Germany: the youth, Die Linke and the class struggle

The electoral success of left-wing Die Linke in Germany shows that there is a genuine desire among young people to fight against all the evils of capitalist society. Die Linke received 8.8 percent of the vote in the Bundestag elections and was thus able to celebrate a surprising comeback compared to its performance in recent years. It is now polling at 11 percent. It is the strongest party among young people. It even won the elections in Berlin. 

The result among first-time voters has revealed the enormous polarisation among young people: 27 percent for Die Linke, 6 percent for the populist BSW, 20 percent for the right-wing AfD. Meanwhile the traditional parties of the establishment – the conservative CDU, the Social Democrats (SPD), and the liberal Greens and FDP – together only received 43 percent. 

Young people recognise capitalism as a system of permanent crises and constant decline. Only 46 percent of young people are optimistic about the future of Germany, compared to 62 percent in 2021. When it comes to the future of the world, only 38 percent are optimistic. 

Life in crisis-ridden capitalism is a constant psychological burden on young people: 51 percent suffer from stress, 36 percent from exhaustion, 33 percent have anxiety, etc. The biggest concerns for young people are inflation (65 percent), war in Europe and the Middle East (60 percent), unaffordable and scarce housing (54 percent), the division of society (49 percent), climate catastrophe, the rise of the right wing, etc. 

At the same time, the generations since the 2000s are the most politicised and politically active in decades. 50 percent of young people describe themselves as interested in politics. They have seen or experienced the Arab revolutions of the 2010s; the mass movements in Latin America, Africa and Asia; Fridays for Future; Black Lives Matter; the women's movements in Spain, Ireland, Poland, Iran and, most recently, the protests against the genocide in Gaza. 

Young people are looking for change, a dignified life and meaningful and secure work. This desire for a better society must sooner or later turn into class struggle. The electoral success of Die Linke has revealed the militant mood among young people. 

Shortly before the election, Die Linke was able to strengthen its reputation as a force for social justice and, above all, as a champion against racism and reactionary migration policies. The vote in the Bundestag between the CDU and AFD in favour of a racist asylum bill sent a shockwave through the youth. Die Linke countered this by saying that it would ‘take to the barricades’ against racism, austerity, rearmament and war. This was the central factor that enabled Die Linke to achieve its surprising electoral success. 

This promise to fight inspired a broad section of young people to get behind Die Linke. The party was able to build on the militant energy with which hundreds of thousands demonstrated against Friedrich Merz (CDU) and the AfD. 

Die Linke is perceived as a militant party that opposes the open racism and brutal austerity policies of the established parties in Berlin. In doing so, it has been able to tap into the concerns of a large proportion of young people. 

The history of Die Linke 

Yet Die Linke has been in a deep crisis for years. On the day of the vote on the racist asylum bill, it was only at 3 percent in the opinion polls, a level it had been languishing at for a year. Even in the 2021 federal elections, it failed to pass the five percent threshold required to enter the Bundestag, and was only given seats as it won the vote in three constituencies outright. In 2023, the party split. The split-off around Sahra Wagenknecht (Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht – BSW) adapted to the AfD, raising anti-war and anti-immigration demands. The majority continued the party’s adaptation to the liberals and Social Democracy. 

The social roots of Die Linke lie above all in two profound periods of social turbulence, in the 1990s and early 2000s. 

Die Linke has been in a deep crisis for years / Image: Die Linke, Flickr

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent liquidation of the GDR's planned economy by the West German capitalist establishment had barbaric consequences for the working class in East Germany, which faced brutal deindustrialisation, mass unemployment and emigration, and the collapse of social security. It was a lasting humiliation that gave the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism), successor to the ruling party of East Germany, a mass base in the East from the mid-1990s. 

Furthermore, in the early 2000s, broad sections of the population were severely disappointed by the policies of the Social Democrat-Green coalition government under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The reformist SPD acted as an agent of capitalist interests in the bourgeois government with the Greens. Capital dictated the reactionary Agenda 2010 policy, which involved social cuts, austerity policies, attacks on labour rights and the ‘Hartz IV’ attacks on unemployment benefits. These counter-reforms were carried out by the Social Democrats and the Greens. This led to resistance on the streets and the opposition of trade unionists and a layer of SPD members, who founded the WASG (Labour & Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative) in 2004.  

