German Trotskyists Say: Solidarity with Greek Workers

Financial Crisis Rocks Imperialist EU

For a Socialist United States of Europe!

European leaders agreed in mid May on an almost $1 trillion package of credits for Greece and other heavily indebted European Union (EU) countries, clearly expecting that committing such an unprecedented sum would calm jittery financial markets. Instead, capitalists worldwide became even more fearful that, with a number of EU governments groaning under the weight of huge deficits, European banks with large holdings of Greek and other government debt might be facing crippling losses. With global financiers cutting back on lending within the euro zone, many industrial companies and even banks are increasingly finding their sources of credit cut off. This all raises the spectre of a full-blown financial crisis in Europe that could potentially trigger a renewed economic downturn worldwide.

Capitalist rulers across Europe—especially in the most debt-ridden countries like Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain—are determined to make workers pay for the growing economic crisis. The austerity measures that governments are trying to ram through include slashing the wages of public-sector workers, gutting pensions and jacking up sales and other taxes.

Workers have not been taking these attacks lying down. Greece has had a total of five one-day general strikes so far this year, with another projected for sometime in June to coincide with the debate in parliament on a bill to slash pensions. On May 27, hundreds of thousands demonstrated across France as strikes against a government plan to raise the retirement age delayed flights, closed schools and interrupted train traffic. In Spain, a public sector strike has been called for June 8, while in Italy the six-million-strong CGIL union federation has announced a nationwide stoppage for June 25. This rising line of working-class struggles points to the need to forge revolutionary parties that can lead the proletariat, at the head of all the oppressed, to sweep away the bankrupt capitalist order.

We reprint below an abridged translation of an article published in Spartakist No. 183 (May 2010), publication of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

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Trade unions in Greece carried out two nationwide general strikes on February 24 and March 11 in response to assaults on wages and pensions by the nationalist government headed by George Papandreou of PASOK [Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement]. The Greek government is carrying out a program dictated in large part by the European Union and imperialist Germany, the dominant power in the EU. The Greek ruling class is, however, not just a minion of the EU; it is also using this opportunity to smash the power of the Greek trade unions and enrich itself even more blatantly. As to supposedly shifting the burden of the crisis onto “high incomes” through new tax rates, with which PASOK wants to calm the anger of the poorer layers of the Greek population, Manager Magazin (24 February) reported on the response of the Greek bourgeoisie: “Capital Flight: Greeks Transferring Billions to Safe Havens.”

Here in Germany, the bourgeoisie has unleashed a chauvinist campaign with blanket accusations that Greece had been living “beyond its means” and had engaged in “lies” and “deception” regarding the Greek budget deficit, etc. Josef Schlarmann, chairman of the CDU [right-wing Christian Democratic Union] association for medium-sized industry, went so far as to suggest that the Greek government should sell “uninhabited islands” and other state property to cut its deficit. This was seized upon by [the tabloid] Bild and turned into a campaign that ran for weeks. In an expression of the German bourgeoisie’s imperial arrogance, EU members Greece, Spain and Portugal as well as Italy and Ireland—increasingly hard-hit by the economic crisis—have been chauvinistically stigmatized with the acronym “PIGS.”

Germany has traditionally viewed the Balkans in particular as its backyard, with the peoples of the region forced to toe the line or else directly suffer the jackboot of German imperialism. In World War II, German imperialism occupied Greece and Yugoslavia, employing the bloodiest means in its efforts to suppress the heroic resistance. And at the beginning of the 1990s, German imperialism played a key role in promoting counterrevolution by goading the peoples of the Yugoslav deformed workers state into bloody internecine, nationalist wars. In 1999, the SPD [Social Democratic Party]/Green government under [Gerhard] Schröder and [Joschka] Fischer along with its NATO allies participated in the U.S.-led war against Serbia, establishing an occupation regime in large parts of the former Yugoslavia. Now economic means are being employed in an attempt to force Greece, an “ally” and EU member, to cooperate and squeeze the last drop of blood out of the Greek working class and oppressed. German army out of the Balkans!

