As some of our British comrades in Left Unity contemplate sinking to unheard-of levels of blandness in the hope of attracting the tired, poor and huddled masses, such considerations do not seem to cross the minds of the Polish Władza Rad group. “We are communists,” proclaims the ‘About’ section of its internet portal proudly

, and the header features a lineage of thinkers programmatically ending with Leon Trotsky’s portrait.

In a country whose collective memory is still informed by the sordid atrocities of the Stalin era, the Gomułka government’s thinly veiled anti-Semitic witch-hunts and the police massacres of protesting workers, one has some explaining to do when publicly associating oneself with the hammer and the sickle. We commend Władza Rad for taking on this difficult, but ultimately inevitable, task.

Perhaps it is for this reason that the comrades, who are organised in the Polish Party of Labour (PPP), feel a certain kinship to the Weekly Worker and its uncompromisingly communist polemicising against all odds. They certainly felt sympathetic enough to link to our website – their only one to a non-Polish political organisation – as well as publishing translations of some of our articles. With this in mind, we presume they are sufficiently steeled to take criticism.

Frankly, this author was surprised how much Władza Rad comrades’ answers to our interview replicated the ‘anti-sectarian sectarianism’ that we have come to know in the UK. We understand that the PPP is a halfway house formation of a few hundred active members and home to social democrats, Marxists and so-called ‘national lefts’. The idea that such an organisation has real influence among the masses and that other Marxist groups (‘the sects’) can therefore be ignored sounds all too familiar to our ears.

Given history, we are sceptical whether an organisation which uses the Polish national colours to evoke the imagery of the Solidarność trade union – and, yes, this author is aware of the progressive elements that organisation initially contained – can be praised as uncritically as the Władza Rad comrades are doing in our interview. Will such a formation equip the working class with internationalist consciousness? Will its demands for the nationalisation of certain industries perhaps lead the masses, step by step, towards a genuinely new, communist society? Would that not require an altogether different political programme?

I am not suggesting that Marxists should not participate in the PPP, but as is the case with all such formations, the struggle for communism needs to be carried into its ranks – by means of ruthless, open criticism of the right instead of subservient party patriotism.

What happened to you at the May Day demonstration in Warsaw?

On May Day, we joined a demonstration organised by the All-Poland Alliance of Trade Unions – a social democratic trade union centre, originally formed in the 1980s by the then government as a counterweight to Solidarność – and the Alliance of the Democratic Left, the social democratic party that came into existence through the transformation of the former ‘communist’ party.

Last year we participated in a rally and march organised by the APATU/ADL, and met with a positive reception and interest from ordinary participants. Photos of our banners appeared in the media, and a certain MP belonging to the Christian democratic Law and Justice Party reported this to the public prosecutor’s office, alleging that a crime had been committed by us and the organisers of the demonstration, who had “not reacted to the law being broken” – even though the hammer and sickle is not actually outlawed in Poland. The prosecutors declined to investigate the case.

When we arrived at this year’s demonstration, we noticed they were showing pictures from last year’s demonstration on a large outdoor screen, including some that featured our banners. So we unwrapped our banners and, once again, met with interest and sympathy from protesters. However, some 15 minutes later we were approached by stewards, who demanded take them down because “the organiser won’t have them here”. They also threatened to call the police if we did not comply. So we decided to pack them away. Since we could not march under our own banners, we left the demonstration.

About a mile away, the police stopped us and asked to see our papers. We wish to emphasise that none of the many police officers took any interest in us at the demonstration, nor did they do so as we were leaving.

Why did the organisers react so harshly?

We can only speculate why they reacted in this particular way. Conformism? Pressure from the right? Unfounded fear of prosecution? Wariness of being labelled Bolsheviks? A determination to prevent the party rank and file from fraternising with ‘subversives’? We do not know.

A couple of years ago, I read that the public display of communist symbols had been outlawed in Poland. Can you sell your literature openly?

In 2011, the constitutional tribunal accepted that a prior regulation which prohibited the display of materials “carrying fascist, communist or other totalitarian imagery” was, in fact, unconstitutional – partly because it was imprecise. Contrary to what the right might claim, communism is not banned in Poland. According to article 13 of the constitution, it is forbidden to invoke the “totalitarian methods and operational practices of Nazism, fascism and communism”, but not their respective ideologies.

Article 265 of the penal code bans the promotion of “fascist or other totalitarian systems”, but there is no definition anywhere as to what “other systems” are considered “totalitarian”.

To what extent is this enforced against groups such as yours?

Every now and again, we receive a ranting email full of insults and swearing, saying we are all going to jail – but we continue to operate regardless. We do not distribute any physical literature because we think that internet propaganda is far more efficient, seeing as it has a wider reach and expenses are lower. But groups that do are not getting any trouble.

After 1989, no-one in Poland has ever been convicted for advocating communism. The post-Stalinist Communist Party of Poland continues to operate legally, the hammer and sickle being its officially registered symbol. It is true that the owner of the now defunct Uncensored Leftinternet portal, Michał Nowicki, was fined for “calling for the demolition of memorial sites”. He was prosecuted for agitating for the destruction of monuments to the anti-communist underground movement, the National Armed Forces – not for propagating communist views.

Surveys in former eastern bloc countries often reveal that considerable sections of the population share a certain nostalgia for the certainties of life under the old regime. Are positive reactions to your hammer and sickle imagery partly motivated by such sentiments?

It is possible that this is partly the case with older people. But we also receive positive reactions from people too young to remember the days of full employment and so on. In view of the crisis of capitalism, the impoverishment of working people and unemployment approaching 15%, sentiments for an anti-capitalist, anti-system character are increasingly common.

Polish Spartacists have a negative attitude towards the PPP, claiming instances of anti-Semitism and such. Could you comment on that?

Many organisations – for example, those financed by the German Rosa Luxemburg Foundation – have a negative attitude towards the Polish Party of Labour. These slurs are normally dishonest, or they give a warped account of the truth.

To give you a perfect example, the PPP was slandered for supposedly supporting Adolf Hitler’s state, because an image of him, titled ‘His state’, appeared on the front page of the Union Herald(Kurier Związkowy). Yet it would have been perfectly possible to find out what the title page was referring to by reading the article: our chairman was comparing prime minister Donald Tusk to Hitler on the grounds of his neoliberal, anti-union politics. The extreme fiscalism that this prime minister’s rule has led to has also greatly contributed to incredible pressure upon ordinary people. The article cites a case where a mother of two was sent to prison for failing to pay a tax bill of €500, which she did not even know about because she had not been receiving official letters. This, however, did not prevent some organisations from accusing the PPP of anti-Semitism and even neo-Nazism.

The PPP does have problems with anti-Semitic gaffes in election campaigns. This is because the party, which has a formal membership of around 2,000 people – but far fewer active members – therefore for the 2011 parliamentary elections and hence entered an electoral alliance with Self-Defence, a peasant party. In Warsaw, a circle called Wspólnota Samorządowa (Self-Rule Society) came forward, whose candidates began to express rightwing and anti-Semitic views during the election campaign.

Polish law makes it impossible to withdraw candidates once the electoral register has been submitted. That is why the PPP publicly disassociated itself from some candidates in a special statement, which is available on the party’s website. The PPP is too small and not well enough organised to thoroughly screen all candidates in such an enormous venture, especially as there are generally significantly fewer applicants than there are places to fill on the electoral list.

As for the Spartacists, there exists no organisation in Poland they do not accuse of being right-deviationists and flunkies of the bourgeoisie, as a result of which their membership has never exceeded three people. Nobody takes their reflections seriously.

What are the reasons why you are working inside the PPP?

The reason why we support the PPP is because it is the only workers’ party in Poland. It is also the biggest extraparliamentary party that regularly participates in elections. It has a radical leftwing character, and there is nothing in its programme which would suggest that it is anti-Semitic, bourgeois and the like. We would never work in an anti-Semitic party because it would be a disgrace for us to participate in anything of that sort.

