Version imprimableThe invasion of Ukraine has opened the gates of hell. Evil has been trivialised beyond all interests. Wagenknecht’s political transformation was born out of war. More than a nostalgic throwback to the Berlin Wall, she is a product of our times: once again, in the midst of the chaos of war, there are leftists who deny themselves as such and opt for nationalism.
Abandonment of socialism as critique of a system of property ownership
There is not much left of the critique of capitalism if it does not raise the question of social ownership. There can be no left unless it contests the terrain conquered by neo-liberalism, and the first line of this contestation is the ownership of the commons. In the case of Wagenknecht’s party, the theme of ownership is central, but as the protectionism of the German industrial bourgeoisie: ‘So, a commonsense energy policy and industrial policy would start by considering the Mittelstand’s needs, in a way that encourages owners and their families to hang on rather than sell their companies to some financial investor.’ [1]
One of the BSW’s antiphons is to end sanctions against Russia in order to restore the flow of cheap gas, the so-called ‘commonsense energy policy’; we’ll come back to this later. But first of all: this vision of capitalist ownership is based on the abdication of the objective of building an autonomous working class policy: ‘What matters in Germany is the Mittelstand, the strong block of smaller firms that can position themselves against the big corporations. That opposition is as important as the polarity between capital and labour. You have to take it seriously in Germany. If you appeal to people purely on a class basis, you won’t get a response. But if you appeal to them as part of the wealth-creating sector of society, including owner-run companies, in contrast to the giant corporations—whose profits are funnelled to the shareholders and top executives, with almost nothing to the workers—that does hit home.’
With no link to the interests of the world of work, Sahra Wagenknecht assumes her party’s place as ‘the legitimate heirs of both the ‘domesticated capitalism’ of post-war conservatism and the social-democratic progressivism,’. More clearly, Sabine Zimmermann, party chairwoman in Saxony, explains that the BSW is ‘to the left of the CDU and to the right of the SPD’ (Jacobin, 20 September 2024).
Wagenknecht’s discourse could garner votes against a backdrop of a general shift to the right. But these votes are a confirmation of a turn to the right, because the programme that brings them together is an ideology of class conciliation and a capitulation on social ownership of the economy. Wagenknecht confines herself to proposing elements of tax justice and nationalist state regulation to preserve the property of the German industrial bourgeoisie.
A multipolar, compartmentalised world
Before it became a journalistic euphemism for neo-Nazi gangs, the term ‘nationalist’ was too often used as an insult to a left defending democratic sovereignty against capitalist globalisation or critical of authoritarian European federalism. This anathema implies that rejection of liberal diktats can only result from selfish atavism, not from any idea of solidarity and cooperation. Any self-respecting Left, in any European country, defends popular sovereignty against the injunctions of the transnationals of financial capital enshrined in the EU treaties. And there is nothing nationalist about that.
But anyone who wants to find traces of this left-wing popular sovereignty in Sahra Wagenknecht’s nationalist drift is mistaken. Instead, Wagenknecht is proposing an old-fashioned reactionary nationalism, rooted in class collaboration and taking up the themes that the right has managed to put on the agenda - energy, immigration and ‘morals’ - to reproduce versions of the far-right’s conservative and supremacist German programme.
It is on the issue of climate that this German nationalist supremacism expresses itself most clearly: ‘Destroying the domestic car industry by making electric cars obligatory just to meet some arbitrary emissions standards is not what we support. Nobody now alive will live to see average temperatures going down again, regardless of how much we reduce carbon emissions.’
This transparency is to be welcomed, but the conscious choice to condemn future generations in the name of the fossil economy is abject. Without being a climate denier (Wagenknecht acknowledges the existence of the climate crisis), the BSW assumes its supremacism: instead of rapidly reducing emissions in one of the richest and most industrialised countries in the world, it gives priority to mitigating the effects of the disaster for the German voter. ‘First equip homes for the elderly and hospitals and childcare centres with air conditioning at public expense, and make places close to rivers and streams safe against flooding.’ Chaos can spread throughout the world and nationalism will see our home (or our region, or Germany, or Europe) as the mirage of a fortress.
The rejection of internationalism
The slogan ‘for a multipolar world’ reflects the vision of a left that sees itself as part of the geopolitical chessboard. On this chessboard, the imperialist side and its adversaries face each other, and the left has the choice between being a white pawn (aligned with Western liberalism) or a black pawn, in which case it would adopt Putin’s rhetoric on the war in Ukraine, turn a blind eye to the institutional violence in Iran and Syria or treat Venezuelan electoral fraud as a necessary evil. Those nostalgic for the ‘multipolar world’ have not yet realised that, a year after the genocide, China and Russia are keeping their trade relations with Israel intact and putting no pressure on Netanyahu. But even such a contradiction does not seem to bother the campists.
Ms Wagenknecht’s stance on the war in Ukraine has made her a rising star in certain sectors of the left. Added to the anti-NATO tradition of the former East Germany is the energy agenda of German industry, obsessed with reopening the supply of cheap Russian gas.
Clearly, this cynicism in Wagenknecht’s position does not negate some of her criticism of the SPD-Green government. For many months, it maintained a relatively moderate stance in its support for Kiev against the invader. Remember that Germany was directly attacked by the Ukrainian side at the start of the war (with the destruction of Nord Stream, the Baltic Sea pipeline for Russian gas).
