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Crisis and Class struggle in Germany
Two months after the re-election of the Red-Green
coalition government, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder threatened to resign. ‘Anyone
who thinks they can do a better job should go ahead and do it’, he told the
executive committee of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) on 10
December. The coalition faced another test in elections on 2 February, one of
them in Schröder’s home state of Lower Saxony. ARON AMM, from Sozialistische
Alternative (SAV – the CWI’s Germany section), reports from Berlin.
ECONOMIC CRISIS, a wave of bankruptcies and redundancies,
record debt and financial collapse, industrial action in the public sector, and
demonstrations against war preparations have engulfed the country. The
government and ruling capitalist class are in open conflict over what to do.
Militancy among workers, the unemployed and young people is gaining pace.
Germany is the third largest economy in the world and number
one in the European Union, contributing 20% of EU gross domestic product (GDP).
But what was once an economic giant is now wobbling. This year it is likely to
find itself bottom of the EU table for GDP growth, the fourth year in a row. The
collapse of the stock market also overshadows that witnessed in any of the other
leading economies. Between January and October 2002, the Deutsche Aktienindex (Dax
– the share index of the 30 largest companies on the Frankfurt stock exchange)
dropped by 48%. The Dax has recovered slightly since then, but has been unable
to reverse these losses so far.
This economic crisis poses a serious threat to the future of
the European Monetary Union. The level of public debt in 2002 was 3.7% of GDP,
significantly above the 3% limit allowed by the EU ‘growth and stability pact’.
This year the target will be met only if the German economy grows by 1.5%, a
level that all economic research institutes regard as illusory. Germany is the
fourth EU country – after Greece, Italy and Belgium – to amass a national
debt in excess of the permitted 60% of GDP (62% in 2002). The national debt –
massively increased by the cost of reuniting West and East Germany after 1989
– more than doubled during the 1990s, reaching €1.2 trillion (£800bn). A
landslide from this mountain of debt is already cascading towards taxpayers –
€170 million (£113m) every day, just to pay the interest.
Investment in Germany has been decreasing since 2000 and
consumer spending has collapsed. Only the export market, which accounts for one
third of the German economy, has averted a deep recession (in the car industry,
which employs 750,000 people, the figure rises to 70%, underlining Germany’s
dependence on the US market). Industrial production declined by 2.1% in October
2002, having already decreased in September. ‘Negative growth’ of industry
is expected for the fourth quarter of last year. Whereas 37,000 companies went
bust in 2002 – including large firms such as Kirch Media, Babcock, Fairchild
Dornier and Herlitz – the projection for this year is 42,000. This wave of
bankruptcies has cost 650,000 jobs. Official unemployment stands at 4.2 million.
‘The money isn’t gone – it’s ‘just’ somewhere
else’, read a homemade placard during the first warning strike on 11 December
in the capital, Berlin, at the beginning of public-sector pay negotiations.
Under the Red-Green government, corporation tax has been transformed from a tax
on business to a subsidy. In 2000, it raised €25 billion (£17bn), but in
2001, €400 million (£270m) was paid out to large companies. A nurse or a
refuse collector has to cough up more taxes than DaimlerChrysler or BMW! BMW is
the largest industrial company in Munich, making a net profit of €1.1 billion
(£730m), yet Munich, the third largest city in Germany, is bankrupt. Local
councils such as Offenbach in the state of Hesse are planning to privatise 88
schools, ‘after the British example’, to reduce public spending.
Dismantling social security
"THE TWO MEN who lead the country, Gerhard Schröder
and Joschka Fischer, can’t decide how [to deal with the crisis]. Highly
contradictory messages are sent to the people. One says: the situation is
serious, we have to do some difficult things, but we will protect you from
fundamental changes. Germany can, in principle, stay like it was. Doing without
certain things is a temporary phenomenon. That is the signal from the Social
Democrats and the trade unions.
"The other says: the situation is serious, we have to
do some difficult things, but the really fundamental reforms have yet to come.
Germany will never be the same again. The – limited – sacrifices will be
permanent". (Tagesspiegel, Berlin, 11 December 2002)
Although the government and big business are publicly
arguing over what measures to take, Schröder’s cabinet is bowing to the
interests of the ruling class: "The miracle is not a normal category in
politics. But what is happening among the German Social Democrats is a break
with all previous experience of Berlin political life. Suddenly, the SPD accepts
everything that for years was denounced as capitalist demonism". (Handelsblatt,
13 December 2002)
What this mouthpiece of medium-sized business describes as a
‘miracle’ is really a confirmation of the analysis Marxists made during the
1990s: that the SPD – just like the Labour Party in Britain – has changed
from a workers’ party with a capitalist leadership into a bourgeois party
through and through. The SPD and Die Grünen (the Greens) are attempting to load
the burden of this crisis onto the backs of the working class. It’s not about
‘limited sacrifices’, it’s about unlimited cutbacks. The ‘welfare state’
is to be dismantled. If the plans become reality, Germany will indeed ‘never
be the same again’. All the social rights that were fought for and won by the
labour movement during the era of Otto von Bismarck in the last third of the
19th century are under attack.