The PPP is the only party that fights the neoliberal politics of the state and the bourgeoisie. It was formed out of the most radical Polish trade union, WWZ August 80, which is known to organise the most militant and radical strikes. Not even the neoliberal media denies the socialist character of the party and trade union.

Aside from us, activists of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International operate in the PPP. The Polish section of the Committee for a Workers’ International was also involved for a long time, while the Polish section of the International Socialist Tendency has often given it electoral support.

How strong is the Polish left?

If we’re talking about the extraparliamentary left, there exist mostly small groups that are affiliated to various bureaucratised ‘internationals’. They are more interested in directives and instructions from the ‘HQ’ than in Polish current affairs. They also introduce to Poland ‘from the top down’ a hostility and mutual aversion between Marxists. In addition, they lack any kind of base in the working class. As the only group that has any influence in the working class, the PPP is an exception. WZZ August 80 initiated, among other things, the general strike in Silesia on March 26.

Where do you see the Polish left heading with regard to Marxist unity and gaining influence in society?

Gaining influence in society is more important than Marxist unity, and the former does not necessarily result from the latter. The aim of uniting all sectarian groups is an undertaking that requires a lot of effort, but is not necessarily politically fruitful, nor does it automatically guarantee influence in society – no matter how many zeros you add up, the result is still zero. This does not mean that we reject potential initiatives towards cooperation and unity, but our experience does not fill us with optimism.

Our experience also suggests that, given scarce industrial action, it is necessary for the workers’ movement and social movements to win new layers.

The only way out is activism among workers, which is the reason why we operate in the PPP. Out of many organisations of the extraparliamentary left, only three are registered. Of those three, only the PPP conducts regular political activity among the masses. Most recently, we had campaigns against the new ‘garbage collection agreements’ and for free public transport.

Considering the history of the Polish working class and trade union movement, is it particularly difficult to win people to non-nationalist perspectives?

As for the influence of the history of the workers’ movement on attitudes in the working class, it is worth citing a public opinion survey that was conducted in March. About 80% of respondents support the nationalisation of the railways, mines, power stations and forests and want the state to guarantee full employment. At the same time, when asked whether capitalism or socialism was preferable, a third chose capitalism and the rest decided they had “no opinion”. The fact that people still associate socialism with empty shelves and a government that shoots at workers negatively impacts on any potential successes of socialist agitation.

In protest against the neoliberal politics of the ruling party, the Citizens’ Platform, a section of working people supports the Christian-democratic PiS as a “more social” party – but in most cases, this is a matter of opting for the lesser evil rather than strongly supporting conservative or nationalist ideology. From our experience as PPP activists, we can also conclude that it is not as difficult to convince somebody of our programme as it is to convince people to vote for an extraparliamentary party – or, indeed, to vote at all.

There has been some debate following the Weekly Worker’s series of articles on feminism, including on Labour Representation Committee member Louise Whittle’s blog, Harpymarx. It’s regrettable that a lot of it has been conducted in a less than sober manner, with individuals ranging from the AWL-leaning Shiraz Socialist blogger to a leading member of North London Solidarity Federation opportunistically riding on the wave of thought-terminating hysteria. The latter person, to whom the CPGB apparently represents something like ‘rape denial apologists’ or ‘rape apology deniers’, quite happily engages in infantile Twitter “hate campaigns” against individuals, yet blocks people from his own feed when asked inconvenient questions or challenged to debate.

I responded to the anarchist nothingiseverlost‘s misrepresentations of the CPGB and its organiser, Mark Fischer, which he/she published in several comments below this article by Louise Whittle. Unfortunately, Louise is no longer approving my comments. Therefore, find below the follow-up reply I tried to leave last week.

Mark Fischer’s letter, which prompted this discussion, can be found under the heading ‘Bogey Bowler’ on this page.

Dear nothingseverlost:

Frankly, I do not believe that the AWL member in question had ample reason to feel “not safe” or contemplate calling for the security guards simply because a member of the SWP Disputes Committee happened to be somewhere in the same building. As Fischer himself wrote, “what did the AWLer think comrade Bowler’s presence portended?” I expect the AWL comrade attends protest marches despite the presence of police – arguably no less brutal and unaccountable than the most hardened SWP hack? Does she ever use public transport? Does she ever go out? Does she ever cross the road? Of course, I cannot be sure. But I think it’s safe to say that in view of the dangers that daily life poses to most people – without them being on the brink of tears at all times – Maxine Bowler’s rushing by poses a comparatively negligible threat.

So yes, this is utterly “irrational”,  “brittle” and – running danger of insulting children – “childlike” behaviour, triggered not by the comrade’s gender, but the result of disempowering, infantilising, bureaucracy-aiding ‘safe spaces’ mongering, in this case opportunistically endorsed by the AWL (for reasons too long to go into here). Not only do I think you are doing women a disservice by refusing to acknowledge the ludicrousness of such behaviour, I also think you are being dishonest.

And yes, I do think that feminists – that’s feminists, not women – often have a tendency to positively endorse and perpetuate irrational conduct. This is symptomatic not of their gender (there are plenty of zealous male feminists in and outside of the left), but of a particular political culture – one that has effectively replaced critical thinking with outrage and moral one-upmanship. It is not exclusive to feminism, although it’s particularly pronounced there. But in case you think we attribute terms such as “hysteric” or “screeching” exclusively to (female) feminists, be assured that we have framed our criticisms of the SWP’s brand of anti-fascism, for instance, in precisely the same terms.

It can be a real problem debating feminists because, as Demarty correctly observed in his earlier comment, they tend to elevate feminism to the status of a faith that is beyond criticism and must be adopted unquestioningly – as if the umbrella term for several overwhelmingly non-revolutionary trends of thought somehow had a monopoly over the women’s question (no Holy Programme here, just a Holy Hodgepodge of half-remembered fragments of post-Stalinist and left liberal concepts, see also the latest article by Mike Macnair -“dry as dust” by your standards, but informative).

This feeds into what I have described earlier: if you criticise feminism in any shape or form, you are a “sexist”. If you point out that this logic does not follow, you are a sexist because you are “calling women irrational”. If you try to explain what you meant, you are “patronising to women”. If you stop explaining, you are “arrogant”. If you appeal to calm, constructive debate instead of shouting insults, you are a “man telling a woman to shut up”. And so forth. It’s a no-win situation that makes me wonder whether there exists a feminist manual for how to terminate debate. It’s not that I’m particularly heartbroken over this, but it does make it so much more difficult for either side to arrive at any new conclusions.

In reply to your question whether I would have a problem with individual Jews being described as “money-grabbing” and such depends entirely on the context and whether it’s clear enough that such a description is not intended as racist innuendo. For instance, if you referred to Gene Simmons of Kiss as a cynical, money-grabbing businessman who doesn’t give two shits about art, I don’t think I would suspect underlying anti-Semitism.

Fischer made clear enough – and in more ways than one – that this was not intended as a swipe at supposedly “female” characteristics. He went out of his way to emphasise the connection to a particular kind of politics. You’re quite free to argue that he did not actually mean what he wrote, and that it’s more important to consider whatever can be read into a couple of expressions he used. But then we’re entering the 1990s ‘war of the words’/political correctness/language debate of postmodern academia, which is of little interest to me politically.

I concede that the term feminism is used in a variety of ways today (which is why clarification of its ideas is particularly important). To some, ‘feminism’ is shorthand for a special commitment to achieve gender equality as far as possible under present circumstances, including on the left. I have no problem with that, though this lower-case feminism often reiterates tactics of feminism proper, none of which I find particularly desirable (e.g. ‘safe spaces’ campaigns, autonomous organising of the specially oppressed). In my view, we are better off dropping the core assumptions of second-wave feminism and developing the women’s question in Marxist terms.

