Eines is certain: these will be dramatic days for the Left Party. The party conference is taking place this weekend in Erfurt, the leadership will be re-elected and principles will be discussed. Hardly anyone would deny that the party is in an existential crisis after disastrous election results, various intrigues, mutual accusations, a MeToo campaign and apparently unbridgeable assessments of the political situation.
As a representative of the interests of the working and poor population, she is hardly noticed anymore. You could already read about the destiny party conference. To be or not to be, is that the question? The end of the party is in the room, said Sahra Wagenknecht before the party conference. Under penalty of doom, it really doesn’t get much more dramatic than that.
One might think that party conventions would be good subject matter for plays. Public trials of strength that were prepared in long backroom discussions, big speeches that sweep the audience away, tight votes that remain exciting until the last moment, history is made here. Who doesn’t feel the whiff of a royal drama of Shakespearean proportions, in which the often tragic confrontation with the sword has been replaced by the more humane use of the word?
In fact, you have to search a long time before you come across a corresponding German-language play. But there is one thing that fits the current situation of the Left Party like no other.
“Not for long”
Shortly before his death in 2003, the poet and playwright Peter Hacks wrote a short drama called “The Party Congress”. The reason for this was the severe crisis in the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), which had missed out on entering the Bundestag a year earlier. “In private. Do you realize that the party has gotten to the point where it is self-destructive?” says chairwoman Rosi to board member Maryam in the play. “I would say if she keeps doing what she’s doing for much longer, she won’t be doing much longer,” she replies. How often has one heard from Left Party circles in recent weeks that “business as usual” should not be allowed, and how often the opposite has been observed.
“We need an effective third relief package”
“It is not clear to me why the FDP of all people says no when it comes to tax cuts,” wonders Dietmar Bartsch, leader of the Left Party parliamentary group. In the WELT interview, he explains how citizens can be relieved. He says: “We need a higher and a clear grant.”
In “The Party Congress”, what is happening in the large hall is broadcast over the loudspeaker into a back room. That’s where the really important, because acting, staff meet. In his classic study “On the Sociology of Parties” from 1911, Robert Michels, who later went over to Italian fascism, had already established that the parties in a democracy produce an inner oligarchy. A caste of functionaries, you could also say. In addition, Michels observed “that in the democratic parties of the present, the major differences of opinion are fought out less and less on principle and with the pure weapons of theory and therefore quickly degenerate into personal bickering.” Who would want to contradict that?
Bickering is also inevitable in “The Party Congress”. How can the party – in the play: Party of Social Visionary Rebirth – be saved? A speaker piles phrase after phrase, invokes the principle of plurality and the principle of heterogeneity, speaks of the party of Pragmatic Utopianism. Today one might think of mosaic and movement links.
Another suggestion: all right and left dissenters will be expelled, albeit with the help of a commission on which both wings are represented. Different factions blocking and blaming each other for it without changing the state, that sounds fairly familiar too. Never forward, and the others are always to blame.
Socrates, Jesus Christ and John Law
In terms of ideals, things are no less confused at the party congress. Sometimes one calls for a renunciation of the legacy from Marx, the ideal fathers of the party are now Socrates, Jesus Christ and John Law, the inventor of paper money and founder of the first central bank. Another time, a speaker storms the stage and, with a few well-worn slogans, makes the delegates dream of a departure, which, however, is merely a renaming to the Bolshevik Revival Party. With sarcastic wit, Hacks shows the organizational and conceptual blockade of a party. It seems that this one has forgotten its purpose. What was that again: social revolution, institutional opposition or pluralistic confusion?
No special assets, please: Dietmar Bartsch (centre), Janine Wissler (right) and Gesine Lötzsch
Quelle: picture alliance/dpa/Kay Nietfeld
The Left Party must also make a decision. Does she want to burst open the power alliances within the party, in which one has settled so nicely despite the self-destructive consequences? Do you want to be greener than the Greens for another year of climate neutrality and a minimum wage of one euro more socially democratic than the SPD, or do you take a consistent class standpoint?
Do you want to support the war or those who don’t want to wage it but are supposed to pay for it? Do you want to be a reliable partner in politics, or do you want the left-wing opposition that makes the establishment tremble? Do you want a new woken coat of paint or actual changes? There will hardly be any agreement on this at the Erfurt party conference. But every decision is likely to have far-reaching consequences.
In his drama, Hacks left the solution open. He probably didn’t know any either, which could result from the plot itself. In an interview from the time when “The Party Congress” was written, he brought another protagonist into play, the good old Weltgeist, because “when the global economic crisis and a senseless war or a habit of wars come together, you very quickly have communist movements again.
In other words: One can then also rely on something that the world spirit has planned.” The world spirit, however, appears brittle. One cannot exactly rely on historical-philosophical speculations à la Hacks these days. Is the end near or is it open? For better or for worse, the Left Party must take matters into its own hands.