But last year, the SPD adopted the openly militaristic line of the Greens, began delivering offensive weapons to Zelensky (enabling him to hit targets outside its territory) and adopted an economic recovery strategy based on the arms industry. The apogee of this adherence to war policy was the admission of the future installation on German territory of US nuclear missiles capable of reaching Moscow. Berlin’s total embrace of the war agenda has strengthened Wagenknecht’s rhetoric (cheap gas for German factories is worth more than Ukraine’s right to self-determination) and enabled her to compete with the far right for an anti-war narrative with a nationalist profile.
But this position does not translate into consistent anti-militarism. On the contrary, the BSW’s immigration policy involves the militarisation of Europe’s southern border against foreign workers trying to reach the continent, the maintenance of concentration camps financed by European coffers, and the continuation of the death toll in the Mediterranean and the Sahara desert, among other things.
Resumption of the far right’s cultural wars
Exonerating oneself from explicit racism (on a good day) does not constitute a confrontation with the extreme right. Like the fascists, the BSW blames immigrants for the crisis in public services (‘shouldn’t overstrain collective resources’) and the pressure to drive down wages. As if the ‘housing shortage of 700,000 units’ or the deterioration of education and health services were not the result of disinvestment and liberal policies, but caused by Syrian refugees fleeing the war. Or as if Germany did not have unemployment at historically low levels, which indicates that migratory pressure is merely the employers’ alibi, responsible for the permanent pressure on wages.
To construct its perverse argument, the BSW uses the rhetoric of austerity and budgetary limits and does not propose to increase transfers for social housing or the recruitment of teachers and staff for migrant reception services. On the contrary, BSW is fighting for the abolition of social benefits for the 100,000 or so migrants whose asylum applications have been rejected but who are protected by German law (mainly because they come from countries that offer no security of return). In other words, Wagenknecht wants to use marginalisation and misery as pressure for voluntary return to the chaos of countries like Syria or Afghanistan, but all she will achieve is to encourage people to flee to a clandestine existence in Germany, exploited and even more vulnerable to the networks, mafias and social resentment that fuel xenophobia.
Wagenknecht may well maintain, in the manner of the small print in contracts, guarantees to respond to accusations of xenophobia and nationalistic selfishness: support for countries of origin to retain their young people, with better access to capital investment, a fair trade regime, reimbursement of training costs for highly skilled immigrant workers. All this benevolent programme is undermined by her public rhetoric in favour of stricter restrictions on immigration policy.
Competing with the far right by adopting its rhetoric to confront the Islamophobic, anti-immigration electorate produces the same result: pitting the poorest against the most vulnerable. And in the end, as electoral studies show, the far right is gaining votes and its ideas are spreading to the rest of the political spectrum.
When Donald Trump won the 2016 election, there was no shortage of people who theorised that his victory reflected the left’s supposed focus on ‘mores’, the famous fractal causes that would alienate it from ‘normal people’. Many of these critics ended up joining Trump’s propaganda effort. Even then, it was the global far right that was putting its ‘culture wars’ against ‘wokism’ ‘at the centre of the political debate’. Faced with this onslaught, there were and still are those who, today, want the left to drop the banners of the fight against discrimination and the recognition of difference.
Since 2017, a lot of water has flowed into the mill of the far right and the feminist and LGBT movements have been among the broadest and most powerful in confronting the conservative agenda and silencing it, even if there is no shortage of those who still find ‘exaggeration’ and ‘excess’ in the expression of these social movements, still called ‘new’.
Conservative adaptation is therefore a constant temptation for the left in this period, but Sahra Wagenknecht is playing in a higher division of this league. Her policy is a complete conservative conversion, a term she uses in no uncertain terms. In her overview of the political centre, the feminist and LGBT rights agenda is simply erased: ‘we want to meet people where they are—not proselytize to them about things they reject’. Full stop.
When it comes to gender equality, Germany has ‘by and large overcome patriarchy’ and feminism is therefore a museum piece. It’s clear that the far right is not far from being the most popular party, but even neo-Nazi misogyny doesn’t seem to pose a risk to women. Once again, racism in disguise: it is ‘through a back door’ that the oppression of women, supposedly overcome, can ‘be reintroduced’ once it has supposedly been overcome.
On the issue of LGBTQI+ discrimination, Wagenknecht wants to impose silence: the people of East Germany ‘can’t deal with those debates about diversity, (…) But there is an exaggerated type of identity politics where you have to apologize if you speak out on a topic if you don’t have a migration background yourself, or you have to apologize because you’re straight.’
Capitalism continues to punish difference, while turning sexuality into a niche market, but instead of recognising the emancipatory potential of feminist and LGBTQI+ perspectives in the face of free-market exploitation of bodies, this nationalism assumes the worst conservatism: invisibilisation and silence.
Deserting the left
One of the worst consequences of Putin’s expansionism and the invasion of Ukraine has been the radicalisation of misalignments, whether on the left, which has become the black pawn in the chessboard of secondary powers, or those who have come to normalise NATO as a defensive bastion - which it never was.
The position of Bloco de Esquerda on the invasion of Ukraine proves that it is possible - and even essential - to reconcile criticism of imperialism with support for the defensive resistance of the invaded people. Wagenknecht’s party appears to be the ultimate example of the left assuming the role of black pawn. But that’s not the right way to put it: class conciliation, German supremacism and anti-immigrantism, conservative capitulation - all these changes have already pushed Wagenknecht away from the left.
8 November 2024
Translated by International Viewpoint from SolidaritéS.