As I mentioned in this readers’ letter to the Weekly Worker, this does not mean that one cannot draw on any insights from the women’s movement – though for a fruitful exchange of ideas to take place, feminists would have to stop shielding feminism from criticism.

A report of a joint event between the CPGB and the Assoziation Dämmerung in Hamburg, including my talk on the proletariat past and present, has been published in the electronic magazine Schattenblick. You can read the German language text here.

Assoziation Dämmerung have published an audio recording of the event here.

It’s class war! For a revolutionary perspective!” screamed the flyer in graffiti-styled letters set against a mural background, promoting a joint event between the Assoziation Dämmerung and our CPGB delegation to Hamburg. As the aesthetic sense suggests, the Assoziation Dämmerung emerged from what is known as Germany’slinke Szene, the subcultural radical left milieu steeped in autonomism, squatting and Black Bloc tactics – in this particular case, the association’s beginnings go back to a militant animal rights group founded as Tierrechtsaktion Nord in the 1980s.

Over time, however, the group morphed into something rather different when an in-depth study of Marx prompted some of its members to move away from German autonomism’s lifestylist trappings and towards a more serious, communist politics. Critical theory is another important reference point in the association’s political identity, yet their engagement with Horkheimer, Adorno and ‘western Marxism’ has not led them, step by step, away from the proletariat and into the arms of Moishe Postone et al, as has been the case with vast sections of the former German new left. In fact, one of the group’s foremost ambitions is to offer a genuinely Marxist critique of ideology.

The setting for our first meeting, however, could not have been less ‘new left’: my public talk on the working class and the class struggle took place in the German Communist Party’s (DKP) Hamburg headquarters, the Magda-Thürey-Zentrum. Formed in 1968 as an ‘official communist’ successor to the banned KPD – and, one may argue, a legalistic alternative to ‘new left’ radicals – the German Communist Party is today internally divided between a moderate wing that seeks alliances with those to its right and a traditional ‘Marxist-Leninist’ fraction. The DKP’s examination of both the Stalin era and ‘really existing socialism’ may have been more thorough than has been the case in some other ‘official communist’ quarters – ie, more than just a theory-free Khrushchev moment – yet the party’s ‘Leninism’ remains distinctly post-1923 in its stubborn clinging to the possibility of socialism in one country. Suffice to say, the DKP does not allow factions, and publicly arguing against the leadership line is not well received.

That said, the Magda-Thürey-Zentrum lived up to its motto of being an “open house”. True, there seems to have occurred a minor misunderstanding during the booking process: somebody mistook us for the DKP’s British sister organisation, the Communist Party of Britain (CPB). But, given the alphabet soup that is the British left, who can blame them – and, after all, what is one letter between friends? Fortunately, our hosts took a similar view: an angry phone call from the Morning Star’s CPB complaining about us “Trotskyites” was shrugged off with the succinct comment that “as long as they are not fascists, we have no problem with them speaking here”.

Class-consciousness

I opened my talk with a quote from Chris Cutrone’s brooding blog entry, ‘Class-consciousness (from a Marxist perspective) today’. Cutrone’s troops, the Platypus Affiliated Society, are now deployed in several German cities, though in a ‘left’ landscape made up to a considerable extent of ‘anti-Germans’ and their epigones they find it harder to attract as much negative attention as they do in the UK. I cited Cutrone’s plaintive remarks not merely as a characteristic example of communist swan song, but as symptomatic of a left that has for too long taken a narrow and inadequate view of the proletariat and the reasons why it constitutes the revolutionary subject.

Like Cutrone, much of the left considered phenomena such as “unemployment and impoverishment” – rather than the separation from the means of production – to be the decisive factors that necessitate the modern working class to become capitalism’s active euthanasia team. From the left’s fixation on the industrial proletariat as the crucial layer operating ‘at the point of production’ resulted a fetishisation of the workplace and of trade unions, and a glorification of the worker as a worker – a notion rather at odds with Marxism’s project of overcoming the division of labour. With the gradual disappearance of the classic industrial working class in western societies, disorientated Marxists are left to either perpetuate their increasingly dead-end syndicalism or wave goodbye to the proletariat for good and embark on a quest for alternative ‘emancipatory politics’.

I discussed various definitions and narratives of the working class ranging from Owen Jones’s popular book, Chavs, through to the relatively novel concept of the ‘precariat’, deemed by worried ex-lefts as a ‘new, dangerous class’ that must be re-integrated into bourgeois society lest it take up ‘extremist’ politics. There has hardly been a moment in the history of the proletariat when it has not been precarious, I argued, yet the greater levels of fragmentation since the 1980s do necessitate a rethinking of revolutionary organisation (see also M Macnair Revolutionary strategy London 2008, p29).

What Cutrone terms “class-consciousness” in his observations – namely the trade union consciousness of social democracy’s golden age – may not be at its highest ever level. Yet there exists an arguably more universal proletarian consciousness of not having any control over one’s life, only insufficiently acted upon by various layers of the class by means of spontaneous riots, sporadic protests and momentary occupations. It is, to put it crudely, the consciousness of belonging to the ‘class of the fucked’. The relative lack of sociological homogeneity may be a temporary obstacle – making it all the more necessary to construct a revolutionary party capable of uniting and organising all fragments of our class, employed and unemployed, as a class for itself.

As the bourgeoisie becomes increasingly unable to rule “because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within its slavery” and “has to feed him instead of being fed by him”, as Marx and Engels wrote in their – by no means definitive - Communist manifesto, the elemental recognition that there exists a global, systemic problem which permeates passing movements such as Occupy is perhaps not the worst starting point for a new class-consciousness, and certainly no shoddier than the sectional, often nationalist trade union consciousness of old. In order to raise and deepen this consciousness, it is vital that the Marxist left learns to treat spontaneous activity as the nucleus of consciousness, not – as was the case in ‘really existing socialism’ – as its opposite. It should go without saying that the former approach is not at all the same as spontaneism.

No to EU

Following an introduction to our organisation’s history, CPGB comrade Tina Becker discussed in greater detail what such a revolutionary party would entail: high politics rather than lowest-common-denominator slogans, and taking democracy seriously instead of replicating organisational norms that resulted from a permanent state of emergency in 1920s Russia. The ensuing debate among those present – members of the SDAJ (the DKP’s youth organisation), Arbeitermacht (Workers Power), Die Linke andGegenstandpunkt among them – demonstrated a certain level of acceptance of our central ideas, but was prematurely cut short when a comrade enquired about our position on the European Union. After that, all hell broke loose.

The expected characterisation of the EU as a bosses’ club – as opposed to reasonably worker-friendly national governments, of course – was not long in coming. This soon slid into calls for a collective withdrawal of the most downtrodden European states from the EU and into immediate ‘socialist’ isolation: if Greece, Spain and Italy jump into the abyss together, it was implied, then out of the ashes a network of socialist countries may arise. Inexplicably, somebody cited Cuba as a successful instance of socialism in one country. He then – paradoxically – asserted that “the Cubans are now awaiting socialism”. Quite correct, comrade – they have been doing so for almost 55 years.

Whatever our differences, I was impressed with the comparatively high level of debate particularly on the part of the Socialist German Workers Youth (SDAJ), whose comrades – despite their idiosyncratic reading of Lenin – knew their Marx and Engels well, thus challenging us to up the ante instead of just causing us to sigh in despair at Stalinoid commonplaces. My key take-away from this part of the evening is that CPGB comrades need to be equipped to discuss concrete, even meticulous details when it comes to Europe-wide working class unity versus the imperialist ‘unity’ of the EU. Abstract appeals to an ‘alternative vision’ and such are not enough to win this important argument, however correct they may be on the level of internationalist principle.

Halfway to partyism

A second, non-public meeting brought together our hosts, the Assoziation Dämmerung, as well as members of the Left Party (Die Linke), SDAJ, and a number of smaller grouplets and publications such as Steinberg Recherche, Schattenblick and the rank-and-file union organisation, Jour Fixe, which aims to unite full-time workers with other sections of our class. It should be said at the outset that with five topics up for discussion – working in reformist and halfway house parties, Europe, imperialism, Marxism and animal liberation, and ‘anti-Germans’ – we took on more than we were able to discuss in depth.

