Schmidt still in control of SPD but party majority supports peace movement put on the table inside the coalition is not These systems include 108 launchpads for
It was the convention of a party with a million members, the strongest party in the Second International, the So-
Partei Deutschlands positions grate this leftwing and end the "fraying on the edges," as Willy
Brandt so colorfully put it?
On all these questions, the party leadership grouped around Schmidt and won a preliminary victory, and as hot as that served up in party conven-
Finally, the left wing was more strongly integrated into the party.
leaders were reelected to the party leader-
With all the differences that were zialdemokratische (SPD-Social Democratic Party of Gerof the "NATO double decision" pro- sive process of organizational differentiaThis gathering was awaited with intense interest in West Germany, Western Europe, Moscow, and Washington. only the Reagan administration but Ted Kennedy sent personal advisors. But the debates and decisions at the five-day affair (April 19-23) were rather a let down. They hardly seemed to justify the great expectations.
In fact, such modest results were in glaring contrast to the site of the delibera-
Under the vast roof of the futuristic Olympic Hall, the delegates shut their eyes to the darker days ahead, and offered no answer to the problems that already exist and those that are looming on the horizon-in particular unemployment and arms escalation.
Instead of responding to these big problems, they cobbled together comformulas designed to maintain existing state of affairs, the SPD as still the governing party.
the convention was a success for Helmut Schmidt, the chancellor and vice-chairman of the party, and for the majority of the SPD leadership. was only a very preliminary one.
SCHMIDT'S VICTORYA BREATHING SPACE The interest in the SPD convention focused on three questions:
1) Would the convention lead to a further undermining of the WashingtonBonn axis for U.S. and NATO arms escalation. That is, would the politically and militarily most important pillar of the U.S. arms escalation policy in Western Europe be seriously weakened?
Would this convention of the principal party in the government further undermine the coalition of the SPD with the FDP in Bonn? Would the results of this gathering make it easier for the Liberals to go over to the CDU/CSU and thereby carry out a change of government "from the top"?
3) How strong was the left wing of the party that in recent months has formed around Erhard Eppler and Oskar Lafontaine? Would it be possible to integained a breathing space.
The decisive votes on the question duced a majority for the Schmidt position. So the SPD will continue to uphold the NATO decision. They are for negotiations for a reduction in intermediaterange missiles, and at the same time preparing to station more U.S. missiles in West Germany beginning in 1983.
On the other hand, this resolution said tnat there was nothing "automatic" about the stationing of more missiles. A new special convention of the SPD is supposed to discuss this question again in 1983 and decide on it. The question, of course, depends on whether the SPD is still in the government, which is highly Schleswig-Holstein state organization of the SPD that called for rescinding the NATO decision was rejected. fected was the demand by the left-wing, representing a sort of minimum agreement, that preparations for the stationing intermediate-range missiles in West Germany be stopped for the period of the disarmament negotiations.
In the first vote, Schmidt's majority was 70 to 30 percent. In the second, on the missile moratorium, the division was 60 to 40. There was, however, no exact count. And at least in the case of the second vote, it seemed to me and many of my fellow journalists, that the actual vote was closer than that reported.
The left was unable to win on any point. It suffered another relatively narrow defeat on the question of a two-year moratorium on the construction of nu-
So, the convention made no decisions that the FDP could wave around like a red flag. Of course, in those days, the Liberals were looking for something like that with a magnifying glass. week in which the SPD dominated the headlines, the Liberals needed some way
In any case, this search by the Liberals was a pointless and transparent undertaking, because both the FDP and the SPD delegates know that the soup that is expressed, which were sometimes sharp, no possibility appeared for a more extention. The appearance in recent months of the new Democratic Socialists organization around former SPD members Bundestag deputies Coppik and Hansen played no role in the discussion.
The left also clapped thunderously when Brandt referred briefly to the Democratic Socialists in his opening speech, saying that such a party to the left of the SPD had no chance, and that those who were leading it were not going to get anything in the SPD.
