial wars and accumulation, is not unconditional. It is offered more willingly to those who are perceived to be productive capitalist workers (“middle-class”), to those who might be better assimilated without disturbing existing hierarchies (“like us”), and to those who are not racialized as others (“with blue eyes and blond hair”). The wealth of the West is only justifiable if people elsewhere, who are different, are disposable.

That is why the Visegrad 24 Twitter account can tout the humanitarian hospitality of Poland, while arguing that the country has the right to defend its borders against the refugees pushed through Belarus. Some lives are considered to deserve being saved less than others, and some people are considered to deserve being here less than others. Saying this without weakening our claims to solidarity with the Ukrainian people may be a difficult rhetorical task. But we should not give up on saying it. As we should not ignore the outrageous increase in German military funding (which also caused the stocks of German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall to go up 40% on Monday), even though we encourage support for Ukrainian defense efforts. As we should not ignore the violently Islamophobic video of Azov Battalion soldiers shared by the official Twitter account of the Ukrainian National Guard, even though we find Putin’s claims to “denazify” Ukraine to be themselves merely fascist pretenses.

There is no contradiction in acknowledging, at the same time, that there is rampant racism in Eastern Europe manifesting in the differential admission of refugees. That the Ukrainian people are the victims of imperialist aggression and deserve our unreserved support and help. We should care about Ukraine, and we should care about the Ukrainian people. If now is not the right time to question hypocrisy, when is? We should also take this chance to question why we have cared less about the suffering of others. 

Elections and Class Struggle in France: How useful is Jean-Luc Mélenchon? (Part One)

With the French Socialist Party in ruins, the France Insoumise is proposing a new version of left reformism. How useful is it to French working people?


02/03/2022

The French presidential elections take place in April 2022. With two far-right candidates, and with Macron playing a strong hand, there is plenty of bad news, but there is a hopeful side too. This article (part one) will look at the usefulness for working people of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s campaign and organization. Part two will look at his left patriotism, foreign policy, and at some major disagreements of Marxists with his strategy.

Mélenchon got seven million votes (19.5%) in the first round of the French presidential elections in 2017, the biggest radical left vote in France since 1945. France Insoumise (FI) votes were particularly common among blue-collar voters (24%), low-paid white-collar voters (22%) and among 18-24 year-olds (30%). At present, at over 11% in the polls, Mélenchon has at least three times the support of the Socialist Party, which held the presidency till 2017, and no other left candidate comes near. In the last elections, 21.4% was enough to get through to the second round. Fewer may be sufficient this time, and Mélenchon’s team is hoping to mobilize those working-class voters who usually stay home, to create a surprise on election day.

Mélenchon’s pitch and his programme [1]

The fact that, after five years of Macron, the 500 richest families in France have doubled their wealth, while the number of children living in poverty has risen by 40%, along with the remarkable combativity and class consciousness of French workers in recent years, guarantees that there is plenty of space for the radical left. Mélenchon and his team believe it is possible to bring about a “citizens’ revolution” to usher in “the epoch of the people”, to quote the titles of two of his many writings [L’ère du peuple, Paris, Fayard, 2014].

It is hardly surprising that so many are inspired and encouraged. The FI programme proposes dozens of measures to radically reverse the trend of wealth being siphoned off ever more by the 1%. It proposes to freeze prices on a series of basic necessities and to develop a policy of a basic quantity of free electricity and water for every household. A sharp rise in the minimum wage and of minimum pension rates is promised, while the laws passed by Macron and Hollande which restricted workers’ rights to organize and to have stable contracts, are to be repealed. The programme plans a completely free health service (at present most people take out complementary insurance). It also promises retirement at 60 and a shorter working week.

The vision put forward is one that takes full account of the urgency of climate deterioration: policies include the end of nuclear power before 2030, a move to 100% renewable energy, and the creation of a million and a half climate jobs. The intention is to set up massive support for organic agriculture, creating 300,000 jobs and moving quickly to 100% organic farming.

The programme reacts to recent movements by reserving a billion euros for the fight against sexist violence. And, after the recent scandal of large-scale mistreatment of elderly people in the Orpea chain of private retirement homes (1,100 homes across France), an FI government would only allow retirement homes to be run by non-profit organizations or by local governments.

