Wolfgang Streeck, noted in this longish piece, from Salvage. some here might have seen his books, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/authors/streeck-wolfgang and his numerous Sidecar pieces. https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/search?query%5Bauthor%5D=Wolfgang+Streeck .
Sahra Wagenknecht’s plan for peace <https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2024/02/sahra-wagenknecht-germany-plan-for-peace> Why the left-wing politician wants to free Germany from Washington’s grip. By Wolfgang Streeck <https://www.newstatesman.com/author/wolfgangstreeck> Excerpt from Aufstehen’s Populist Revolt: Local Patriotism and the ‘Left-Behind Left’ <https://salvage.zone/aufstehens-populist-revolt-local-patriotism-and-the-left-behind-left/> by Kevin Ochieng Okoth <https://salvage.zone/author/kevino/> | August 20, 2020 "Wagenknecht and Streeck have been vocal about their stance on what they see as the new identitarian left. At Die Linke’s conference in 2018, Wagenknecht claimed that a commitment to open borders was ‘*weltfremd*’ – that is to say that it expresses an ideological naïveté or ivory-tower worldview – and entirely at odds with the principles of a left politics. In an interview with the *Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung*, Wagenknecht blamed the bogeyman ‘new left’ for alienating Die Linke’s voters, arguing that they had distanced themselves from the working class and resorted to ‘identity politics’. Streeck, for his part, has frequently commented on the ‘lifestyle left’s’ obsession with gender, claiming that their only political aim is to spread the use of the *Gendersternchen*, a symbol that makes it possible to address all genders in the heavily masculine German language. For Wagenknecht, only a ‘real’ left politics positing a ‘realistic anti-capitalism’ might win back voters in the east from the far right, and halt the ongoing reversal of gains made by trade unions and works councils throughout the twentieth century. Writing in *Der Spiegel*in August 2018, Bülow and the other early Aufstehen supporters Sevim Dagdelen (of Die Linke) and Antje Vollmer (of the Greens) offered further insight into the movement’s aims. Domestically, they argued, it was about time to return to some form of post-war social democracy: free education, affordable housing, free healthcare and investment in infrastructure. This would better connect the depopulating rural towns with Germany’s rapidly urbanising cities. Aufstehen’s foreign policy would focus on ending the European Union’s ‘regime change’ politics and rich industrial nations’ exploitation of poorer ones, by attacking the root causes of mass migration. For Bülow, Dagdelen and Vollmer, globalisation was nothing but a smokescreen for large-scale deregulation and privatisation – the causes of chaos, wars and mass migration. The failure of the left – the SPD, Greens and Die Linke – to stand up for the ‘losers of globalisation’ had led over 8 million voters to abandon the parties in the last two decades. If the left did not wake up and act now, it would only lose more voters to the far right. But what Aufstehen offered was a nationalist solution to Germany’s economic and political malaise. Economic migration, Wagenkecht argued, could only lead to increased competition in Germany’s stretched labour markets, particularly in the low-wage sector. Capitalism could only be restrained or subdued within the bounds of the nation state. And nation states, by definition, have boundaries, which ultimately meant that states must protect their borders if they were to curb the worst excesses of financialised capitalism. While asylum seekers fleeing persecution in their home countries were perfectly welcome, economic migrants were not. Increased economic migration, Wagenknecht claimed, would lead to a brain-drain of qualified workers, luring them from their homelands in the Global South to the more prosperous North. Instead, she argued, it would be more sensible to invest in the German education system, addressing deficits in infrastructure, education and transport, while paying close attention to global disparities between the economically developed centre and the underdeveloped periphery. For Quinn Slobodian and William Callison, it is Aufstehen’s failure to recognise the subject of its ‘populist’ politics that is to blame for its demise. This failure was the somewhat predictable result of Aufstehen’s narrow social-democratic focus on the state. Streeck’s disregard for contemporary political struggles, for instance, has been well documented. In recent interviews Streeck has dismissed such struggles as ‘local’, ‘dispersed’ or ‘uncoordinated’ without, as Jerome Roos notes, having much of a clue about their composition, aims or methods. Further, in an article for *Neues Deutschland*, Peter Grottian contends that Aufstehen did close to nothing to build a counter-hegemonic bloc by communicating with social movements and other civil-society actors. The leadership seemed to have no interest in the messy day-to-day organising work of radical politics; its socialism was a conforming nonconformism, suited, arguably, to the politics of the late 1960s, but of little use today. Factionalism within Die Linke is more complicated than is frequently portrayed in the German media. Since its inception, the party has struggled with infighting. Tensions within it can be traced to the formation of its predecessor, the Linkspartei.PDS (discussed below), and attempts at reuniting the East and West German left. There are now not two but nine official *Strömungen *(tendencies or factions) within the party. These range from the