Before 1933, Willy Brandt was a member of the centrist Sozialistische Ar-
(SAP-Socialist Party), and he pointed to this as a "personal lesson" for the delegates: 1931, I was in the minority (vis-a-vis the SPD majority), and I had another membership card in my pocket. Politically, I don't disavow anything that I did, but I drew the lesson from history that forming organization (outside the SPD) leads nowhere."
THE SPD CONVENTION AND THE PEACE MOVEMENT In 1979, at the last party convena large majority voted for Helmut Schmidt's resolution that there should be negotiations with the USSR for limiting intermediate-range nuclear tioned in Europe, but that at the same time new weapons of this type should be procured in case the negotiations did not lead to "equilibrium" between East and West in this sector.
A week after the 1979 SPD conventhe NATO ministers in Brussels adopted their infamous "double deci-
It took quite a different tack. According to this decision, the stationing of new U.S. intermediate-range missiles was by no means made conditional on the outcome of disarmament negotiations. The resolution made it crystal clear:
"The ministers have decided to modernize the intermediate-range missile potential of NATO by installing American ground-based systems in
Pershing 2 missiles and 464 ground-based Cruise missiles (GLMC).....
The SPD convention in 1979 also expected that concessions to the right in the U.S. would be repaid by Washington signing the SALT II treaty. But the opposite happened. The new government headed by Reagan refused to ratify this agreement, which involved only a modest limitation of the arms race. And that was
The Reagan government presented a program for arms escalation to congress that involved hundreds of billions of dol-
The core of it was producing new generations of nuclear weapons of mass destruction. This turn of events created a
The decisive change, however, since the 1979 Berlin convention, and the one that influenced the 1982 convention was the appearance of a peace movement of hundreds of thousands of people in West Germany and around the world.
A party such as the SPD could not fail to be influenced by such a development. You have only to recall the numbers of the peace demonstrations in West Germany. At the time of the 1979 conthere was a demonstration of SPD's support for building nuclear reactors and demanded that it be changed. Up to that time, the largest antinuclear demonstrations, such as those at the Brokdorf nuclear power plant outside Hamburg, drew about 100,000 people.
Since then, in 1981 alone, there were three demonstrations. The first was on the Lutheran church commemoration in Hamburg It drew over a hundred thousand people. The second, limited to West Berlin, was for the visit of the U.S. Secretary of State, Alexander Haig. It drew 50,000 people. And finally there was the demonstration in Bonn, the biggest peace demonstration in West German history and one of the biggest for Western Europe as a whole. It was called by more organizations, brought out more than 300,000 particiweek before the recent convention, "Easter Marches" against the arms race and for peace were held in all major West German cities and in many
One demonstration, on April 17, directly focused on the SPD convention. It was relatively modest in size. 50,000 demonstrators marched through Munich, which because of its rightist political climate is known as "the secret capidouble decision notestanding tons the SPD change its position on the armament question.
At the concluding rally, a giant balloon was launched by the Red Mole group, a youth organization close to the German section of the Fourth International. It pulled a huge banner that pointed to the next stage of the movement. The banner said: "See You Again on June 10 in Bonn." 16
Schmidt still in control (DR)
It seems certain that hundreds of thousands of people will come to Bonn on that day to give a fitting reception to the U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, the personification of the U.S. arms escalation program.
It is obvious why the peace movement in West Germany has gotten such support-and why there is such great sensitivity on this question, in contrast with the backwardness of the West German workers' consciousness on most others by comparison with the other European
On the one hand, the horrors of the second world war unleashed by Nazi Germany-ten million German dead, the destruction of all the country's big cities, and partition-have left a deep imprint on the consciousness and subconsciousness of the German people.
Moreover, both German states, West and East Germany, are the area where the most atomic warheads are concentrated, and would therefore be the prime target of U.S., Soviet, French, and
If anything can be predicted with certainty about a nuclear third world war, it is that nothing would remain of either German state but perhaps a few survivors who would envy the dead.