The last few weeks have been dominated by power struggles in the German government and the EU over how to deal with the catastrophic situation. Finance Minister [Wolfgang] Schäuble suggested setting up a European monetary fund in order to avert such catastrophes in the future. But Chancellor [Angela] Merkel, fearing Germany would ultimately be stuck with the bill, was averse to this plan, instead suggesting that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) deal with Greece. Der Spiegel (22 March), on the other hand, cites Schäuble stating that “the American-dominated IMF [is regarded] as an extension of U.S. foreign policy and has no business in the euro zone.” Reflected in the government debate is the continual argument over whether German foreign policy should orient toward the U.S., as desired by the “Atlanticists,” or toward a more independent course leaning on Russian support, as openly promoted by Schröder. But this is just a debate over which course is better for German imperialism.

At any rate, Merkel and Schäuble, unwilling for Germany to act as Europe’s “paymaster” any longer, are united in the aim of having Germany emerge a winner from the economic crisis. Many commentators fear that their course is acutely endangering the EU and the euro. The arrogance of Merkel & Co. bespeaks German imperialism’s newfound self-confidence, causing the rest of Europe to fear ominous developments to come. As “Madam No!” Merkel seemingly had her way at the EU summit and was hailed at home as the new “Iron Lady”—a reference to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who made her name through her all-out war against the trade unions in the 1980s and subsequent destruction of Britain’s manufacturing sector.

But this acclaim and the deal whereby Greece would have been forced to pay market interest rates—which would have driven Greek indebtedness sky-high forever—did not persist for long. French president [Nicolas] Sarkozy got together with Italian prime minister [Silvio] Berlusconi and European Central Bank head [Jean-Claude] Trichet and worked out a different deal, guaranteeing initial loans to Greece at an interest rate of 5 percent. And Schäuble agreed to this in a conference of the finance ministers. Financial Times (13 April) columnist Wolfgang Münchau noted: “As long as the credits are paid back, with this contract more funds will be flowing from Athens to Berlin than vice versa.”

And it’s toward Berlin that the transfer of wealth has been steadily proceeding. When French finance minister [Christine] Lagarde criticized overly low wages in Germany, which she blamed for imbalances in the EU, she was greeted with a wave of outrage from Germany’s ruling class and its literary hacks. However, in the 10 March Frankfurter Rundschau, Heiner Flassbeck and Friederike Spiecker advanced arguments similar to Lagarde’s: “Greece and all of southern Europe need a leveling-out [of wage levels], because they, rightly, did not participate in German wage-slashing over the last ten years. This leveling-out must occur in the medium term; otherwise the euro can’t be preserved, no matter how long, how hard or by which institution the thumbscrews are applied to the Greeks.” They go on to complain, “With the assistance of the [European] Central Bank, German policy doggedly refuses to reflect on the actual source of balance-of-payments disparities—Germany’s policy of slashing wages.”

While these “imbalances” do genuinely exist, appealing to the German government and the capitalists to pay higher wages, as the SPD and Die Linke [Left Party] similarly do, is utterly delusional
—it’s like convincing sharks to become vegetarians. With this crisis the German bourgeoisie feels the wind in its sails and intends to extract even more profits out of the workers of Germany and Europe. The only way to oppose this is hard class struggle.

EU: From Anti-Soviet Alliance to Imperialist Consortium

As proletarian internationalists, we communists are opposed on principle to the EU, which is dominated by the imperialist powers Germany, France and Britain. The EU exists centrally to advance the interests of these imperialists and their junior partners and to employ the stronger dependent states such as Greece and many East European countries as their manufacturing backyard. Since the mid 1990s, the EU has served increasingly as a means for totally excluding refugees and immigrants, who are either left to drown in the Mediterranean or held in detention camps reminiscent of concentration camps, to be shipped back as rapidly as possible to the hellish conditions in countries exploited or directly destroyed by imperialism.

