Germany: Who is behind the neo-Nazi march in Duisburg?

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Germany: Who is behind the neo-Nazi march in Duisburg?
By Dietmar Henning
31 March 2010

Neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists staged an anti-immigrant
demonstration last weekend in the German city of Duisburg. This
right-wing march, involving the National Democratic Party of Germany
(NPD) and the Pro NRW (Pro North Rhine Westphalia) pressure group, was
organised to pass directly in front of the Merkez mosque in the
northern Duisburg suburb of Marxloh. Opposing this blatant provocation
in a city where every third inhabitant has an immigrant background, a
broad alliance was formed under the slogan of “Duisburg’s going the
wrong way.”

The World Socialist Web Site welcomes a wide-ranging mobilisation
against the neo-Nazi march. But several crucial issues need to be
exposed and clarified.

First and foremost, the struggle against extremism requires the
building of a party that consistently fights against capitalism and
mobilises the working class on the basis of an international socialist
programme. This is so because the breeding ground for extremist
discontent is to be found in the social and cultural decline of a
community that is based on exploitation and drives an ever-greater
section of the population into social misery.

It is precisely those organisations and parties—the Berlin political
parties and the trade unions, now feigning indignation about the
Nazis—whose capitalist, anti-social policies enable the neo-Nazis to
hold their heads high.

The neo-Nazis in Germany and Europe are largely a creation from above.
By this, we mean that they are intentionally promoted by sections of
the state and media in order to channel mounting opposition to
unemployment and social cutbacks along racist and right-wing lines.
The Federal Constitutional Court stated in 2003 that every seventh
functionary of the NPD was on the payroll of the Federal Office for
the Protection of the Constitution (Germany’s domestic intelligence
agency). It justified its refusal to place a ban on the party by
claiming that “as things stood, the issue concerned an activity of the
state.” The NPD receives millions of euros of taxpayers’ money in the
form of election campaign subsidies. The police protect their
demonstrations and target those opposing them.

Geert Wilders, the right-wing populist in the Netherlands, began his
political career in the liberal People’s Party for Freedom and
Democracy (VVD), which for years participated in coalition governments
with the Christian and social democrats to implement social cutbacks
and dismantle democratic rights, particularly for refugees and
foreigners. Wilders’s sordid incitements are willingly spread by the
media, while the government grants him round-the-clock police protection.

According to the declaration of the “Duisburg’s going the wrong way”
alliance, the “apparently bourgeois facade” of Pro NRW conceals “a
deep contempt,” directed “equally against Muslims, immigrants and
victims of the (niggardly) Hartz IV unemployment benefits scheme.” As
though contempt for foreigners and the poor was something incompatible
with a “bourgeois facade”!

Berlin’s former finance senator, Thilo Sarrazin (SPD—Social Democratic
Party), has been stirring up right-wing extremists and hounding
immigrants and the long-term unemployed for months. He has publicly
complained that Turks and Arabs have “no productive function other
than for the fruit and vegetable trade.” Especially the Turks, he
rants, will only go on producing new “headscarf girls” and eventually
“conquer Germany with their high birth rate.” He also urges Hartz IV
recipients to “take cold showers” to save money.

The SPD’s Berlin arbitration committee recently decided that his
outbursts in relation to immigrants do “not directly contradict
positions reached by the party convention or the party leadership.” On
the contrary, his provocations might “also be useful in that they
stimulate open discussion.” In other words, Sarrazin’s baiting of
foreigners and the socially deprived is compatible with the SPD’s
party programme.

The racist campaign waged by Sarrazin and numerous other
representatives of the ruling class is deliberately employed to steer
the social crisis in a reactionary direction. This is just as much the
case in the Netherlands and France, with the campaign against Islam,
as it is in Germany.

When these political parties and trade unions go on about integration
and “united community living” in order to distract attention from the
actual role they are playing, they should be spurned with the contempt
they deserve. Expressing moral indignation, linking hands in protest
and praying for peace will prove just as ineffective in stemming the
rise of extremism as appealing to the state to ban the fascist NPD.
This last move would serve only to boost the authoritarian power of
the state apparatus, since it would inevitably employ the same tactic
against its left-wing adversaries. Sit-ins, the building of barricades
and throwing Molotov cocktails also miss the point when it comes to
understanding the central problem: the political paralysis of the
working class through the operations of existing political and trade
union structures.