A determined effort is planned to tax the rich more and stop the use of tax havens. On inheritance tax, Mélenchon’s programme would impose a twelve million euro maximum. Anything more than that would go into the public coffers (and, calculations show, could pay for student grants for all). For the rest of us, up to 120,000 euros of inheritance would be completely tax-free.

Finally, the France Insoumise [2] wants to change the constitution and sharply reduce the power of the president, moving to a sixth Republic (the Fifth was established in 1958). If Mélenchon were to be elected, he would call a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution.

In a world where austerity, privatization and individualism are sold to us as inevitable, it is a breath of fresh air to watch Mélenchon and FI members of parliament on television defending these reforms. And the reforms are popular. Early February, the manifesto was number six in the list of best-selling books in France, and the YouTube channel had 700,000 subscribers. A recent opinion poll [Harris, August 2021] showed that 88% of people approved of a sharp rise in the minimum wage, and 90% agreed retirement pensions should never be below the minimum wage. Eighty per cent said enough water for basic needs should be free and 86% are in favour of aiming towards 100% renewable energy, while 63% want a change in the constitution and the establishment of a sixth republic.

In addition to its radicality, the FI campaign has an insurgent tone, which drew millions of voters in 2017 who had previously stayed home at election time. Mélenchon quotes the great French writer Victor Hugo, saying “From now on, this word ‘Revolution’ will be the name of civilization, until it is replaced by the word ‘harmony’”. He likes to repeat in meetings that great left slogan “Ecology without class struggle is just gardening really”. And he insists that “the only thing that can limit exploitation is resistance to exploitation”.

Islamophobia

Like the rest of the radical and revolutionary left in France, the France Insoumise does not sufficiently mobilize a fight against islamophobia. Macron’s dissolution of groups that assisted victims of islamophobia was greeted only by angry press releases by the whole of the left. However, Mélenchon’s recent positions, with encouragement from anti-racist groups based in multi-ethnic, working class neighbourhoods, represent a historic shift in France on the question, as the islamophobic consensus on the left is now thoroughly broken. Fascist candidate Eric Zemmour accuses Mélenchon of “lying down passively before the Imam”, and he is regularly attacked for being “soft on Islamic fundamentalism”.

In December 2019 there was the first ever mass demonstration specifically against islamophobia in Paris. Mélenchon was there (whereas the Socialist Party refused to support). Unlike some, Mélenchon refuses to apologize for having been at the demo. This demonstration caused some dissensions within the Communist Party, and within the France Insoumise, with one of their MPs, François Ruffin, famously commenting that he wasn’t going to this demonstration “because I have football on Sundays”.

Since then, Mélenchon’s defence of Muslims against racism has only become louder, clearer, and more systematic. The FI group was the only parliamentary group to vote against the islamophobic laws – supposedly against “Muslim separatism”– pushed through by Macron last year. Mélenchon declared that “separatism” was “ a stupid concept” invented “in order to stigmatize Muslims”. He now regularly reminds his mass audiences that “hatred for Muslims is a central factor of division allowing the powerful to remain powerful”.[3]

It is not an accident that some influential Black anti-racist groups are calling to vote for him, when they are often uninterested in “white politics”. One explained it was because Mélenchon “had broken with the Islamophobic consensus” and because he defends “the creolization of society” (a term Mélenchon has often used) and explicitly rejects a White identity for France.

Usefulness in struggle

The fight against the power of capital has always had three main aspects: [4] Firstly, the concrete fight – gaining wage increases, union rights or permanent contracts; secondly, the political fight – pushing through laws that help our class (whether it be bigger health budgets or gay marriage) and finally the ideological fight, to push back the idea that “There is No Alternative” to vicious austerity and militarism, and to push forward the idea that capitalism can be overthrown, and explain how this might be done. How useful in these struggles is the FI?

If Mélenchon gets a strong vote in the first round, every concrete struggle will be encouraged. If he should get to the second round (and the large number of candidates means this is not impossible) it will be a political earthquake. Already in 2022, solid railway strikes and education strikes for pay have shown that a fightback is coming – a large radical left vote will help this along.

