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A righteous man – Obituary: Rolf Verleger

Psychologist, professor, human rights activist: the Jewish humanist Rolf Verleger has died


13/11/2021

Rolf Verleger died in Lübeck on Monday. After graduating in medical psychology this is where he had taught at the university for many years. Rolf grew up in a religious household with parents who had escaped from the Auschwitz and Stutthof concentration camps. This also shaped him through his political 1968 years and led him back to religion, again and again. Neither Kant nor Marx were his mentors, but Rabbi Hillel (died 10 BCE) and Akiba (died 135 BCE), along with the Torah: “In the Torah, all ways are ways of goodness, and all its paths are peace,” he wrote in 2017 in his book One Hundred Years of Homeland? “I grew up with this directive. I was inculcated with it by my parents, I thought of it when I was at home or on the road, when I lay down at night and got up in the morning.”

That remained the case when he later helped to build up the Jewish community in Lübeck and integrated the numerous Jewish immigrants in the 1990s. Judaism, as represented by the then President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany Ignatz Bubis, was his home. The Judaism of charity and active morality, not that of the nation, or the Israeli state.

This was bound to lead to a confrontation with the new Central Council, to which he was appointed in 2005. In an open letter, he sharply criticised Israel’s military action in Lebanon and attacked the attitude of the Central Council: “Is this still the same Judaism (…) whose most important commandment our Rabbi Akiba named: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’? No one believes me nowadays that this is the ‘real’ Judaism in a time when the Jewish state discriminates against other people, punishes them in collective responsibility, practices targeted killings without trial, has ten Lebanese killed for every compatriot killed and lays whole neighbourhoods to waste. Surely I can expect the Central Council of Jews in Germany to at least see this as a problem.” However, he was recalled and lost his chairmanship of the Lübeck Jewish Community.

But Rolf Verleger did not resign. He fought for his “homeland”, that is, the Judaism of charity and a state at peace with its Arab neighbours. His criticism of the settlement policy, the violence of the occupation army and the settlers, the wars against Gaza intensified as the violence escalated. He became involved not only in the “Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East”, but also in the “German-Arab” and the “German-Palestinian Societies”. In 2016, he founded the “Alliance to End the Occupation in Palestine”, which is now called the “Alliance for Justice between Israelis and Palestinians”.

I met Rolf Verleger at the formation of this group, which he asked me to join. I saw in him the authentic voice of a Judaism of reconciliation and the great humanist Jewish tradition. He was not against the Jewish state, he even felt an unambiguous “belonging” to it, but his criticism of the governments’ wars and excesses of violence was without compromise. That he is now no longer with us is an immeasurable loss, not only for those who knew him and worked with him, but for all those who fight for peace between the two peoples. Rolf said that his daughter once told him during his conflict with the Central Council: “You will live and die as a righteous man.” And so it came to pass.

This obituary first appeared in German in the junge Welt. Translator: Ana Ferreira. Reproduced with permission. For a junge Welt interview with Rolf Verleger on the constructed connection between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism (published in 2017) click here.

To celebrate its 75th birthday , the junge Welt has started the action “Newspaper for peace”. You can give your loved one 75 issues of the jW for €75. After this, the subscription ends automatically, and must not be cancelled.

The politics of Greta Thunberg

Greta Thunberg has so far played an exemplary role in the climate movement. But sooner or later she may have to make a difficult choice on how to go forward


11/11/2021

I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries about climate change activists lately – it seems to be the latest trend, particularly in German cinema. They introduce us to a number of inspirational activists, who are serious about wanting to change the world. But most of these activists share the same political flaw – they see change coming from getting a seat at the table where government representatives talk about “blah, blah, blah”.

One of these films is Now in which young environmental activists are excited when the UN invites youth delegates to a session on climate change. Another is Dear Future Children in which Hilda from Uganda relishes her invitation to speak at the Copenhagen Climate Summit. It may be worth mentioning that the film’s other main characters, Rayen and Pepper are resisting police tear gas in Chile and Hong Kong respectively.