But the EU is itself a fragile formation exposed to continuous tensions stemming from the disparate national interests of the European imperialists, which threaten to split it apart. Nor can it be otherwise. Although the productive forces have long since expanded beyond a national framework, capitalism is a system resting essentially on nation-states: each of the various national capitalist classes needs its own state to push through and defend its interests at home and abroad. This contradiction is, indeed, one of the causes of the last two world wars. And hence the supposed goal of political union or a European super-state is necessarily an empty utopia. Even the free-trade alliance of the EU is threatened in the present crisis due to the imbalances inevitably created by rapacious capitalism. As the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin, a leader of the first successful workers revolution, wrote in August 1915:

“Of course, temporary agreements are possible between capitalists and between states. In this sense a United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists...but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe, of jointly protecting colonial booty against Japan and America.”

—“On the Slogan for a United States of Europe”

The origins of the European Union go back to the 1950s, when the West European imperialists under U.S. leadership attempted to stabilize their alliance against the Soviet Union through closer economic cooperation. Issuing out of the October Revolution of 1917, the Soviet Union remained a workers state—based on the expropriation of the capitalists and the collectivization of the means of production—despite its degeneration, which commenced in 1924 with the appropriation of political power by the bureaucratic caste led by Stalin. This is why we Trotskyists unconditionally defended the Soviet Union militarily, and this is why the imperialists always desired to destroy it, wanting to regain unimpaired access for their capital into East Europe and the Soviet Union and to be able once again to exploit the peoples living there.

Our opposition on principle to both NATO—the military alliance against the Soviet Union—and the EU and its predecessors derived from our unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union, the DDR [East Germany] and the other deformed workers states of East Europe. The character of the EU underwent a change with the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, when the anti-Soviet aim of the EU disappeared. To assert their own interests more effectively vis-à-vis their U.S. rivals, Germany and France—themselves rival imperialist powers—sought to improve their coordination and, among other things, to maneuver with capitalist Russia.

In 1989, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, then French president [François] Mitterrand made French acquiescence to German reunification dependent on the two countries’ agreement on a common currency. This was supposed to help avert the danger of a newly strengthened Germany going it alone and to prevent confrontations between the two “partners.” Additionally, it would be a weapon in the currency war against the international hegemony of the U.S. dollar. From this the euro emerged. But the unity between these two imperialist powers is itself fraught with conflict, as demonstrated by the disputes over shifting production sites and mass firings at Airbus, the Franco-German-dominated airplane manufacturer and defense concern, in the early spring of 2007, as well as by French finance minister Lagarde’s criticism of export-fixated German industry. Supported by British imperialism, the U.S. is attempting to slow down or prevent the consolidation of such a competing imperialist bloc.

The Euro and German Imperialism

The attitude of the German bourgeoisie toward the introduction of the euro was mixed to negative, since it saw the danger of ceding sovereignty rights while obtaining a currency that would tend to soften. In particular, the experience of the catastrophic inflation of the 1923 crisis seems to have put a permanent stamp on the German capitalist class. Only four years after the German bourgeoisie had barely averted being overthrown by proletarian revolution in 1918-19, thanks to the betrayal of the SPD and USPD [Independent Social Democratic] leadership, in 1923 the [right-wing] Cuno government sought to shift the costs of [World War I] reparations to French imperialism onto the working class and the lower middle classes by stoking inflation. The result was an intensifying crisis that provided the best chance so far for the German working class to take power into its own hands through socialist revolution—by that time the KPD [German Communist Party] had become a mass party anchored in the proletariat. But the revolutionary leadership of the KPD had not sufficiently broken with the politics of the SPD and allowed the chance to pass.

The price demanded by Germany for introduction of the euro was far-reaching concessions from other members of the euro zone that would guarantee the euro’s hardness. Thus no political pressure was to be put on the European Central Bank; the “Stability Pact” [part of the basis for launching the euro] stipulates that new indebtedness of a country cannot exceed 3 percent of the gross domestic product and provides for massive penalties should this figure be exceeded.