The France Insoumise has at present 17 MPs elected to the National Assembly, including a call-centre operator, Adrien Quatennens; a librarian, Danièle Obono; and a nursing assistant, Caroline Fiat. They have carried out intensive parliamentary work since 2017, occasionally managing to push through an amendment in the interests of the 99%, but more often proposing bills or amendments that are voted down, but that nevertheless allow a debate in parliament and in the media on a wide range of social questions. On the question of police racism, for example, the FI proposed an amendment that would oblige all police officers who checked someone’s ID to give a certificate to the person concerned. This would improve the situation in particular of Black and Arab men, by making repeated checks several times a day impossible. The FI MPs have stood out in their denunciation of police violence.

The vocal FI support in parliament and in the media for the successful campaign in 2019-2021 to push back Macron’s plan to smash pensions was certainly useful, as was the support for the Yellow Vests. The MPs organized a minute of silence during a parliamentary debate for the Yellow Vests killed and injured during the movement “because of their commitment to be citizens”.

FI MPs know how to attract the media. A couple of years back, when one of Macron’s ministers mocked those protesting at a cut of “only five euros” in Housing Benefit, France Insoumise MPs upset the government by coming into parliament with some shopping, to teach the minister what you can buy with five euros when you are poor. Last week, François Ruffin brandished a huge cheque for many billions of euros in parliament, symbolizing the money given by Macron to big business during his presidency.

On the key question of antifascism, Mélenchon is the one who had the courage to stand directly against Marine Le Pen in her own constituency in 2012, and the FI were central to the organization of last year’s rare mass demonstration against fascism. Meanwhile, one FI MP, François Ruffin, is responsible for the two best mass-distributed political documentaries in the last 30 years: “Je veux du soleil” (2019) [5] about the Yellow Vest revolt, and “Debout les femmes” (2021) on the work and struggles of women cleaners and care assistants.

The France Insoumise sees the presidential campaign as a time of crucial political education and debate (two and a half hour political interviews on prime-time TV is the way we do things here!). [6] Three of Mélenchon’s recent long TV interviews received more than 1.5 million visits on the FI YouTube channel. He is an extraordinarily good speaker. His February meeting at Montpellier, entitled “The rich are idlers” got an audience of 8 000 people, and 300 000 YouTube visits. For the political struggle of our class, the France Insoumise is doing its bit.

Libel and slander

Naturally, Mélenchon is the target of impressive smear campaigns, which have loudly trumpeted that he is a megalomaniac, a racist, an Islamist, an antisemite and, most recently, a friend of Putin’s. These smears usually come from the Right, the Socialist Party, the Greens or the mass media, but are occasionally taken up by people on the far left. [7] The smear campaigns run in the usual manner, with Socialist Party press releases saying “He’s a friend of Putin’s”, soft left papers saying “It is widely believed he is a friend of Putin’s”, and many foolish people vaguely on the left chipping in helpfully with “Can you prove he isn’t a little pro-Putin on Tuesdays?” There are not enough people on the left who understand that any section of the left must be fiercely defended against smear campaigns by the whole of the left. The Corbyn experience in Britain shows how crucial this is.

The aim of this first part has been to explain the importance of the exciting left election campaign of the France Insoumise, which is generally underplayed on the international left. In part two, I will look at Mélenchon’s vision of foreign policy, of left patriotism, and some other places where Marxists have important disagreements with him.

John Mullen is a Marxist activist in the Paris region, and a supporter of the France Insoumise. His political website is here.

Footnotes

1 You can find online, in English, the Table of Contents of the 2017 version of the programme, which gives an impression of its nature and tone.

2 For reasons which have mostly to do with how the French language works, the best translation of “La France Insoumise” is “France in revolt” not “France unbowed”. Firstly, “soumis” and “insoumis” are relatively everyday words in French, whereas “bowed” and “unbowed” are not, in English. More importantly, “France unbowed” suggests the whole of France is referred to, whereas “la France Insoumise” can refer to that part of the French nation which is in revolt. This is why you can see terms such as “La France vaccinée”… ( word for word “vaccinated France”…) to speak of that section of French people who are vaccinated, or “La France syndiquée” (“unionized France”) to speak of those in France who are members of trade unions.