Revealingly, Die Linke member Christin Bernhold was the one participant who painted working in reformist organisations in the most lurid colours. As a recent candidate for the local state parliament elections, she experienced first-hand how Die Linke apparatchiks systematically hassle, impair, censor and withhold resources from unwelcome Marxists in their ranks. Yet despite this, and despite running on an explicitly socialist platform that the likes of the Socialist Workers Party would never advocate in any of their ‘broad’ initiatives, she came close to winning a seat. A much bigger impact, we argued, might be made if Marxists everywhere united around a common programme and operated in coordination – inside and outside reformist outfits. Whether we liked it or not, the majority of advanced workers – however isolated – are rarely found in immaculate political environments these days.

Comrade Christin remained pessimistic: despite Die Linke’s formal acceptance of various platforms and tendencies, she argued, the apparat effectively rendered the organisation no more democratic than parties that do not permit factions. Picking up on this – and no doubt inspired by the relatively open impression the SDAJ/DKP members had made – I enquired whether DKP comrades could imagine their party opening up to other Marxist tendencies in the future: how about a real communist party based on the model that led the Bolsheviks to victory in October 1917? How about open and public debate, factions with full democratic rights, and so on? Alas, this is where I hit the proverbial brick wall. The comrades were not at all in favour of “Trotskyist entryism” into their party – after all, what if the “entryists” become the majority and take to demolishing some of its more indispensable doctrines? That of ‘socialism in one country’, for instance, had already been “proven correct”. One may well wonder just what historical evidence to the contrary the comrades still lack to reconsider their position.

Comrade Susann Witt-Stahl introduced what is perhaps the Assoziation Dämmerung’s most peculiar feature, their continued attachment to ‘animal liberation’. Rather than simply attaching the issue to Marxism, the comrades claim, they have arrived at their positions through a careful reading and development of Marx’s writings on nature. Adorno, they say, was one of the few Marxists who picked up on these signposts when he wrote about the “tormentable body” – and his friend Horkheimer considered human relations as part of a broader ‘solidarity of life’. Central to the Assoziation Dämmerung’s theses is the realisation that not only human society, but all of nature, has a history; therefore, nothing pertaining to the relationship between humans and other species – or indeed, between other species – is fixed.

Given the unusual territory and time restraints, it was perhaps inevitable that our objections were of a rather rudimentary nature. We may have even lived up to comrade Susann’s sardonic characterisation of “otherwise perfectly capable Marxists momentarily stooping to an idealistic neo-Kantian rather than historical materialist level of arguing when it comes to this particular topic”. But for this and other debates, there will be another time – hopefully our inspiring visit will facilitate further exchanges with our German comrades.

Jack Conrad regrets in the CPGB podcast on ‘SWP rebellion and feminism’ that he has “not heard of any feminist movement raising radical demands for working class women”. If that is true, how thorough was his research? There exist socialist and Marxists feminisms, to name but two schools which speak of class almost incessantly. Even the post-Marxist cultural studies variety cannot do without taking into account ‘class’ – or whatever it thinks constitutes class – as a key analytic component.

Now, you may argue this is all unnecessary, that it isn’t going anywhere, even that it’s harmful – and there are some good reasons to do so. But in order to criticise anything you need to at least be aware of its developments since the turn of the 20th century. To dismiss present-day feminism based on what you know about the Suffragettes is a bit like dismissing Lenin based on your knowledge of Fourier.

I do not agree with much of what the various feminisms have to say – least of all the ‘Women always speak the truth (except when they disagree with me)’ variety espoused by regular Weekly Worker letter-writer Heather Downs. Furthermore, I believe that much of what is known as ‘gender studies’ is profoundly hostile to sexual impulse and desire, which it attempts to squeeze into politically correct shapes. Its proponents say that sexuality is of the mind, yet in reality they prove themselves to be as hostile to the mind as they are to sexuality. Their totalising responses to complex questions, not to mention their aggressive moralising, are poison to critical thinking.

Nonetheless, I find it hard to believe that no worthwhile conclusions can be drawn from the women’s lib experience of the 1960s-70s, or that the vast body of literature that emerged on its back is devoid of any useful insights. Jack Conrad says that these days most feminism is restricted to academia. So what? The same was true of psychoanalysis, yet the best Marxists – including Trotsky – did their damnedest to acquaint themselves with the theories of Freud (who was not known as a supporter of the proletarian struggle).

As has been stated elsewhere, second-wave feminism stepped in where the organised left had failed. Where Marxist groups accommodated feminist and other identity-centred groups, they compartmentalised them without attempting as much as a critical exchange. When the left rid itself of these groups, this occurred in a no less shallow fashion. The result is that we really do not have a lot to say about more recent developments in sex and gender relations. Is it absolutely out of the question that we might benefit from some of the knowledge accumulated in these movements?

We need to educate ourselves about all currents of emancipatory as well as pseudo-emancipatory thought – if only, as Lenin would put it, to find the kernel of the truth that the opponent is working with. To merely attack a caricature is to liken ourselves to the caricature our opponents draw of us: that of the historical re-enactment society that is not interested in applying Marxism as a tool to analyse the present.

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I’m a little disappointed that my article, “Of Runes and Men“, which you reposted from Red Mist a year ago did not stimulate any substantial discussion. Instead, we’re back to business as usual: musicians and their far right links and sentiments are listed, and the notion is put forward that their gigs must be stopped – including in cooperation with councillors, clerics, and the like.

I was also pointed to comments on my article at Indymedia, but they did not offer anything beyond pointing out minor inaccuracies (e.g. Sotos only joined Whitehouse later rather than being a “pioneer” of power electronics) and claiming that this would “discredit” me. I also sensed a certain allergy on behalf of anti-fascists to the idea of reconsidering one’s arguments and – god beware – changing one’s line of action.

No one addressed my core arguments, which – in a nutshell – were:

1) that fascism is less defined by the ideas that fascists choose to delude themselves with than by what it does. This has implications on how we are to treat insubstantial phenomena such as neofolk.
2) that the sub-Gramscianism of the New Right never worked and never will.
3) that the (liberal) popular front tactic re-enacted in miniature by anti-fascists is precisely the wrong way to counter the far right.

I was hoping for an article that would address and counter my arguments.

I also tried to leave a comment to the entirely misinformed the Love Music Hate Racism call on their campaign website. Perhaps predictably, it never saw the light of day – which is consistent with the LMHR/UAF/SWP habit of suppressing debate as to not “confuse” activists.

The anti-fascists remind me a passage from the Sartre essay “Jew and anti-Semite” that I recently read (my translation):

“The thinking man racks his brains groaningly. He knows that his contemplations will always just remain possibilities rather than certainties, and that other considerations will call everything into question again. He never knows where he is going, he is ‘open’ to everything, and the world thinks of him as a procrastinator. But some people are drawn towards the eternal rigour of rocks. They want to be unswerving and intransigent like boulders and shy away from change: for where might such change lead them?

It is a case of primal fear of the self, a dread of truth.[...] Because they fear logic, they yearn for a way of life where logic and research play a subordinate role, where one never searches for what one has not already found, where one never becomes what one has not already been. There is only one way to obtain this: passion.

Only the rush induced by a strong emotion provides instant certainty, can keep logic in check, can defy knowledge gained from experience and persist through one’s entire life.”

Now, obviously I am not citing this in order to liken anti-fascists to anti-Semites, which would be absurd. What I do want to illustrate with this excerpt is the unwillingness of many leftists to actually think, to debate, to review their positions, to progress and evolve. They are content with rallying the troops around bogeymen just to keep them going. But Marxism means materialist analysis, not idealism and hysteria. Tactics are not the same as strategy. let alone dogma – they need to be constantly reviewed. And carrying on is not the same as advancing.