explicitly Marxist Kommunistische Plattform (KPF – Communist Platform) to the radical democratic Emanzipatorische Linke (Ema.Li – Emancipatory Left). Wagenknecht, formerly of the KPF, was a founding member of another faction, the Antikapitalistische Linke (AKL – Anticapitalist Left), a tendency that has continually rejected coalition with the SPD and the Greens. Some AKL members also voiced their concerns about Aufstehen’s cross-party approach, insisting that Die Linke was the only forum capable of uniting a variety of left-wing factions and movements. Wagenknecht believed that there could be no Red-Red-Green coalition – SPD, Die Linke and Greens – in the Bundestag unless the Greens and the SPD dropped their ambitions to be part of a grand-coalition government and made a significant shift towards the left. The exclusive focus on immigrants and the urban middle class of the party’s twin leadership, Katja Kipping of the Emanzipatorische Linke and Bernd Riexinger of the Sozialistische Linke (Socialist Left) factions, she argued, had also made it impossible to win back the eight million voters that abandoned the parties since 1998. Despite Wagenknecht’s high popularity ratings, however, she continually failed to secure the party leadership. (*Die Zeit*interpreting her frequent TV appearances as a sign of her increasing irrelevance within the party). Aufstehen was her last real chance at capturing power; had it succeeded in its project, Wagenknecht could have become the de facto leader of the left, leaving her free to bypass opposition within her party and define the political programme of a united German left. The reasons for her retreat were then, of course, not only personal. Clashes with Kipping and Riexinger led to her increasing marginalisation within the party. When she showed early signs of an anti-immigration position, many in Die Linke, including in the reformist Forum Demokratischer Sozialismus (fds – Forum for Democratic Socialism), distanced themselves, writing an open letter voicing concern about the party’s direction, and stating that they did not want to be associated with Die Linke members whose politics were fundamentally opposed to the founding principles of the party, further arguing that anti-racism should be central to any left political platform, and that attempts at creating left-wing versions of right-wing policies were entirely futile. Anti-immigration views could not pass as a *realpolitik*of the contemporary German left. In such a context, Aufstehen’s attempt to ‘[roll] out a social movement like the latest iPhone’, as Slobodian and Callison succinctly put it, was destined to fail. There are surely lessons to be learned from Aufstehen’s brief time on the political stage. What led its leadership to adopt an outdated anti-immigration, left-nationalist and mild social democratic platform as the basis for a movement that was to reinvigorate the German Left? And why were Wagenknecht, Streeck, Lafontaine and Stegemann so convinced that their success relied on winning back economically and politically marginalised voters in the East, who were supposedly drifting right towards the AfD?..." "For Streeck, a new culture war has taken the place of old class struggle, and the main contradiction is now between what he calls the ‘deregulation left’ and the ‘xenophobic right’ it has conjured up as its antagonist. Traditionally, he notes, ‘the left favoured regulation as a defence against the uncertainties of the free market, whereas deregulation was sought by the Right, especially since “globalisation”’. The deregulation of national borders only allows for open-ended immigration which, according to him, effectively undoes the work that labour movements have done in restricting the supply of labour, and limiting competition in labour markets. The social base of the xenophobic right are the workers and lower middle class who used to be the pro-regulation left’s social base –that is, those calling for stricter controls on immigration and labour mobility. As the terrain has shifted, the left has abandoned its ‘traditional reliance on a democratic state as a political instrument of social justice’. Such ‘anti-statism’, he argues, is then disguised as a moral duty, necessitated by our collective humanitarian values – our new ‘civil religion’. This has had lasting political effects; most notably the political division between a vocal middle-class left and a silent working-class left. He follows up his argument with several clichés about crime, *Parallelgesellschaften*(ethnic enclaves), ‘Mafiosi families’ and the recruitment of second- or third-generation immigrants by terrorist groups, which have little do with the number of immigrants, but a lot to do with how immigrants are treated by the host nation. Most perplexing are his statements such as the following: As immigrant children crowd inner-city public schools, ‘white’ parents, especially of the educated middle class and regardless of how welcoming they may be, will always find ways to send their children to schools where they learn the national language properly. Similar developments are under way in housing markets, with ‘white flight’ from areas where immigrants cluster. The result may be another line of conflict, between ‘nativist’ defenders of what they consider their old rights to material support and cultural comfort, and the advocates, in politics and the liberal public, of new and sometimes, at least for the time being, superior rights for the victims of war and persecution. Instead of analysing the role that the German state plays in intensifying extremism, war and persecution – Islamophobia among the German public, military