The PSG and the EU
elections
By Frank Brenner
After the recent European Union elections,
the WSWS ran a number of articles assessing the results of these elections,
including the performance of the German section of the International
Committee, the PSG (Partei fur Soziale Gleichheit). These articles bear some
comment.
First, some facts. The PSG received 9,673
votes in the election. This compares to the previous election, in 2004,
where the PSG received 25,800 votes. Which is to say that the party’s
vote fell by a whopping 62.5 percent. To call this a steep decline is an
understatement. Moreover, the PSG scored dead last of the 31 German parties
contesting the EU election, including some very obscure and makeshift groups
peddling everything from spiritual politics to the merits of internet
file-sharing. This result is all the more noteworthy given that these
elections were held in the midst of the global financial crisis, which is
hitting the German working class hard.
So what accounts for this? Surely that
should be a pressing concern for the party. But you won’t find a coherent
explanation in the WSWS commentary. Here is how PSG leader Ulrich Rippert
handles the issue in his assessment of his party’s
campaign:
The
PSG received 9,673 votes. While this total is significantly less than the
vote won by the party in the European election five years ago, it would be a
mistake to assess the significance of the elections from the narrow
viewpoint of how many votes were won.
Now, it is true that Trotskyist parties are not
electoralist machines and that votes are not the primary consideration
determining our politics. But clearly votes have some significance.
Imagine if the PSG vote had increased by 62.5 percent: of course the
party would have trumpeted such as a result as indicative of a growing
influence in the working class. Indeed this is just what happened in 2004.
Then the WSWS was so proud of the PSG vote that it put the vote numbers in
the headline: “Socialist Equality Party of Germany receives nearly 26,000
votes”. The article went on to declare: “This increase in votes is of
considerable political significance. It shows that a section of workers,
intellectuals and youth are beginning to seriously take up political issues
and support an international socialist perspective.”
But you can’t have it both ways – you can’t
take credit for a good result but dismiss the significance of a bad
one. There is –
or should be – no question that such a dramatic fall in the party’s vote
calls for a critical reappraisal of what the PSG has been doing to reach the
working class.
But there is nothing in Rippert’s report to
suggest that this is going to happen. So far as he is concerned, blame for
this vote loss lies with everything and everyone except the PSG. In the
first of what amount to a string of excuses, he argues that five years ago
the party did better because “there was a strong protest movement against
the Hartz IV laws and the anti-welfare policies” of the previous Social
Democratic Party (SPD) government of Gerhard Schroder, but that now “any
hopes on the part of the working population that they could defend their
interests within the framework of the parliamentary system has been dashed.”
But this explains nothing because the PSG never appealed to such hopes; if
anything, the dashing of these hopes should have led to more votes
for the PSG, not less.
The same is true of his next excuse, that
“the real role and identity of the European parliament has been grasped by
broad layers of the electorate,” that it is “a pseudo-democratic cover” for
the rule of European capital, and so there was a lot of abstentionism. But
again since the PSG never fostered such illusions, it makes no sense that
this accounts for the collapse of its vote. Moreover, while the overall
abstention rate was high (at around 57 percent), it was no higher than in
2004; indeed the total number of votes was actually up slightly this
time.
(In passing, let us note what Rippert’s
excuses imply about the party’s vote result in 2004. If what he says
is true, then it would seem that the big majority of those who voted for the
PSG five years ago did so for completely misguided reasons – because they
saw this vote as a way of furthering hopes “that they could defend their
interests within the framework of the parliamentary system” or as an
expression of their democratic illusions in the European parliament. This
would mean that these votes had nothing to do with the PSG’s program, which
is to say that they were random protest votes that the PSG happened to pick
up. As we’ve seen, this isn’t how the WSWS presented the vote back in 2004.
But if we assume nonetheless that there is some truth to this, it would mean
that in both elections the PSG failed to make any impact on mass
consciousness. If anything, that would make for an even stronger case for a
critical reappraisal of the party’s work.)
Rippert has two more excuses. First, with
the increasing desertion of the established parties by the masses, a
plethora of small and single-issue parties have emerged that have fragmented
the vote. This is true but beside the point: if the masses are deserting the
established parties, then this should have helped, not hurt, a party
espousing revolutionary Marxism, especially and above all in the midst of an
economic crisis. (On the other hand, this excuse would have some validity if
most of the PSG votes in 2004 were indeed just random protest votes, since
there are now many more parties for these protest votes to go to. But again
this would only confirm how little impact the PSG is having on
working class consciousness.)
Finally, Rippert complains, rightly of
course, that the mass media subjected the PSG campaign to “a systematic
boycott,” but this too is beside the point since one can safely assume that
the mass media wasn’t any less hostile to the party in
2004.
After these less-than-convincing excuses,
Rippert tries to balance the negative of the vote result with more positive
results: the party was able to recruit some new members and establish a few
new branches, while receiving lots of “positive feedback” for its campaign.