I hope you will take this as a comradely criticism, not as an attack.

Published in Weekly Worker, 8 November 2012

There can be no annual Marxist school without a session on the far right and that was the case with Socialism 2012. But, credit where credit is due, the Socialist Party in England and Wales does not treat the subject as an easy recipe to stir up emotions, conjure up apocalyptic visions and cohere the troops around an easy target. Unlike the SWP’s, its treatment of the English Defence League is not only remarkably sober: it acknowledges that it is a social question rather than just one of physical threat.

Take the question of social base. The SWP assumes that fascism always and everywhere attracts primarily the declassed petty bourgeois – because that was the case in inter-war Germany, and because Trotsky’s famous analysis is, apparently, a timeless formula that one only needs to copy and paste. Back in the 1920s and 30s, however, the proletariat was solidly organised in mass parties and unions around social democratic and communist politics. The Communist Party of Germany was, by the early 30s, a ‘radical party of the unemployed’ as well as employed workers. But, given the low level of working class organisational culture in today’s Britain, surely the frustrated petty bourgeoisie is not the only social class that feels it has neither a future nor a political home? A study conducted by the Blairite think tank, Demos, would suggest that, despite its moneyed leadership and lumpen, hooligan hard core, the overwhelming majority of EDL supporters are backward, disaffected workers. Rather than worrying about burning poppies and Islam, anxiety about their future prospects and immigration seem to be their prime concerns.¹

Consequently, SPEW does not limit its engagement with the EDL to hollering Unite Against Fascism demos, which set ‘us’ (the multicultural multitude) against ‘them’ (the fascists). In her talk, ‘How to combat the far right?’, London secretary Paula Mitchell drew attention to the importance of raising social demands in connection with anti-fascist work. Socialists needed to “go around the estates and argue for genuine class politics instead of capitulating to the liberal anti-fascism of the popular front”, she argued. In a contribution from the floor, a Greek comrade cited Golden Dawn’s ‘social programme’ of handing out food to “true Greeks” – where on earth, she wondered, was the numerically far stronger left?

There were a few more contributions from mainly young comrades – among them many anecdotal accounts of anti-EDL protests and local campaigns – before I intervened. The notion that a real political alternative is needed, I assured comrade Mitchell, was understood. I confessed I was sceptical, however, whether the Labour Party mark two advocated by SPEW, which would inevitably stand on a Keynesian platform of one sort or another, could possibly do this.

Despite their relatively diverse manifestations in modern history and sometimes anti-capitalist posturing, far-right movements are, in essence, parasitic on mainstream nationalist discourse, I pointed out. Mainstream nationalism, whether of the Conservative or Labourite variety, imbues its subjects with the idea that it is their right and duty to work for their country’s competitiveness and economic growth. This, it is promised, supposedly translates into abundance for the whole national collective.

Life under capitalism, however, can be quite disappointing. Leaders make ‘difficult decisions’. The country never seems to be performing well enough. Not even the dubious privilege of selling one’s labour-power for a living is secure. The frustrated nationalist is left asking questions, and the far right is happy to provide the answers: elements alien to the nation are undermining its coherence, morale and performance – and they do so in cahoots with treacherous, insufficiently patriotic governments. What is merely a radicalisation of already existing concepts thus assumes an anti-establishment posture.

Now, if we want to undercut the ideological breeding ground of the far right, I wondered, how about simply telling people the truth and nothing but the truth? What use is there in a new Labour Party, which would continue to sow illusions in economic recovery on the level of the nation-state – as if Britain was somehow disconnected from the world economy? What good is perpetuating the ideology of national ‘growth’ through investment, as SPEW is quite happy to do?² Why not a party that argues for an explicitly Marxist, internationalist alternative – one that not only challenges fascist ideology by radically subverting the nationalist paradigm, but also points to a real way out of the mess that is global capitalism?

To advocate Keynesianism and nationalism as a ‘political alternative’, I concluded, did not actually represent an alternative to either the existing Labour Party or the far right.

Comrade Mitchell’s reply was not wholly satisfactory. The new workers’ party, she begged to differ, would not be like the old Labour Party at all: instead of only claiming to represent workers, it would provide “actual working class representation” and put forward “clear class politics”. This, she added, is what “ultimately undercuts the far right when talking to people on the estates”. What is more, SPEW would argue for “the best possible, socialist and internationalist programme” within that party.

The time was up, the session was over. Why building another nationalist workers’ party would be a better move than arguing for Marxist internationalism in the already existing one remained comrade Mitchell’s secret.

One needs a sense of perspective. Despite allegedly numbering 25,000-35,000 ‘members’, the EDL does not enjoy the support of more than a tiny segment of British society, and we are not yet in an economic situation such as Greece. However, as comrade Mitchell correctly observed, 80% of the cuts are yet to hit us. It is never too early to work towards an antithesis to the nationalist consensus currently spanning from the far left to the far right: a real Marxist party.

Notes

1. Given the unwillingness of the far left to seriously analyse the EDL’s social base and its tendency to use class categories as a means of moral condemnation, one has to make do with statistics such as those provided by Demos:www.demos.co.uk/files/Inside_the_edl_WEB.pdf?1331035419.

2. www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/12775/14-09-2011/austerity-policies-strangle-growth.

In his comments (Letters, October 11) on my article in the Weekly Worker (‘Not part of the left’, October 4), Chris Cutrone of the Platypus group asserts that, “for good or ill”, the ‘anti-Germans’ must be considered “part of the global left”. A strange declaration, seeing as neither the German left nor the hard-core anti-Germans themselves share this view.

As I reported in my article, they operate in accordance with their slogan, “Deny the left and other Nazis the right to exist”. Like other ex-communists before them – whether Shachtmanites-turned-neocons or Eurocommunists-turned-Blairites – their journey took them to a place that can no longer be meaningfully described as ‘left’ by anyone who has eyes to see. As those who remember Jack Straw recommending Lenin’s pamphlet, Leftwing communism, in a 2004 issue of The Independent will readily concede, residue Marxist vocabulary is not unusual among the lapsed and the terminally diseased.

If Cutrone is really prepared to consider any tendency that operates with left imagery or terminology as “part of the global left”, then I look forward to reading translations of Russian National Bolshevik Party pamphlets in the pages of The Platypus Review - without comment or additional information, of course, so as to facilitate the unprejudiced “conversation” and reinvigoration of the “dead left”. After all, that formation’s fantasies of a Eurasian empire under the Russian jackboot are, to use Cutrone’s words, “no worse, ideologically, and certainly not practically,” than Stephan Grigat’s far more reality-based agitation for imperialist war against Iran, with all the social tragedy, political devastation and heaps of corpses it entails.

But Cutrone’s blog, The Last Marxist, offers a somewhat less impartial outlook: “Now, we are clearly more sympathetic to the anti-fascist rather than the anti-imperialist ‘left’,” he observes. “This can be found in our orientations towards the anti-Deutsch and others as our preferred objects of critique – more interesting, in certain respects, as objects of critical engagement, to be redeemed in some way.”

Indeed, Cutrone’s sympathies for what he calls the “anti-fascist left” are quite clear. What is more, his coding of social-imperialism as “anti-fascist” is a stratagem borrowed from Nick Cohen, whose grouplet of signatories constitutes the bulk of what Platypus members refer to as the “global anti-fascist left” outside Germany. Those people’s “anti-fascism” amounts to little more than support for the ‘war on terror’ and an explicit allegiance to ‘democratic’ bourgeois rule, with all its anti-democratic ‘checks and balances’ (see The Euston manifesto). It has nothing to do with fascism – unless we extend the definition to any type of ‘authoritarianism’, including being sent to bed without supper. Nor is it in any way related to the countless international anti-fascist groups, which, despite elevating the threat posed by the far right over all other political concerns, are generally not imperialist-friendly. They would rightly object to being lumped in with the likes of Cohen and Grigat.