Let me be clear. These films – and others like them – are good, sometimes great, and offer a realistic view of the current state of the climate change movement. The trouble is that many activists appear to want to transcend the fact that the Great and the Good are ignoring their demonstrations by allowing themselves to be co-opted by the governments and big business who are the cause of the current environmental crisis.

And then there is Greta

Not so Greta Thunberg. For a few years, she has been following a strategy of both acknowledging that Climate Summits are happening and calling them out for what they are. Her recent intervention dismissing the “blah blah blah” of the COP26 summit in Glasgow is just the latest of a series of statements in which she speaks truth to power.

One note about style in this article. I am not going to refer to Greta as “Thunberg” like a dispassionate journalist. She is one of us, a comrade in arms. We may disagree on individual points of theory, but she is a passionate and courageous fighter. who is on our side. I’m going to call her Greta.

Let’s look at Greta’s record in the 3 years after she sat outside the Swedish parliament with her now famous “Skolstrejk för Klimatet” placard. In Katowice in 2018 at the COP24 summit, when Greta was still 15, she said “I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet. Our civilisation is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money.”

In January 2019, she tweeted “I was given the opportunity to speak at a lunch in Davos today… On the panel was Bono, Christiana Figueres, Jane Goodall, Will.i.am and Kengo Sakurada. #wef.” From “lunch in Davos” to “Bono” there are enough trigger warnings here for us to expect the worst. But here’s what she actually said in the video attached to the tweet:

“Some people, some companies, some decision makers in particular have known exactly what prices and values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable money, and I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.”

In September 2019 at the UN climate action summit, Greta said: “We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” So, yes, Greta has attended climate summits, but never at the cost of her own silence. She has regularly and consistently called out the organisers of the summits for the inadequacy of their response. She has refused to help them pretend that everything is ok.

The run up to COP26

How did Greta react to the recent COP26 climate summit? In a speech at a Youth4Climate meeting in Milan before the summit started, Greta complained that “of course, we need constructive dialogue, but they’ve now had 30 years of blah blah blah and where has that led us? … They invite young people to meetings like this to pretend that they are listening to people. But they are not. They are clearly not listening to us. And they never have.”

Around the same time, she wrote in the Guardian: “The climate and ecological emergency is, of course, only a symptom of a much larger sustainability crisis. A social crisis. A crisis of inequality that dates back to colonialism and beyond. A crisis based on the idea that some people are worth more than others and, therefore have the right to exploit and steal other people’s land and resources … It’s naive to think that we could solve this crisis without confronting the roots of it.”

In an interview around the same time, she said “Nothing has changed from previous years really. The leaders will say we’ll do this and we’ll do this, and we will put our forces together and achieve this, and then they will do nothing. Maybe some symbolic things and creative accounting and things that don’t really have a big impact. We can have as many COPs as we want, but nothing real will come out of it.”

Greta’s attacks on the system have made her resistant to being co-opted by even the most liberal politician to greenwash what they have actually done in office. In the same interview, she was asked what she thought about New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern speaking out about climate change being a matter of “life or death”.

Greta’s response was typical: “She looks sceptical. ‘It’s funny that people believe Jacinda Ardern and people like that are climate leaders. That just tells you how little people know about the climate crisis.’ Why? ‘Obviously the emissions haven’t fallen. It goes without saying that these people are not doing anything.’ In April, it was revealed that New Zealand’s greenhouse-gas emissions had increased by 2% in 2019.

Greta in Glasgow

Greta did not participate in COP26. A few months before the conference started, she made a statement saying: “Of course I would love to attend the Glasgow #COP26. But not unless everyone can take part on the same terms … Inequality and climate injustice is already the heart of the climate crisis.” The point became moot after Greta was not invited to attend. Instead, she attended a number of demonstrations and addressed the press on her own terms.

At a march in Glasgow, Greta said: “It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure” and addressed the culpability of world leaders: “The leaders are not doing nothing, they are actively creating loopholes and shaping frameworks to benefit themselves and to continue profiting from this destructive system. The COP has turned into a PR event.” Pointing at the crowd, she continued: “Our leaders are not leading. This is what leadership looks like”.

