BERLIN AND THE GERMAN
LABOR MOVEMENT
By W BECKER
The foreign policy of the Soviet leaders has for it as they were half a decade ago. This reflects the change in the relationship of forces change of attitude in Moscow's foreign between imperialism the non-capitalist world, especially the USSR.
Meanwhile there has been no less a change in the relationship of forces between the colonial revolution and world imperialism, to the disadvantage of the latter. Professor Henry A Kissinger, the American strategist of the "breakthrough," expresses this profound change as
I believe that the West as a whole is standing before a really very great crisis, does not have to do with only the Russian pressure. On the one hand, this steady pressure of the new countries in Asia and Africa, which is being strengthened through their very strong resentment against the West, so that the area in which Western values are valid becomes ever more narrow...
[Our italics.]
Kissinger, who has recognized after his own fashion how much imperialist policy's margin for manoeuvre is growing steadily limited, has also understood that as a result the situation grows ever more explosive. He is of the opinion that Berlin is worth a war — even if it should prove to be World War III. Thereby he ing: we have our backs to the wall. And in fact American imperialism, determined to defend its life, would sooner blow up the whole world than capitulate, unless in its own country it runs up against the only force capable of preventing this madness because it can settle its social causes -the working class. Just as for any other capitalist country in the world, this law is valid for the German Federal Republic.
The discrepancy between historico-political needs and the factual situation is as crass as can be imagined. The world is, without any doubt, now heading for a new peak of crisis in ready crisis-laden existence. This time it is at the Berlin powder-magazine that the fuse burning. Faced with this development, the Ger-
1 The original text in English being unavailable, the quotation above is a retranslation from the German text in the magazine, Der Spiegel.
man working class stands devoid of any orientation or leadership.
The Anti-Atom-Death Movement, which never had a real life — thanks to persevering sabotage by apparatuses of the Social-Democracy and the trade unions is dead. There are nowhere bases for a movement similar to that against remilitarization. Nothing indicates that the SP D or one of the big unions is thinking of intervening in the matter with extra-parliamentary measures. Hence, even if the worst is spared us, we shall end up with a compromise that will be as dubious as all the agreements that have been made on the shifting foundation of a world shaken by social crises. But the danger of war in Europe remains latent because its causes per-
The following theses set out from this premiss, and draw the trial balance of the experience of half-a-decade's division of Germany. They are to show that there is still today a perspective, the socialist perspective, which contains to a considerable degree a possibility of solution for the German question.
THESES FOR A SOCIALIST FOREIGN POLICY
1) Ihe existence of Berlin as the phantom
Word was on i deman
can carry out what is incumbent on Germany in the prevention of this war of annihilation. If the German working class is unable to solve this task, Germany will become one of the decisive battlefields in the catastrophe of all mankind.
2) The political solution of the German question must prevent the military extermination of our people. The iron curtain that separates the wo parts of Germany impedes the workers of he German Democratic Republic from coming to an understanding with their class comrades in the German Federal Republic; it also prevents the workers of the German Federal Republic from seeing and grasping the deep-going process of ocial Change taking place in the East
3) The German bourgeoisie, rigged out in Christian-Democracy, has shown itself, by its acceptance of the rearming of Germany and of the supplying of atomic weapons to the Federal Army, to be the worthy successor of the bourgeoisie of the fascist Third Reich and of the imperialist Reich of the Kaiser. Because of its di-
minished international weight, it can no longer of a system of plurality of parties on the basis
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL start its own independently conducted war attain its foreign policy objectives of winning back its lost territories and providing political support for its economic expansion. It can, however, make its remaining Federal Republic into a fortress within whose walls its Western partners can build up their atomic strength for the defense of their joint capitalist interests. The German bourgeoisie can thus, with the German question, provide the ". juridical pretext" starting the Third World War for the defense of international capitalism against the assault of the colonial peoples and, in case of need, the working class.
4) If the Soviet bureaucracy, with the agreement of its tool Ulbricht, has chosen Berlin as its target-objective in Europe, it is for the tollowing reasons:
a) It has given up hope of politically winning over the West-German working class - and probably the whole West-European working class. Hence it prefers to plug the Berlin leak and strengthen the Democratic Republic economically and militarily in order smultaneously to consolidate politically the blindly devoted Ulbricht regime.
Mb) It has taken over as its own foreign policy Dulles's formula of the calculated risk, i e, of going right to the brink of war to achieve its political aim; it is applying it to the question of Berlin and Germany, and has thus conjured up a real danger of war.
5) In the Potsdam Agreements the four victorious powers pledged themselves to treat Germany as an economic unit and to break the domination of the monopolies, the militarists, and the fascists. They employed therein the same formulae, which, however, covered up opposed social interests. The results were:
La) The destruction of capitalism and landed property in the Democratic Republic, but by typically Stalinist-bureaucratic police methods, i e, the elimination and even repression of any democratic initiative by the working class.
Mb) The reëstablishment of the power of the monopolists and miltarists in the Federal Republic, against the resistance, ineffective because reduced to parliamentary prattling, of the Social-
Democracv and the trade unions. There was thus destroyed the basis on which it might have been possible to set out on political paths leading to the reunification of Germany.