Ironically, however, it was Germany under Schröder that was the first to violate this treaty and then used its power to avoid having to pay the fines. Now, with Greece and potentially other countries as well in a much more dangerous situation, Germany is mustering all its forces—and there is not a trace of solidarity with an EU “partner.” The chauvinist campaign against Greece is being set in motion so as to prevent the German working class from hitting on the idea of placing blame for the crisis at the feet of the capitalist system and its own rulers. The workers movement in Germany must mobilize in solidarity with Greek workers and all the other victims of the EU imperialists—after all, they’ll be confronted with similar attacks in the immediate future. The witchhunt against Greece also serves to split and weaken the multiethnic working class in Germany.

SPD: “Social Demagogy” for German Imperialism

Sigmar Gabriel, the chairman of the SPD, a bourgeois workers party, sang the same tune as the government, blaming Greece and rejecting financial support. To the question of whether Germany should aid Greece, he replied (Bild interview, 5 March):

“Yes. But not by sending money to Athens. This would be wrong and irresponsible! Because we’ll be going into debt ourselves for this or would have to cut back on educational and social spending. This would mean: the weakest among us would have us bleed for the gamblers and speculators—an absurd notion!”

As for the poor “bleeding for the gamblers and speculators,” the SPD/Green government in 1998-2005 used all its power to drive this forward. For example, by eliminating the tax on sales of equity shares, it freed capital that had been tied to industry and enabled speculation in the financial markets, among other things.

Assuming something of a left face, Gabriel seeks to divert attention from this: “We must fight this ‘plague of locusts’ and finally pull the plug on the speculators.” What a mockery, coming from a party that was in power for 13 years and made the rich infinitely richer and plunged millions of workers and their families into bitter poverty. It was precisely Schröder’s Agenda 2010, the Hartz reforms [supposedly freeing up the “frozen” German labor market] and the loosening of regulations on hiring temporary workers that opened the path to more power for the “gamblers and speculators,” who are not “American,” but are to be found in the Frankfurt bank towers and in the central offices of big German corporations.

The last great act of the Grand Coalition of the CDU and SPD was helping the banks get out of the fix their drive for profit had gotten them into. For this, the capitalists’ government had hundreds of billions of euros to spare, “expropriating” the banks’ massive debts, so that the country’s working class is now paying them through taxes. The superprofits that the banks are making again stem from surplus value created by Greek, East European, German and other workers, which the capitalists are appropriating.

Left Party: For an EU with a Social Sugarcoating

The completely social-democratic Left Party solidarized with the protests of the trade unions and oppressed in Greece against the starvation program imposed by the EU...on paper. (The Left Party came into existence through a fusion of the ex-Stalinist [East German] Party of Democratic Socialism with trade unionists and leftists in the West who were dissatisfied with the SPD.) However, it did not carry out solidarity actions through its base in the trade unions. For the Left Party, “solidarity with Greece” really has nothing to do with class struggle against the German bourgeoisie but only with admonishing it to carry out a “more social” policy. Thus, in a February 26 statement, [Left Party parliamentary spokesman] Ulrich Maurer worried about the cohesion of the capitalist EU and of capitalism itself: “If the gambling continues, a chain reaction is preprogrammed in other countries. Weak countries in the euro zone like Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy have chalked up debts of 524 billion euros with German financial institutions. The results would be incalculable.” He then calls on Germany to stand in the forefront in assisting Greece.

In a March 5 press release, the Left Party introduced its positive program:

“Chancellor Merkel must finally rein in the speculators. The Left Party demands a reform of the euro zone: the EU must launch euro loans so as to reduce the risk premium for Greece, the European Central Bank should purchase Greek state bonds to break the power of the speculators and the rating agencies. To avoid this sort of crisis in the future, corporate taxes should be harmonized Europe-wide and a Foreign Economic Stability Pact adopted.”

