A Sudeten-German Marxist
Disney Haiti Justice Campaign
THAT'S WHY GREEDY COMPANIES
LIKE DISNEY CALL HAITI THE Pocahantas pyjamas cost $12 in New York. The Haitian women who make them get 5-7 cents. No wonder workers at Disney subcontractors
MAGIC KINGDOM!!
are trying to organize. We want Disney to stop doing business with subcontractors who refuse their workers' demands for • A wage of at least
$5 per day (double current rates) • genuine collective bargaining. •
Improved working conditions, such as clean drinking water. • An end to indiscriminate layoffs, and firings for union organizing.
We have postcards, fact sheets and other materials which you can adapt for local organizing efforts.
• Disney/Haiti Justice Campaign, PO. Box 755, Fort Washington Station,
New York, NY 10001; (212) 592-3612. E-mail <bloom@soho.ios.com>.
It is true: Hitler and his Heydrich set up a terror regime in the "Czech Protectorate." But we must not therefore accept the "theory of collective guilt": Sudeten German Communists, Socialists and Trotskvists suffered iust as much under this regime as our Czech class brothers and sisters.
After the war, with the Potsdam Agreement, the Western Allies and Stalin gave the green light to the crime of the expulsion. We must always emphasise that the expulsion in 1945-47 took place under a bourgeois government — Benes again - and that it was then that the worst excesses took place. Later, after the Communists took over after 1948, they showed themselves to be more tolerant. • After the war, in West Germany, you tried to counter the reactionary use of the Sudeten question in the Social Democratic Party (SDP).
The "Seliger Community" was made up of Sudeten German Social Democrats. It never sought te really analyse the causes of the expulsion. Its top functionary, Wenzel Jaksch, was a declared enemy of Marxism and of our position on the question of nationalities. In 1960 he had the cheek to declare publicly that the "Sudeten Germans are at the disposition of NATO as brave soldiers against the Soviet Union."
I wrote an article in Sozialistische Politik' newspaper, in which I vehemently attacked Wenzel Jaksch. On account of this article I was expelled from the "Seliger Community" without further ado or procedures. In the SPD on the question of the expelled [Sudeten Germans], it is just as in all other questions: One adopts bourgeois positions and thus drifts always more to the right, during the period of the cold war and of economic boom: rearmament, demilitarisation, emergency suspension of civil rights.
In the Sudeten German Council the "Seliger Community" also acknowledged without comment that former Nazis
THESE EXPLOITED WORKERS MAKE ONLY 284 TO 35¢ AN HOUR, OR ABOUT SE FOR EVERY DISNEY GARMENT THEY MAKE!
represented the entire organisation as functionaries. • What was the most important difference in trade union work before the Second World War in the Sudetenland and after the war in West Germany?
In the 20s and 30s it was a given that the socialist goal was also the goal of the trade unions. In post-war West Germany we were forced to remove all socialist demands from the program in the name of unity and to do "trade unionism only." In the conditions of the cold war and the boom this had the added effect that any understanding of this capitalist society was lost. The bitter fruits of this are evident today. The trade unions stand powerless on the ruins of their policy, and in the face of mass unemployment. "Social partnership" did not benefit them. In my industry, textiles, especially around Augsburg, most of the work places have been rationalised out of existence or transferred abroad -and the "secure" replacement work is anything but secure. • You had close connections with the Fourth International before and after the war. What did that consist of and what did it mean for you?
In the Thirties I had contact with comrades from Dresden who were in contact with Trotsky. We formed a small group and published a newspaper. Then I had to join the German army (Wehrmacht) — fortunately as a medic so that I was also able to treat adversaries too.
After the war, when I was living in Augsburg, West Germany, I was able to establish contact with George Jungclas. In the Fifties and Sixties, Sozialistische Politik newspaper formed an important connecting link — I always sold a large number in Augsburg. These connections with the Fourth International were vitally
- for me they were and are the only possibility of dealing with socialist theory and practice and to apply them to given conditions.
history * Without this relationship, the same thing would have happened as occurred with dozens of Social Democrats in Augsburg who still considered themselves to be socialists at the beginning of the Fifties — they became thoroughly bourgeoisified
I tried to anchor this relationship also inside the SPD. We created a "Marxist Work Circle" that tried to form a counterweight to the rightward motion of the SPD. The party leadership proceeded ever more sharply against us, especially when on the question of demilitarisation we won a large majority of the Augsburg SPD to our position against the course of the party leaders. The Work Circle was forbidden to advocate its views without permission; in this manner it was choked off finally in
I became more and more isolated politically. In addition many of those with whom I could still have a meaningful political dialogue died. And finally of course the decline of the textile industry led to the dispersal of hundreds of good trade unionists, men and women. Augsburg was not an area where socialism flourished Precisely in this kind of situation the connection with the Fourth International rose in importance, both through the GIM [International Marxist Group] and the newspaper, to which I regularly contributed, especially for short news items. * 1. Sudetenland was the German speaking part of Bohemia under the Austrian empire. In 1918 these German-speakers formed the second-largest ethnic group in the new Czechoslovak Republic. At the end of World War II Czechoslovakia expelled the entire German minority. German-speakers were also expelled from territory in Silesia (Schlesien), Pommerania (Pommern), and Prussia (Preußen) which now forms part of Poland and Russia. Estimates for the total displaced population range from 12-15 million. Spokesmen for the expelled [Aussiedler] movement in West Germany have been an influential lobby in favour of reactionary and revanchist policies towards West Germany's Eastern neighbours. 2. Sozialistische Politik (SoPo) was published until 1966 by left social democrats and members of the Fourth Reprinted from Was Tun #387, 13 July 1984. Interview by Winfried Wolf. Translated by Ed Kovacs, a member of the US Socialist-Feminist organisation Solidarity.
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