4 These were mentioned by Marx as early as 1850.

5 At least 200,000 people saw it in French cinemas.

6 Two and a half hours of the Green candidate here and of Jean-Luc Mélenchon here.

7 Leading member of the New Anticapitalist Party, Olivier Besancenot, in this interview for example.

To stop the war we need political clarity

Nearly 20 years after the great mobilisations against the Iraq war, the Left is now dangerously divided. Where did it all go wrong?


01/03/2022

A war is always a moment of truth, and it is truly shocking to see so many (former) comrades collapse like a deck of cards under the impact of events. In these last few days I’ve seen everything on the miserable world of social media, from calls to purge “Putinists” (whatever that is) from the Left to those who think of themselves as particularly radical for demanding harder sanctions against Russia (capital of course is against that, you see, so they think this gives their reckless calls for escalation an anti-capitalist flair).

Many are circulating an obscure letter by the proverbial Ukrainian leftist that accuses the “Western Left” of being in cahoots with Putin for pointing out that NATO is still a thing (there is probably also a proverbial Ukrainian leftist in the Donbass who is imploring us to support Putin`s invasion as a continuation of the Red Army’s assault on Berlin). Shocking as all of this is, however, understanding should come before judgement. Where did it all go wrong? Here’s a modest attempt in that direction.

Twenty years ago, we experienced a relative revival of the Left under the twin impact of both the alterglobalization movement as well as the movement against the war on Iraq. While it was easy to be against George W. and the neocons in this unipolar moment, it was not always easy to analytically discern the root causes of things like the “war on terror”.

A minority of us made the argument that the state and imperialism were still a thing, and that the fact that we now lived in a unipolar moment did not mean that the state was irrelevant or that challengers to this order would not ultimately appear. Indeed, we argued that the war on Iraq was not the result of neocon-groupthink but a badly organized flight forward to prevent the emergence of such challengers to US hegemony.

But a much significant proportion of those radicalized held on to another theoretical framework, based more or less on Toni Negri’s Empire. It argued that interstate rivalries were a thing of the past, and things like Iraq were merely police operations undertaken on behalf of a networked and neoliberalized global capitalist class (forgive the under-sophistication, but this general description holds true about the direction of the argument). It was Kautsky’s ultra-imperialism theory reloaded.

The political conclusions many drew were manifold. First, it was passé to talk about imperialism. If you did that, you were labelled an authoritarian Stalinist of the “primary/secondary contradiction”-variety. I remember a history professor during my first semester at uni in 2003, whose course basically consisted of praises to Empire as the “21st century’s Communist Manifesto”.

Another lesson was quite reformist in the literal sense – it was to support European integration as a benign project that merely needed to be reformed in a progressive direction. This was basically the line followed by Syriza, Die Linke, and others in Europe, with all the known consequences.

Accompanying Negri “domestically”, was Holloway`s Change the World Without Taking Power, a manual on how to turn your low impact on actual politics into a moral asset. Under the impact of Occupy, many Hollowayists would suddendly discover that politics matters after all and become self-declared left populists, but that’s another story.

Iraq was a disaster. It accelerated the process it sought to prevent. Regional powers were strengthened – Iran, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Turkey, and others. The US overstretch meant others like Russia and China found a breathing space and could challenge the US up to a certain degree.

Then the 2008 war in Georgia happened. Market capitalist Russia could tolerate this much globally, but not in what it regarded as its own backyard – the post-Soviet space. It maintained its own sphere of influence there after 1991, with “peacekeeping” operations in the Caucausus, Moldavia and Central Asia.

Now, the US was encroaching on that space too, and was even dangling NATO membership to the Ukraine, the buffer zone between Russia and post-expansion NATO (as to why, check out Brezinski`s “Grand Chessboard” among others). Every Western action resulted in an increasingly assertive counterreaction, Crimea and Syria to name the most important ones.

