A turning point for
WEST GERMANY
The government, can, indeed, point to a series of successes. These include, first of all, carrying through the deployment of the missiles and reducing the national debt - that is, massive cutbacks in social spending, in particular for the unemployed pensioners, the sick, and for working the SPD and the Greens
From 1982 to February 1985, the number of registered unemployed risen from 1.84 million to 2.6 million. And this is despite two years of "economic upturn." Thus, we are seeing the emergence of a new poverty in the world's imperialist country.
Midway in the term of the
"turn" parliament, state elections have been held in the Saarland and Berlin, and municipal elections in Hesse. Their outcome shows that replacing the government of the bourgeois parties in
1987 with a Social Democratic (SPD) government supported by the Greens remains possible, if a credible political alternative is built up.
At first glance, the election results seem contradictory. In the Saar, the
SPD gained an absolute majority, the bourgeois liberals (FDP) overcame the 5% hurdle for representation in the parliament and the Greens did not.
In Berlin, the SPD got its worst result in the history of the Federal Rep-
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) remained the strongest party, and together with the FDP - which also made it back into parliament there - it is now able to form a stable bourgeois government.
10.6% the result for the Alternative List fell considerably below the expectations of about 13%.
In Hesse, the result confirmed the Red-Green alliance, with the SPD
The CDU suffered massive losses, and the gaining more than the Greens.
FDP got only 4.4%, failing to make it into the city councils.
However, if you look more closely at the differing results of the various local elections, especially the vote for the SPD and the Greens, the picture becomes more consistent. Overall, the bourgeois parties were the losers
(they lost 220,000 votes). For the two winners, the SPD and the Greens, these elections marked a turning point.
Angela KLEIN
Where the SPD campaigned on the theme of defending jobs and the environment and showed an openness
Greens (the Saar and Hesse), it won the
Where it oriented toward collaboration with the CDU, as in Berlin, it lost. This means for the Greens that they are going to have to give up their cherished notion that they are the only opposition party in the country."
Voters are not turning to the Greens automatically any more.
The issue of defending the environment is no longer sufficient to differentiate them from the
SPD programmatically. It is clear the majority of the voters want a program of ecological and economic reforms.
the extent that the SPD appears to offer such a program (as in the Saar), the hopes voters for seeing such reforms put through center on the Social Democrats. The Greens on their own do not have the strength to introduce such
To a large extent, people have voted for them as a "left corrective" to
However, where the SPD dashes these hopes for reform by adopting a right-wing program, disillusioned and more backward voters turn to the CDU, which, according to public opinion polls, still gets more credit than the SPD for effective economic
The Greens are facing a severe internal crisis. The issue is not just their tactical approach to the SPD, but fundamentally programmatic identity position toward the bourgeois state.
International Viewpoint 22 April 1985
Today, it is no longer any secret that of the Schmidt government in the autumn of 1982 was brought about by direct intervention of the Industrial-
Association [Bundesverband Deutschen Industrie]. From the bosses' standpoint, the new all-bourgeois government's first task was to prepare the conditions for the confrontation with the unions made necessary by a sharpening economic crisis. The objective, as the
Zeitung said, was to bring about a "change in the climate," to put forward a "convincing overall perspective for the medium term.
The immediate objectives for the new government were to carry through the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in the Federal Republic; to "trim" the budget, that is, reorganize public spending to the disadvantage of the wage earners so as to be able to "finance the risks of private investments"; to eliminate the vestiges of the reforms introduced by the SPD-FDP coalition, such aslimitedabortion rights; and to end the "investment freeze" in spending on nuclear technology, which came about because the movement in the 1970s forced a de facto halt to building nuclear power plants.
The bourgeoisie hoped that when the SPD was sent back into opposition, it would be able to recoopt the "protest potential" that had grown up to its left. In this way, the flow of support to the Greens would be halted, and the domination of the bourgeois parties would be
In fact, the Bonn government has not achieved this objective of the bourgeoisie.
only 35% of the registered unemployed get unemployment compensation; 26% get only unemployment aid.