In the mid-2000s, there were two parties – the PDS and the WASG – that expressed the will of the class-conscious layers of the working class and young people to resist the Schröder agenda and the cuts in the East. These two parties merged on 16 June 2007 to form the left-wing reformist party Die Linke. This was a step forward because the class struggle required an organised expression that could gather together and unify all those willing to fight. 

The rise of Die Linke was thus a product of this crisis of the Social Democrats, which not only failed to offer reforms throughout this period, but instead offered only counter-reforms. Reformism forces the working class into an unequal marriage with its class enemy, the capitalists. In the crisis of capitalism, the rulers pass on the consequences of the crisis to the working class, while the latter is prevented from resisting by its reformist leadership.

Die Linke was an attempt by the working class to break out of this forced marriage. For the first time, there was a party to the left of the SPD that could win a mass base in East and West Germany and give the labour movement a militant impetus. Die Linke achieved successes in state and federal elections and its membership grew. It gave a large layer of left-wing activists the opportunity to fight for change, and it raised hopes for positive reforms. However, this spirit of optimism soon came into conflict with the reformist foundations of Die Linke.

A fundamental weakness

From the very beginning, grandees such as Gregor Gysi or Dietmar Bartsch had come to terms with capitalism and given the membership of Die Linke a reformist disorientation, claiming that elections, parliamentary work and participation in bourgeois government coalitions with the SPD and Greens could bring about reforms. 

From the very beginning, grandees such as Gregor Gysi or Dietmar Bartsch had come to terms with capitalism and given the membership of Die Linke a reformist disorientation / Image: Die Linke, Flickr

The party did not mobilise a struggle for its programme outside, as well as inside, parliament. Instead, the party adapted to the constraints of the capitalist system. This resulted in a constant servility to the liberal media as well as Social Democracy and the ruling class itself. Where it came to power at a regional level, it gave in to the pressure to carry out austerity and privatisation instead of organising resistance through the labour movement. Where it was not in government and took part in social movements, it did not take leadership.

As a result, after a brief rise, decline set in during the second half of the 2010s, from which Die Linke and its leadership in particular failed to draw the right conclusions. One call for renewal followed another. But the content remained the same: constant adaptation to liberal ideas and parliamentarianism. 

Die Linke degenerated into an election campaign machine. Even the tame idea of ‘democratic socialism’ in the party programme fell by the wayside. It refrained from challenging the capitalist class with class struggle and, as a result, was plunged into a deep crisis from 2020 on. It remained completely passive in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war, the energy crisis, inflation, and also the deep economic crisis that Germany has been stuck in since 2018. The leadership of Die Linke had manoeuvred the party into complete paralysis in the midst of the deepest crisis of capitalism, which led many to leave the party.  

In 2023, we wrote the following on the crisis of Die Linke: 

“Today it is clearer than ever that the straitjacket of reformism must be broken. From climate change to inflation, all the symptoms of capitalism's crisis require mass resistance. The movements around Fridays for Future, Black Lives Matter, but also the strike movements of recent months, show that such a struggle is emerging on the streets and in the factories, in which the working class and young people themselves are coming onto the scene. This requires a new organised expression: a workers' party that takes up the struggle for socialist revolution.”

Die Linke today 

Prior to the federal election this year, Die Linke appeared to break out of its passivity. The party stood out in the movements which challenged the racism and reactionary policies of the AfD and CDU. Die Linke appeared to be the most honest party on that question because the SPD, Greens and liberals organised their own lurid racist anti-refugee hysteria. Die Linke also organised a vigorous door-to-door election campaign, particularly in Berlin and Leipzig, and took on the problems of the masses: high rents, poor pay and austerity. This breathed new life into the party’s electoral hopes, but the party’s apparent militancy was not to last.

At the press conference the day after the election, Jan van Aken, the leader of Die Linke, said that the Left Party will “fight every attack on the welfare state both in parliament and on the streets”. He pointed out that the new members were keen to “continue on the streets”. 

However, the leadership of Die Linke has not organised any struggles to defend social gains and against military expenditure since then. Instead, it enabled the establishment parties CDU/CSU, SPD and Greens to organise a coup in the old Bundestag against the new election result. The old parliamentary faction of Die Linke voted in favour of the old Bundestag convening to hold a debate and vote on the €500 billion special fund for ‘infrastructure’ and the reform of the constitutional limits on state borrowing (the so-called debt brake), which allows unchecked debt-financed rearmament. 

While the parliamentary group in the Bundestag nevertheless voted against this counter-reform, the leaders of the Left Party in the federal states of Bremen and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania made their loyalty to the bourgeois parties clear by supporting these war loans in the Bundesrat.