I don’t know exactly what went on in the heads of those who thought imperialism was a thing of the past, but it looks like two thought processes kicked in, which are now merging into one. If the whole world was so decentered and networked, it didn’t really matter where you were. And if – channelling Holloway – your political impact on your own rulers was near zero, you had to denounce everything and everyone, become a propagandist or worse, hope your own rulers could be persuaded to do something about what you thought was wrong in this or that part of the globe.

So through the rabbit hole of social media we had those great exercises of moral blackmail against a “Western left”, or “tankies”, or what have you not, that clinged on to an archaic anti-imperialism. We were told, Russia was also “imperialist” (as if this was news for us), even as they called for imperialist no-fly zones in Syria and drew ridiculous analogies to the Spanish Civil War.

On the other hand, it looks like the processes of electoralism and institutionalization that many from the noughties generation went through got the better of them. If you make peace with the fact that your own political impact is close to zero, then what’s left is to opportunistically attach yourself to any kind of “popular” (i.e. manufactured) mood, hoping to become its progressive wing and win this election or enter that coalition in government. Politics transforms itself into mere marketing – “I’m also against NATO, but it’s not exactly what people care about at the moment”.

So, now we have many from that side who are shocked that Russia, an imperialist state, would do an imperialist thing. And this leads to those insane Paul Mason-types who pass as left-wing but call for strengthening the “nuclear deterrent”, to sound credible. AOC is calling for the authorization of military force (i.e. World War III) before congress, even as no serious US policymaker is contemplating this at the moment.

They effectively argue that, it’s not all imperialisms that should be condemned now; it’s that *only* Russian imperialism should be condemned. For some, Western countries are now flawless democracies and not imperialist any more, whereas other condemn NATO and Western imperialism solely in the abstract, fully detached from any analysis of the concrete situation unravelling in the Ukraine. Truly, their condemnations reveal themselves to be simply justifications for their “own” imperialism, except they don’t call it like that.

We live in dark times and darker times are still ahead. This senseless war should end immediately. We need disarmament and de-escalation on a European and global level. Solidarity and fighting our own rulers, whether in Washington, London, Berlin, Mumbai, Damascus, Kiev or Moscow, must prevail.

Stop the War!

Statement by the LINKE Berlin Internationals on Ukraine


28/02/2022

Deutsche Version unten

We condemn the Russian state’s aggression and demand that it withdraw immediately all its forces from Ukraine. We believe that there can be no justification for this aggression. We support Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity, and the Ukrainian people in their resistance to the invasion. We stand with the Ukrainian people against this aggression, and embolden our efforts against fascisms and authoritarianisms in all their manifestations.

At the same time, we oppose a military offensive or any escalation of the conflict by NATO and the EU. Diplomatic solutions, not further military escalation, should be used to stop the war.

We reject the push to war over Ukraine. In nearly every war, working class people die for the greed and power lust of our rulers. Wars are usually fought in the name of one nation or another, but we agree with the Communist Manifesto when it says that working people have no country. For this reason, we also demand that all those fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine who wish to come to Germany are granted asylum.

The current escalation is a result of imperialism – where economic competition leads to military conflict. The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and the imperial ambitions of Vladimir Putin are threatening to cost hundreds of thousands of lives. In particular, the Western suggestion that Ukraine join NATO breaks an agreement that George H.W. Bush made with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990.

The main task of socialists is to oppose the militarism of our own ruling class. As Karl Liebknecht said, the main enemy is at home. This means that we should also demand that Germany leaves the military alliance of NATO, as a step towards the dissolution of NATO.

Calling for an end to German militarism does not mean lining up alongside Putin or Russian nationalism. Putin has a track record of imperial intervention – in Chechnya, Georgia and Crimea. He is a neoliberal tyrant and is no friend of the working class – in Russia or elsewhere. Our answer is solidarity with the anti-war movement from below in Ukraine, in Russia, in the USA, and everywhere.

While we must oppose Putin, talking about his crimes without mentioning the crimes of NATO only feeds the drive to war. From the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Gulf Wars, claims of brutality on “the other side” have been used to feed the drive to war, while similar atrocities from “our side” are systematically ignored. The ruling classes throughout the world are brutal, and must be opposed through popular uprisings, not war.