The government aims to implement the Hartz Commission
recommendations on employment rights: means-testing unemployment benefit,
increasing temporary work with pay cuts of 20-30%, and removing protection
against unlawful dismissal. The government has set up the Rürup Commission,
made up of representatives from the government, business and trade unions (as
was Hartz) to draw up cuts to social security, introduce a two-tier health
service, and increase the retirement age. Shop workers’ pay and conditions are
to be undermined by extending shop opening time on Saturdays from 4pm to 8pm.
National collective wage agreements are being replaced with local deals.
The capital is the trailblazer. The Berlin city government
of the SPD and the Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (PDS – successor of
the former Stalinist state party in East Germany) has left the national
association of local authority employers and has cancelled collective wage
agreements. It has increased civil servants’ and teachers’ working hours by
two hours a week and is cutting back on 950 crèche staff in education.
Never before has a German government suffered such a
dramatic collapse in support during its first 100 days in office. An opinion
poll from the Forsa Institute on 4 December, found that the SPD would only get
27% of the vote in an election (on 22 September it got 38%). "I’m glad to
be back in Berlin under the glass dome [of the Bundestag], in the constituency
all I get is abuse", said Wolfgang Grotthaus, SPD representative from
Oberhausen, in the weekly political magazine Der Spiegel (9 December 2002). If
there were an election today, 40% of those who voted SPD in September would stay
at home.
The Schröder/Fischer government has also hit a crisis in
foreign policy. The government granted the US use of military bases in Germany
and the right to over-fly German airspace, and has co-operated with war
preparations. However, the Red-Green government is publicly split. The rightwing
of the SPD, organised around the Seeheim Group, is already considering the
possibility of a Grand Coalition with the conservative opposition Christlich
Demokratische Union (CDU), with the SPD economy minister, Wolfgang Clement,
replacing Schröder as leader. Ministers publicly stab each other in the back.
The Greens shot down their party leaders at their conference in December.
The Unified Service Sector Union, ver.di (Vereinigte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft,
made up of public-sector, transport, finance, media, telecom, print and shop
workers), organised a demonstration in Bremen on 5 December, during the
public-sector wage round. Speakers were repeatedly interrupted by shouts of ‘Eichel
must go’. These slogans, aimed at the SPD finance minister Hans Eichel, are
reminiscent of the ‘Kohl must go’ shouts on demonstrations in the mid-1990s
which, in 1996, culminated in 500,000 workers marching in Bonn – then Germany’s
seat of government – spontaneous strikes involving 100,000 metalworkers
defending their right to sick pay and, in 1997, road blockades by miners in the
Rhine and Ruhr. Then, the trade union bureaucracy managed to smother the
protests by raising the possibility of a change of government in the general
election of 1998. Today, it lacks that room to manoeuvre.
The class struggle
DECEMBER’S WARNING STRIKES mobilised 250,000 workers.
Union leaders were forced to adopt a more radical tone. For example, the head of
ver.di, Frank Bsirske, said in numerous speeches: "What we don’t need is
savings for Gloria [von Thurn und Taxis] and the Holtzbrinck family with an
estimated family fortune of five to six billion euros". In Hesse state
parliament, the CDU minister-president, Roland Koch, compared the union campaign
for the reintroduction of a wealth tax, which would raise €15 billion
(£10bn), to the persecution of Jews under the Nazis: "Stop misleading
people that it would only affect a few rich people. The way Mr Bsirske did it on
television yesterday, naming the names of individuals, was like putting some
kind of new star on their chest saying: ‘they are the rich, the ones who
should pay’."
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the leading German
capitalist newspaper, distanced itself from "an improper comparison,
because the persecution of Jews under Hitler bares no comparison. Koch’s later
apology was compelling". But it went on to defend making ‘parallels to
other times’ to ‘instruct today’s politics’: "If Koch had in his
speech recalled the beginnings of the class struggle, no one would have been
entitled to get angry, certainly not in those parties whose intentions in this
regard are not entirely distant from this. That struggle also started with
accusations against the rich". (13 December 2002) These reactions at the
beginning of the dispute display the first beads of sweat on the foreheads of
some ruling class representatives.
Working-class action had begun before the pay round.
Throughout 2002, one sector after another took part in warning strikes (retail,
printing, banking, in the postal service and at Telekom) and more militant
action (in the metal and building industries). This was remarkable given that it
occurred during an economic downturn and directly before a general election. The
stoppages in the building sector were particularly noteworthy, as this sector
has been gripped by crisis since the middle of the 1990s.
The disputes are nowhere near the same level as in Spain,
Italy, Portugal or Greece. Nonetheless, the German working class is the most
powerful on the continent due to the dominance of industrial production in the
economy. The ruling class has not attempted a head-on clash comparable to that
in Britain under Margaret Thatcher, with her onslaught against the miners and
the British labour movement during the 1980s. Even though the attacks have
accelerated, conditions in Germany are far better than in most other leading
capitalist countries. The metalworkers’ union, with 2.5 million members, is
the second-largest trade union on the planet, after ver.di. The trade union
umbrella organisation, the Deutscher Gewerkshaftsbund (DGB), has eight million
members.