Also speaking in Glasgow was Barack Obama, who was hailed by many journalists when he told young people: “You are right to be frustrated. Folks in my generation have not done enough to deal with a potentially cataclysmic problem that you now stand to inherit.” Yet the solution that Obama offered was to “Vote like your life depends on it, because it does.”

But many climate change activists are disenfranchised because of their age. And let’s remind ourselves – Obama was US President for 8 years. During this time he told the audience at a gala for Rice University’s Baker Institute “I know we’re in oil country and we need American energy. You wouldn’t always know it ,but it went up every year I was president… Suddenly America is the largest oil producer. That was me people … say thank you.”

Greta’s continued interventions give a clear sign that Obama and Ardern’s greenwashing are clearly inadequate (and this is before we get to governments run by conservatives and climate change deniers). She has a different vision of where our strength lies. As long ago as 2018 she was arguing: “If solutions within this system are so difficult to find, then maybe we should change the system itself … The real power belongs to the people.”

There is a dialectical relationship between Greta’s appearances at demos and the climate change movement. Her appearances and statements help mobilise the demonstrations, and the main reason for the size of her public platform is the large movement behind her. But can this last forever?

Quo vadis Greta?

In the 1980s, long before they had an international hot single, the anarchist pop group Chumbawamba wrote a song, Ulrike, about Ulrike Meinhof, leading member of the Red Army Fraction (RAF, popularly known outside Germany as the Baader-Meinhof group). In the song, they asked: “Who wants to be a Green MP? I don′t”.

This is not the place for a detailed discussion of a 1970s ultra-left organisation, but briefly: the RAF tried to continue the mass movement of 1968, and retained a substantial amount of popular support (including from my CDU-voting German teacher). But as the active movement went down, they increasingly resorted to desperate acts of individual terrorism.

In the absence of a mass movement, prominent supporters of the RAF variously ended up as the SPD Interior Minister, a member of the Nazi NPD, and indeed a Green MP. The party leaders either committed suicide or were murdered by the State in Stammheim prison, depending on whose version of history you believe.

What has this to do with Greta Thunberg? The Guardian reporter Simon Hattenstone remarked “Career-wise she always tells Svante [her father] she’d love to do something that’s nothing to do with climate, because it would mean that the crisis has been averted. But they both know it’s a fantasy.” For the moment, at least, there seems to be little chance of Greta relinquishing her activism to become a Green MP or work for an NGO.

And yet we should still ask the question: what would happen to Greta if the climate change movement dies down? Another recent film Aufschrei der Jugend, about Fridays for Future Berlin, shows how the lack of obvious gains for the movement has led a number of activists to drift off into travelling the world or (shock, horror) finishing their studies. We can’t guarantee that the climate demonstrations can sustain their current size.

We could approach a fork in the road where Greta is forced to take a decision that she has not yet had to make: does she move to the right and allow herself to be co-opted or to the left and risk losing some of her support?

Appeal to workers

We recently saw a development in her politics when she invited striking workers to join her at the COP26 protests. Referring to ongoing strikes by Scottish rail and bin workers, she tweeted: “Climate justice also means social justice and that we leave no one behind. So we invite everyone, especially the workers striking in Glasgow, to join us. See you there! #UprootTheSystem @fff_glasgow”.

This is not just a vague intersectional attempt to bring different campaigns together. It was also an appeal to the climate movement to work with the people who do have the power to stop capitalism in its tracks.

Workers responded in kind. Refuse and Cleansing Convenor Chris Mitchell tweeted from the GMB account: “This is a message of thanks and solidarity to Greta Thunberg, who tweeted yesterday inviting every striking worker to rally in Kelvingrove Park on the 5th of November to march from there to George Square in solidarity for climate justice and social justice, where no one gets left behind.”

As James Plested argues in an article entitled Why Greta Thunberg is cooler than you:

“The other thing that makes Thunberg so cool is what she says about our side in the climate struggle. Unlike the leaders of the more mainstream currents of the environment movement, whose approach centres on mobilising people at best only as a kind of adjunct to the ‘real work’ of behind the scenes lobbying, Thunberg has again and again laid out a perspective for change that puts ‘people power’ front and centre.”

