Die Linke presents blueprint for party platform

[Die Neue Zeit]

[I have threads on this in the Die Linke usergroup and the German forum, since the text is still only in German.]

http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20100321-26017.html


Germany’s socialist party The Left has submitted a draft of its policy platform, some two-and-a-half years after its founding. Both the conservatives and the SPD attacked the 25-page paper as a populist hodgepodge.

Representatives from a 16-member commission led by The Left party leaders Oskar Lafontaine and Lothar Bisky unanimously adopted the draft programme earlier in the week before presenting it in Berlin on Saturday. The completed platform will not be put to a vote until autumn next year.

Bisky said the coming debate of the party programme would help establish what “defines the core of The Left’s identity.” Fellow party head Lafontaine said the leftists would use the new platform to stake out the party's ambition to govern – even at the federal level, under the right circumstances.

The new document outlines three principles meant to guide the party’s work, which include achieving a “society united in solidarity” and putting that goal before economic concerns.

The party’s immediate aims include guaranteeing the right to decent jobs, access to quality, tuition-free education and a fair tax system that takes pressure off of low- and middle-income earners.

The programme also recommends that the country's power, telecommunications and railway companies be turned into state collectives, though Bisky denied the party would use East Germany's political system as a model. The draft programme outlined the party's support for voter referendums and political strikes, which are currently not allowed in Germany.

Hans-Peter Friedrich from the Bavarian sister party of Merkel's Christian Democrats said the draft programme revealed the leftists’ “true face” and opposition to freedom and democracy in German society.

The Social Democratic Party's general secretary Andrea Nahles described the document as “hodgepodge” of contradictory information. “You can’t make a state out of East German nostalgia and narrow-minded delusions of power,” she said.

But the Left Party saw the criticism as a sign the party is moving in the right direction. “If there were no outcry from our political opponents, then we’d have done something wrong,” Left Party deputy leader Klaus Ernst said.

The Left was founded by the union of the successor to the East German communist party and disgruntled western German trade unionists that had once supported the Social Democrats (SPD). Under the leadership of Lafontaine, once the head of the SPD, the hard-line socialist party has started to establish itself across western Germany.

[Red Commissar]

Ahh, all the buzz words

FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY
EAST GERMAN NOSTALGIA

If they're getting the major parties commenting on them, I suppose that's a start like Mr. Ernst said.

I'm not to familiar with Die Linke past what I've read about them on the internet. I know they have their draft posted but being in German I can't read it... could you possibly give some highlights of it that the article glossed over?

[zimmerwald1915]

The new document outlines three principles meant to guide the party’s work, which include achieving a “society united in solidarity” and putting that goal before economic concerns.
I agree with Gramsci: as soon as a passable translation's out, it'd be nice to have it posted. The way the "society united in solidarity" is presented here smacks of class collaborationism to me, but again, that could simply be the article's presentation.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Ahh, all the buzz words

FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY
EAST GERMAN NOSTALGIA

If they're getting the major parties commenting on them, I suppose that's a start like Mr. Ernst said.

I'm not to familiar with Die Linke past what I've read about them on the internet. I know they have their draft posted but being in German I can't read it... could you possibly give some highlights of it that the article glossed over?

1) 35-hour workweek but also plans for a 30-hour workweek based on future productivity growth
2) Right of workers veto against closures except in clear cases of business insolvency
3) Nationalization of banks
4) (Already mentioned) Political strikes

The only sad thing missing from this platform is Oskar Lafontaine's statement years back to include this from the Communist Manifesto:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/album.php?albumid=553&pictureid=4808

"For exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, (the bourgeoisie) has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."

[syndicat]

But as is made clear in the stance of Die Linke in the Babylon Cinema struggle in Berlin (where they have supported implicitly the effort to destroy the anarcho-syndicalist FAU), they do not support workers' right to a union of their own choosing or grassroots unionism. Nor do they appear to have any critique of the bureaucratic service unionism of the DGB.

[FSL]

1) 35-hour workweek but also plans for a 30-hour workweek based on future productivity growth
2) Right of workers veto against closures except in clear cases of business insolvency
3) Nationalization of banks
4) (Already mentioned) Political strikes



Are these immediate aims? Because even for Die Linke this looks like not that much if it's their program of governance.