What the new U.S. arms program and the cynical discussions about "a limited nuclear conflict" mean essentially is an atomic war concentrated on German soil. Moreover, the new Soviet SS-20 intermediate range nuclear missiles stationed in the USSR and aimed primarily at West Germany have aroused an awareness of this danger in millions of Germans, in both the East and the West; and hundreds of thousands of them have come into the streets to protest against the plans for arms escalation.
The 5,000 people who demonstrated on February 14, 1982, in Dresden, East Germany, for the same thing are an indication that the movement has spread to the East. It has continued to develop underground there, so that sudden, explosive developments are quite possible.
In the period preceding the Munich SPD convention, it became apparent that a clear majority of the SPD membership does not support the course of the Schmidt-Brandt leadership on the arms questions, but is much closer to the posi-
This was shown in the votes in the district committees, the grassroots organizations of the SPD. A majority were for a "Missile Moratorium," that is for stopping the installation of the new U.S.
intermediate-range missiles for the duration of the disarmament negotiations, and for demanding that the USSR reduce its
SS-20 firepower to the level of 1978 (1).
The fact that the left was able to get no
"more" than 40% of the vote at the convention on any question is a result of se-
The first is the insufficient coordination of the left, and what might be called the superdemocracy of this convention. At first glance, the SPD is an extremely democratic party. Anything can be discussed. It is even possible to take part in demonstrations in opposition to the party leadership. In fact, Eppler and
Lafontaine participated marches shortly before the party conven-
The SPD local organizations can, and do, submit motions to the convention. The result was a 700-page memeographed bulletin with more than a thousand motions, which reached the convention delegates three to four weeks before the event.
Since all these motions come in without any coordination, many overlap. And there is no way delegates can arrive at the convention with clear views. This was reflected in the fact that the left suffered from a severe lack of coordination.
To be sure, there were meetings of the left, and such meetings are permitted. But they were strictly informal gatherings. They produced no concrete results. They led to no common platform. And least of all did they work out any common tactics for intervening in the convention.
This lack of coordination went so far that even the decisive motion, the one for a "missile moratorium"-the only one that had a chance of getting a majority against the Schmidt wing-was not drawn up before the convention but only during it, a day before the vote on this question. And it was introduced as a motion from the floor.
As a result, this resolution had so many weaknesses and ambiguities, that the right could pick it apart like an artichoke before the vote, and even undermine the remaining bastions of the left.
A second reason for the defeat of the left is the professionalism with which the party leadership operates. It was precisely the only force that was well prepared for this convention. It presented "main resolutions" on the three most important questions- armament, energy policy, and unemployment-that made some concessions to the left and were dressed up with a lot of progressive verbiage. At the same time, they avoided saying anything concrete that might be a stumbling block for the government's policy and the coalition with the bourgeois liberals.
The party leadership played on every psychological and demagogic string to influence the delegates. In fact, it is by no means true that the over 100 delegates all had hard and fast positions and, therefore, could not be influenced. Indeed, the preparation that the leadership made for this convention presupposed the existence of a significant number of delegates open to such maneuvers.
THE FAILURE OF THE SPD LEFT As important as the lack of coalition of the left wing and the professional factionalism of the leadership were for the outcome of the SPD convention, other factors also played a decisive role.
In its editorial on the opening of the convention, Was Tun, the paper of the International Marxist Group, German section of the Fourth International, outlined the sort of policy that the SPD left needed:
We have said, and we still say, we defend the SPD against attacks from the right at the same time as fighting against Schmidt's policy. In 1980, we called for a vote for the SPD against Strauss (2). What today seems opportune for hundreds of thousands of former SPD voters has to be called opportunist in the case of an organization, that is, to avoid taking a clear position on the SPD
An alternative SPD policy that would have to be supported by the left can be conceived of and outlined.
-Rejection by the Munich SPD conventioi of the arms race and the policy of making the workers pay the costs of the capitalist crisis.