The demands addressed to Merkel to rein in speculators or hurry to the aid of Greece may sound nice but proceed from the false assumption that capitalism is rational and can be steered, and that the German bourgeoisie is not driven by profit. So this is all a dangerous illusion. The Left Party then comes to the conclusion that it simply wants a more social EU, where the effects of capitalism are not so extreme. “Europe needs its own monetary fund, one that will explicitly not take the IMF as its model.... The Left Party will support a European Monetary Fund only if it breaks with this policy” (March 8 press statement). That is putting sheep’s clothing on the EU capitalist wolf so as to reconcile the working-class base of the Left Party with the EU and prevent it from waging class struggle against the EU and the German capitalists.

This “social Europe” does not exist. The “welfare state” in West Germany owed its existence to the struggles of the working class and the existence of the DDR and the Soviet Union, which impelled the German bourgeoisie to surrender part of its profits. With the destruction of the DDR and the Soviet Union, the German bourgeoisie views this “welfare state” as simply too expensive. What we are seeing in the EU are the centrifugal forces of the various nationalisms that are driving the EU apart—and the euro zone even more so. This will continue.

On the one hand, the EU is a bloc directed against its imperialist rivals, the U.S. and Japan. On the other, it is an instrument of the European imperialists, first and foremost the German imperialists, to exploit the working class of Europe more effectively. It will exist only as long as it serves this aim. Otherwise other instruments will be brought to the fore to advance these interests, above all protectionism—which is on the advance
—or, ultimately, imperialist war once again. The solution for Europe’s working class lies not in the deceptive “unity” of imperialist/capitalist nation-states but in the Socialist United States of Europe.

The Left Party has again and again made clear that it is committed to bourgeois democracy. In a further significant expression of its underlying loyalty to capitalism, the Left Party leadership distances itself from the DDR deformed workers state, where industry and the banks were nationalized. The question of whom nationalization benefits is inseparably linked to which class rules. Thus Commerzbank was “partially nationalized” and Hypo Real Estate wholly nationalized so as to rescue these for the capitalists. In France and Italy, industries have often been controlled by the state, which did not make them any less exploitative. In the [1938] Transitional Program, Trotsky explains how our calls for nationalization differ from those of the reformists à la the Left Party. The phrase “charlatans of the popular front” refers to those who want to forge capitalist coalition governments with the participation of bourgeois workers parties like the SPD or the Left Party:

“In precisely the same way, we demand the expropriation of the corporations holding monopolies on war industries, railroads, the most important sources of raw materials, etc.

“The difference between these demands and the muddleheaded reformist slogan of ‘nationalization’ lies in the following: (1) we reject indemnification; (2) we warn the masses against demagogues of the People’s Front who, giving lip service to nationalization, remain in reality agents of capital; (3) we call upon the masses to rely only upon their own revolutionary strength; (4) we link up the question of expropriation with that of seizure of power by the workers and farmers.

“The necessity of advancing the slogan of expropriation in the course of daily agitation in partial form, and not only in our propaganda in its more comprehensive aspects, is dictated by the fact that different branches of industry are on different levels of development, occupy a different place in the life of society, and pass through different stages of the class struggle. Only a general revolutionary upsurge of the proletariat can place the complete expropriation of the bourgeoisie on the order of the day. The task of transitional demands is to prepare the proletariat to solve this problem.”

The Left Party is also striving to administer capitalist society in North Rhine-Westphalia. What is required in order to be permitted to do this is demonstrated by Berlin’s SPD/Left Party government. In 2002 the PDS (now the Left Party) was brought into the government so as to save the Berlin Bank Company (of which the City of Berlin is incidentally the majority owner) from bankruptcy with guarantees of over 21.6 billion euros. The Berlin government disposed of the profitable parts, now leaving the State of Berlin to pay off the 9.7 billion in losses at the expense of Berlin’s workers, pensioners, children, etc. It is throwing these billions to the capitalists, just as the CDU, SPD and FDP [Free Democratic Party] are doing on a national scale.