Gc) Since "destalinization" introduced after Stalin's death is only a form of self-defense by the Stalinist bureaucracy, it was not extended, once the limited goals set by the Khrushchev fraction had been reached, to the democratization of political life, i e, to the reëstablishment of a socialist constitution and to the reestablishment of freedom of fractions within the Communist Parties and trade unions. In this way the Soviet bureaucracy itself blocked its own road toward the working class in the West. The further sharpening of the international situation, through the German question and the orientation toward military solutions, is the result of the objective impossibility for the German bourgeoisie and the Soviet bureaucracy to find a lasting compromise acceptable to both sides, i e, to take the road to socialization in the Federal Republic and to democratization of political life in the Democratic Republic. Coexistence international treaty basis can never be more than a highly unstable interim situation, threatened at every moment, which expresses in world forces a momentary balance that is steadily coming to an end. This will under present conditions lead, not to a long period of relaxation of strains, but to an increased sharpening of tensions. 6) After the end of the Second World War, Stalin, prisoner of his conservative-bureaucratic conceptions, hostile to revolutionary mass moveand repeating his old erroneous practice in foreign policy, believed, more than his former Western allies did, in a long period of peaceful coexistence. Trusting thereto, he sacrificed the Communist movement of Greece, he sacrificed the Communist-led French and Italian underground movements, whose disarming was required by him and carried through by the Communist Parties of both countries. Stalin was ready to sacrifice the Jugoslay and the Chinese revolutions, and in this way to negotiate a longer period of calm for the Soviet Union. This tailed, owing to the enormous pressure of the Chinese revolution on the ever more independent position of Mao Tse-Tung, who finally refused, against Stalin's wishes, mit to Chiang Kai-Shek. This attitude aided the rapid victory of the Chinese revolution, whereby the decisive turn in the relationship of forces on the international scale was furthered. Not only Stalin's calculations, but also those of the US bourgeoisie, were upset by the victory of the Chinese revolution. It was forced, with Marshall Plan aid, to go over to the offensive. The United States achieved a temporary economic and political stabilization of the West.
Germany, which by its division into two west forms the European frontier between the and East," in this way becomes the central point of the US A's efforts at stabilization and its European stronghold in its conflict with the Soviet Union. The economic consolidation and milit-
38 ary rearming of the Federal Republic form the US A's first European defense line.
7) The Soviet Union was right to complain that the reëstablishment of monopolies in the Federal Republic broke the Potsdam Agreements. Stalin, however, hoped in compensation to use the Communist mass movements in France and Italy as auxiliary troops of Soviet diplomacy, to revent a consolidation of relations between the capitalist states and to force his former allies to come back to the Potsdam Agreements. He hoped in this way to be able to prevent the West from encircling the Soviet Union. He also never abandoned the thesis of the social transformation of the Federal Republic as a precondition for coexistence with the West.
Khrushchev: however, explained in his Berlin note that the difference in the political and soclal systems of the Federal and Democratic Republics was not the nub of the question. He thereby drew the trial balance of his bankrupt policy of seeking to win over the Western working class.After the French Communist Party was defeated, after it was decided to rearm the Federal Republic atomically, and after no action of resistance by the German workers' movement was forthcoming, Khrushchev — basing himself on the current advance of the USSR in arms -in his own Stalinist-bureaucratic way deduced the lesson from these events. The distrust that exists in every bureaucrat toward the working class made him give up the search for a way out oriented along class-political lines. He prefers the economic and political isolation of the Democratic Republic and the reënforcement of military frontiers to any efforts at winning over the German working class.
3) A German socialist foreign policy must start out from the basic consideration that the causes of a Third World War arising out of the German situation can be removed only if:
a) by the socialization of heavy industry,
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL banking, insurance, and the power industry, monopoly capital's power is definitively broken in Germany. Without this transformation of the social structure of the Federal Republic and the internal policy connected therewith, no fundamentally new foreign policy in search of reunification is possible.
b) the possibilities of a gradual democratization within the Eastern bloc are consistently aided. A precondition therefor is the lessening (or cessation) of military pressure on the Eastern bloc through an active fight against German rearming. Another precondition is the establishment of normal diplomatic relations with all the states of the Eastern bloc.
c) relations are established with all the Communist mass parties and trade unions in the West, to forge a Socialist-Communist united front against European reaction and its neofascist dangers. The Communist mass movements which have been formed under the conditions of parliamentary bourgeois democracy are an expression of the free will of the working class of these countries, and hence should not be measured by the same scale as is used with the C Ps of the Eastern bloc.
d) by the use of all trade-union and political means of struggle and propaganda for a socialist programme of reunification, negotiations are carried on with the Ulbricht regime to set up a German confederation. Within such a confederation, there must always be maintained the spirit of a democratic-socialist offensive which regards the confederation as a transitional form toward a unified socialist Germany.
Only in this way can the Ulbricht clique be undermined fervenion, yithe priet Uni an without provoking an immediate and can the Adenauer regime be overthrown and a political and not military solution of the German question be ensured and the annihilation of Germany in a Third World War be prevented.