I self-criticise for failing to mention the Initiative Sozialistisches Forum sect – whose text, ‘Communism and Israel’, Platypus has also published – in my brief rundown of ‘anti-German’ history. According to Henning Böke, who was among the early ‘anti-Germans’, when those were still identifiably part of the left, one must “distinguish the new anti-German current which emerged after 1994 from the anti-German tendency of the early 1990s”.

And furthermore “the new anti-Germans [from the ISF] who came after us were radical academics who never had been involved in any social movement … They constructed the core of new anti-German ideology by rejecting any kind of workers’ movement and, even more, any idea of a collective emancipation.”

Whether the partial change of personnel really represented a clean break between the old Kommunistischer Bund cadres and the new ISF guard is arguable. Ideologically at least, the latter seems very much a consistent aggravation of the former, with the already discarded proletariat increasingly assuming the role of a transhistorically anti-Semitic bogeyman. The anti-Germans’ ‘Goodbye to the working class’ takes the shape of ‘Fuck the left’ – a position that is aggressively manifest in their activism, which I have described at length and which Cutrone declined to comment on.

It is worth reading the full text (‘Nuanced history of the anti-Germans’) to get an idea of the thematic affinities between the ISF current and Platypus. Beside their reconsideration of liberalism as a precondition for progress and their Postonian allergy to any anti-capitalist activism, the anti-Germans consider bourgeois democracy to be the hallmark of ‘civilisation’ that distinguishes the west from intrinsically ‘fascist’ peoples such as the Arabs. One may well wonder: if these folks are part of the global left, then where do we draw the line – somewhere to the right of Anders Breivik? As evidenced by Platypus’s decision to publish texts from the ISF milieu, it is this “hard-core” current – not the early 90s tendency – that Cutrone wishes to “redeem somehow”.

Cutrone does not discriminate between ‘anti-imperialist’ apologia for reactionary Middle East regimes, on the one hand, and the principled anti-imperialism proposed by campaigns such as Hands Off the People of Iran, on the other. It is obvious that the opposition to imperialism bothers him more than the sugar-coating of tinpot dictators, which is why he wraps ‘imperialism’ in sniffy inverted commas. Progressive conclusions will not be drawn in “conversation” with the neocon warmongers that Platypus is bringing to the table.

Its policy of publishing ‘anti-German’ writings while blanking out the context appears like an attempt to make the best of a bad job – a way to create international space for the ‘anti-Germans’ where there previously wasn’t any. Superficially, the presentation of duplicitous Grigat con-jobs alongside a variety of left texts and well-meaning criticisms appears as a quasi-postmodern “dead left” curiosity exhibition, implying that everything is as valid as everything else. But I suspect there is a specific political project behind the disinterested appearance: namely that of advancing positions which deny the historical role of the working class.

In light of this, I am sceptical whether a point-by-point reply in The Platypus Review that “directly addresses concerns [arising from the Grigat article] with respect to Iran”, as requested by Cutrone, would be a very good idea. We have long argued that, in principle, it is not reprehensible to debate anyone, including fascists – but it is preferable if that does not happen on the opponent’s terms. Sometimes, the internet dictum, ‘Don’t feed the troll’, is the correct tactic.

According to some circles in Germany, Fabian Köhler is a Nazi and anti-Semite pure and simple. In 2009, when he interviewed a local member of the National Democratic Party for the student paper Unique under the pretence of investigative journalism, so they say, his real intention was to provide a platform for his comrade in spirit. Like other neo-Nazis, his adversaries continue, Köhler instrumentalises the Israel-Palestine conflict in order to stir up anti-Jewish hatred. His articles contain “hate-fuelled agitation that is second to none” and are informed by a “pure contempt for humanity”, attests Erfurt’s ‘German-Israeli Society’, which campaigned to have Köhler removed from the Unique editorial board.¹

But Unique refused to dismiss the dangerous agitator. What is more, the cunning Köhler has been writing for Neues Deutschland, Germany’s biggest leftwing daily, since last August. Among his “hate-fuelled” agitational pieces, we find one entitled ‘War in the diaspora’, in which he pulled off the audacious balancing act of criticising both the Syrian rebels and president Bashar Assad, as well as speaking up for the Palestinian minority in that country.² One cannot help but admire the camouflage skills of a man who manages to write for leftwing newspapers, oppose nationalist tyrants and defend ethnic minorities while actually being a Nazi!

Except, of course, Köhler is far from being one. Rather than being driven by “hate” and “contempt”, the journalist identifies an “interest for other cultures and diverse points of view” as his driving force. In an interview with the Muslim Markt website, he recalls how his six-month stay in Palestine as a student introduced him to a movement rarely reported: that of “peaceful resistance” against the Israeli forces in the occupied territories. He joined the International Solidarity Movement, which primarily aims to raise awareness of the situation in Palestine through meticulous documentation and prevent arbitrary violence against Palestinians by tactically placing foreign journalists and observers at checkpoints, public protests and the like.³

Köhler’s fundamentally pacifist, ‘human rights’-orientated work is enough to earn him the scorn of Zionists, and that of the Antideutsche(‘Anti-German’) movement in particular. To make matters worse, on September 2 Neues Deutschland published ‘Deine Mutter baut Atombomben’ (‘Your mother builds nuclear bombs’) – a piece in which Köhler cautiously but courageously exposed the defamatory and intimidatory methods of Stop the Bomb, a campaign that pushes for harsh sanctions and, somewhat less openly, military action against Iran.⁴ I say ‘cautiously’, because the word Antideutsche is not mentioned once in the article – despite the fact that Stop the Bomb is packed to the rafters with ‘Anti-German’ activists. ‘Courageously’, because to be branded an “anti-Semite” in Germany, no matter how erroneously or maliciously, can mean the end of a journalist’s career.⁵ The ‘anti-Germans’, who are best imagined as a cross between the Euston Manifesto grouping, the black bloc and collective neurosis, have long learned how to utilise this. Originally a part of the ‘non-dogmatic’ German left, they have become something altogether nastier over the past decade or so, directing most of their energies against German communists and socialists.

‘Drop the Bomb’

Stop the Bomb presents itself as a campaign that “demands economic and political sanctions against the Iranian Islamist regime” – a regime which, it argues, “calls for the genocide of an entire [Jewish] people” and aims to “destabilise the region”. With the soft war against Iran well underway, campaigners continue to call upon the west to increase the pressure. In a November 2011 interview on Austrian television, Stop the Bomb co-founder and ‘scientific advisor’ Stephan Grigat emphasised that not “just any mild sanctions” would do: “harsh and strict sanctions” were the order of the day. However, if the “preferable” policy of harsh sanctions did not achieve the desired results, “military action is, naturally, an option”.⁶

The TV presenter was dumbstruck at such rhetoric on behalf of a campaign that, after all, was named ‘Stop the Bomb’, yet Grigat’s statements were consistent with the logic of regime change from above. Sanctions, of course, are a form of war – and often a tactical prelude to armed conflict. As we have seen with Iraq in the 1990s, they serve to starve, demoralise, divide, weaken and tie to their despots the local working class, preparing the ground for military intervention and regime change by imperialism, on imperialism’s terms, and with imperialism’s best interests at heart.

Elsewhere, too, Grigat did not mince words: in a 2008 interview entitled “Iran as a threat”, he pushed for a regime change “by any means necessary … I support everything that can bring this regime down”.⁷ In Stop the Bomb – aptly nicknamed ‘Drop the Bomb’ by German lefts – Grigat rubs shoulders with people such as the Israeli historian, Benni Morris, who complements his hysteric blustering about a “demographic threat” posed by high Palestinian birth rates with unambiguous calls for a nuclear first strike against Iran.⁸ Morris was first heard publicly making these calls at the Stop the Bomb conference in Vienna in 2008.⁹ Like Grigat, who considers Israel “too liberal”, Morris does not waste time with anything resembling a rational political argument: after all, there is always the holocaust.