deployments in the Middle East or German weapons exports that have destabilised the ‘home’ countries of refugees – Streeck evokes a notion of the capitalist state as a neutral and democratic instrument that can be used to protect the domestic working and middle class from migrants. This is a far cry from any left politics worthy of the name. Wagenknecht, in her book *Reichtum ohne Gier*(Wealth without Greed), argues that establishment elites have neglected the middle class, effectively ‘downgrading’ it. This concern with the middle class – who as Thomas Groes has pointed out are the bastion of neoliberalism – is surprising coming from a supposedly left or even socialist political movement. In *Germany’s Hidden Crisis*, Oliver Nachtwey points to a possible explanation for Aufstehen’s obsession with the downward mobility of the German middle class. According to Nachtwey: In recent years Germany has seen a lively discussion on the middle class, provoked by the discovery of its shrinkage. In post-war Germany, this middle class was always more than a social datum. It was (and still is) seen in public debate as an anchor of stability, a reference point of social normality, an element of integration and, not least, a sign of social permeability and ascent. It is thus not surprising that German society views itself as a society of the middle. Nachtwey points out that there are an increasing number of skilled employees and workers among this shrinking middle class, and that it is highly reliant on the institutional protection of the welfare state to secure its social status. Since this middle class ‘cannot rely on the security of property or wealth’, there is a widespread fear of downward mobility owing to a rise of precarious labour conditions due to deregulation and privatisation. But this class has also sought to protect its privileges by shutting itself off from lower classes and ‘abandoning solidarity with the weak’. Prejudices about laziness, lack of education, crime – that Streeck and Aufstehen frequently echo – serve to bolster the status anxiety felt by this middle class, resulting in ‘increased fears of [cultural] contamination and infection’ and a rejection of diversity. When we consider the makeup of the AfD voters and the emergence of the precarious middle class it is increasingly clear who is part of Aufstehen’s conception of the working class, and who is not. Streeck and Wagenknecht, for instance, refuse to acknowledge hierarchies within the workplace between permanent staff (the precarious middle class) and mostly migrant agency workers. As Nachtwey points out, low-paid migrant agency workers are often ‘employed in the service sector, call centres, the food industry, cleaning and care work, and the retail trade’. Those most affected by privatisation and labour market deregulation then, are women and migrant workers – the working poor who are often paid ‘wages scarcely enough for living expenses’. And, of course, the unemployed. But they seem to have no place in Aufstehen’s outdated and homogenous conception of the working class. Aufstehen seems to have a blind spot for the ‘invisible’ migrant workers that effectively keep the German economy going: hundreds of thousands of workers from Poland, Romania, Bosnia or Bulgaria and other Eastern European states that come to Germany every year. These workers don’t drive down domestic wages; on the contrary, they fill gaps in the labour market in sectors that many ‘Germans’ are unwilling or unable to fill. As German borders closed in March due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we could once again see who these essential workers from Eastern Europe are, and what they contribute to German society. April and May are usually the main seasons for the asparagus harvest, which relies heavily on such migrant labour to harvest 122,000 tons of asparagus annually, on over 1,600 farms. With borders closed and many self-isolating, 1,800 workers were flown in from Romania to ensure that German farmers wouldn’t lose out on their harvest. German farmers and agribusiness rely on the use of such seasonal migrant labour. But these migrant workers are excluded from Aufstehen’s conception of the working class; portrayed as a nuisance to the effective functioning of the welfare state. In his essay ‘Notes on Late Fascism’, Alberto Toscano argues that in their current incarnation, the right-wing nationalist projects of the Global North are ‘driven by a nostalgia from synchronicity’, for that elusive post-war moment, of, in the German case, the *Wirtschaftswunder*, a depoliticised era of unprecedented economic growth and social stability that relies on a ‘racialised and gendered image of the socially-recognised patriotic industrial worker’. Left-nationalist attempts at reviving the image of the left-behind left, the neglected white industrial worker, only intensify racism and nationalism by repeating the myths of right-wing propaganda. One cannot simply posit the existence of a political subject without reference to political-economic realities. To argue that there is a working class (or a left-behind left) as Streeck and Aufstehen do, that needs to be won away from the lures of fascism, is to again assume the false totality (or existence) of a homogenous class agent in Germany. Instead, we should ask ourselves, as Sandro Mezzadra and Mario Neumann do, are such left-nationalist strategies just the result of the Left’s inability to develop transnational alternatives capable of addressing the realities of globalised capitalism?..." Michael Pugliese -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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