Left-wing NS
Join Date: Jan 2005
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A critical examination of the political program of the PSG
The Party for Social Equality (PSG) for those who dont know can be seen as the German section of the http://www.wsws.org . It is taking part in the state election of Berlin this weekend (17. September 2006) and although it propably wont get many votes, a critical examination of its program and ideas is important since it brags about being the only socialist alternative in Berlin.
The http://www.wsws.org again for those who dont know identify themselves as trotzkyist socialists. The major difference trotzkyists have in contrast to other socialists is that they dont beleive capitalism can be overcome in one country alone and that it needs the joint effort of the worlds working class to bring about a change of the system.
Enough said here is the party program of the PSG :
Quote:
PART 1
Support the Socialist Equality Party campaign for the Berlin Senate
Statement of the Socialist Equality Party of Germany (Partei für Soziale Gleichheit)
28. June 2006
The Socialist Equality Party (Partei für Soziale Gleichheit — PSG) is standing its own candidates in the September state elections in Berlin. Our goal is to provide a clear voice and a revolutionary socialist orientation to the widespread opposition that exists to the anti-social policies of the Berlin state government, a coalition between the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Left Party/Party of Democratic Socialism.
Our participation is a step toward the construction of an international party that opposes war, defends democratic rights, and fights for social equality and the eradication of poverty.
We reject the endlessly repeated claim that “the coffers are empty” — the standard formulation employed by the rich and super-rich to push through new social cuts and impose poverty on the mass of the population.
The tax breaks implemented by the last federal government have effected a gigantic redistribution of wealth from those at the bottom of society to those at the top. Many millionaires and large-scale enterprises now boast that they have drastically reduced their tax payments, or pay nothing at all.
In 2001, so-called tax reforms resulted in a revenue loss of €1.8 billion to the Berlin state treasury, yet that same year the state legislature provided €1.75 billion to bail out the scandal-ridden Berlin Bankgesellschaft. Since then, as part of a new “risk control law,” some €300 million is being made available every year to the bank, so as to underwrite the financial assets of Berlin’s elite.
We have only contempt for the claims of Mayor Klaus Wowereit (SPD) and his economics minister, Harald Wolf (Left Party/Party of Democratic Socialism), that there is no alternative to this policy. Under the so-called “red-red” coalition, the Berlin state legislature likes to talk about “social innovation,” while it serves the interests of big finance on every concrete question, and acts as a lackey of an arrogant financial elite. It will go down in history as the most cowardly and incompetent administration the city has ever seen.
The Socialist Equality Party is seeking to put an end to this orgy of self-enrichment. Our aim is not to beg for alms or reform capitalism, but to replace it with a socialist system in which the economy serves the needs of working people, rather than the profit interests of a financial oligarchy and the greed of corporate bosses.
If we are elected to the Berlin state legislature, we will fight for a programme that sets out to eliminate poverty and all forms of social misery. We call for:
* The re-introduction of business taxes that have been abolished; the taxation of large private fortunes; the immediate cancellation of the bailout of the Bankgesellschaft Berlin (BGB). All financial promises made to benefit the BGB must be declared null and void, while the savings of small depositors are protected.
* The initiation of a programme of public works in road construction and the renovation of schools; the employment of additional teaching staff; the re-opening of swimming pools, sports and leisure facilities, libraries, etc., that have been closed. All cuts in wages and social conditions for public service employees must be restored.
* The abolition of all secret government activities and confidentially rules; the integration of the general population into political decision-making; the establishment of citizens’ committees to develop proposals for resolving the problems in various city districts and at other levels of the administration. Only in this way can the population intervene actively in politics and oppose the profit interests of big business.
The argument that such policies would lead to factory closures and yet more unemployment does not frighten us. We know that these policies cannot be completed within one city or within the boundaries of one state. But they must be initiated! And they must be linked to the political mobilisation of the working class across Europe and internationally.
Today, workers around the world confront the same problems and can resolve them only on an international level. The globalisation of production has undermined all attempts to improve workers’ living conditions on a purely national basis. Workers require an international perspective to defend their most elementary rights.
A serious socialist initiative in the Berlin state legislature that boldly opposed the employers’ organisations and lobbyists, that called things by their real name and sought to mobilise the population for fundamental social change would produce a very different outcome than that produced by the cowardly laments about unavoidable social cuts uttered by people who call themselves left-wing, but who in every case act as the cat’s paw of the right.
Such a socialist initiative would send a powerful signal. Millions of workers, young people, students, pensioners, people from all social layers in Europe and worldwide are looking for a political way forward. The propaganda about the German “social market economy” is being disproved daily by the news flowing from company boardrooms. No one still believes the talk of “blossoming landscapes,” as promised when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, especially those in the former East Germany.
All the unresolved problems that led in the previous century to fascist terror and world wars have resurfaced. With mass unemployment and increasing social desperation, the political rottenness of capitalist society takes on the form of right-wing extremist tendencies, on the one hand, and police state repression, on the other.
