Ingar Solty is senior research fellow in foreign, peace, and security policy at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Institute for Critical Social Analysis in Berlin
This month marks 100 years since the birth of Marxist historian E. P. Thompson. His work offers vital insights into the growth of class consciousness — but also helps us see how parts of the 20th-century left lost their structural focus on class.
Germany’s former Die Linke parliamentary leader Sahra Wagenknecht has founded a new party. She claims it’s a voice for the ignored middle and working classes — but the party is mainly focused on winning over Germans who’ve turned to the far right.
In Germany, even radical left-wingers who long distrusted state power are today calling for more tanks and jets for Ukraine. Lacking alternative solutions to the conflict, parts of the Left increasingly fall in behind the government’s call to rearm.
The Bundestag has voted to make Germany the country with the highest military budget after the United States and China. For decades, Germany has tightly restricted social spending — but when the money is for weapons, no such limits apply.
Leo Panitch, who died on Saturday, defended working-class politics even in times when many of his colleagues succumbed to neoliberal triumphalism. His work had a political, not just academic, purpose — and its message will survive among the generation of socialists whose thinking he shaped.
In the last years before the Berlin Wall’s fall, most opposition movements in East Germany sought a reformed, more democratic socialism. But the effect of reunification on October 3, 1990 was a wave of neoliberal triumphalism in both East and West — undermining the principles of social solidarity and pushing the Left into the wilderness.
The coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a series of emergency measures to reorient our economies toward the public health care response. The crisis offers a glimpse of how production could be made to serve social needs — but only if we defeat those who want a return to capitalist normality.
Faced with another global recession, many governments are responding with even stronger state interventions than they did in the 2008 financial crisis. But stimulus packages to prop up businesses must also pose the question of public control — not just bailing out corporations, but repurposing their operations to confront the disasters ahead of us.
Frankfurt School cofounder Max Horkheimer is today credited as an insightful analyst of authoritarian culture. But Horkheimer’s ever-pessimistic outlook reflected the political defeats of his time — and an oft one-sided view of the loss of working-class agency.
As soon as we show up for work, our much-vaunted free speech goes out the window. But when we win full employment and don’t fear losing our jobs, we can tell the boss what we really think.
Seventy-five years after the Nazis murdered him, we celebrate the life of German anti-fascist athlete and communist resistance fighter Werner Seelenbinder.
The Social Democrats have collapsed. Die Linke is divided. Will the German left ever be able to contend for power?
Angela Merkel has resigned as CDU leader. Her failed promises of “prosperity for all” are leading to the disintegration of the traditional mass parties.