-Support for a program that creates jobs in the public sector, defends social that would wipe out unemployment by introducing the 35-hour workwith no cut in pay, and which would involve mobilizing together with the trade unions to win all these things.
-A strategic reorientation toward fighting for an all-SPD government, for which the support of the Greens and the Alternative Slates supporters should be won.
With such an orientation, victories in Hesse and Hamburg would be as probable as defeats are now certain. And then in the event of a withdrawal of the DFP from the coalition, Bonn could call for new elections and campaign against a change in the government "from the top. " In any case, only with such an orientation would the SPD have a chance to win the Bundestag elections in 1984.
And it was precisely here that the SPD left dropped the ball. It did not take up the question of unemployment but concentrated exclusively on the question of armament and peace. Even the close link between armament policy and the "budget cuts policy"was not pointed
And the party leadership exploited this failure with cold, precise calculation. It was the leadership that presented itself and "its SPD" at the Munich convention as a "workers party." It made "employment policy" the central question at the convention. (How demagogic this was is by the very term "employment since the government's policy has led to 2 million unemployed and accepts that, or even objectively pro-
It was because the left literally left the ground to them that the leadership was able to get away with this and make such an orientation seem relatively credible and to focus the attention of the media on this.
On Tuesday, the convention divided into essentially two work groups. The first dealt with "employment policy," the second with "peace policy." The whole SPD left gathered in the limited space allotted for the "peace workshop," while the "employment workshop" met in the main hall. It included the middle-of-the-road and right-wing SPD delegates and dozens of the most right-wing union leaders and members of factory councils who had been invited. They were right at home and "among themselves."
How seriously the party leadership around Schmidt and Brandt took the question of unemployment was shown by the fact that they were not in the hall. They did not bother to come to either
Obviously they used the time for more wheeling and dealing, that is, preparing for the following decisive day, when the votes would be taken.
Just as the SPD left handed the question of unemployment to the right, it had no answer or alternative to the question of the leadership of the party. accepted Helmut Schmidt as chancellor and at the same time it accepted the coalition with the FDP as a long-term al-
The leaders of the left never tired of stressing their loyalty to Schmidt. SPD-FDP coalition was presented either as "the only conceivable parliamentary solution at the moment" or the question was simply elegantly sidestepped.
In the period before the convention, there had been statements by the SPD leftists that began to challenge this governmental alliance. For example, Oskar Lafontaine, leader of the Saarland SPD, which stands on the far left of the party and has done well so far in elections, said in an interview shortly before the convention: "If stepped-up armament is the price for the coalition, then it isn't worth it. We cannot make compromises on this (3)."
1. In 1978, Brezhnev said that in the area of intermediate-range missiles there was "more or less a balance." The peace movement and the SPD left, to some extent, took this up. and started to call for the withdrawal of the SS 20s that had been brought in to reinforce the Warsaw Pact arsenal, and that at the same time there should be no more U.S. and NATO intermediate-range missiles put in place. The Soviet leadership gave new indications that it considered such a reduction of its own nuclear armament possible.
In the 1980 parliamentary elections Franz Josef Strauss, a rightist tainted by cor- was
Strauss was able to mobilize CDU/CSU: it remained VoTes single the
On the other hand, his candidacy on the voters back to the polls to cast their votes for the SPD, making possible the formation of another SPD/FDP coalition government.
17
base significantly and in coopting the the capitalist crisis and their well-known
Has the SPD been brought back "into line? " Was the process of differentiation frozen in Munich? Brandt-Schmidt convention? balance sheet would be overly hasty. Similar conclusions may have been drawn in the top echelons of the party in the first days after the convention. (But even there, some may have found cause for dissatisfaction. Schmidt, for example, must not have been very happy that he got only 84% of the vote for the party leadership, while Brandt got 91%. ago, Schmidt came in before Brandt (4].)
In fact, this convention did not produce any definitive results. The developments that appeared in the period before it will continue afterwards.