Our participation in the election seeks to link up with the revolutionary socialist traditions of the working class.
Like no other city, Berlin has historically been the focus of the socialist workers’ movement. In 1867, the pioneers of revolutionary socialism August Bebel and William Liebknecht were the first Social Democrats to enter parliament in the German capital of Berlin. It was in this city that the world’s first Marxist mass party developed, the SPD.
It was also here that the SPD committed its historic betrayal, when in 1914 it agreed to the Kaiser’s war credits and supported the First World War. In 1918, the city was at the centre of the November revolution, but social democracy prepared the murder of revolutionary leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the hands of the Frei Korps, the precursor to Hitler’s Brownshirts. It was here in 1933 that the workers’ movement experienced its greatest defeat, when the SPD and the Stalinist German Communist Party capitulated without a fight to Hitler’s fascist hordes.
After Hitlerite fascism and another world war, Berlin became the front line in the Cold War. The city was divided by the infamous Berlin Wall.
Here, in 1953, building workers marched from East Berlin’s Stalinallee to the Brandenburg Gate and called on West German workers to join them in a general strike. On both sides of the Wall, the ruling elites rested on the greatest lie of the twentieth century—the identification of Stalinist dictatorship with socialism. In the autumn of 1989, when millions demonstrated in East Berlin and brought down the Stalinist regime, political demagogy reached a new pinnacle. The fall of Stalinism was used, in the name of liberty and democracy, to introduce a capitalist market economy.
Today, 17 years later, this propaganda has been thoroughly exposed and discredited. Mass unemployment, increasing poverty and want, and the constant assertion that there is no alternative to this social catastrophe amount to a devastating indictment of the capitalist system.
It is necessary to draw a political balance sheet and articulate some fundamental truths.
What differentiates the Socialist Equality Party from the SPD, the Left Party/Party of Democratic
Socialism and the Election Alternative (WASG)?
The interests of the vast majority of the population cannot be reconciled with a social order based on the private ownership of the means of production and the nation state. The social crisis cannot be overcome within the framework of the existing capitalist system.
Demonstrations and “pressure from below” alone cannot put a stop to the attacks on social and democratic rights. What is needed is a political movement of working people that is completely independent of the SPD, the Left Party and the trade unions, and that fights for the re-organisation of society on a socialist basis.
On this basic question, the Socialist Equality Party differs fundamentally from all other parties that are standing in this election.
For decades, many workers in West Germany and West Berlin voted for the SPD — not because the SPD stands for a socialist society, but because the party promised to improve social conditions through reforms within the framework of capitalism. Such a perspective has proven completely illusory. After seven years of an SPD-Green Party federal government, nobody can seriously claim that the SPD is capable of genuine social reforms.
In 1998, many had hoped that the incoming SPD-Green Party government would put an end to the years of welfare cuts under the conservative government of Helmut Kohl. Instead, the opposite took place.
The seven years of the Schröder government witnessed the biggest-ever redistribution of income from the bottom of society to the top. The wealthy and the employers were awarded tax breaks, depleting the public coffers. The loss of tax revenues was then used as the excuse for substantial cuts in social spending. The gap between great wealth and working class incomes widened as never before. Today in Germany, one in eight children lives in a family that depends on welfare support.
In domestic policy, Interior Minister Otto Schily followed in the footsteps of the “black sheriff” Manfred Kanther, continuing his attacks on democratic rights and on immigrants. In foreign policy, the SPD-Green Party government deployed German troops in international combat missions for the first time since World War Two.
The Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) adopted the reformist banner of the SPD just as this party was consigning it to the rubbish heap. The precursor of the PDS — the Socialist Unity Party, the ruling Stalinist party of East Germany — had quashed every expression of resistance against the Stalinist dictatorship, branding it an attack on “socialism.” With the collapse of East Germany, the Stalinists renamed their party the Party of Democratic Socialism and swore allegiance to the “free market” and private property, promoting the illusion that capitalism was compatible with the interests of working people.
As long as the PDS remained in opposition in the aftermath of German reunification, it was able to sustain illusions in its “left” credentials and the viability of the capitalist market system. With its entry into the Berlin state legislature, however, its political bankruptcy was rapidly revealed.
All the social attacks that the PDS previously condemned are being pushed through in Berlin with PDS support. If any further proof were necessary that the PDS is no alternative to the Social Democrats, it was amply provided by the four years of PDS participation in the Berlin state government.
The PDS entered the Berlin state government in 2001 as a consequence of the Berlin banking scandal. The first official act of the SPD-PDS coalition was to secure the finances of the bank’s major investors and shareholders by means of a guarantee valued at 21.6 billion euros.