Half of the budget reduction planned for 1985 is at the expense of the unemployed. (Average unemployment compensation is less than 900 Deutschmarks a month.) This "budget cutting success"
is in contrast to the failure in the 35-hour week fight to maintain the hardnosed capitalist line that "any cut in worktime is out of the question" It stands in contrast also to the failure of the attempt to undermine the fighting strength of the union during the 35-hour struggle through the Nurenburg Labor Institutes's refusal to pay locked out workers the compensation due thém. This decision was later overturned by the courts.
The government has not yet dared to abolish the limited abortion rightsincluded in Article 218. With respect to immigrant workers, although the laws have been toughened, the government has been obliged to make concessions.
The most important thing, however, is that the government's political calculations have gone awry.
situation in West Germany has become more unstable. Already in the fall of
1982, the FDP split and lost its representation in a series of state parliaments. In
Hesse, for the first time, a majority emerged for a "Red-Green" alliance.
Moreover, immediately after the federal parliamentary elections, a wave of mass mobilizations began, which have continued over the past two years. dealt the government its first defeat in
April 1983. It had to abandon its planned census because 25% of the population refused to cooperate with it. In the fall of 1983, 1.2 million people demonstrated against the deployment of the missiles.
In 1984, half a million workers engaged in the struggle for the 35-hour week, which turned for a time into a fight against the government. In a short time, the mass mobilizations politicized the climate in the country to a considerable
The SPD played no role in struggles, and gained nothing from them. In 1982, it managed, despite the wide. spread disillusion with its procapitalist austerity policy, to mobilize masses of workers against the Schmidt government's ousting by the right. On October
500,000 people joined in a demonstration called by the National Confederation of Labor (Deutsche Ge-
werkschaftsbund * DGB) originally against the Schmidt government'sausterity policy but which was then turned into a protest against the "betrayal of the FDP." However already in the federal parliamentary elections in March 1983, the SPD lost a considerable number of working-class voters to the CDU, because it would not take a clear position either for the demand of many unionists for the 35-hour week with no cut in pay or against the deployment of the missiles. To the contrary, it refused to make the deployment of the missiles an election issue at all. The SPD in opposition
In the following mobilizations, moreover, the SPD formed the rearguard. It adjusted its demands to those of the unions and the mass movements well after they had organized powerful mobilizations without its help. In these circumstances, the SPD could obviously not co-opt any "protest potential." From state election to state election, the Greens kept gaining votes, while the SPD stagnated, and the bourgeois parties lost votes. Brandt's statement on the evening of the March 6 election, "there is a majority on our side [to the left of] the CDU and
" came to evoke the spectre of a "Red-Green alliance," which is looming larger now as the 1987 federal parliamentary elections approach.
In the last two years, the SPD has tried to keep its head above water by following a line of political ambiguity. The outrage at the "rightist coup" made it easier for the party leadership to block the necessary debate over the errors that led to the loss of government power. The party's criticism of the bourgeois government has focused mainly on the latter's retreat from the "detente policy" and on arguing that in the economic field the Kohl cabinet has not proved any more successful than Schmidt, although it is more
The long overdue discussion about a general political alternative has been banned from the Program Commission, in which some maneuvering room is accorded to SPD left wingers such as Eppler and von Oertzen.
The SPD's approach to the Greens demonstrates primarily a determination to dispose of this competition on the left by resorting to the most varied methods. The right-wing of the party.
which is aiming for a "Great Coalition" with the Christian Democrats, is attemptto accomplish this by reactionary demagogy, claiming that the
Greens are out to destroy jobs and overthrow the bourgeois state, and that they are "politically incompetent." The left wing, in particular Oskar Lafontaine, are trying to eliminate the problem
Greens by a tactic of embracing them.
They will accept collaboration with the
Greens, but only if they are ready to share governmental responsibility.
All these tactical subterfuges, however, cannot conceal the fact that the SPD still has no credibile alternative to offer. The state party organizations follow partially contradictory premier of Hesse, Holger Boerner, who is on the right of the party, has accepted an alliance with the Greens out tactical considerations. For this purpose, asylum and the granting subsidies to alternative businesses, social institutions, training centers and women's
Two months after the alliance was formed, it broke up over the SPD's approval for the expanding of a nuclear fuel producing plant. municipal elections, Boerner is trying to continue with the same tactic, offering the Greens a coalition.
In Berlin, Hans Apel, a representative of the SPD right wing and a former minister of defense under Schmidt, campaigned on a clear right-wing, anti-Green program. ment, and against any allance with the Democratic minoritv Alternative Slate.