It is clear that what is needed is not just verbal protests in parliament but to organise the fight against austerity and rearmament in workplaces, schools, universities and trade unions. Anything else is giving the next government a free pass for militarism and redistribution from the bottom to the top. 

The coming government made up of the CDU/CSU and SPD will utilise this counter-reform to the full. The establishment warmongers are now buying tanks and bombs. They are exporting weapons and have started sending soldiers all over the world – this month, for the first time since WW2, Germany permanently deployed troops in another country, in Lithuania. They are fuelling the war in Ukraine and Israel's genocide. At the same time, they want to turn young people in this country into cannon fodder and are preparing for war with ‘Operation Deutschland’. 

It is clear that what is needed is not just verbal protests in parliament but to organise the fight against austerity and rearmament in workplaces, schools, universities and trade unions / Image: Die Linke, Wikimedia Commons

The working class is to pay for the imperialist great power dreams of the German ruling class. With anti-Russian and anti-Muslim chauvinism and war hysteria, they want to generate patriotism and loosen our purse strings. The CDU/CSU, SPD and Greens, together with the bosses’ federations, supported by the racist demagogy of the AfD, are dumping the costs of the crisis and war on the working class and young people. 

The ruling class is demanding sacrifice. They say we have lived beyond our means and that the ‘peace dividend’ has been used up. That is a lie. The crisis of capitalism in Germany is the fault of the capitalists, their politicians and their governments. What we are experiencing is the crisis of this system, which is driving the world into barbarism. They are destroying everything that makes a halfway civilised life possible. 

In this situation, the leadership of Die Linke has extended its hand to “all democratic parties” in a resolution passed on 1 March. Die Linke MP Gregor Gysi, the longest-serving member of parliament and therefore the President by right of age of the Bundestag, also reaffirmed this stance in his opening speech to the new Bundestag on 25 March: 

“The majority of members of the Bundestag assume that a high capacity for deterrence is needed through the Bundeswehr and its weapons, so that no country would dare to attack us. They believe that negotiations can only be conducted on an equal footing on this basis. Those who see things differently, such as myself, should never label those who hold this viewpoint as warmongers. After all, they want to secure peace along the way.”

Gysi presented himself as a vehement advocate of ‘defence spending’, concealing the social consequences and the coming barbaric policies of the bourgeois parties. 

Beforehand, Die Linke had come out with the promise to “take to the barricades”. It said it would denounce the bourgeois parties' policy of cuts, armament and inaction in the climate crisis, and lead a fight against it. However, Gysi’s first appearance in the new Bundestag called for reconciliation with the class enemy. The leadership of Die Linke is thus, after the parliamentary elections, treading the same path of reformism that previously led it into a deep crisis. 

Which way forward? 

The electoral success of Die Linke has revealed the youth’s desire to fight. Die Linke now has the opportunity to break through the passivity of the labour movement imposed by the trade union leadership by mobilising the youth on the streets for a protest movement against austerity, rearmament and the incoming government. 

This is the responsibility that Die Linke now bears: it must bring the working class opposition onto the streets. It should call its membership and electorate (over 4 million votes) into the struggle. We communists are of the opinion that Die Linke should fight for its programme on the streets. That is why it was elected. 

By courageously leading the way, the youth can show the rest of the labour movement that it is possible to fight. The youth have been inspired by the recent global class struggles and have the potential to inspire the labour movement in Germany. If you fight with determination, you can win. Now is the time to act. Now is the time for a mass movement on the streets, led by the youth. 

We communists are in favour of such an offensive and are campaigning for it everywhere. The ruling class is demanding an enormous bloodletting from the entire working class. The youth should say: we will not pay for your crisis! We will not let you take what we have! We are entitled to much more! We want more from life!

We think that the youth and working class not only need more radical methods of struggle but also a programme that can mobilise the masses to fight back against the ruling class. Reformism and the ‘social partnership’ have hampered every independent movement of the working class and youth and led to defeats. The labour movement therefore needs a voice and an organisation that can lead it out of this impasse and revive the class struggle. 

We communists of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RKP) in Germany are fighting for such a party. Our programme opposes national patriotism and the defence of this system of exploitation and oppression. We say that the youth and the labour movement can only rely on their own strength. They must take their fate into their own hands and fight for power in society. 

We say: peace to the huts, war on the palaces. For us, this means class struggle instead of class compromise. The future of the youth and the working class lies in the struggle against capitalism for the socialist revolution.