Then one blow followed upon the other: the cutting of 15,000 jobs in the public services, with 18,000 more to be eliminated by 2012; withdrawal from the local government employers’ association, so as to renege on collective bargaining agreements and cut salaries by some 10 percent; a cut of 3,000 jobs and a 10 percent lowering of wages for Berlin public transit employees; massive cuts in jobs and wages in the hospitals; the introduction of some 34,000 so-called “one euro” jobs, partly to supplant regular jobs; a drastic increase in fees charged by kindergartens and day care centres; the abolition of free teaching materials and reductions in school teaching positions; the slashing of subsidies to Berlin’s three universities by 75 million euros, corresponding to a cut of 10,000 student positions and more than 200 teaching staff; the sale of the GSW public housing company with its 65,000 dwellings to an American investor and Cerberus.
These are only the most important in the long list of anti-social measures implemented in Berlin for which the SPD-PDS coalition is responsible.
The attacks by the Berlin state legislature on social benefits and public services are at the forefront of such assaults nationwide, outdoing even those states governed by the conservatives. This had led to a dramatic worsening of living conditions for many workers and their families.
The number of industrial jobs in Berlin has shrunk from 260,000 in 1991 to just 102,000. Officially, 18.1 percent are unemployed. Almost 250,000 of the city’s 3.3 million inhabitants live on what was previously called “welfare assistance.”
Berlin has become the capital of poverty and social decline. Its debts of 60 billion euros are higher than those of any other large city in Europe. Poverty has reached a scale comparable to the worst periods of the 1920s. According to the latest figures, some 20 percent of Berlin’s children live below the poverty line, defined as less than 50 percent of the average monthly net income of 1,213 euros.
The PDS, which in the eastern districts of the city is still the strongest party, and which has controlled several key ministries in the state legislature for the last five years (Economics and Employment; Science, Research and Culture; Health and Social Affairs), shares political responsibility for the social disaster in Berlin. Its attempts to present its merger with the Election Alternative organisation (WASG ) as the establishment of a new “Left Party” recalls the fable of the emperor’s new clothes: the innocent eyes of a child can see that the emperor is naked.
For its part, the Election Alternative is a combination of worn-out Social Democratic and trade union bureaucrats and a handful of middle-class radicals. The organisation’s leading members have served inside the SPD and the trade union apparatus for many decades, and supported all of their attacks on the working population. Its leading light, Oskar Lafontaine, spent 40 years in the SPD. He closed down the steel industry when he held the post of prime minister in the state of Saarland. As SPD chairman, he organised the election victory of Gerhard Schröder in 1999, only to capitulate shortly afterwards and leave government without a fight when he encountered opposition from the international financial press.
To expect such figures to change their political course is absurd. What motivates them is not the social needs of workers, but rather the need of German capitalism to contain the class struggle through the promotion of reformist illusions, which in the past had provided a basis for stable capitalist rule. As long as a large majority of the working population believed that capitalism could provide for their basic needs, there was no fear of a return to the violent class conflict that shook the German Reich and the Weimar Republic.
The SPD has moved so far to the right that it can no longer guarantee social stability. This is the motivation for Lafontaine and Gregor Gysi (PDS) to create a new version of the SPD. The Left Party does not represent a break with the politics of the SPD. It is, rather, a desperate attempt to sow new illusions in social democratic policies that have so miserably and visibly failed.
It is within this context that one must view the decision of the Berlin branch of the Election Alternative (WASG) to stand its own candidates against the Party of Democratic Socialism in the upcoming Berlin Senate election. Their candidacy is an attempt to provide a fig leaf to cover up the nakedness of the emperor.
The stance taken by the Berlin WASG is absurd: On a federal level it supports cooperation and unification with the PDS in the form of the Left Party, while in Berlin it runs its own candidate against the PDS. This contradiction arises from that fact that the practice of the Berlin Senate has completely discredited the Left Party even before it has properly gotten off the ground.
The Berlin WASG maintains that the programme of the Left Party has been disfigured in the capital to the point of non-recognition. The opposite is the case: the programme of the Left Party has been made transparent in Berlin. The Berlin Senate reveals what can be expected from this party wherever it enters government.
The controversy over the candidacy of the Berlin branch of the WASG has already showed what both the Left Party and the WASG think of democratic principles. When the Berlin regional organisation of the WASG did not follow the wishes of the national executive and agree to drop its election campaign in Berlin, the national executive stripped its Berlin branch of its powers — until the national executive was forced to revoke this decision by a court order. One can only imagine how such a party would treat its own members, let alone opposition from the working class, if it ever came to power.
The Socialist Equality Party looks upon the machinations of the Left Party and the WASG with contempt. The decline of social reformism has objective causes that cannot be overcome by palace intrigue and tactical manoeuvres. All over the world, social democratic parties are following the same course. The conversion of the British Labour Party into a new edition of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party is only the clearest expression of this process. It is necessary to confront this fact and draw the appropriate political conclusions. Otherwise, social decline will find expression, by default, in the growth of extreme right-wing forces.
... continue PART 2
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In the age of Globalization,its not the international Left,but the nationalist Right,which is the true anticapitalist force,which will set restrictions on the international Capital and will secure and improve the nation-state as a social shelter.
Last edited by alex; September 14th, 2006 at 04:51 AM.
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