The extremists dare to crawl out of their holes mainly because the
working population currently has no voice of its own. For years, jobs
have been destroyed, wages cut and social rights dismantled, while—at
the other end of society—bankers and speculators have shamelessly
enriched themselves.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU (Christian Democratic Union) is just as
responsible for this as the SPD and the Greens, who initiated
implementation of the Hartz IV unemployment support laws. The Left
party also organises the demolition of social welfare wherever it
participates in government. For their part, trade unions set out to
dispel any sign of potentially effective social protest.

Duisburg, with its approximately 500,000 inhabitants, provides a
glaring example of the consequences of this common policy. There,
social misery is alarmingly palpable: 70,000 people are dependent on
Hartz IV; 13.5 percent of Duisburg are unemployed, the highest
unemployment rate in the Ruhr region. Poverty is concentrated in a
number of the city’s districts, particularly in the former steel and
coal worker’ neighbourhoods to the north. Proportionally, many more
Duisburg citizens of foreign origin live there, because they are far
more affected by the social decay. In the former miners’ district of
Walsum, almost every third foreigner lives off Hartz IV; in the Walsum
area of Aldenrade and in Marxloh, where the neo-Nazis march was
staged, it is as many as one in two. In the Bruckhausen district with
its almost 6,000 mainly Turkish residents, more than 80 percent of the
under-25s are dependent on Hartz IV. It is because of such misery and
frustration that so many immigrants are driven to seek refuge in religion.

When it comes to social cutbacks, all the political parties in
Duisburg are the same. Only last week, the city council passed a
gruelling austerity budget with votes from the SPD, the Greens and the
Left party, who all helped to draw it up. At a German Association of
Trade Unions (DGB) rally last Sunday, Mayor Adolf Sauerland (CDU)
spoke alongside social democrats and a representative of the church.
The parties and trade unions with close links to the SPD and the Left
party are utterly contemptuous of the people and their needs.

Thus, the declaration of the alliance “Duisburg’s going the wrong
way”—whose tone is set by the Left party and the unions—claims that
the extremists and neo-Nazis might be able to profit from an
anti-Islamic debate, “that is initiated from the middle of the
society.” But who is supposed to be “the middle of the society”? The
general population?

Workers and young people everywhere are looking for ways and means to
fight against social cutbacks, militarism and the dismantling of
democratic rights. But they are being systematically obstructed by the
SPD, the Left party and the trade unions.

The real problem is not the neo-Nazis, who find their audience in
backward and confused sectors of society, but the parties and unions
that are enforcing the social demolition and strangling all opposition.

It should not be forgotten that Hitler owed his success in 1933, not
to the strength of his own movement, but to the paralysis of the
labour movement. At the time, the SPD crippled their supporters by
slavishly subordinating themselves to the state and President
Hindenburg; and the Stalinist-dominated KPD (Communist Party of
Germany) by indulging in ultra-leftist ranting instead of struggling
to build a united front against the Nazis.

However, 2010 is not 1933. A political and social offensive on the
part of the working class would immediately separate and disperse the
extremist rabble like dust and give courage to all those disheartened
by the social decline.

The struggle against extremism is therefore inseparable from the
building of an independent political movement of the working class.
The international financial and economic crisis has greatly sharpened
the class divisions within society. In all countries—especially in
Greece—governments are exacting from the working population the
billions they gave away to the banks.

An independent movement has to begin by bringing together all workers,
youth and socially deprived people across all national, ethnic and
cultural borders. The dividing line is not between Germans and
foreigners, but between workers and capitalists.

It must uncompromisingly oppose all cutbacks and sackings and fight
for a socialist programme. The big banks and big business must be put
at the service of society, and production organised according to
social needs rather than the profit-making interests of capitalists.
It must set up committees of workers to organise opposition, and build
a new workers’ party.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) fights for the establishment of a
new international, socialist workers’ party. As the German section of
the Fourth International, we represent the Trotskyist tradition, which
has defended Marxism against the onslaught of social democracy and
Stalinism.

We call upon all opponents of right-wing extremism to contact the SEP
and its youth organisation, the International Students for Social
Equality (ISSE), and to read our daily internet publication, the World
Socialist Web Site.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/duis-m31.shtml

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