In Nordhein-Westfalen, where a state election is coming up in May, the Social Democratic premier, Rau, is running on a program of government-assisted capitalist modernization. annual investment of a billion Marks, the Ruhr is to be transformed into a new Silicon Valley, at the expense of the iron and steel industry, the industrial backbone of the region. The latter industry is to be "trimmed down." Among other things, this is to involve the fusion of Thyssen and Krupp into a supertrust, Rheinstal AG, this going hand in hand with mass layoffs.
Rau will not hear of IG Metall's recent demand for nationalization of the steel
And he has rejected out of the conditions of the Greens for SPD government, that is, that the government get out of the nuclear energy business and drop the project of building a breeder reactor and a hightemperature reactor.At the same time, the Bavarian SPD is in the forefront of mobilizations against the nuclear-fuel treatment plant that is to be built in the Bavarian forest.
In this constellation, Oskar Lafontaine in the Saar has put forward a program that seeks to offer a coherent general political, and not just tactical, answer to the two questions that the opinion polls show concern the greatest number of people - unemployment and protection environment. i: It can be best "environmental Keynesianism." For the Saar, this program calls for public investment in energy-saving projects; nationalization of the Arbed
Saarstahl steel corporation, the biggest employer in the Saar, which has been blackmailing the government for years with the threat of factory closures, and a massive paying off of Arbed's debts with federal money; and an extension of participation in management
(co-determination).
environment, Lafontaine's program calls for a 100-kilometer speed limit on express highways, building wastesmoke scrubbers in the coal-using power
Like Rau, he also wants to bring in high-tech industries through state-aid, but those that facilitate environmental protection, not the new rationalization
This program, thus, does not challenge the capitalist system. The result would be a left austerity policy an environmental twist. Lafontaine has said openly:
not promise campaign that unemployment would be
The economic and financial facts in the Saar are so bad that I cannot promise anything The Social Democrats have never held back, when it was necessary for pressing economic reasons, from eliminating jobs. For us, the only the conditions under which this is done. We are against mass layoffs (Interview in Der Spiegel March 18, 1985.)
On the other hand, Lafontaine has bolstered his reformer's image by seeking discussion with the Greens and by appointing one of the organizers of the peace movement, Jo Leinen, minister for the environment. He even ventured into dangerous waters two years ago, propos ing that West Germany withdraw from
In West Germany today, the sort of line Fontaine puts forward could clearly win the majority. It bases itself on the peace and environmentalist movements, as well as on the leaderships of the most advanced unions, the ones that fought for the 35-hour week in 1984. This has given the left wing of the SPD a new face. But it is not likely that this line can get majority support in the SPD before 1987. The party's right wing is on the rampage with the Greens. Moreover, it is improbable that the left wing will wage an open struggle within the party for its positions.
The Greens developed out of the mass mobilizations of the 1970s as the political expression of protests against the policy of the Social Democratic government. For a long time, they saw the SPD, "the party for modernization," as The spectacle of a movement" co-opted with the crisis of production relations" bureaucratically degenerated and deformed transitional societies, fostered the idea that the root of all evil was not class rule but industrialization in general.
Even after the bourgeois parties took governmental power, there was an open debate among the Greens about where they should seek support - in the ranks of the SPD or the Christian Democrats.
The ideological and political confusion that arose in the Greens out of their refusal to start off from a characterization of West German society as a class society should not, however, obscure the fact that their social base is to be found predominantly among the youth and the broad layer of wage earners.
can explain why they have been able to
International Viewpoint 22 April 1985
come out for progressive demands raised by the unions, such as the 35-hour week, nationalization of the key industries, and others, although they stand outside the organised workers movement and have very little understanding for work in the factories and the unions. Moreover, the Greens' support for such demands often remains only verbal or limited to parlimentary initiatives, such as the bill against lockouts recently introduced by the Greens.
However, over and above all these weaknesses, the Greens stand to the left of the SPD on most political questions — defense of the environment against the profit economy; rejection of NATO; women's right to choose; full legal and material equality for foreigners; international solidarity with the liberation struggle of oppressed peoples in the Third World; and mobilizing against fascism and
The Greens are now far from being a single issue party. support for all the mass mobilizations in the last two years, in contrast with the attitude of the SPD, has gained them the image of a party that stands clearly to the left of the SPD. This development has also led to a different sort of relationship with industrial workers and the unions. The turning point in this respect was the Westfalen in October of last year. In these through, inasmuch as they not only took away a quarter of a million votes from the SPD but also got high votes in the working-class neighborhoods.
