GERMANY: Workers and students mobilize

From www.ft-ci.org
GERMANY: Workers and students mobilize
By Antje Berlinger and Marcelo Torres
Thursday, November 20, 2008

The German working class is showing signs of wanting to follow in the steps of their class brothers in Italy and Greece. In Germany, a significant increase in struggles over demands that largely exceed the policy of wage moderation that the union bureaucracies have tried to impose, can be observed. Thus, last week, workers belonging to the metalworkers' union IG Metall partially shut down production in the heart of the German economy: automakers and electricity. Up to 550,000 workers of the plants of Opel, Mercedes Benz, Ford, Audi, BMW, Bosch, Nokia, Siemens and MAN forced the union leaderships to call warning strikes, work stoppages and demonstrations. They were demanding 8% wage raises, a demand that the IG Metall bureaucracy quickly betrayed, given its fear of calling a strike of indefinite duration, by arriving at an agreement, behind the backs of the workers, for a 4.2% raise, way below the 8% demanded originally.

While the President of the employers' association, Dieter Hundt, was welcoming the agreement as representing a "sign of common sense in a difficult economic situation," groups of rank and file workers were demanding and are still demanding "repudiation of that meager result and immediately beginning with a strike referendum," since "they cannot unload the crisis on our shoulders." According to estimates, in the coming year, 350,000 workers will lose their jobs, half of which would be in the automotive sector. Now, temporary workers have already been thrown into the street, and neither staff reductions of workers with permanent contracts nor wage cuts can be ruled out.

And the problem is that the "German marketplace" depends in large part on countries consuming its products, countries that are now stricken, as trade partners: the US, the United Kingdom, and the Spanish state. According to some estimates, exports, the preeminent German economic motor, will suffer a big sudden halt that will lead to only a 0.4% growth in exports (after this year's 4.2%) or even complete stagnation.

"Managers, out of the universities!"

Attacks by the bourgeoisie are also intensifying in the educational sector, where, besides the directives of the Bologna plan, a wave of privatizations is being carried out, from the kindergartens up to the universities, which intensifies the class character of the educational system. For instance, at present, only 16% of university students are sons or daughters of workers, and only 3.3%, children of immigrants. Last Wednesday, facing this situation, high school students, accompanied by university students and some professors, organized a 24-hour strike with demonstrations in approximately 40 German cities. More than 100,000 students filled the streets, demanding an end to inadequate funding of education, and a quality, unrestricted, and popular education, gratis. Students in Hannover surpassed the limits of bourgeois legality by blockading the regional parliament, and in Berlin they seized the Humboldt University by assault, waving red banners from its balconies. They forcefully entered a large room where businessmen were negotiating patent rights for universities, and they forced the businessmen to hold their signs while they helped themselves to the culinary delicacies from the banquet prepared for the occasion, to the cry of "a -anti -anticapitalist" and "managers, out of the universities."

These most recent acts are one more proof that young people in Germany are starting to wake up from their lethargy, beginning to see the need to find responses to the dominant ideologies and demand active participation in [determining] the conditions they live under. Precisely in this social climate where people are beginning to feel that in the context of the ideological failure of neoliberalism and the lack of responses from the bourgeoisie to face up to the economic crisis and from the traditional parties, the youth univerisites of the party Die Linke are organizing circles for reading and discussing Capital by Karl Marx. After years of the exile of Marxism from the universities, 2,000 young people meet every week in more than 40 German universities to read and debate that work, next to leftist intellectuals. After years of de-politicization and silence, of the alleged end of history, groups of young people are putting criticism of capitalism on the agenda.