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From Inprecor (International Press Correspondence), Nos. 5–6, August 1974, pp. 13–18.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The July 15 issue of the leading West German newsweekly, Der Spiegel, published an article on Germany that strikingly illuminated the political and economic situation in the country. It was called The Economic Conjuncture: The Great Trembling. The article said that Chancellor Helmut Schmidt “fears a great crisis. All the people who have spoken to the chancellor during the first few weeks of his government ... were warned that there was a danger that unstable international financial markets could collapse at any time and that world economic chaos could break out ... The chancellor was preoccupied more with plans to avert global economic chaos than with the reform programs of the social-liberal coalition.”
How seriously can this be taken? Is there really a threat of grave crisis in the country that until now has been the most stable of Western Europe? Or are the present difficulties of the West German economy short-term ones? Will they be eliminated by Social Democratic reforms? To answer all these questions it is first necessary to briefly discuss the special features of West German imperialism during past decades.
The continuity of the German workers movement was broken by fascism and the second world war. This fact asserted itself during the struggles of the years 1945-1952. The trade-union bureaucracy and the Social Democracy were able to canalize the workers’ demand for the expropriation of big capital, which was responsible for Nazism, into the harmless slogan of “co-management as a first step.” During this period, the West German Communist party, once one of the most powerful components of the Third International, was but a shadow of its former self. Slavishly following Moscow’s foreign policy, the CP upheld the necessity for a “broad, antifascist popular front,” a line that was often to the right of that of the Social Democracy. First the CP supported dismantling industry in the Ruhr in the interest of reparations, then it maintained the line of the “antifascist popular front” – even after the monetary reform of 1948 and the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, when the consolidation of West German capitalism was already obvious and the postwar boom was being prepared.
Under the leadership of the reformist and Stalinist organizations, the working class was increasingly driven onto the defensive and suffered a serious defeat in 1952 with the adoption of the law on factory councils (Betriebsverfassungsgesetz) The electoral defeat of the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – Social Democratic Party of Germany) in 1953 and the establishment of a strong bourgeois government completely buried the dream of “achieving socialism by the electoral road.” The years 1952 and 1953 thus represented a real turning point. Before this turn, there had been many strikes that had a clearly political, even if defensive, character. During the two subsequent decades there were no such strikes.
The history of the West German working class from 1954 until the middle of the 1960s is marked by a pernicious separation between “purely” economic strikes led by the trade unions (of which the most important were the metalworkers strikes in Bavaria in 1954, Schleswig-Holstein in 1957-58, and Baden-Würtemberg in 1963) and pacifist political struggles against rearmament. This separation corresponded to the declared line of the trade-union and SPD bureaucracies. After 1953, both these bureaucracies openly declared that they were prepared to recognize as legitimate only those political decisions taken by the bourgeois parliament. In 1959 the SPD took another step by adopting the Bad Godesberg program. This program gave its approval to the existing bourgeois system as a “social market economy” and abandoned the politico I goal of socialism. The Communist party had maneuvered itself into such isolation that the bourgeois state was able to ban it in 1956 without provoking the slightest actions in its defense by the West German working class.
There were two important factors that formed the backdrop to this whole development: the long economic boom of the West German economy and the development of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
For various reasons that we cannot detail here, West German capital experienced a boom of extraordinary breadth that can be compared only to a certain period of the last century. The growth rate of the West German economy was on the average far higher than that of the international imperialist economy. While the bourgeois class was the main beneficiary of this boom, the real wages of the workers, which had been very low after the second world war and the 1949 monetcry reform, went up considerably.
On the other hand, in eastern Germany a bureaucratically deformed workers state was constructed under the protection of the Soviet army and under conditions that were extremely unfavorable at the outset, partly because of the war reparations the Soviet bureaucracy extracted from current production until 1953. The standard of living of the working class was much lower in East Germany than in West Germany. Further, this state oppressed its own workers and crushed the workers insurrection of June 1953 through military action.
This situation created an important base for the specific anticommunism of West Germany and for its partial rooting in the working class.