We don’t know where Greta will end up, but for the moment, her role in the climate movement is exemplary. But history is made by movements, not individuals. This is why it is essential that the whole of the climate change movement recognises who our allies are and who are our enemies. At the moment, we could do worse than listening to some of Greta’s speeches.

Single Mothers Don’t Need Pity or Contempt – They Need Support

Without the sustained picture of poor pitiful single mothers, many women would no longer be living with their partners


08/11/2021

Back when my teenager was a very small child, a married colleague came by to visit my little flat in Rigaer Straße in Berlin-Friedrichshain. I was renting two rooms at €279 (those were the days, hey!) “Your ex pays for this flat, right”, she asked. “How”, said I, “Do what?”

The colleague was Irish, just a little older than me. And married to a German guy called Nils. “Nils told me”, she said, “how it works in Germany. He said that you don’t pay your rent on your own. Your ex pays for you. Now he’s got to pay for two flats, because you’ve decided to leave him! I dunno, I feel kinda sorry for him.” You could literally smell her disapproval – but I was more confused than anything else. “Paul’s still a student”, I said. “And he doesn’t have to pay anything. Actually, it’s the Job Centre who pays the rent right now.”

I am a social scrounger, not a gold digger!

GET IT RIGHT, BITCH, I thought. I’m a social scrounger, not a gold digger. Why did Nils say something so strange? My colleague seemed about to shudder.

“I could never do this myself!”, she said. She was almost shivering with fear. “Live on your own! With your children! Without a man! Compleeeeetely alone. It’s just terrifying! Alone in bed every night – so cold, the very idea! No-one who you can call when the washing machine isn’t working. Oh, absolutely. I would have to…:” now she whispered very quietly, so that the children wouldn’t hear. “…kill myself!” I nodded.

This wasn’t the first time that I’d heard something like this. And I find this pity people openly feel for single mothers, really interesting. It’s always pity, never empathy. Pity mixed with contempt. The poor single mother, alone with the kids. Alone with the washing. Alone in a cold bed. Alone, alone, alone. You feel pity for these poor women – these wretched women. With their empty lives in their cold flats, in their cold beds!

I think it’s a problem when people feel sympathy or pity for others – without any real empathy for their problems or curiosity about what the realities of their lives are. If people were truly interested, if people had any kind of curiosity for the reality of single mothers’ lives in Germany, they’d know that our beds are really not that cold – mine isn’t, at any rate.

Our problems have nothing to do with loneliness!

Like many other single mothers in Germany, I live in a WBS flat – that is a flat with a ‘Wohnberechtigungsschein’, which entitles you to subsidized housing. A three-room apartment. This mean I don’t have my own bedroom – I sleep in the living room. So, almost every night, at around three o’clock in the morning, my toddler runs from his bedroom into the living room, jumps on to my sofa bed, and informs me that sleeping alone just isn’t “comfy”. This means that we sleep together on my small bed settee, his hot body pressed against mine. Sometimes he takes so much space that I fall onto the floor, and he wakes up, looks at me with interest, and asks curiously what I’m up to. Yeah, ok, probably if I did have a bedroom, he’d still be running into my room at some time in the night.

But the point I am trying to make is this: The problems of single mothers have nothing to do with loneliness. Our lives are difficult, but they’re not lonely or sad. We often have colourful, full, warm lives. But often also lives which are bloody hard. They’re not hard because we’re lonely, or because we’re missing a man, a husband to complete us. Single mothers’ lives are hard because society has made conscious decisions to make them hard.

People spend a lot of time and energy on pitying poor single mothers. During Corona, in the election year, or whenever it suits politicians, basically, many, many crocodile tears will flow because of us poor single mothers! So much pity. Because of single mothers, lockdown had to be ended immediately – because of single mothers the speed limit on the motorway could not be removed. Seems like single mothers are the perfect victims sometimes. Well, it’s nice to be thought of every now and then – but forgive me for thinking that this pity for single mothers only comes into play when it’s useful. If something needs to be changed which would ONLY benefit single mothers – well, then the tears don’t flow quite so hard.