There is today an SPD left that has significant influence; and, on the question of NATO's stepped-up armament policy, an important issue for the Schmidt government, it has the majority of the party members behind it.
This left is quite prepared to fight in the party, and, partially, in the framework of the mass movements. that it confines itself to, or concentrates on, the issue of peace and the arms escalation and avoids the decisive question of unemployment shows its weakness. is also shown by its failure to present an alternative to the Schmidt-Brandt leader-
But such failings are typical of left wings in mass reformist parties of this
And for West Germany the existence of such a left, no matter what its limitations, is a new factor.
The last time there was a left wing in the party was in 1959, in opposition to the Bad Godesberg Program, in which the SPD came out for a "social market economy." At that time, the left was in a defensive position; today it is on the of-
Moreover, the internal differentiation over the emergency powers laws that the SPD pushed through parliament in 1968 in its Gret Coalition with the CDU/CSU were not so far reaching as the present ones. In particular, no leading SPD members were involved in the development of left opposition tendencies. Today, it is quite different. There was a whole series of leaders in the left wing. There is Eppler, a leader of the Baden-Wurttemberg state organization; Oskar Lafontaine, a leader of the Saarland state organization; Matthiesen leaders of the Schleswig-Holstein state organization, and Ulrich Klose, a leader of the Hamburg organization.
Secondly, there is a mass movement escalation and for peace, which initially put the spurs into the SPD
This mass movement is a natural sounding board for the SPD left. Its mainly pacifist ideology makes it quite open to the positions of the SPD left, and it itself influences the SPD left.
This represents an important difference from the period 1969-72, when the SPD succeeded in extending its mass youth and student revolt into the party. In those days, the radical and partially revolutionary ideology of the "Extra-parliamentary Opposition"and its core, the SDS, stood in opposition to the reof SPD reformism under Willy The SPD was able to carry out its coopting operation only on the basis of the defeat of SDS and its disintegration
Today, fundamentally, there is only one decisive barrier to the SPD left and even sections of the party leadership finding points of agreement with the peace
The SPD is in the governtherefore, shares the responsibility for this policy of arms escalation.
Even if the question of government is left aside, the peace movement in West Germany is going to grow; it is going into new mass mobilizations; and this is going to give impetus to the process of differentiation in the SPD and to help further strengthen the SPD left. SPD-dominated government seem numbered in any case. The Munich convention did not change much as far as that is concerned. Objective factors are more and more undermining the SPD-FDP co-
The demands for a stronger "budget-cutting policy," that is austerity, are becoming more insistent. of unemployment, the shows a deficit of 10 to 15 billion Deutschemarks. The FDP has repeatedly and sternly warned that it will not "take the responsibility" for any new increases in the national debt.
since the military appropriations are sacrosanct, this means further cuts in social welfare expenditures. And this is the best way for the SPD to assure that it will lose the coming state parliament elections in Hamburg in June and in Hessen in September, just as it lost the preceding ones in Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony this March. In those elections, the SPD vote fell by roughly 6%.
If the SPD loses these next two elections also, however, then the government in Bonn would be at least crippled. All indications are that this would mean that in one way or another the government will fall. This could happen either by the FDP switching coalition partners and forming a government with the CDU/CSU, or by new elections, in which the SPD would be doomed to defeat.
It is certainly premature to consider exactly how the SPD could develop in opposition. The only thing certain is that the view that this would lead to an abrupt leftward swing is not well considered. the other hand, it also seems clear that in opposition, the SPD would tend generally toward the left and that it would be able to coopt more left currents and increase its base among the workers. would be after a phase of "regeneration" that would be marked by personal and factional clashes in the party.
Fourthly, there is class society and
And in West Germany also, these factors are not just something that exists in theory but being felt in the most
The 2 million officially registered unemployed testify to this. real decline in real wages came in 1980-81 and further losses are in store in the current year. Most of all, there have been notable cutbacks in the "social welfare fabric." All these developments have left first mark on the West German At the same time, there is a danger that in the next period the workers reaction might be channelled in a reactionary
That is particularly true in view of the beginnings of antiforeignworker feeling.