All this led to a political situation characterized by three features:
The recession of 1966–67 created one million unemployed and caused a 1 percent decline in industrial production. Hardened apologists for the capitalist system were not especially bothered by such figures. Nevertheless, this recession began to shake West German society.
For the bourgeoisie, it amounted to a serious warning. The ruling class understood that the political-economic instruments it commanded were not adequate to deal with the crisis of late capitalism. It found itself obliged to replace its instrument of political rule, the CDU-CSU, with an instrument of classic integration. By orienting toward a “grand coalition” of the SPD and the CDU, it achieved two results at the same time: first, an expansion of the instruments of state intervention into the conjuncture I economic situation; second,a greater integration of the working class into the system, thanks to the SPD’s participation in the government. The latter result was supposed to serve to make the workers agree to bear the costs of the recession. This strategy met with success in the short-term. The working class remained traumatized by the effects of the recession until the middle of 1969, and this allowed the employers to reap enormous profits from the new boom while wages increased only moderately.
But over the long term, for the working class the recession of 1966–67 meant the end of the illusion that capitalism could assure permanent economic prosperity and constant increases in real wages.
At the same time, the great movement of radicalization of students and youth in general throughout Western Europe began to take hold in West Germany. Between 1965 and 1969 a broad socialist movement – beginning as a radical-democratic protest movement – developed in the universities and spread throughout the whole educational system and into sectors of working-class youth. In spite of its political heterogeneity, this movement succeeded in winning direct political influence in West German society, for example during the campaign against the draft state of emergency law, during the February 1968 congress for Vietnam, and during the turmoil caused by the assassination attempt against Rudi Dutschke, one of the leaders of this movement. The student movement was able to develop this political striking force above all because the bourgeois state was not prepared to deal with it either politically or through repression. The tragic aspect of the movement lay primarily in the absence of simultaneity of the radicalization of student youth and the working class. In May 1968 in France the “spark” of the student barricades detonated the combativity of a working class steeled by economic struggles and possessing a much higher level of political education than the West German workers. But in West Germany there was hardly any interaction between the students and the workers (the only exception being the struggles against the state of emergency law, in which the trade unions felt obliged to respond to the initiatives of the student movement in order to direct these initiatives into a few protest actions).
The two factors – the 1966–67 recession and the radicalization of student youth in 1965–69 – are of great importance in understanding the evolution of the German Federal Republic. In a certain sense, they created the bases for an economic and political turn in West German society – the first since 1952. Faith in the permanency of the “economic miracle” was shaken. Initial alternatives to bourgeois society were articulated by the student movement. A radical critique contesting the very foundations of this society began to be heard anew. Although the protest movement was not proletarian in its great majority, it renewed the revolutionary current that had been broken by the victory of fascism. The bases were thus laid for eliminating the negative factors and brakes that had been created during three decades of the history and defeat of the German workers movement.
In fact, several years later, there was a turn in the behavior of the West German proletariat. This turn was expressed above all on the field of economic struggles. The West German working class began to go on strike without the approval of, and even against, the trade-union bureaucracy. After September 1969, wildcat strikes occupied an important place as a means of working class struggle (the latest wave of wildcats took place in the summer of 1973). These strikes also forced the unions to adopt a more offensive tactic of struggle in order to maintain their hegemony over the working class (the strike in public services at the beginning of 1974 provides an example).
In the political realm, this turn was expressed by a working-class rapprochement with the Social Democracy, or more exactly, by massive and active support to West German Social Democracy and its reformist projects, as well as by a massive and clear break with the Social-Christians as the “employers party.” The political turn of the West German working class thus strengthened the traditional mass workers party instead of weakening it. The clearest expression of this intensified support came when the Social-Christians tried to oust the Brandt-Scheel government by means of a “cold coup, “ by buying a few parliamentary votes (in 1972). Tens of thousands of workers reacted by calling spontaneous strikes and hundreds of thousands massed in street demonstrations to protest against “Barzel’s coup.” (Ranier Barzel was then the CDU-CSU candidate for replacing Willy Brandt as chancellor – Inprecor.)