Western politicians and the media have suddenly decided that they oppose militarism and expansionism. Yet from Korea to Vietnam, from Afghanistan to Iraq, NATO has a history of invading other countries and abusing human rights. Whatever the problem is, NATO cannot be any part of the solution.

We urge the media to avoid dangerous bias and to confront this dangerous situation sincerely. We’ve witnessed the way the Western media broadcast the Afghanistan and Iraq wars at the beginning of this century as a live TV show. We are currently seeing the same process in the Russian media. RT (Russia Today) announced that the invasion was carried out to “denazify” Ukraine. This is just a mirror image of “War on Terror” during the Bush administration. Only chauvinists will be convinced by this partisanship journalism.

Although Germany now has a Red-Green-Yellow government, this does not guarantee a peaceful foreign policy. A Red-Green government willingly supported Germany’s first military interventions since the Second World War – bombing former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. The German government has just broken a long-standing practise of not sending weapons to conflict zones. Sending German weapons to Ukraine only serves to add oil to the fire.

We make the following demands:

  • Stop the war

  • Stop the Russian aggression towards Ukraine

  • Germany should offer a safe passage and haven to deserters and other people fleeing Ukraine ohne wenn und aber

  • Germany takes in all refugees – whether Ukrainian, Afghan, Syrian, Yemeni or Somalian – and provides the same support system for all

  • NATO troops must withdraw from Eastern Europe

  • Germany should leave NATO as a step towards its dissolution

  • Demilitarize Europe

  • Better controls on all imperialist propaganda

  • Speed up the transition to renewable energies to break Germany’s dependence on Russian gas

We call on all Berlin LINKE Internationals members and supporters to take part in the many rallies for peace, a ceasefire, and disarmament.

The International Anti-War movement stands united. Hoch die Internationale Solidarität!

Stoppt den Krieg!

Erklärung von DIE LINKE Berlin Internationals zur Ukraine

Wir verurteilen die Aggression des Russischen Staates und fordern den sofortigen Rückzug aller Streitkräfte aus der Ukraine. Wir glauben, dass es keine Rechtfertigung für diese Aggression geben kann. Wir unterstützen die Unabhängigkeit und territoriale Integrität der Ukraine und das Ukrainische Volk in seinem Widerstand gegen die Invasion. Wir stehen mit dem Ukrainischen Volk gegen die Aggression und bekräftigen unsere Bemühungen gegen Faschismus und Autoritarismus in all seinen Manifestationen.

Gleichzeitig lehnen wir eine militärische Offensive oder jegliche Eskalation des Konflikts durch die NATO und die EU ab. Diplomatische Lösungen, nicht weitere militärische Eskalation, sollten den Krieg stoppen.

Wir lehnen den Vorstoß zum Krieg um die Ukraine ab. In nahezu jedem Krieg sterben Menschen der Arbeiterklasse für die Gier und Machtlust unserer Herrscher. Kriege werden üblicherweise im Namen der einen oder anderen Nation geführt, aber wir stimmen dem Kommunistischen Manifest zu, wenn es sagt, dass Arbeiter kein Vaterland haben. Aus diesem Grund fordern wir ebenso, dass allen vor der russischen Invasion in der Ukraine Fliehenden, die nach Deutschland kommen wollen, hier Asyl gewährt wird.

Die derzeitige Eskalation ist ein Resultat des Imperialismus, in dem wirtschaftlicher Wettbewerb zu militärischem Konflikt führt. Die Ausdehnung der NATO nach Osteuropa und die imperialen Ambitionen von Vladimir Putin drohen hunderttausende Leben zu kosten. Insbesondere der Vorschlag des Westens, dass die Ukraine der NATO beitritt, bricht eine Vereinbarung, die George H.W. Bush und Michail Gorbatschow 1990 trafen.

Die Hauptaufgabe eines Sozialisten ist es, den Militarismus der herrschenden Klasse abzulehnen. Wie Karl-Liebknecht sagte, der Hauptfeind steht im eigenen Land. Das bedeutet, dass wir auch fordern sollten, dass Deutschland die militärische Allianz der NATO verlässt als einen Schritt hin zur Auflösung der NATO.