The biggest losers of all time

It’s a weird paradox really: on the one hand, single mothers serve as a symbol for the biggest losers of all time – portrayed as people for whom things couldn’t be worse. Yet at the same time, the most paranoid fantasies circulate about how easy things are for us! Apparently, if you’re a single mother you IMMEDIATELY get a nursery place, a married mother told me in the playground. Or if you’re a single mother you’ll be given your WBS certificate IMMEDIATELY, according to my good friend Lina. And when you’re a single mother, the youth welfare office pays your nursery costs, doesn’t it?, asked my good friend Stefan. Right? Right? Right? Or the other day on the internet, a white young childless guy assured me that if you’re a single mother, you just have to show a WBS voucher to a housing company like Degewo, and you IMMEDIATELY receive a flat – assigned to you!

These paranoid fantasies remind me of the fantasies Pegida supporters have about refugees who are driven in taxis paid for by the welfare office to cosmetic surgery clinics paid for by the state health insurance. It’s interesting, though, that these crazy fantasies about single mom privileges are more or less believed by everyone – even by people who are not misogynist or sexist or classist in the slightest. This is because so little is actually known about the lived reality of single motherhood. It really makes you wonder: if our society really gave so many privileges to single mothers, why would people have to pity us?

The function of pity for single mothers

And it’s important to recognise that this pity has a function: it demonstrates contempt. We are meant to understand that we are shit, basically lonely, sad, marginal figures. Why did Nils tell my ex-colleague that I get “my rent” paid for me by my ex? He didn’t want her to see that it is possible for a woman to live independently from a man – he wanted to show her that I’m to be pitied. I think that the reason for this pity is to scare off married women. Oh, the poor single mothers – their life is so cold, so gruesome, so terrible – compared to the happy married women. I honestly think: if the single mother wasn’t such a tragic figure – if society showed more solidarity and fair treatment for single mothers – there would be far fewer women who stay with their male partners.

And we mustn’t forget that the term “single mother” can be used to describe many different people in many different life situations. There are single mothers who are white German women in secure, well paid jobs, who live around the corner from their mama and share everything 50/50 with their ex. Such women really don’t need so much pity! There are single mums too, who are, white foreign women, who don’t even know the father of their child – and earn so much that they can pay a nanny. Princess Diana was also a single mother, as her boys lived in boarding schools (yeah, okay, she is a single mother who deserved our pity!) But single mothers’ struggles can be quite different. We are not all in the same boat – far from it. However, even the truly “poor” single mothers – the ones who live from Hartz IV or precarious work: they don’t need your pity either. What single mothers need is empathy, support and a fairer society. And a WBS voucher for a flat with a bedroom!

This article first appeared in German on the Edition F website. Translation: Phil Butland. Reproduced with permission.

Why Demonstrate in Berlin for Western Sahara?

Speech at the rally for Western Sahara, Brandenburger Tor, 6th November 2021. Plus Photo Gallery


07/11/2021

Why should we demonstrate in Berlin for Western Sahara? Apart from International Solidarity and the fact that Europe is the home of colonialism.

Firstly, because Germany is a leading country in the EU. It is the EU which is responsible for the sufferings of the Sahrawi people. Spain was the original coloniser of Western Sahara, and even though it formally handed over the country to Morocco – and not to the Sahrawi people. It is still the administering power. The EU must be clear about its role in supporting and perpetuating occupation. We demand that the German government oppose the occupation of Western Sahara.

Secondly, because EU companies are profiting from the country’s natural resources. These include German companies like Heidelberg Cement. It is not a coincidence that Heidelberg Cement is also responsible for similar exploitation of the Palestinians and cooperation with the occupying Israeli government. We demand that German and European businesses stop profiting from exploitation and occupation,

Thirdly, because Germany is a member of the UN. The UN promised a referendum on independence over 30 years ago, but has still failed to act. We demand that the German government uses its influence in the UN to push for a referendum. This is the very least that the Sahrawi people deserve.

Germany, the EU, and the UN are failing to act because they are profiting from exploitation and oppression. They will only act if we force them to act. This is why we must unite our struggles in one fight.