The legislative elections of 1972 thus had a more clear character as a social confrontation. Frightened by the wave of wildcat strikes, the capitalists overtly supported the CDU-CSU, reversing their policy of 1969. The SPD campaign was waged under slogans that, while demagogic, had very clear social significance, like “millions of voters against the millionaires.” The working class voted strongly for the SPD, which also won new votes from middle layers. This led to a clear SPD victory and a new coalition, this time between the SPD and the FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei – Free Democratic party, the second-largest bourgeois party in West Germany, a liberal formation – Inprecor).
Our earlier remark about the radicalization of the youth and working class is appropriate here in an altered form: There was a lack of simultaneity between the workers radicalization on the level of economic struggles and its radicalization on the level of political consciousness. Through their strikes, the workers broke massively in practice with the workers bureaucracies of the SPD and the DGB (Deutsche Gewerkschafts Bund – German Trade Union Federation), but there was nothing like this break on the political level.
Nevertheless, there was a progressive element even in this “turn” toward political reformism: The workers gradually lost faith in the self-regulating capacities of capitalism. They shed their belief in the superiority of this system over the system of a planned economy. A conviction developed that it was necessary to change this system, and, in the absence of a broad revolutionary current in the working class, this conviction led to hopes that the change could be made by reforms. This indicates the profoundly sectarian character of the attitude adopted by a good number of West German revolutionaries who called for a boycott of the parliamentary elections in 1972. Just as it was correct to denounce the reformist illusions of the Social Democrats during the elections, it was incorrect to present the more active commitment of the working class to the Social Democracy as a primarily negative development. At the time of an active commitment of the organized West German working class against the CDU-CSU as a party of the employers, a call for a boycott of the elections was understood by the most committed workers as a call for indifference, and even as indirect support to the party of the employers.
In the meantime, it was proven that the 1966–67 recession was in no way an “accident” or an “error” brought on by an inadequate conjunctural policy, but was instead a characteristic of a new stage that had opened for West German capital. Five factors illustrate the present economic difficulties of West German capitalism:
Already today the big exporters of the automobile industry are paying 10,000 Deutschemark (about $4,000) to any work-er who voluntarily retires. Opel, a subsidiary of General Motors, has cut its employment rolls by 3,000 (at a cost of 30 million DM) by this method. And it will save money in this way, because it allows the company to implement the rules on layoffs, partial unemployment, and so on.
In short, it has turned out that the economic situation in West Germany differs only quantitatively from the general economic situation in the other imperialist countries. The variation results from some remaining reserves that were accumulated during the long boom. In the medium-term the world’s second industrial power is heading toward a serious recession. The breadth of that recession and its impact on the world market will be of considerable importance to the world economic conjuncture. Chancellor Schmidt, whom we quoted at the beginning of this article, seems to have understood this.
For the West German bourgeoisie, an important aspect of the SPD’s participation in the government is an attempt to “integrate” the working class through “concerted action” (among unions, employers, and the government) and to obtain the unions’ endorsement of limits on annual wage increases. But for the working class, the SPD’s governmental participation represents a hope that social reforms will be carried out and that the “quality of life” will be improved. In view of the contradictory nature of the social interests at work, not only the effort to “integrate” the working class, but the policy of the SPD as well is condemned to failure.
During the most recent contract negotiations, the Social Democrats responded to the pressure of the employers by openly opposing the wage demands advanced by the unions. But because of its interweaving with the union bureaucracy, the Social Democracy was incapable of effectively acting against these demands. Nevertheless, effective action is exactly what the bourgeoisie expects of the bourgeois state in the present situation.
For its part, the working class abandoned its hope of obtaining important social reforms, and it thus abandoned its offensive support to the SPD because of the worsening economic situation and the overtly procapitalist attitude of the government headed by the SPD. The workers’ euphoric attitude toward the SPD in 1972 gave way to resignation and disappointment. The minimal reactions of the working class to Brandt’s resignation as compared to the reaction to the “cold coup” of 1972 testify to this.