The increased militancy, however, is on a collision course
with the acquiescence and sell-out of the trade union bureaucracy. The limited
nature of the struggles so far is not down to a lack of anger or determination,
but the fear within the union leadership that it may not be able to control more
widespread disputes.
Nonetheless, the cauldron is boiling so much that it is
increasingly difficult to stop fighting measures being taken. Due to the extent
of the economic crisis, attacks on workers’ living standards, disillusionment
with the government and the role of the trade union leadership, the
consciousness of the working class will develop in leaps and bounds. Other
international disputes, which union leaders avoid mentioning, are a source of
encouragement. In Bremen, fire-fighters carried a banner with the message: ‘An
English labour struggle is possible here too! We’re ready! And that’s a
promise!’ A warning strike by kitchen staff in a Stuttgart hospital was
marked by the strikers singing the Italian revolutionary song, Avanti Popolo.
Furthermore, opposition is mounting to military expenditure, which has
multiplied tenfold under Red-Green governments.
The compromise deal
A LARGE-SCALE strike movement was avoided when the
public-sector pay round ended in a compromise well below the union claim for ‘more
than 3%’. The union leadership conceded ground on pay for workers in the East,
on ‘opening clauses’ which allow for the renegotiation of previous
agreements, and on breaking national collective bargaining.
The extent of the developing radicalisation was shown by the
willingness of civil servants to take action. The majority of teachers, police
officers and fire-fighters are considered as ‘state servants’ (BeamtInnen)
with no right to strike. The German civil service association, which is not
affiliated to the DGB, organised a 40,000-strong demonstration in Berlin on 14
December. And at the earlier demonstration in Bremen, union members distributed
mock certificates with the inscription: ‘We hereby award the civil servant
…… the right to strike from now on and for the rest of their life’.
The public-sector employers’ room for manoeuvre was
limited due to the record debt in a growing number of local authorities. At the
same time, the trade union leadership was under increasing pressure from below
for action. Ver.di has also been losing members – 80,000 last year alone.
Bsirske has attempted to distance himself from previous
trade union leaders. "‘That man is not to be envied’, or ‘I wouldn’t
want to be in his shoes’ - that’s what other union leaders are saying about
him. In ver.di’s predecessor union, ÖTV, it was anger from the membership at
the results of pay rounds that, at least indirectly, cost union leaders
Wulf-Mathies and Herbert Mai their positions". (Handelsblatt, 10 December
2002) Wulf-Mathies ignored the majority vote of the membership to reject a
compromise and continue a two-week strike in 1992. Mai was forced out during the
bureaucratic merger of several unions to form ver.di in 2000.
Der Spiegel recalled an even earlier public-sector wage
dispute: "The legendary wage round of 1974 has not been forgotten, when the
heavyweight trade union leader Heinz Kluncker forced through a wage increase of
11% for public sector workers - and in doing so spelled the beginning of [SPD
Chancellor] Willy Brandt’s political demise". (9 December 2002)
The warning strikes proved that the workers are prepared to
confront the bosses. And despite the settlement new conflicts are developing. In
Berlin, strikes in the public sector are a strong possibility. In the current
city-wide pay negotiations, SPD and PDS politicians are demanding pay freezes or
cuts, and reduced holiday entitlements and Christmas bonuses. But not for all.
Bus drivers and the city’s cleaning staff are to get the national deal. The
intention is to split the working class and even to provoke weaker sections into
taking action with the aim of breaking union resistance. Protests could take
place by public-sector workers against pay cuts, by civil servants and teachers
against longer working hours, and by child-care workers against the crèche
staff cuts.
This could have important repercussions for the workers’
movement nationally. A success for the SPD/PDS government in Berlin would
encourage politicians and employers in other parts of the country to step up
their attacks. On the other hand, a determined fightback in the capital would
give the workers valuable experience, raise class consciousness and confidence,
and could motivate militancy in other sectors.
The bad compromise accepted by the national leadership of
ver.di and its derailment of the strike will deepen the polarisation within the
union, which has been fuelled by ten years of internal conflict. The ‘network
for a fighting and democratic ver.di’, a national opposition group in the
union in which members of SAV play an important role, will have a pivotal part
to play.
SAV holds the view that the attacks by the government and
the ruling class, alongside the looming war against Iraq, require a mass
mobilisation. SAV calls for a national trade union demonstration and the
preparation of a one-day general strike. SAV supports the call for the massive
involvement of the trade unions in the national anti-war demonstration on 15
February and raises a socialist alternative to the capitalist crisis, linked to
the slogan of building a new workers’ party.
There will also be increased interest in class struggle
oriented and anti-capitalist ideas among larger sections of workers and young
people. This radicalisation will express itself chiefly in the form of trade
union and social protest, and the developing anti-war movement. And out of the
upcoming struggles, we could see the first signs of the development towards a
new workers’ party.
Translation: Sean McGinley
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