We communists oppose on principle any participation in capitalist governments. As Rosa Luxemburg explained, when socialists join the government of a capitalist state, this does not transform it into a socialist government but rather transforms the socialists into bourgeois ministers who are permitted to administer the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (see “Down With Executive Offices of the Capitalist State! Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009).

DGB Leadership: Class Collaboration for “Production-Site Germany”

Anyone commenting a bit critically on governmental policy toward Greece makes the point that the “wage moderation” of the last few years has contributed to the “imbalances” in the EU and the euro zone. Thus the SPD’s Europe expert [Angelica] Schwall-Düren notes in the [Berlin] Tagesspiegel (25 February): “The Greek balance of payments deficit is also a product of the German export surplus, which was achieved through slashing wages at the expense of German workers and other EU member states.” Speaking for the Left Party, Michael Schlecht explained in a March 8 press statement: “The Left Party calls for, among other things, a foreign economic stability pact to end German wage slashing.” Whatever may be meant by “foreign economic stability pact,” the Berlin SPD/
Left Party-controlled city government, which has been on the cutting edge of slashing public sector wages, has hardly set a good example of ending wage cuts locally. Indeed, just the opposite has happened with these treacherous “socialists” in the government.

As virtually every worker has personally experienced, the reality in Germany has been falling wages. Even harder hit are the unemployed. These are the effects of counterrevolution in the DDR and East Europe 20 years ago and shortly afterward in the Soviet Union itself. The DDR’s industry was virtually leveled, robbing its working class of its social power. Shortly after capitalist reunification, assaults on the working class in West Germany were intensified enormously. The then-CDU/FDP government under Helmut Kohl did win some concessions from the trade unions, but a large-scale breakthrough was prevented. It was only the SPD/Green government under Schröder and Fischer that achieved this breakthrough, resulting in a “revival” of the German economy. That government also carried out the first war deployment of the German army since World War II.

With the Hartz laws and the lifting of restrictions on subcontracted labor and short-term wage contracts, the SPD and Greens effectively instituted a nationwide low-wage sector, one that has also been exerting pressure on the wages of permanent employees for a long time now. When hundreds of thousands of subcontracted workers were fired at the outset of the crisis and the short-term contracts of workers were not renewed, [metalworkers union] IG Metall scarcely lifted a finger in their defense. The trade-union bureaucracy sees its clientele as being mainly workers on fixed contracts, whose jobs are supposedly being saved through this sellout of the weaker parts of the working class. But in fact these assaults are also impacting core workforces, albeit with some delay. What’s necessary is class struggle to rebuild the unions. For a fight to organize the unorganized! Equal pay for equal work! For an end to the division between permanent employees, contracted workers and workers on short-term contracts! One company, one union, one wage scale! For a class-struggle trade-union leadership!

The “upsurge” of the German economy in the last few years was paid for by the working class through enormously increased exploitation. This was carried out with the active support of the Social Democratic trade-union bureaucracy, which accepted, basically without a fight, one wage reduction after another and a massive worsening of working conditions. This took place, and continues to take place, under the pretext of “preserving jobs” as part of the framework of the nationalist campaign for “Production-Site Germany” [maintaining Germany as a manufacturing center].

The nadir, at least for now, of this tragedy of sellout and betrayal can be seen in this year’s wage contract negotiations in the metalworking industries and in public service. IG Metall did not even present a wage demand and immediately obtained a contract with vague promises and clauses rolling back workers’ gains. Following a warning strike, [public employees union] Ver.di called for mediation and accepted a lousy deal that can only mean a further drop in real wages. This is having a negative effect on union membership: the number of [union confederation] DGB members fell from eight million in 1999 to 6.26 million in 2009. Feeling themselves challenged, the union tops are attempting to bureaucratically silence leftist oppositionists in the unions.