(In West Germany, there are 4.5 million foreigners, of whom 2 million are
In the Schleswig-Holstein elections, in the northern Germany city of Kiel, a strongly antiforeigner slate got a relatively high vote, including up to 6% in working class neighborhoods. lar racist slate is being put forward in the coming elections in Hamburg.)
Sharper conflicts between labor and capital are inevitable, and are developing in particular at the factory level, where they are taking the form of stronger responses by the workers to layoffs and
Doubtless, this process will have its effects on the SPD, and it is by no means predetermined that in that case the SPD left will remain within its present limitations as regards its ideology or the
In any case, these objective factors the conditions for further processes of differentiation in the SPD and the present mass movement against the arms escalation and for the building of a socialist alternative to reformism Stalinism. They also improve the conditions for a campaign of political propaganda focusing on the class character of the existing bourgeois society that will make it much more difficult for the SPD left to "overlook" this state of affairs, and much more difficult as well for the SPD leadership to divert attention from it, as it did in the Munich convention.
In his theses for this convention, Helmut Schmidt could still get away with
"Ever since human beings have existed, they have lived from the exploitation of plants and animals. From what else could they live?" (5).
This changed vote relationship can by no means to interpreted as a matter of "perso-
Brandt presented himself at this conwho at least wanted identify himself with the basic elements of the reform policy that the SPD followed from 1969
He stressed several times that a "renewal of the party" was needed.
In contrast, Helmut Schmidt represented The difference from the preceding years was that faith in the self-correcting powers of the market-and therefore in the ability of the "operator" Schmidt to overcome or moderate the crisis-is vanishing. the only party paper still being published by
It is a weekly with a circulation of And this is for a party with a million members.
Mexican women's committes campaign for Rosario struggle of the Trotskyists in the Labour the IMG, spoke of Charlie's role in helpby Fernando ZAMORA
For the first time in Mexican history, women are organizing as women in an independent participation in the elec-
Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, presidential candidate of the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT-Revolutionary Workers Party), Mexican section of the Fourth International is not just the first woman candidate for the presidency of the republic. Her campaign is the first campaign which openly identifies with and supports and popularizes the activities and demands of the womens liberation movement.
On March 14, hundreds of women packed the Cine Regis in Mexico City to constitute the Front of Women's Committees in Support of Rosario Ibarra.
Present in the presidium among others, representatives of women telephone and automobile workers; women's campaign support committees from various cities and peasant communities in the interior of the country; representatives of the Committee of Relatives of Political Prisoners, "Missing Persons, " and Political Exiles of Guadalajara; as well as representatives of the PRT, the Union de Lucha Revolucionaria (Union of Revolutionary Struggle), and the Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo (Peoples Revolutionary Movement)-two far-left groups working with the PRT in the Unidad Obrera Campesina Popular (Workers, Peasants, and Poor Peoples Unity) electoral slate.
In addition, greetings were received Frente Campesino Independiente ((Independent Peasants Front) of Sonora, and important and combative peasant organization; various local women's committees in support of Rosario Ibarra; and from committees of telephone operators in support of the campaign.
In the rally, the speakers took up the question of the role of women in social struggles and the obstacles that women face in these struggles.
Susana Vidales, Provisional Committee of the Women's Front pointed out that "the committees to support Rosario Ibarra have been established not only because...in our country the candidacy of a woman for president of the Republic...represents a way of confronting the view that women should stay at home or in the best of cases stick to 'women's issues'...(but above all) because of what is behind the candidacy of Rosario, what it represents..."
Rosario Ibarra was the final speaker. "Companeras and companeros" said in part of her speech, code of the three loyalities still exists: obedience to the father, obedience to the husband, and obedience to the brother or son. My own life, companeras and companeros, has revolved around the existence of three men-I was the daughter of Ibarra, later the wife of doctor Piedra, and later, I was the mother of Jesus Piedra.