This leads Rippert to draw the
following, head-spinning, conclusion:
More
important than the relatively small number of votes won by the party is the
fact that, together with these positive experiences, the election
result fully confirmed the political analysis of the PSG (emphasis
added).
So, the political analysis is “fully
confirmed” – fully, no less! – even though the party lost two-thirds of its
vote. One might well wonder: with a few more such ‘confirmations’, perhaps
the party’s support will disappear entirely.
What does it mean to say that the political
analysis is “fully confirmed”? Rippert points to the decline in support for
the Social Democrats as being “a historical turning point,” which is
certainly true (though it hardly requires the great analytical skills of
Marxism to have noticed this). But in any case, a Marxist political analysis
always assesses the correlation of class forces for the purpose of
guiding the party’s intervention in the working class. Hence a key part
of that analysis has to be an honest examination of the party’s own
political practice. “The school of Lenin was a school of revolutionary
realism,” Trotsky once wrote, by which he meant that the Bolsheviks “did not
exaggerate success, did not distort the correlation of forces, did not try
to win by shouting.”
But Rippert’s article substitutes
rationalizations for revolutionary realism. He explains away a serious
political setback by invoking what has become a virtual mantra for the IC
leadership – that forever and everywhere the party’s perspectives are
“confirmed”.
Clearly that confirmation has nothing to do with the party’s practice, and
this means that theory and practice are held fundamentally apart from each
other. Historically, this has been the characteristic of opportunist
tendencies in the Marxist movement, but such a divide is characteristic of
abstentionist and sectarian tendencies as well.
Here some of Trotsky’s warnings about
sectarianism are worth citing:
[I]t is not enough to create a
correct program. It is necessary that the working class accept it. But the
sectarian, in the nature of things, comes to a full stop upon the first half
of the task. Active intervention in the actual struggle of the working
masses is supplanted, for him, by an abstract propaganda for a Marxist
program ... Though he may swear by Marxism in every sentence, the sectarian
is the direct negation of dialectical materialism, which takes experience as
its point of departure and always returns to it. A sectarian does not
understand the dialectical interaction between a finished program and a
living (that is to say, imperfect and unfinished) mass struggle.
This is directly relevant to Rippert’s
article. Only by excluding the “dialectical interaction” between the party’s
program and the mass struggles of the working class is it possible for him
to proclaim that the PSG’s political line has been “fully confirmed”. All
such ‘confirmations’, their Marxist rhetoric notwithstanding, are, as
Trotsky says, “the direct negation of dialectical materialism.” One might
add that equally bereft of dialectical insight is Rippert’s balancing of the
negative vote results with “positive experiences”. Few new members will stay
for very long in a movement that is stuck at the level of “abstract
propaganda for a Marxist program” and is incapable of going over to an
“active intervention in the actual struggle of the working masses.” There
is, in that sense, an essential connection between the recruitment and
training of new forces and the ability of the party to win a hearing from
broad sections of the working class in campaigns such as elections. The road
to building the party lies through finding a road to the
masses.
But there is little indication that the PSG
leadership is interested in moving from abstract propaganda to finding a
road to the masses. We can see this if we turn our attention from the PSG
vote to what is happening politically in the working class. From the EU
election results it is clear (as Rippert himself notes) that many workers
are deserting the traditional political parties, particularly the Social
Democrats. Where are these workers going?
While the political landscape is highly
fragmented, one evident trend is that some workers (the more confused and
backward elements) have shifted to various right-wing populist movements. In
Germany, however, a different
trend has seen a significant section of workers shift to the Left Party, an
amalgam of dissident Social Democrats, union bureaucrats and remnants of the
old East German Stalinists.
This is an important political change in
the German working class and requires careful attention by Marxists. The
Left Party is unquestionably a reformist trap for the working class, a way
to channel those workers wanting a break with the SPD back into bourgeois
politics. So the task of Marxists is to win these workers over to a
revolutionary program. The question is, how?
If you read the WSWS, you would think this
can be done merely by issuing repeated denunciations of the Left Party. This
is very much the attitude of the abstract propagandist. The latter conceives
of political life “as a great school,” writes Trotsky, “with himself as a
teacher there.” The ‘teacher’ issues proclamations and denunciations, and
expects as an automatic reaction that “the working class should put aside its less important matters, and
assemble in solid rank around his rostrum.”
When this doesn’t
happen, the propagandist ‘teacher’ simply responds with more of the
same.
It is true that the aim of the Left Party
is “to prevent an independent movement of the working class by creating
illusions that the revival of a [reformist] program was possible,” as one
recent WSWS article states.
But the support for the Left Party is a manifestation of the
disillusionment of the masses with the SPD. This means that there is
necessarily a tension between the leadership of this party and its support
base. That tension is already inherent in the project to revive reformism.
The impossibility of that happening in the context of the current global
financial crisis opens the way for Marxists to build a bridge to
socialist consciousness for these workers.
