GERMANY ly possible up to the 22nd week and the state must provide the necessary equipment in sufficient quantities. The 22nd week is, for the ASF, the limit when "the foetus can live independently outside the body of the mother. It is the limit of the right of women to decide". The old debate of the 1970s is then manifestly not yet over. But we cannot permit ourselves the sectarianism of those years. It is indisputable that the proposals of the ASF would constitute a great step forward for women. This does not render superfluous the struggle for the total suppression of 218, but makes a common campaign a burning issue of the day.* Carthyism T HE FORMER ruling party in the
GDR, the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany - the Communist Party, has transformed itself into a new party, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). It is no longer a government party and is the main opposition party in the GDR. In the first free parliamentary elections, it received 16% of the popular vote. In the subsequent municipal elections, it received about 30% of the vote in such working class strongholds as East Berlin, Eisenhüttenstadt (the steel industry town), Schwebin, Neubrandenburg, Rostock and so on.
Public opinion polls also credit it with 2% of the vote in West Germany. If these projections are correct, and if the PDS maintains its mass base in the present territory of the GDR, it would just go beyond the threshold of 5% of the total vote in general elections in the whole of Germany needed to obtain representation in parliament.
That would mean that for the first time for decades a significant compact political force to the left of social democracy and the greens would be present in the German parliament, with the possibility of exercising pressure on both these parties.
This is considered as a source of nuisance if not a risk of political destabilization by the bourgeois parties and the West German SPD. They have started frantic manoeuvres in order to make that possibility more unlikely. They want do whatever possible to order to weaken and even destroy the PDS.
One of the manoeuvres they are employing to this end is an attempt to expropriate the PDS. The new, pro-capitalist majority of the GDR parliament (Volkskammer) has pushed through, without any debate, a law which seizes all the financial holdings of the PDS and puts them under state control, pending an enquiry on their origins.
### Funds and politcal opportunities
The argument used for justifying this law is that these funds are ill-gotten, the result of the exploitation of the East German people and a source of basic inequality of opportunity for the various political parties operating inside the GDR and tomorrow in a united Germany.
In the new German context this law is, in fact, a McCarthy-type attack on an organization of the labour movement, and an inadmissible limitation of democratic freedoms. We have especially to denounce the cynical hypocrisy which lies behind that movement. Why is money originating from the bureaucracy's power and privileges more tainted and illegitimate than money originating from capitalist wealth, accumulated through the exploitation of the working class, that is, the extraction of surplus value? In the GDR, there is a massive influx of CDU, massive mix or coo,
CSU and FDP money, all coming from capitalist subsidies for these parties. Doesn't this upset the "equality of opportunities" between political parties — especially when the holdings of the main opposition party are being seized?
And what about the funds of social democra-
15 cy, originating from out-
GERMANY right corruption, not to speak of those originating from the CIA at the beginning of the Cold War with the purpose of splitting the international trade union movement? Walter Reuther, who co-headed the operation, has now publicly admitted this.
So, if we are to apply even a minimum of distributive justice, one would have to seize and investigate the financial holdings of all the German parties. This would make the functioning of all parties practically impossible and would be a big blow against political freedom and democracy as such. Of course, one should be in favour of all concrete measures which would establish and guarantee financial equality of opportunity between all parties but to seize the holdings of the PDS alone is a clear attempt to deliver a blow against that party's chances in a united Germany, if not to try to destroy it.
The fact that, for purely electoral reasons, the SPD is in the forefront of this attack shows how unprincipled that party has become, not only on the basic problems of workers' interests but also on elementary principles of democratic rights and freedoms. Bureaucratic privileges hated by the masses
Undoubtedly, the SPD's demand has a popular echo among the masses of the GDR. The privileges of the SED bureaucracy, seen as a product of exploitation of the toilers, are legitimately hated by these masses. Inasmuch as big cases of individual corruption, theft and so on are involved, they should indeed be the objects of inquiry and, if necessary, prosecution by the courts.