Last week, many of us were demonstrating in Berlin against the coup in Sudan. In previous weeks, we have demonstrated for Palestine, for Kurdistan, for Egypt. These are all parts of the same struggle against the same people.

The Berlin LINKE Internationals are doing our best to link up the different international organisations in our city. Now one quarter of Berliners do not have a German passport. We have many separate struggles, but we must bring these struggles together.

This is why we call on the EU and Germany to recognise the Frente Polisario as the legitimate representatives of the Saharwi people.

This is why we say

Free, Free Palestine!

Free, Free Sudan!

Free, Free Western Sahara!

One Struggle, One Fight!

Photos: Phil Butland, Norma Lorenzo and Jaime Martinez Porro

The Paradox of Solidarity for Labor That Should End

Drug Dealers in Recent German TV and Film – Why the Left should support Dealers


06/11/2021

Dealer Work Online

A perverse factory ballet introduces Germany’s most famous drug dealer, the Kinder-Zimmer dealer Maximilian Schmidt in the Netflix documentary Shiny_Flakes: The Teenage Drug Baron, which was released in August.

Punching pills from bright powders, steel shafts strike and pirouette to the nostalgic rattle and clang of industrial-age metal on metal, hydraulics hissing and popping, building to a menacing crescendo, as vividly colored tablets shudder and fall from a conveyor belt. Cut. Schmidt sits at a table in what looks like a prison. He rotates a smartphone to read online customer comments that make him burst out laughing:

“‘I always order my crystal [methamphetamine] here, then I shoot it up. And when the flash comes I cook the cocaine to make a bit of crack, and then I smoke a nice pipe.
Top-notch, A++++ stuff.
Guys! I lost two teeth right afterwards.
This stuff really fucks you up. I definitely recommend it – you idiots!’

Schmidt pockets the phone, smiles and says, “Looks like he was satisfied.”

Smoking crack and shooting speed are two of the most stigmatized forms of illegal drug use. Unless a viewer knows that you can use methamphetamine without losing your teeth, and that this comment is meant as a joke, Schmidt’s laughter is monstrous.

When not answering questions seated at a staged interrogation table, Schmidt reenacts the labors of his crime in an exact replica of his childhood bedroom up to and including his violent arrest. He smashes fist-sized crystals of ersatz-MDMA with a hammer, counts pills, weighs powders, cuts sheets of LSD, heat-seals small plastic bags, packs it all in envelopes to post, and taps out responses to customers. He also expresses his gratitude and surprise for help he received from anonymous online comrades who “would answer any stupid question,” about processing bulk orders of drugs.

We see him work to exhaustion, round the clock, then collapse.

Schmidt was 19 years old when he was busted in 2015. He grew up in Leipzig a child of post-reunification Germany’s go-go spirit of self-interested enterprise. He saw drug use in movies and on TV portrayed as fun. Though he himself never used drugs, for society at large, he said, drugs were about, “Hey, let’s party”.

In the new Germany, his entrepreneurialism is an expression of fashionable start-up audacity, a radicalism suited to his times. A theme Shiny_Flakes’ producers caricature in their hit Netflix series based on Schmidt’s story, “How To Sell Drugs Fast (Online)”, among the best, most socially useful, and anti-capitalist drug-crime fictions I have seen. It mocks the main character’s Steve Jobs hero-worship, and ridicules police stupidity and racist dealer clichés and hyper-violence. It sends up smarmy business gurus and includes an organic hipster juice company fronting for an MDMA factory run by two stylish young Dutch women who are, like all true TV drug dealers, as murderous as they are cruel, offering fresh juice and business offers that cannot be refused.

The German drug-entrepreneur comedy is not new. The 2001 box-office hit Lammbock – Alles in Handarbeit (Lammbock – All Handcrafted) that starred Moritz Bleibtreu and Lucas Gregorowicz was about stoners who solve post-high school troubles by adding weed delivery to their pizza business. It includes a dreadlocked hippie character flashing peace signs in a stock comic reference to drugs’ other radical history. The one rooted in pro-drug politics defended and celebrated by activists as means of revolutionary consciousness raising.