Of course we have to be completely up-front
with workers about the rotten politics of the Left Party, but we also need
to open up a dialogue with these workers by participating in their
struggles, appealing to their aspirations and posing demands that can help
clarify and sharpen the inherent tensions inside this party. In other words,
we need to show these workers through their own experiences that the
only way to achieve the reforms they want is through a socialist
revolution.
But an abstract propagandist balks at the
“imperfect and unfinished” nature of the development of mass consciousness.
The Left Party is a reactionary formation, end of story – that is very much
the standpoint of the PSG. But you cannot open up a dialogue with workers if
all you are doing is denouncing the party they
support.
To be sure, WSWS reports have taken note of
the tensions within the Left Party, but this is never for the purpose of
promoting a political intervention among the supporters of this party. In
the run-up to the EU elections, those tensions came out into the open with a
number of prominent members, all in the party’s right-wing, resigning and
claiming the party was becoming too radical. In the WSWS coverage, there was
no suggestion that these tensions might express, in however distorted a
form, the pressure of the masses. On the contrary, the PSG’s analysis was
that these right-wingers were leaving at a time when the Left Party “is in
fact shifting markedly to the right.”
How then to explain these right-wingers’
resignations? The author of this article concedes that “it may appear
paradoxical that prominent representatives of the right wing of the Left
Party are quitting as the organization turns further to the right.” He then
goes on to explain that the right-wingers want to “line up unreservedly
behind the existing order,” whereas the position of the Left Party
leadership of Oskar Lafontaine and Gregor Gysi is that “now is not the time
to ditch their leftist rhetoric.”
But if this is true, then the party
isn’t “shifting markedly to the right”. Rather it is tacking to the
left, albeit only in its rhetoric and inconsistently (which is all you would
expect from such a reformist formation). If Lafontaine and Gysi are opposed
to ditching their leftist rhetoric for now, even to the point of a split
with some of their right-wingers, then surely to some extent this must be
due to pressure on them from their support-base in the working class. In
other words, the analysis in this article is a muddle, and what is lost in
this muddle is a possible opening for an important intervention by the
revolutionary movement.
In another article on the Left Party’s
results in the EU election, we are again told that “the Left Party is
following in the footsteps of the SPD and moving further to the right. This
cannot take place without internal frictions.”
Again, since the “frictions” that have emerged are with the right-wing of
the party, it makes no sense that the party is “moving further to the
right.” But even letting that pass, if there are such “frictions” because of
a rightward shift by the party, then this must mean that the party
leadership is coming into increasing conflict with its base of support in
the working class. All the more reason for Trotskyists to do what they can
to exploit these frictions in order to demonstrate to these workers
that only revolutionary socialism provides a way out for them.
But there is no indication in these
articles that the PSG will do anything in this regard other than issue more
denunciations. In other words, they will make no effort to link up in a
living way with the experiences and aspirations of the many workers who
currently support the Left Party.
Instead, the WSWS seems eager to report any
drop-off in support for the Left Party: “It is notable that according to
opinion polls the Left Party is losing support – despite the crisis,”
declared one article.
(Alas, the same could now be said for the PSG.) When it reported on the Left
Party’s EU election results, the WSWS claimed that the Party “was patently
unable to profit from the decline in support for social democracy”. While
the results were indeed disappointing for the Left Party, it actually
increased its vote marginally (by 1.4 percent). Nonetheless, the WSWS
rushed to conclude that this result was clear proof that “workers, the
unemployed and those dependent on Hartz IV welfare payments are increasingly
dismissive of this party.”
If this is true of a party that increases its vote, one can only wonder what
conclusion one should draw about a party that loses two-thirds of its
vote!
One gets the sense that just as the PSG
confronts its own setbacks with rationalizations, so it confronts the
political challenge of winning over the supporters of the Left Party with
wishful thinking. This over-eagerness to write off the Left Party is really
an expression of exasperation: having completely failed to get a hearing
among the workers supporting this party, the PSG now hopes that it will
disappear on its own. But if the Left Party is losing support, where are
these workers going? Clearly they aren’t going to the PSG. While the
demise of a reformist prop for capitalism would be welcome, the crucial
question is what happens to the base of this party. If it is not being won
to revolutionary Marxism, then the demise of the Left Party would actually
signal a deepening of the confusion and political fragmentation of the
working class.
Exasperation and wishful thinking are bad
guides to revolutionary practice. The idea that the disappearance of the
Left Party would somehow make it easier to recruit workers to the PSG is a
dangerous illusion. So long as spontaneous consciousness still prevails in
the working class, then formations like the Left Party will inevitably
re-emerge, and the task of Trotskyists will again be to open up a dialogue
with these workers and build a bridge for them to socialist consciousness.
Only through such interventions can Marxists make it possible for workers
to consciously surmount reformist obstacles to their political
independence and liberation.
The EU election results are a warning that
the PSG needs to take a long, hard look at its work. It has not begun to
find a road to the masses, and it has not even placed that task on its
agenda. If it doesn’t reorient itself away from sectarianism and towards the
perspective embodied in The Transitional Program, then it will
increasingly become “the direct negation” of revolutionary
Marxism.