The Social Democratic trade-union leadership is attempting as far as possible to stifle all struggles in embryo, since it fundamentally shares the nationalist conception and lie that what is good for the employer is also good for the workers. This includes conspiring with the bosses to improve by hook or by crook the “competitiveness” of the given firm, i.e., the bosses’ rate of profit. At the beginning of December, the bureaucrats’ strategy came to a dead end, as workers at Daimler’s Sindelfingen plant began protests against the transfer of 60 percent of [Mercedes] C-Class production to [the German city of] Bremen and 20 percent to the U.S. Rightly fearing loss of their jobs, they struck effectively for several days. But the thrust of the struggle was nationalist and protectionist. Thus one banner stigmatized the Daimler Executive Board as “vaterlandslose Gesellen” [“men without a fatherland”]; the underlying tenor was that Mercedes had to remain “German” and the C-Class in Stuttgart.

A deal was made that would supposedly guarantee the Sindelfingen jobs, with production of the SL roadster being shifted from Bremen to Sindelfingen. This led to protests and strikes in January by Daimler workers in Bremen, who demanded that production of the SL roadster remain in Bremen. These struggles were praised by oppositional trade unionists like those of “Alternative” and virtually the entire left, without the slightest criticism of the nationalist thrust or the divisions between workers in the various plants.

The Berlin Alternative (8 December 2009), a Daimler workers’ newspaper, states: “The goal must be to mobilize co-workers in all plants comprehensively to preserve all jobs.” While this is correct, Alternative maintains total silence on the nationalist campaign against the transfer of 20 percent of the C-Class to the U.S. Nor can they do anything else, since they basically share the conception of “co-determining” what is produced where. This is nothing but wretched co-management and class collaboration: “Critical fellow workers...demand that the transfer of the C-Class must be stopped.” Thus in its report on the Bremen strikes, the 23 February Alternative fails to mention that these were directed against the transfer of the SL roadster to Sindelfingen.

The questions of what and where to invest will be a matter of concern for the workers when they rule and the plants belong to them through the expropriation of the capitalists. Wanting to “co-determine” today only chains the workers to their own exploiters and divides them—country against country, plant against plant, young against old, etc. What is required instead is a struggle of class against class—one based on international solidarity that also includes American workers and puts an end to the playing off of workers from various localities and companies against each another. IG Metall can support the struggle to organize workers in Daimler plants in the non-union U.S. South through waging class struggle against the Daimler bosses in Germany, thereby breaking the downward spiral of wages. What is necessary is a fight for distributing work to all hands at full pay! For a radical shortening of the workweek at full pay! But to achieve the right to work for everyone, trade-union struggle alone is insufficient—capitalism must be overthrown worldwide through socialist revolutions.

For Class Struggle Against German Bourgeoisie and Capitalist EU!

In reality, the current conflicts demonstrate that the EU is an imperialist bloc that will sooner or later break apart over its contradictions, and opposition to the EU from an internationalist perspective is very necessary indeed. Down with the EU and racist Fortress Europe!

As is the case at Daimler, in many industries in Germany, Turkish, Greek and German workers as well as workers from the former Yugoslavia have been working side by side for decades. They must be mobilized in the fight against the German capitalist class, as well as the EU dominated by it, if they are to defend themselves, the Greek working class and the workers of Europe. The German capitalists profit endlessly by driving Greek workers into misery. They are planning the same thing here, especially once the elections in North Rhine-Westphalia are over. The main hindrance to fighting this program is the social-democratic misleaders, whether from the SPD or the Left Party, who act as the doctor at the sickbed of capitalism.

The multiethnic German working class, with its various components from Mediterranean lands, the Balkans and East Europe—with often more militant class-struggle traditions—possesses the organic links to support the struggles of Greek workers, of Turkish and Kurdish workers in Turkey as well as of workers in many other countries. Above and beyond this, a joint internationalist struggle here in Germany would be seen as a beacon to the working class of East Europe and worldwide to take up the struggle against increasing exploitation and oppression. Such a struggle could mark the beginning of the end for the EU imperialist alliance and introduce a struggle for the Socialist United States of Europe, which would eliminate exploitation, racism and national oppression in an internationally coordinated planned economy! Central to this is the reforging of the Fourth International as world party of proletarian revolution, the task the International Communist League has set for itself.