A generation later, dudes delivering weed with handcrafted pizzas are out, internet start-ups with PowerPoint business plans in. All traces of drugs’ radical history have vanished.

Debate over drugs’ political use split leftists in Germany’s Sixties youth movements, leading to the expulsion of pro-drug leftists from political cooperative apartments and communes. Out of the tumult, in 1969 a group of stoner-friendly militants for the “right to get high” („Recht auf den eigenen Rausch“) and direct action, including violence, announced the formation of the notorious Zentralrat der umherschwelfenden Haschrebellen (Central Council of Wandering Hash Rebels).

If German socialists today have come around to support legalizing drugs, and German high school children, notably girls, may be depicted in a popular TV comedy enjoying and managing their use of cannabis, MDMA, and ketamine, as they are in “How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)”, it is thanks to a half-century of activism for drug decriminalization, which included a vestige of the Haschrebellen who called the national demonstration in 1997 establishing the annual Hanf Parade, one of Berlin’s largest annual political protests.

The parallel normalization of “soft” drug use in popular culture has long established drug illegality as an apolitical means of transgressive self-realization that only the most unhip reactionaries, and some police, find objectionable.

What has not changed is the status of labor required for the provision of illegal drugs, work performed by people who are nearly always called “drug dealers”, whether they grow cannabis, smuggle tons of cocaine, or stand in the park selling small bags of whatever’s available.

For the Left, the unnamed paradox is that this is labor, that is illegal work, that even if ethical, remains labor that should disappear. (An exception is the Haschrebellen, as they exist today on a website. See their Dealer Special page.)

Unlike sex work, the activities of drug smuggling, clandestine production and distribution, may only be politically defensible under prohibition, and only to the extent that prohibition is deemed unjust and harmful to society, as it appears to be in German public opinion and the platforms of political parties from the pro-capitalist FDP to the socialist LINKE.

Acid Communism

Berlin’s HKW (Haus der Kultur der Welt) cultural center hosted an “Acid Communism” conference in June this year, which opened with a talk by cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen titled “Access to Tools (on Acid)”.

The idea of “acid communism” revived for Diederichsen the question, “What would have happened if hippie drug culture and the New Left had not diverged, the first descending into esotericism, the others ending up Maoists?” Yet he never mentions their brief fusion in the 1969 Haschrebellen, or their subsequent apparitions.

The Haschrebellen story is complicated, and Diederichsen’s twenty-minute talk was not about the history of pro and anti-drug radical politics. It was about how the psychedelic deconstruction of commodities may have better reflected Marxist analysis than the puritanical anti-drug Left understood. Still the absence of any example of political action stemming from a politicized German drug culture was unfortunate since the origin’s of “acid communism”, as Mark Fisher imagined in the 2017 essay inspiring the conference, advocated deploying the experiences of “psychedelic consciousness” as a means of advancing socialist political action as much as theory.

Fisher argued this new form of mass consciousness encompassed not just drug users, but masses of working class people, and that it, and related socialist Sixties projects, were the main targets of neoliberalism summed up in the Thatcherite dictums: There is no alternative (to capitalism), and Society does not exist (only families and individuals). That neoliberal ideological onslaught helped to neutralize psychedelic consciousness and establish illegal drugs as symbolic commodities of individual transgression and self-realization – or destruction.

A World of Bosses

In recent German drug dealer film and TV fictions, forms of this transgressive self-realization occur when the deserving hero achieves dominion over others and assumes his natural destiny to become a “boss”. The body of the dealer at work is mystified into the imagined transcendence of work, or worker, to boss. Unlike the sex worker, who since the 1970s has enjoyed growing Left solidarity, the drug worker’s body can disappear, and usually does in fiction.

No German fiction better illustrates this than Burhan Qurbani’s 2020 Berlin Alexanderplatz, made, in Qurbani’s words, to tell the story of Berlin’s Black refugee park dealers and promote a utopian multicultural new German.