The West German bourgeoisie is now intensifying its efforts on two levels to prepare most adequately for a confrontation with the working class. On the parliamentary level, the CDU-CSU is utilizing its possibility of blocking the decisions of the Bundestag by its one-vote majority in the Bundesrat. (The Bundestag is the chamber of deputies. The Bundesrat, second house of parliament, is composed of representatives of the parliaments of the Lander, the West German states, according to the federal structure of West Germany – Inprecor.) There is hardly a law proposed by the government that is not challenged and whose application is not delayed on the initiative of the Bundesrat. The aim of this policy is to force the SPD to move increasingly to a line more hostile to the interests of the working class, to eliminate the real (and therefore costly) reforms that have been made, and above all to intensify its “hard line” on questions of “internal security, “ that is, its actions against the revolutionary left.
In this general strategy, the FDP, liberal component of the governing coalition, often plays the role of the opposition’s Trojan horse. When parliamentary means prove insufficient, the opposition resorts to the Constitutional Court with the aim of having the SPD’s laws or reforms declared “unconstitutional.” This is what happened with the law legalizing abortion in the first three months of pregnancy, for example.
But the bourgeoisie is not restricting its actions to the parliamentary field. Capital is also mobilizing its own “extra-parliamentary opposition.” Several thousand employers at a big meeting in Cologne listened to inflammatory speeches calling upon them to wage “class struggle.” A “national meeting of craftsmen” was organized in Hanover in which government representatives were met by shouts of “Shoot them! “ and “Go to the eastern zone!” (eastern zone being cold war language for the German Democratic Republic). During a mass meeting of peasants held recently in Dortmund, the understandable fear of the small peasantry and their anger at the capitalist “restructuration” proposed by the Common Market were “redirected” against the government to the profit of the bourgeoisie. The “virile” words spoken by Franz-Josef Strauss, number one German representative of the “strong state, “ at the conclusion of the July 1974 congress of the CSU must be placed In this same context. Strauss said that an offensive struggle had to be waged against “the influence of Marxism” to “banish it from Germany and Bavaria” and to stop the “SPD from selling Germany to the GDR.” This “extraparliamentary” offensive has not failed to lead to a regroupment of neofascist forces that are characterized by accentuated militancy and pronounced social demagogy.
The fall of Willy Brandt, the “peace chancellor,” was the first striking result of this offensive by the bourgeoisie. It represented the SPD’s acknowledgement of the failure of its “reform policy” and “integration policy.” The public service strike at the beginning of 1974 clearly demonstrated that failure. Brandt asserted that wage increases beyond 10 percent would lead to an inflation rate of more than 10 percent and an increase in unemployment. He proclaimed that such increases were intolerable for the government. But the public service union, under rank-and-file pressure, was forced to launch strikes and carried the day, without the government daring to intervene massively against the strikers as the employers were hoping would happen. This trade-union victory had consequences for all the wage negotiations then going on. Everywhere, new contracts included wage increases exceeding 10 percent.
The elections to the Ldnder parliaments in 1974 also reflected the failure of the SPD’s policy. Social Democratic losses were significant everywhere, sometimes running as high as 10 percent. Working class support for the SPD declined. Because of the worsened economic situation, middle layers and backward sections of the working class even began to identify the CDU-CSU with stability and economic prosperity.
The occasion for Brandt’s resignation was provided by the Guillaume espionage affair. Brandt seized upon this to admit the failure of his policy. It gave the employers and the CDU-CSU enough ammunition to eliminate Brandt as a “man of weakness, “ a “security risk, “ and so on. It may be supposed that the timing of the revelation of the Guillaume affair was not determined fortuitously.
