German chancellor ’s austerity measures re call the Weimar Republic

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German chancellor’s austerity measures recall the Weimar Republic
10 June 2010

The €80 billion austerity package announced last weekend by the German
government, calling for brutal attacks on the poor, has triggered outrage and
shock in wide sections of the population.

Many feel that the cuts targeting the unemployed, the ending of the child
allowance for those on welfare, the abolition of the heating subsidy for those
on housing benefits, and the cancellation of pension insurance contributions for
the long-term unemployed are profoundly antisocial, unjust and cowardly.
Meanwhile, the banks, speculators and those responsible for the crisis remain
unscathed and dictate the cuts in social spending.

The provocative character of the policy is calculated. The attack on the weakest
members of society is not just the result of the pathological high-handedness
and arrogance of Free Democratic Party (FDP) leader Guido Westerwelle and the
efforts of Chancellor Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic Union—CDU) to save her
ailing government coalition. The significance of the austerity package is more
fundamental and far-reaching than that.

It means that the ruling elite have decided to place the entire burden of the
financial and economic crisis on the backs of ordinary people. This cannot be
done without a major confrontation and is, in the end, incompatible with the
maintenance of democratic structures.

These events are reminiscent of the final years of the Weimar Republic. Then, as
now, the ruling class exploited the world economic crisis in order to enrich
itself beyond measure. And as with Merkel’s austerity measures today, it was
claimed that there was no alternative to the emergency decrees of the Brüning
government. In the end, popular resistance was suppressed by fascist terror and
dictatorship.

The Merkel government is opening up a new stage of class struggle with its
cowardly attack on the most vulnerable members of society. The policy of social
mediation, which the German bourgeoisie adopted following the tragedy of Weimar
and the catastrophic outcome of Nazism, is irrevocably over.

The working class cannot avoid a confrontation. It must prepare for great class
battles. This makes necessary a relentless and thorough political accounting.

Merkel, Westerwelle, Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann, etc., are well aware
that the vast majority of the population rejects their anti-social politics. The
elections in North Rhine-Westphalia in early May, which dealt a severe blow to
the CDU and FDP, showed this clearly.

That these policies, which have been rejected by the voters, are being continued
in an even more aggressive form demonstrates that the ruling elite takes no heed
of the will of the populace. The government’s €80 billion cuts programme
represents an attack on democracy and a step towards authoritarian forms of rule.

It is of a piece with the austerity policies being announced by governments
across Europe—Greece, Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, Hungary, Romania,
etc.—all of which are doing the bidding of the international financial mafia.

The Merkel government, like its counterparts throughout Europe, is relying on
the tacit support of all the parliamentary parties and working closely with the
unions. The current outcry by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Left Party
and the unions is a political charade. The calls for protests and resistance
from Willy Brandt Haus (SPD headquarters), Karl Liebknecht Haus (Left Party
headquarters) and the trade unions are pure hypocrisy. They are intended to
prevent the development of an independent movement that breaks free of the grip
of the unions and the SPD.

No one should allow his anger against Merkel and Westerwelle to make him fall
for the demagogic speeches of the trade union bureaucrats. It is necessary to
keep a cool head and look political facts soberly in the eye.

Merkel’s austerity measures take up where the SPD-Green Party government under
Gerhard Schröder (SPD) and Joschka Fischer (Greens) left off five years ago. The
biggest attacks on the welfare state took place under that government. Its
Agenda 2010 welfare and labour “reforms” established a huge low-wage sector.
Many who had worked for decades and paid into the unemployment insurance scheme
were rapidly moved onto welfare and driven into abject poverty.

The budget deficit, which is cited as grounds for the cuts, did not fall from
the sky. It is, in the first place, the result of the repeated lowering of
corporate taxes and the top tax rates by the SPD-Green government. The German
public expenditure quota, i.e., the share of the gross domestic product that
flows into federal, state and local budgets as well as the social security
system, has fallen since the mid-1990s from 50 percent to 44 percent—that is,
below the level of the UK.

Soaring state debts are, secondly, the result of the bailout packages, totalling
more than a trillion euros, which the government handed the banks and
speculators, with the approval of the SPD and Greens, in order to save them and
the euro from collapse.

The decision of the SPD and the Greens to nominate Joachim Gauck, an avowed
anti-communist and former federal commissioner for Stasi documents, as a
candidate for federal president is another political signal. The SPD and the
Greens want to make it clear that they have no serious political differences
with Merkel, who delivered an enthusiastic speech in January to mark Gauck’s
70th birthday.

The SPD and the Greens agree with Merkel that harsh austerity measures are
necessary. Their criticism is not whether they should be implemented, but how.
They believe the Merkel-Westerwelle coalition is too weak and too inexperienced
to withstand the expected pressures from below. If drastic cuts need carrying
out, they should be made by the SPD experts in social cruelty, runs the social
democratic credo.

The attitude of the unions is quite similar. Their officials are frequent
visitors to the chancellery. Just a few weeks ago, the delegates attending the
German Trade Union Federation (DGB) congress enthusiastically applauded the
chancellor. As in the 1930s, the unions are responding to the economic crisis by
moving closer to the state apparatus and partially merging with it.

The DGB bureaucrats regard their main task as ensuring the maintenance of
bourgeois order. While the employers and the government have declared war on the
working class, the unions are doing everything possible to hold back the
workers, limiting them to harmless protests and seeking to block any independent
mobilization.

A particularly nasty role is played by the Left Party, which is closely
connected with the trade union bureaucracy. The warning of parliamentary party
leader Gregor Gysi that Merkel’s austerity measures are endangering the social
peace in Germany is characteristic.

When the German Democratic Republic (East Germany, GDR) still existed, the
apparatus of the Left Party’s predecessor was used to secure the power of the
ruling bureaucracy in the name of preserving social peace. Now they offer
themselves as experts in controlling the working class.

Rarely has there been a party that is as dishonest as the Left Party. While it
protests against the social cuts, wherever it sits in government—as in the
Berlin Senate, the state government in Brandenburg, and many (mostly east
German) local authorities—it enforces social cuts with particular harshness.

The attitude of the Left Party was similar when it came to the government’s bank
rescue packages. First, it approved the use of expedited parliamentary
procedures, signalling its support. Then it voted against the substantive motion
implementing the rescue measures because it knew that its votes were no longer
needed to secure a majority.

There is one important lesson from the tragedy of Weimar: If these opportunist
politics are not challenged, a political disaster is inevitable.

Workers must not let themselves be lulled by the demagogic speeches of the trade
union bureaucrats, their defenders in the Left Party and its petty-bourgeois
apologists. Workers need a new party that tackles the problem at its root.

The International Committee of the Fourth International and its German section,
the Partei für Soziale Gleichheit (Socialist Equality Party), are fighting for
an international socialist programme that focuses on the expropriation of the
banks and big corporations. Only on this basis is it possible to break the
dictatorship of finance capital and establish a workers government that proceeds
from the needs of the population, not the profit interests of big business.

Ulrich Rippert

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