In that respect three remarks should be made which again underline the cynical hypocrisy of the anti-PDS offensive. In the first place, a major part of the financial holdings of the old SED have either been siphoned off by turncoats who are now members of the pro-capitalist parties or are integrating themselves into private firms, or have been privatized or confiscated. Many of the nomenklatura politicians have joined the bourgeois CDU and social democrats. Why are their financial holdings not also put under financial receivership?
The East German CDU has 4,000 full-timers. Who is paying for them? Aren't they also financed by ill-gotten gains?
The present liberal minister of justice held the same post under the Honecker dictatorship. As such he was responsible for the persecution and slanderous condemnation of many political dissidents. The chairman of the PDS, Gregor Gysi, on the other hand, was counsel for the defence of dissidents like Rudolf Bahro. So to say that the PDS is the only successor organization of the bureaucracy and the CDU/SPD are not is therefore just fac16 tually untrue.
In fact, the PDS is only partially a sucInternational Viewpoint #189 • July 16, 1990 cessor organization of the SED. Not only is it no longer a state/government party, but it is also a party which contains many members who were not members of the SED. It is a party which has ideologically broken with the SED legacy to a large extent. No coherent balance-sheet of
Stalinism
It is true that a minority of the old SED bureaucrats - those who cannot find a place in the power structure of a capitalist Germany — are trying to cling to the PDS as a last resort in order to survive politically and materially.
Without a complete and coherent balance-sheet of the roots and nature of Stalinism and of bureaucracy and the way to fight them efficiently inside the labor movement, the credibility of the PDS as a new organization cannot be assured.
In the third place, it is not true that the bulk of the holdings of the old SED is still in the hands of the PDS. A considerable part of these holdings have been abandoned, being either in the hands of the state, now run by the CDU/SPD, or in the hands of the CDU/LDP, or already in the hands of the private sector.
But this whole conflict poses a more fundamental question. The SPD's attempt to cash in on the popular hostility to the bureaucracy's privileges by the expropriation of the PDS, is literally suicidal from the point of view of the whole international social democratic current of the labor movement.Historical experience has proven again and again that to encourage McCarthyite reflexes is to unleash a whirlwind which will not stop at the doorstep of your own little comfortable villa.
In Romania some thousands of anticommunist demonstrators have asked that nobody who has ever been an official under the Stalinist regime should be allowed to stand for elections for ten years. That would force the SPD to disemburg's formula: "Freedom is always the freedom of those who think otherwise." The SPD leadership will only ignore this formula in the GDR today and in the united Germany of tomorrow, at a high price for itself and for the future of democratic freedom in general.
When the McCarthy offensive was unleashed in the USA, first against genuine Stalinists whom we had consistently fought against politically, we pointed out that they were unable to defend themselves in a credible way because they had themselves condoned the political repres sion of our comrades of the SWP [US Socialist Workers Party] during the Second World War. But in spite of that fact, we defended the Stalinists against the McCarthyite cops, and rightly so, because very soon McCarthyism proved itself to be a machine for the repression of elementary freedom of thought and action of practically everybody outside the extreme rightwing forces. Solidarity takes precedence over differences
We applied the golden rule of solidarity with all tendencies of the labor movement, regardless of political differences. In the name of that same proud and principled tradition, we now call upon all tendencies in the German labor movement and left to unite their forces:
• Against all discrimination with regard to the PDS or any other tendency in the labor movement;
• For the abolition of all discriminatory anti-communist legislation like the law forbidding dissidents to exercise certain professions (Berufsverbote);
• For the abolition of all legislation restricting the right to free unarmed demonstration; • For unrestricted democratic rights for the entire labor movement. * miss quite a lot of its present representatives in the GDR, to start with the former mayor of Dresden.
In Britain, there have been attacks on the National Union of Mineworkers for having received "tainted money" to finance the miners' strike. Already the seizure of union funds has become a widespread practice in that country. But international funding of anti-union and anti-socialist propaganda and activity is entirely legitimate for these hypocrites. Bankers' money is "pure"; union money is "impure".
Don't the SPD leaders see that it is only a question of time before such attempts are made against them too?
In the era of Stalinist repression, we repeated again and again, together with the SPD, Rosa Lux-
AGENDA?
PLANTE
REFUND ME,
WHAT'S ON THE