Early in the film, the park dealer underboss, Reinhold, tells film’s hero Francis, “He’s nothing compared to you,” referring to Ottu, a fellow refugee with whom Francis works illegally as a construction laborer. “He’s the one who should be working for you.” Throughout the movie, all the other main characters are bosses who tell Francis that he too should be a boss.

In Berlin Alexanderplatz’s three hours we never get to know an actual park dealer or his community. We never learn anything about anyone who does the work preparing and stashing drugs, or watching out for police, or greeting people and exchanging drugs for money. When the film’s hero Francis finally enters the park drug business by demonstrating his capacity for brutal violence, the only “dealing” we see him do is managing the collection of money. His advancement is nearly complete.

In the movie’s final scene Francis sits alone on the edge of a 19th century fountain in a gray three-piece suit, pale pink tie and matching pochette. Framed in fountain mist and glistening statuary, after having appeared first at the same fountain in mud-caked work clothes, he is finally dressed for his true station. The 21st century new German, properly bourgeois.

For this ending, Qurbani has said, he sacrificed art for propaganda, choosing politics over film elegance. He felt obliged as a taxpayer-funded filmmaker to offer a utopian vision for a new Germany, and to “flip-off” the far-right AfD with a mixed race baby that miraculously appears in the film’s last minutes, and the self-described “freaks”, trans, gay, and people of color immigrants, declaring themselves the new Germany.

Dealers are never mentioned at the film’s three Berlin launch events, one hosted by an entrepreneur whose business is dedicated to professional advancement of disadvantaged German youth, another by a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the third, at Hasenheide Park, where the working dealers who inspired the film could hear the movie and its presenter, a scholar of racial diversity training, chatting with director and cast.

It is easy to understand how refugee and anti-racist professionals would seek to avoid explicit association with drug dealing by ignoring it, even when presenting a movie purportedly made about them. Similar political concerns likely explain the drug dealers’ absence in the TheLeftBerlin.com declaration against racial profiling in the Berlin Wrangel neighborhood that appeared earlier this year.

But for the Left, the wholesale failure to articulate an unambiguous solidarity with illegal drug work contradicts the logical grounds for solidarity now extended to defend the individual right to choose one’s gender and sex partners, to sell one’s body for sex, as well as the right to acquire and use drugs, like beer, cannabis and MDMA.

In her 2020 book Die Elenden, the journalist Anna Mayr explains the contempt and ignorance for the poor and chronically unemployed, prevalent among her peers and the German middle class generally, as a product of the narrowness of journalists’ life experiences, all attending the same schools and all, with rare exceptions, from the middle classes themselves. This may also explain Burhan Qurbani’s inability to portray a dealer and the German journalists failure to notice that his film’s “dealer” is never really a dealer.

Is the absence of drug-work specific (non-anarchist) Left solidarity similarly due to the limited life experience of its intellectuals? Is it due to the Left tendency to equate commerce with capitalism and see dealers, at best, as entrepreneurs, who unlike sex worker/entrepreneurs can be alienated from their labor and only interested in money, indifferent to their trade’s possible harms?

German film and TV depictions of dealers as money obsessed entrepreneurs, violent criminals or helpless victims of circumstance with no other choice, confine illegal drug work to criminality, a criminality challenged by the Left but without following their arguments against prohibition to their logical conclusion. By and large, the Left today rejects the criminalization of queer sexuality and sex work and seeks modes of solidarity with those harmed by their criminalization.

Drug dealers, and other illegal drug workers, including large-scale and highly profitable traffickers, could be reimagined as engaging in forms self-funded civil disobedience that have over the decades weakened, to the point of breaking, regimes of prohibition that criminalize and harm mostly the poor, immigrants and people of color. Work that should merit at least tacit Left support if not active solidarity.

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Scott Holmquist’s recent work on drug dealers includes Shiny Fakes of Dealer Violence, in der Freitag, and the protest art-intervention LAST HERO: 24-hour Park Drug Dealer Solidarity Sit-In (2019). The 2018 Rosa Luxemburg Salon panel discussion, originally titled, “Drug Dealing as Labor,” was part of his exhibition Other Homelands: Origins and Migration Routs of Berlin Parks Drug Sellers.