Nach einem Ende des deutschen Militarismus zu rufen bedeutet nicht, sich neben Putin oder den Russischen Nationalismus zu stellen. Putin hat einen Streckenrekord der imperialen Intervention in Tschetschenien, Georgien und der Krim. Er ist ein neoliberaler Tyrann und ist kein Freund der Arbeiterklasse in Russland oder anderswo. Unsere Antwort ist Solidarität mit der Antikriegsbewegung in der Ukraine, in Russland, in den USA und überall.

Auch wenn wir uns Putin widersetzen müssen, nährt das Sprechen über seine Verbrechen ohne die Erwähnung der Verbrechen der NATO nur den Drang zum Krieg. Von der Kubakrise bis zu den Golfkriegen wurden Behauptungen zur Brutalität „der anderen Seite“ benutzt um den Drang zum Krieg zu nähren, während ähnliche Grausamkeiten „unserer Seite“ systematisch ignoriert wurden. Die herrschenden Klassen in aller Welt sind brutal und Widerstand muss durch Volksaufstände, nicht durch Krieg erfolgen.

Die westlichen Politiker und Medien haben plötzlich entschieden, dass sie Militarismus und Expansion ablehnen. Aber von Korea bis Vietnam, von Afghanistan bis Irak, hat die NATO eine Vorgeschichte der Invasion anderer Länder und des Missbrauchs von Menschenrechten. Was immer das Problem ist, die NATO kann kein Teil der Lösung sein.

Wir drängen darauf, dass die Medien gefährliche Vorurteile vermeiden und sich dieser gefährlichen Situation ehrlich stellen. Wir haben erlebt, wie die westlichen Medien über die Kriege in Afghanistan und dem Irak am Anfang dieses Jahrhunderts in live TV Sendungen Bericht erstatteten. Wir sehen derzeit den gleichen Vorgang in den russischen Medien. RT (Russia Today) kündigte an, dass die Invasion zur Entnazifizierung der Ukraine erfolgte. Das ist nur ein Spiegelbild des „War on Terror“ während der Bush-Regierung. Nur Chauvinisten werden von diesem parteiischen Journalismus überzeugt sein.

Obwohl Deutschland nun eine Rot-Grün-Gelbe Regierung hat, garantiert das keine friedliche Außenpolitik. Eine Rot-Grüne Regierung unterstützte bereitwillig Deutschlands erste Militärintervention seit dem zweiten Weltkrieg und bombardierte das ehemalige Jugoslawien und Afghanistan. Die Deutsche Regierung hat gerade mit der langjährigen Praxis der Nichtentsendung von Waffen in Konfliktzonen gebrochen. Deutsche Waffen in die Ukraine zu senden heißt nur, Öl ins Feuer zu schütten.

Wir haben folgende Forderungen:

  • Stoppt den Krieg
  • Stoppt die russische Aggression gegen die Ukraine
  • Deutschland sollte sicheren Durchgang und Zuflucht für Deserteure und andere Flüchtlinge aus der Ukraine ohne wenn und aber bieten
  • Deutschland nimmt alle Flüchtlinge auf, ob sie Ukrainer, Afghanen, Syrer, Jemeniten oder Somalier sind und stellt die gleiche Unterstützung für alle bereit
  • Die NATO Truppen müssen sich aus Osteuropa zurückziehen
  • Deutschland sollte die NATO als einen Schritt hin zu ihrer Auflösung verlassen
  • Demilitarisierung Europas
  • Bessere Kontrolle über alle imperialistische Propaganda
  • Beschleunigung des Übergangs zu erneuerbaren Energien um die Abhängigkeit Deutschlands von russischem Gas zu durchbrechen

Wir rufen alle Mitglieder und Unterstützer von DIE LINKE Berlin Internationals dazu auf, an Demonstrationen für Frieden, eine Waffenruhe und Abrüstung teilzunehmen.

Die internationale Antikriegsbewegung steht vereint. Hoch die internationale Solidarität!

A century later: the origins of fascism in Italy.

100 years after Mussolini’s March on Rome, how can we understand Fascism?