Willy Brandt’s successor is Helmut Schmidt, former minister of finances and a friend of Giscard d’Estaing. He knows how to procure a respite, at least a short-term one. Instead of announcing reforms, he proclaimed in a ministerial declaration that the new cabinet “would concentrate on what is realizable.” For Helmut Schmidt, what is especially “realizable” is the violation of the electoral promises of 1969 and 1972 on the basis of which the SPD won the support of the working class. As opposed to Brandt, who tried to conciliate the various contradictory wings of the SPD, Schmidt represents the overtly pro-capitalist wing of the SPD, which does not feel bound by the decisions of the party congress and which is prepared to act severely against the Young Socialists and the left wing of the party.
But Schmidt has even less chance of overcoming the contradictions of the SPD as a governmental party than Brandt did. He has been forced to work toward his own fall in the next legislative elections (1976). He has no chance of satisfying the bourgeoisie unless he can succeed in injposing a “stability accord” on the trade unions. Toward this end, he has made a fiscal reform. Accelerated inflation had resulted in a reduction in the real income of the workers by an accentuated progression of wage taxes. In fact, of every DM won by the workers in wage increases during 1973, nearly half was lost through the increase in wage taxes.
But the fiscal reform will only amount to a small reduction in the taxes paid by workers’ households during 1975. Even if the rate of inflation does not rise, the intolerable progression of wage taxes will recommence in 1976. Moreover, this reform involves only one point on which the employers would have suffered a deterioration in their fiscal income compared to the laws now in force. And this point was eliminated under the offensive of the employers and the CDU-CSU. The fiscal reform as finally adopted corresponds even to the short-term interests of the bourgeoisie, since it assures a certain growth in demand on the internal market for the year 1975, which will be a bad year economically.
Obviously, the ideal thing for the bourgeoisie would be for the unions to agree to moderate, or even suppress, their wage demands in exchange for this paltry fiscal reform. Such a success would undoubtedly increase Schmidt’s prestige in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, but it would discredit him completely in the eyes of the working class, with corresponding electoral results.
The West German bourgeoisie’s search for a solution to its crisis of leadership goes on against a different backdrop from that of the other countries of Western Europe. The bourgeoisie in West Germany has much more room to maneuver because of the disappointment and lack of perspective among the working class and the weakness of the revolutionary left. The West German bourgeoisie can force the bourgeois workers party that is the SPD to drift to the right without paying the price of an immediate push to the left by the proletariat, for there is still no credible revolutionary pole of attraction to the left of the SPD that could be considered by a layer of workers as an alternative to the bureaucracies of the SPD and the DGB.
The coming wage negotiations will mark an important stage in the class struggle in the German Federal Republic, since Schmidt has practically adopted the employers’ position. It will thus be necessary for the working class to oppose the government’s policy openly if it wants to defend its own interests. This implies that the workers will pass from a stage of disappointment and disorientation to a more militant defense of their interests and that they will begin to take their distance from the SPD.
What remains to be seen is whether important layers of the working class will be able to extract themselves from the influence of the trade-union bureaucracy and whether the revolutionary left will succeed in extending its influence within the working class, especially among the new workers vanguard that has been emerging in the factories since 1969.
In fact, since the outbreak of the wildcat strikes in the factories during September 1969 there has been a process of gradual replacement of the workers leaders committed to class collaboration during the 1950s and 1960s by more militant leaders. Nevertheless, these leaders have proven incapable of taking the necessary initiatives to deal with the new tasks posed by partial unemployment, speedups, layoffs, and factory closings. This is a reflection of the small amount of progress in class consciousness that has been made in the past five years – even among the most advanced workers – and of the uneven development of the radicalization among the workers, for this same new workers vanguard was capable of leading the wage struggles of 1969 and 1973 independent of and partially against the trade-union bureaucracy.
This bureaucracy has not remained passive. During the past several years it has been trying to strengthen its weakened positions. Until the middle of the 1960s, it tried to base itself on so-called men of trade-union confidence (Vertrauensleute, partially comparable to the British shop stewards or the Belgian trade-union delegates) within the factories in order to neutralize the members of the factory councils (Betriebsträte) who were too inclined to adopt independent class-collaborationist positions identifying themselves with the interests of the employers. These Vertrauensleute were also the promoters of a new workers leadership on the factory level. The trade-union leadership is therefore now trying to put the brakes on the upsurge by imposing new rules and regulations that, among other things, dissolve the interfactory channels of communication of the Vertrauensleute at the local level.
