The Left List/PDS alliance's platform is to the left of the profile established by the PDS in the East. The programme contains a lot of progressive demands, but with an overall reformist logic. The question of principled opposition to the system and the expanded German state is left in the shadows in the interests of the unity of the alliance. Even so, the Left List/PDS slate will be public enemy number one and is the only participant in the election to put forward anti-capitalist ideas, or to propose a democratic socialism. *
International Viewpoint #192 • October 15, 1990
Germany - still a divided country WE publish below a speech by Jakob Moneta, formerly editor of the IG Metall journal, a member of the VSP (United Socialist Party) and a candidate on the Left List/PDS slate. A T A TIME when we are threatened with a "historic date" - October 3 — we are embarking here on a risky enterprise, whose future is not completely clear. It would be catastrophic to sow illusions in this "beginning again from the beginning." It would be even more serious to denounce the hope, simply because we have lost it for a certain time.
My tradition is that of the current in the workers' movement known as the "left opposition". This current paid with tens of thousands of victims for its opposition to the bureaucratic dictatorship in the USSR. Today, many years after their murder, these victims are being rehabilitated.
But their real rehabilitation, and that of the victims from the other socialist, communist and anarchist oppositions, will be when we begin again to get to know and discuss their ideas, their critiques and the alternatives they put forward. It is the eternal lie of all conservative historians that whatever happened had to happen. There have always been alternatives in history, on the condition that human beings have had the courage to defend them and find the strength to realize them. It is this which the Left List/PDS is trying to do now. It aims to show another way out to those who see the collapse of the bureaucratic command economy as the opportunity for them to increase their markets, and reinforce their position on the world market. We have two important traditions to communicate to those who, above all in the GDR, are placing their hopes in "really existing" capitalism.
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Firstly: the uncontrolled market mechanisms of an economy based on the search for private profit do not bring well-being to the mass of humanity, but increasing misery, including mass hunger and the death of millions of children - not to say the murder of millions of children.
Secondly: what is now being advertised as the social market economy only came about as the result of the social struggles of powerful trade unions, capable of organizing resistance to capital's insatiable hunger for enrichment and tendency towards concentration of power. If the Left List/PDS alliance, which is composed of diverse tendencies, wants to gain real credibility as an opposition both in parliament and in society, it must have nothing to do with parliamentary cretinism.
Only links with extra-parliamentary forces can give it credibility. These links must begin with combative unions, the feminist movement, with ecological, anti-militarist, anti-fascist and anti-racist movements, and take in the initiatives of the unemployed and all those forces for which the Left List/PDS can be the parliamentary voice.
### Socialist democracy provides alternative
Only in this way can this opposition take the offensive - as Karl Marx said "it is necessary to overthrow all the relations in which man (sic) is humiliated, subjugated, abandoned and despised." This is precisely the road which leads to an alternative for society — to socialist democracy.
To all those who are today singing the hymn of "Germany, one united country" and "we are one people" , I would like to commend the words of Kurt Tucholsky, who said a long time before the "fascist community of the whole people" and the division of Germany by the Wall: "Germany is a divided country and we are one part of it".
• In 1525, when the German nobility massacred the German peasants who were in rebellion, was Germany "united"?
• Was it united in 1848 in Berlin, when the Royal Prussian army crushed the insurgent democrats?
• Or when Germans repressed the workers and soldiers councils in November 1918?
And what happened to those Germans, who in November 1989 demonstrated with the shout, "We are the people"? This meant, without any doubt, "it is us down here who are the people, you up there are not." They were pushed back by those shouting "We are one people"
But this is the beginning of the stigmatization of citizens from other countries, and of "foreign races." Does this not mean the exchange of the rights of man for the privileges or the ethnically verman, privileges of the "ethnically German", those supposedly tied together by blood?
When the Emperor does not know of parties, only of Germans (Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1914], it is time to get worried.
Even before the big show begins and before the hosannas of Helmut Kohl for the "one country" — with or without the ringing of bells — we should note the participation of the new expanded Germany in the "military actions" in the Gulf. There is even an attempt to sell this as support "for international solidarity" that is, the action decided by the United Nations.
But when did the UN ever call for such support when small nations have been attacked by great powers? What happened in Grenada, Panama or Nicaragua? Nor was anything done when Saddam Hussein killed hundreds of Communists or killed thousands of Kurds with poison gas.
Has the UN become an "intervention force" for the big powers, with which not only Helmut Kohl can feel solidarity, but, apparently, a lot of social democrats and even some Green deputies?
War — key test for workers' movement
The question of war has always been the key test in the German workers' movement - and not only there. It shows who seriously defends the ideas of socialism and who does not. Perhaps there will be some people who consider that I have not marked myself off sufficiently from Stalinism. I think that, having fought Stalinism for half a century, this is not the time to do it, when Stalinism is disappearing from the historical stage.
But allow me to finish with a quote from an independent theoretician of the Uruguayan left, Eduardo Galleano, the author of a moving book, "The Open Veins of Latin America":
"I believe that the inquisition was not Christianity. In our epoch the bureaucrats have degraded the hope and sullied the most beautiful of human endeavors, but I believe that socialism is not Stalinism. It is necessary to begin again. Step by step; our only shield that provided by our own bod. 4 O ies."