27/02/2022

In this brief contribution to the cultural debate of The Left Berlin, I will not hide that I found the drafting of this contribution challenging. This was due the complexity of the topic and quantity of studies that, over the years have undertaken to explain the fascist phenomenon.

I will thus try, to present, 100 years after the Marcia su Roma coup d’état, what is to be meant by fascism and to describe its class nature.

Italian fascism presents some peculiarities reflecting the specific situation of the country at the ending of the First World War. In Italy, the fascist movement took the form neither of an intellectual minority tendency, as in France [1]; nor of a mass political force legitimating its societal hegemony in the electoral arena, as in Germany [2]. We should remember that from the very beginning, as the then secretary of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) Palmiro Togliatti said in his popular “Course on the adversaries” – that it would be a mistake to believe that what was true for Italy – should be true and fitting all the other contexts. Fascism can take different shapes in different countries [3].

Over the first Post-War period, Italy was shaken by deep social and political upheavals. The chronic crisis of the liberal institutions was only the exterior, superficial, aspect of the inadequacy of a bourgeois democracy regime that could not face challenges posed by the likely radical, paradigmatic change following the October Revolution in Russia and the spreading revolutionary wave on a continental scale. Guided by their organizations, workers and peasants, that more than anybody else had borne the war catastrophe, acquired a political awareness that guided them in the elaboration of increasingly advanced demands.

The toughening of the class struggle led the Italian bourgeoisie to question itself on the most effective modes and forms of response. Fascism was born, in this perspective, as the most aggressive and regressive form used by the national capitalist class to repress the workers’ demands that threatened its very existence. The workers had been taught by the historical lesson of the soviets.

It is important to underline an aspect still overlooked in the analysis on the origins of fascism. Too often, even in left political discourse, there is the tendency to value some “schematic” and rather dogmatic theses. These were also criticized in 1935 by Togliatti when commenting on the judgment on the origins of fascism given by the social democrats and the German communist movement. Such perspectives reflect a fondness to see fascism narrowly, as an organized expression solely of the petit bourgeoisie, terrified by the real prospect of mass impoverishment stemming from the economic crisis following the First World War. Fascism was certainly a mass movement in which the reactionary petit bourgeoisie found fertile ground for building a political anti-worker platform.

However, fascism was also something else, which cannot be studied separately from imperialism. In what sense? As  Togliatti said, in order to understand fascism, we need “to connect two elements: the bourgeois dictatorship and the movement of the petit bourgeois masses” [4]

It is  in this bright application of dialectical materialism as an interpretive key of the real course of events, that – from my point of view – is the core of the matter. On the one hand, Fascism presents itself as a mass movement that managed to organize the petit bourgeoisie thanks to an eclectic and confused ideology (going from the most extreme forms of nationalism, to illusory and only apparently anti-capitalistic proposals in the economic sphere). On the other hand, fascism also grew in synergy with great financial capital, with the same big bourgeoisie that, at least in words fascism claimed to be fighting against. That was according to the fascist political manifesto of 1919.

The political program of the National Fascist Party, was influenced by the general orientations expressed by the big bourgeoisie. They –  feeling the threat to Italian capitalism posed by the workers’ advancements during the Biennio Rosso (1919-1921), tried to pursue different paths to end the impasse [5]. In this course of events, the Mussolini coup d’état of 1922 was identified as the best path to defeat the workers’ movement, although, as reminded by the history of the 20th century, only temporarily.

Footnotes

1 S. Berstein, „Fascism and anti-fascism in France from the Twenties until 1945”, in Antifascismo e identità europea, A. De Bernardi, P. Ferrari, Carocci, Roma, 2004, p. 109.

2 Particularly significant are the words of the German historian Lutz Klinkhammer: “The German people was not the first victim of Nazism”. Cfr. L. Klinkhammer, “The youth resistance against the national socialist regime”, in Antifascismo e identità europea, A. De Bernardi, P. Ferrari, Carocci, Roma 2004, pp. 135-153.

3 P. Togliatti, „Course on the adversaries”, in P. Togliatti, Opere, vol. III/2, E. Ragionieri, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1973, p. 534.

4 P. 533.

 5 P. 546-49.