Syndicat, most people -I hope- don't really think highly of Linke anyway. Looking at where it's heading -or what its promises are- can be important though, after all it is a major party in the former DDR states.

[syndicat]

To give a brief background: Last June a struggle for a contract began by the workers at Babylon Cinema, which is subsidized somewhat by the SDP-Die Linke coalition government in Berlin. workers organized a boycott to put pressure on management. In violation of the workers' boycott, Die Linke held its pre-election party and gathering at the Cinema in September.

Most of the workers at the cinema are supporters of the syndicalist FAU grassroots union. When FAU showed up at Die Linke's event to protest their violation of the boycott, they found Die Linke people handing out leaflets denouncing the FAU.

The manager of the cinema is Timothy Grossman, who has tried to get FAU socked with fines and imprisonment of its union secretary. He is the son of Die Linke supporter and former East German Communist journalist Victor Grossman.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Are these immediate aims? Because even for Die Linke this looks like not that much if it's their program of governance.

Gramsci asked for highlights, so obviously I tried to give four or five policy differences with the mainstream.

[vyborg]

Well the pieces of programmes you gave seemed very interesting...I hope to read the whole programme soon

[Die Neue Zeit]

You can actually read the whole program on their main page if you use Google Translate:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fdie-linke.de%2Fprogramm%2Fprogrammentwurf%2F

[Die Neue Zeit]

Participatory Budgeting (http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2010/03/24/paticipatory-budgeting/) by Paul Cockshott




Today’s budget day played out an old ritual. One man with a red bag of office will reveal what he has decided the nation will spend and how it will raise taxes to finance this.

This is the way it is done, and this is the way it seems always to have been done, ‘democratic politics’ is played out around his decisions. The Labour Party will go into the election on the basis of these decisions and the Tories will oppose them, offering some half revealed alternative package deal.

The voters will, for once, have a yes no decision to make on the package in a couple of months. But what if you agree with some of the buget and not other parts, what if you agree with the level of education expenditure but not the level of naval procurement. What if you would prefer the top rate of tax to be 55% not 50%.

Tough!

Its take it or leave it.

There has to be a better way. If phone voting can be used to decide trivial issues like who should leave Big Brother, why can the public not have a say on the important issues that affect them.

It would be quite possible to put up a website with say half a dozen key questions
Should the top rate of tax go up 5%, down 5% or stay the same.
Should VAT go up by 2%, down, 2% or stay the same.
Should health expenditure go up 5%, down 5%, or stay the same.

Provided that the government had previously decided on the overall level of borrowing it is quite simple to count the votes and decide on a consensus level of taxes and expentitures. I show this in the talk I will be giving to the BCS conference next month.

If such a democratic budgeting system were introduced, and if there were provision for citizens initiatives on what questions were to be included in the vote, politics would change. Campaigns would arise focused around specific changes to the tax system that benefited different social classes.
These are questions that directly affect peoples pockets, and would provide a motivation for greater democratic engagement.

In Germany the new Die Linke programme drawn up by Lafontaine commits to this sort of budgeting.

There would of course have to be all sorts of provisions to protect against fraud, but we know how to make mobile phone voting secure, anonymous and verifiable. The Handivote system is one example.

[Paul Cockshott]

Are these immediate aims? Because even for Die Linke this looks like not that much if it's their program of governance.



I read it as programme to put in effect should they come to power -- that is normal for a political party. It seems to me that they are at about the same political position as the CP here, but with more emphasis on participative democracy which the CPGB do not warm to.

[Red Commissar]

There's also the matter of the security agency that observes "extreme" political activities in Germany. Die Linke is being observed by that one and there's certain things they can't say or put in their agenda, or they will run the risk of getting shut down.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Re-legalisation of political and general strikes, as well as encouragement of such activity, isn't one of them.


I read it as programme to put in effect should they come to power -- that is normal for a political party. It seems to me that they are at about the same political position as the CP here, but with more emphasis on participative democracy which the CPGB do not warm to.

Are you referring to the two separate Communist organizations? The first being the cozying-up-to-Labour CPB and its British Road to Socialism?