Good ‘anti-Germans’

It may come as a surprise to the uninitiated, but Stephan Grigat also fancies himself – or at least presents himself – as a Marxist of sorts, being one of the key figures of the radical ‘left’ Antideutschemovement. Emerging from the Maoist (later ‘non-dogmatic left’) Kommunistischer Bund around the time of German reunification, the Anti-Germans perceived the rise of neo-Nazi activity after 1989 as testimony to their alarmist theory of a gradual “fascistisation” of German society, which they had been propounding since the 1970s. Against the background of neo-Nazi hooligans running amok everywhere from Hamburg to Hoyerswerda and a general upswing of national chauvinism, they decided that Germany was on its way to becoming a Fourth Reich and another shoah was potentially on the cards. Buttressing their theories with a carefully selected handful of quotes from Theodor Adorno, according to which preventing a new holocaust was the categorical imperative to be put above any other consideration, they embarked on a mission to hunt down Nazis and anti-Semites all across the Reich – and they claimed to see them virtually everywhere they looked, including on the anti-imperialist left.

Over the years, the ‘anti-Germans’ drifted further to the right until they essentially arrived at neo-conservative positions, albeit bolstered by left rhetoric and decorative (post-) Marxist theory snippets. Whatever value there may have initially been in their ambition to offer a critique of the stifling ‘my enemy’s enemy’ outlook of the ‘idiot anti-imperialist’ left, they merely inverted the dogma, serving as uncritical auxiliaries of the US, Israel, and the ‘war on terror’. For all its problems, George Orwell quite accurately observed in his Notes on nationalism (1945) the need of a certain type of leftwinger to identify with a particular country or nation, “placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interest”.¹⁰For the ‘Anti-Germans’, the object of their transferred nationalism is Israel, against whose unconditional ‘defence’ everything else must take a back seat. In the parallel universe of their making, all of humanity is divided between Zionists and anti-Semites.

Unfortunately for the German left, the ‘anti-Germans’ are no longer a tiny sect of delusional intellectuals, but have become a political force that is as influential as it is unpleasant. Having taken control of a considerable segment of the antifa and autonomist left, they have made inroads into the left party, Die Linke (where they are supported by the reformist leadership), and the Social Democratic Party’s youth organisation. Occupying key positions in traditionally leftwing foundations such as the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, they are strategically well placed to promote ‘young talent’, while cutting off their opponents’ money supply.

‘Soft’ anti-Germans are distinguished by the fact that they have not given up on influencing the left, making it part of their mission to lecture anti-war protestors and Occupy/Blockupy activists about their “anti-Semitism”. ‘Hard-core’ anti-Germans, on the other hand, operate according to the slogan, ‘Deny the German left and other Nazis the right to exist’. This premise manifests itself in smear campaigns against anti-Zionists and soft critics of Israeli foreign policy alike, threats, physical violence, cooperation with the police and judiciary against left activists, and other such methods of intimidation.

Whether a line between ‘soft’ and ‘hard-core’ can truly be drawn becomes a moot point, once you realise that someone like Stephan Grigat, who is considered ‘soft’ by members of the Platypus group (more on this later), addresses the left with articles such as ‘To know the worst: anti-Semitism and the failure of the left on Iran’,¹¹ while at the same time courting xenophobes at the Wiener Akademikerbund, an academic circle close to the right-populist Austrian People’s Party.¹² The German bourgeoisie has long taken a liking to such quirky ‘Marxists’, with funds flowing from the Axel Springer foundation,¹³ among others.

The left

Of course, it is not sufficient to gasp in horror at the latest ‘anti-German’ machinations, lament at how it has undermined the left and limit oneself to defending one’s turf against them – even if the latter will be necessary. To counter reactionary movements like the anti-Germans politically, we need to look at the left that threw them up in the first place.

The Kommunistischer Bund (KB), from which the early Anti-Germans emerged, was but one piece in the mosaic of the German ‘non-dogmatic left’. In opposition to the bureaucratic socialism of the eastern bloc countries and the ‘official communist’ parties of the west, but also drawing on semi-anarchist interpretations of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it threw the baby out with the bathwater, rejecting any central decision-making processes as “authoritarian”. This allowed for a lively journal, Arbeiterkampf, in which a variety of positions and controversies could be openly discussed, but also for political eclecticism, including then-fashionable opposition to ‘class reductionism’, to which the group’s social base – almost exclusively students and academics – was not unreceptive.

After all, it hailed from a generation whom Marcuse had taught that students, minorities and the declassed – rather than the “coopted” proletariat – were the future agents of revolutionary change. The fact that neither the impatient student left’s strategy of ‘entering the factories’ nor the desperate terrorism of the Red Army Faction and similar groups ignited the desired revolutionary fire in the working class seemed to confirm this. At the turn of the 80s, as most German ‘K-groups’ collapsed into the Green Party, cross-class alliances and broad social movements became the KB’s main focus – most prominently against nuclear energy. Helpfully, popular frontism had been in its political DNA from the outset.

When the original core of the ‘anti-Germans’, the Bahamas group, broke away in the wake of German reunification to spread the gospel about ‘fascistisation’ and ‘left anti-Semitism’, they found a willing audience in the anti-fascist groups that had been formed byAutonome activists to defend left spaces against skinhead and football hooligan attacks in the 1980s. The Autonome understood themselves as a radical libertarian left that aimed to operate and live ‘autonomously’ of political parties, trade unions, and – to some extent – capitalist society itself. The alternative structures they created in the form of squats and youth centres set the scene for a life-stylist, direct action-fixated subculture that was hostile to the “talking left” and held ordinary people (“society”) in contempt. One was not required to use one’s brain too much to be part of the Autonome scene – theory came second-best behind romantic left idealism, street-wise bravado and, especially later, a philistine political correctness. Frankly, it was enough just to be there, wear the right badge and like the right bands.

Though initially set up as mere self-defence units, the antifa groups increasingly assumed a life of their own with the rise of far-right violence in the 90s. What they inherited from the Autonome was their moralistic critique of fascism, which they, not unlike official German state ideology, simply regarded as The Great Evil. At best, they flogged a sub-Dimitrov line, according to which the fascists were at all times in cahoots with the state. Anti-fascism, if it constitutes one’s main political focus, has the advantage of not requiring a great deal of critical thinking. It targets an immediate, tangible enemy. Because no-one in their right mind could seriously argue for fascism or racism, it appears as the most righteous of struggles, providing plenty of opportunity for heroic posturing.

And, since it elevates the perceived threat of fascism over all other political concerns, often without positioning it in a more comprehensive theoretical framework, it is vulnerable to all manner of ideas and prone to alliances with various forces. When the police increasingly began to crack down on neo-Nazis in the early 2000s and the SPD-Green coalition government invested vast amounts of resources in anti-fascist campaigns, this caused a cognitive dissonance among many antifa activists: in content, the campaigns were not vastly different to antifa agitation. It was perhaps only a matter of time before parts of the antifa movement, lacking a materialist analysis of fascism, would be swayed by ‘anti-German’ arguments. These reproduced ruling class ideology in counterposing the “Islamo-fascism” of the Arab world to a Zionist project which allegedly represented “the Jews”. Were the imperialists not providing “shelter” from anti-Semitism by backing Israel, after all?

What all these left currents had in common – whether the more theoretically sophisticated Kommunistischer Bund cadres or the antifa foot soldiers – was their ‘non-dogmatism’, which in practice translated into a popular frontist outlook and had its roots in the frustrated workerism of the new left. The latter’s revolutionary impatience was accompanied by a rejection of ‘vanguardism’, relying on the spontaneous movement of the masses. When this was not forthcoming, the “coopted” working class was ditched and replaced by ‘third world’ nationalism, liberation struggles of the specially oppressed, autonomist projects, movementism and so on. It is true that for the ‘anti-Germans’, this served as a conveyor belt for their present anti-working class politics: at the end of the process we see them identifying the working class with Nazism and the ruling class with progress. The answer, however, is not found in a new spontaneism, which in the long run can only result in a repeat of the cycle. To rebuild the working class movement, there really is no way around the patient educating, agitating and organising of the revolutionary Marxist party, as outlined in Lenin’s What is to be done?