The more progressive unions are rethinking their attitude towards the Greens. Just recently, Hans Jansen, responsible for wage policy in the IG Metall leadership, took the following position on the question of "the Greens
"Despite the problems and not in the last instance for the sake of their long term interests, have reason resist the transparent propaganda aimed at using them as a means to exclude the Greens from the range of political options."
Janssen saw the "workers who vote as representing a "shift in the the tertiary quaternary sectors," toward the "working class type of the year 2020 .... These young people want an answer to the apocalyptic visions conjured up by the the crisis of the environment and of economic growth, the poverty and population explosion in the Third World."
Like Oskar Lafontaine, Hans Janssen is interested in co-opting the Greens: "The Green Party has a mandate from those who vote for it to push through political changes here and now, which is only possible through the SPD." At the same time, active class-struggle unionists are seeking support from the Greens for their initiatives, but so far in vain. The Greens have no organized relations either with the workers movement or the mass social movements. They are not structuring or leading these movements, but, at best, expressing their concerns on the parliamentary level.
The Greens have no conception of changing society from the ground up through advancing class struggles. reality, they are far too much concerned with themselves, especially with their role in parliament, to have any idea of how they want to achieve their goals.
Nonetheless, it is the Greens and not the socialists who are the opinion makers for the left today. Their method of explaining the crisis of capitalist society as a crisis of faith in progress and economic growth has been readily adopted by progressive forces in the SPD and the unions. Hans Janssen himself is trying to
-of the costs of environmental damage onto the public always means, in the last analysis, a saving in labor that eliminates
Without an active and preventive policy of defending the environment, it will also not be possible to fight unemployment." That is the angle that Latakes as well, and it closest to the positions of the "Realpolitik wing" of the Greens.
Paradoxically, it has been precisely the Greens' electoral successes that have sharpened the debates in the party and put the pressure on it to clarify its prog. rammatic and tactical positions. concrete possibility that, with their help, the bourgeois government could be ousted in 1987, has brought the Greens under pressure from two directions. On the one hand, this has pushed them to seek unity with the SPD against the right. On the are under pressure not to sacrifice their identity as a party standing to the left of the SPD.
As long as it is the SPD that rejects unity, the Greens can easily make the conditions for voting for a Social Democratic premier very high. As long as the SPD is not ready to depart from rightwing positions on questions of environmental protection, it is easy for the Greens to make this the central issue for differentiating themselves for the SPD. But the vote in the Saar showed that Greens face their first real test when they come up against the SPD left-wing. They cannot outflank the SPD left with the issue of environmental protection. that, they need a socialist program.
On the other hand, the pressure for unity against the right in the Greens is strengthening those forces in the party who are out for a coalition with the SPD and are already openly saying that they are for it. The logic of this position leads in the long run to reintegration in the and the unions":
and uncertainties of collaborating with a heterogeneous protest party, the unions,
Demonstration for 35-hour week organised by IG-Metall (DR)
Wer aussperrt build a bridge between economics and ecology, when he writes:
ive exploitation of nature and the shifting
SPD. The greater the possibilities for a Red-Green Alliance in 1987, the greater will be the attempts to split the Greens. But so far there is no current in the Greens that offers a starting point for solving the problem.
Under discussion are not only tactical decisions regarding parliamentary combinations but in general what strategy the hört eingesperrt.
International Viewpoint 22 April 1985
Greens should adopt to halt the stepped up offensive by the bourgeoisie that is already looming. (The bourgeoisie is out to get rid of restrictions on layoffs, to eliminate "flexible work hours," and a further tightening of the laws on foreign workers, among other things.)
Before a broad socialist current emerges that can attract the working class vanguard, we will see a series of political regroupments both inside and •outside of the Greens. Socialists in the Federal Republic have every reason to intervene in these debates. With respect to the 1987 election, a united-front policy has to involve calling for an SPD government supported by the Greens which must be put under pressure by the demands and mobilizations of the mass movements and the unions.
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