Moreover, the bureaucracy is moving toward more marked disciplinary measures by introducing so-called resolutions of incompatibility alongside the government bans on employing revolutionaries in public services. These resolutions say that membership in a revolutionary organization, generally defined totally arbitrarily anyway, is incompatible with membership in the trade union. The pretext used to pass these resolutions was the line upheld by the Maoist groups of creating a “Red Trade Union Opposition” (Rote Gewerkschaftsopposition, RGO) independent of the DGB. In practice these disciplinary measures are taken against any attempt to create a trade-union tendency.
Taken together, all this amounts to a not insignificant series of preparatory steps by the bureaucracy. And to this must be added the fact that the bureaucracy has partially increased its prestige in the eyes of a part of the working class by moving to an “active” wage policy that had been imposed on it by the wildcat strikes of 1969 and 1972. The collective bargaining round of 1973–74 and the struggle of the metalworkers of Baden-Würtemberg to improve conditions on the assembly lines marked the principal stages of this reactivization of the trade unions. Hence, the trade-union bureaucracy is going into the coming class conflicts extremely well armed. But only the concrete class struggles themselves will demonstrate whether all these preparations are enough to block the process of political maturation within the rank-and-file trade-union bodies.
In order to attain a mobilization necessary for the contract struggles, combative trade-union militants will have to try to rapidly initiate rank-and-file discussions on what demands should be advanced. If they succeed in this there are two possibilities: Either the bureaucracy will yield in advance to the rank-and-file pressure and act openly against the employers and the SPD government, or else a new wave of wildcat strikes will break out and lead to a new loss of prestige for the union bureaucracy.
The economic situation clearly points toward an exacerbation of the recession. Growing dependence on the world market is undermining the economic situation in West Germany. And the aggravation of the recession is loaded with threats to the international imperialist economy. To be sure, Helmut Schmidt is a man who recognizes these threats, but just as certainly he is not the man who can eliminate them. The SPD as a bourgeois workers party has confirmed its ambivalent character during the latest events. This nature does not allow it to impose a policy that is openly and aggressively opposed to the immediate interests of the working class. Such a policy could be applied more effectively by the CDU-CSU or by a military dictatorship. More than ever, the SPD is dependent on the electoral support of the working class.
In this situation, the working class appears to lack perspectives for the immediate future. The workers are partially turning away from the SPD without knowing where to go. The most backward sectors are even turning toward the CDU-CSU. This is in part a result of the fact that the revolutionary left does not yet represent a credible alternative to the SPD and that certain sectarian Maoist groups have hegemony in the revolutionary left.
In the coming period, it will be important not only to find a practical alternative to the “moderation” of the trade-union bureaucracy on the level of “pure” wage struggles. It will be even more important to find a response to the key questions posed by the present situation, that is, an alternative to the “active” trade-union policy based exclusively on wage demands in the boom period, as well as an alternative to the conception that proposes no means of action on the political field other than electoral support to the SPD, the “representative of the interests of the wage earners.”
Revolutionaries must try to introduce into the new workers vanguard in the factories and into layers of progressive trade unionists demands that will allow for organizing a solidarity struggle against the reduction of real wages, layoffs and partial unemployment, inflation, and factory shut-downs. If this effort is successful, it will be possible to unify the whole working class and ward off the demoralization and passivity that is threatening the class. In that case, a new outbreak of workers struggles will overturn the plans of the employers, Chancellor Schmidt, and the trade-union bureaucracy. The slogans must be: No support to Helmut Schmidt! For class struggle trade unionism! The working class must defend its interests by taking its distance from the SPD! For a program of transitional demands – against inflation, for a sliding scale of wages; against layoffs, for a sliding scale of hours; against speedup, for workers control of production.
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