Platypus

Constituting a scurrilous Winston Churchill-Sir Arthur Harris-Binyamin Netanyahu fan club that, at its most extreme, wishes death and destruction upon German workers (‘Bomber Harris, do it again’), the ‘anti-Germans’ might have been relegated to the cabinet of specifically German curiosities by the international left, which they dub the “anti-Semitic international”.

Auxiliaries of imperialism and of the German ruling class, their self-perception as a moral supervisory body to whom even anti-Zionist Israelis ought to justify themselves, the ‘anti-Germans’ might just have been dismissed as a characteristic expression of the German middle classes, which have always been adept at kissing up and kicking down, depending on the historical circumstances. Their brand of Islamophobia, which is more accurately described as anti-Muslimism, would have placed them in the same camp as Geert Wilders and the English Defence League – an organisation for which the ‘anti-German’ magazine Bahamas, in a rare bout of sympathy for the underclass, finds many a word of support and understanding.¹⁴

Internationally, the ‘anti-Germans’ might well have remained in relative obscurity had the Platypus group not taken it upon itself to provide a platform for their views by translating articles such as the already mentioned ‘Anti-Semitism and the failure on the left of Iran’ – an attempt by Stephan Grigat to push Stop the Bomb’s pro-war agenda by cloaking its calls for sanctions in leftish vocabulary. Platypus, which refers to its project as “pre-political”, did not find it necessary to comment on the article – after all, “the left is dead” and Platypus is only “hosting the conversation” among its remnants, as the group’s mantras would have it. If you alert Platypus members to the poisonous nature of Grigat and his brethren, you can expect little more than to be pointed to their statement of purpose, which reminds you once more that it is not Platypus’s role to actually intervene in “the conversation”.¹⁵

As anyone with a bit of experience on the left will be quick to tell you, claims to political neutrality are often euphemisms for something fishy going on, usually located to the right of the target audience. The Platypus “pre-political” variant pays lip service to the notion that neither it nor the left more broadly has any control over world events today. More often than not, this serves as a thought-terminating cliché that can be conveniently wheeled out whenever Platypus members feel they are being put on the spot. Choosing to publish particular articles rather than others is, of course, a political decision. A ‘common sense’ can be established through editorial decisions: a strong polemic alongside a mildly critical reply, for instance, aims to leave the reader with the impression that the truth is to be found somewhere in the middle.

This becomes all the more pertinent when one goes out of one’s way to translate the monomaniac writings of a current that has hitherto played no role internationally. To refuse to comment on, let alone fail to inform the reader about, the realities of the ‘anti-German’ movement amounts to preying on ignorance. The impression is created that Grigat’s are new, exciting ideas which ought to be considered in the course of reconstituting the left – rather than the dishonest outpourings of a current that has long since crossed every class line. It is hard to believe that Platypus, as a body, is unaware of the material realities pertaining to the ‘anti-German’ movement, seeing as some of its German members are embedded in the ‘soft’Antideutsche milieu themselves. This does not stop the group from treating the musings of Grigat et al as if they existed in isolation from the material world. To focus on the realm of ideas exclusively, to disconnect theory from practice – to Marxists, these are strange traits indeed.

More to the point, the very fact that Platypus considers the ‘anti-Germans’ to be part of the left is where trouble begins. One should be careful not to respond in kind to the ‘anti-German’ speciality of smearing everybody and everything as ‘Nazi’ or ‘fascist’. However, it is difficult not to experience a certain déjà vu at the sight of an overwhelmingly middle class movement that combats and intimidates the left with any means at its disposal – ranging from defamation and threats, including posting Redwatch-type left activist profiles on the internet, through to open cooperation with the repressive state apparatus.

Arguably, the relative infrequency of physical violence has more to do with the fact that the ‘anti-Germans’ have thus far failed to recruit street thugs rather than with their good intentions. Beside targeting the far left, they have campaigned against the remnants of the social democratic welfare state that are in the way of the capitalist offensive. We have seen all of this before, including from historical movements that fought the working class and its organisations under the guise of anti-capitalism, sometimes led by people who had emerged from the left. At our most generous, we could point to the ex-Eurocommunists who ended up among Tony Blair’s closest advisors: to seriously publish articles by Martin Kettle et al by the early 2000s in order to help ‘reconstitute the left’ would have been an absurdity.

Naturally, it is not a sin to publish or debate any text, including transparent attempts at weakening the left’s resistance against the war on Iran – as long as you make your own position clear. If Platypus refuses to do so, it must accept that the left will take the group’s connections, its evasions and the general direction in which its idiosyncratic understanding of what passes for ‘left’ politics seems to be pointing as a clear enough answer. At its most elemental, the left opposes privilege, while the right defends it. The ‘anti-German’ movement has amply demonstrated in both theory and practice to which camp it belongs, and eventually Platypus, too, will have to decide on which side of the class divide it stands. However much it refers to the “dead left” – and to some extent justifiably so – its magazine does not exist in a political vacuum.

As for the ‘anti-Germans’, there is not much more to say about them except that they should be driven out of the left as far as they still stick their heads inside it. For those groups that are in contact with Platypus, including the CPGB, there is certainly some value in engaging with those who are open to debate. Nonetheless, it is vital to keep a sense of perspective and priorities: are endless debates about the left’s alleged anti-Semitism worth devoting one’s time and energy to, or are there more crucial issues at stake? Ultimately, we cannot afford to repeat the errors of vast segments of the German left, which, by jumping through every hoop held before them by the ‘anti-Germans’, has truly debated itself to death.

Notes

1. www.jenapolis.de/2009/11/die-jenaer-hochschulzeitschrift-unique-muss-sich-von-ihrem-redaktionsmitglied-fabian-koehler-trennen.

2. www.neues-deutschland.de/artikel/235583.krieg-in-der-diaspora.html?sstr=fabian|k%F6hler.

3. www.muslim-markt.de/interview/2008/koehler_fabian.htm.

4. www.neues-deutschland.de/artikel/237545.deine-mutter-baut-atombomben.html.

5. Köhler has not always been cautious with regard to politically correct etiquette. Editing Unique, he uncompromisingly pursued the magazine’s ambition of “featuring an uncensored and undogmatic diversity of opinions”. This diversity included interviews with prostitutes and porn actresses about sexism, an interview with a Palestinian journalist with alleged Hamas links, opinions from a local Jewish ‘community leader’ and the previously mentioned interview with a local neo-Nazi cadre. But, however controversial the magazine’s choices, its focus on anti-racism and what it called “interculturalism” – ie, the exchange and merging of different cultures instead of multiculturalism’s secluded coexistence – always provided an explicit context. Antifa activists did not approve of Unique’s journalistic ethos and ritualistically burned several hundred copies in the town centre of Jena, dubbing the magazine an “anti-Semitic agitational organ”.

6. http://fredalanmedforth.blogspot.de/2011/11/orf-interview-mit-stephan-grigat-stop.html.

7. www.cafecritique.priv.at/IranAlsBedrohung.html.

8. http://derstandard.at/3325698?seite=9.

9. http://derstandard.at/3325059.

10. http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat.

11. http://platypus1917.org/2012/09/01/anti-semitism-and-failure-of-left-on-iran.

12. https://linksunten.indymedia.org/de/node/35171.

13. The Axel Springer Verlag is the German equivalent of the Murdoch empire and publishes the papers Die Welt and Bild, both of which feature contributions from ‘anti-German’ writers.

14. www.redaktion-bahamas.org/auswahl/web59-2.html.

15. http://platypus1917.org/about/statement.