IS

I think the overall strategic dilemma — the question of power and how to gain it — is at the heart of the internal divisions. Yes, migration policy is something of a dividing line, and has also become one because of the vitriolic rhetoric that leftists on both sides have been hurling at each other, calling each other “neoliberals” (as some more unhinged Wagenknecht supporters sometimes call Kipping) or “AfD light” (as some of Wagenknecht’s more unhinged opponents sometimes call her). Yet, in my view, this dispute merely symptomizes differences in strategic approaches to power and the question of how to deal with working-class voters flocking to the far right. This ought to be debated openly, without self-righteousness, mutual suspicion, and destructive name-calling.

Wagenknecht is well-aware that there are voters with a coherent racist and misogynist mindset whom the Left will never reach, but also that many workers who voted for the AfD are not right-wingers but supported the party because of their insecurities and loss of status, subjective devaluations. She is, rightly, posing the question of how the Left can win them back by driving a wedge between the hard-right and, in many ways, neofascist AfD leadership and its loosely associated base. She wants to do this by showing workers that the AfD does not represent their economic interests, but those of capital, and especially domestically oriented small and medium-sized businesses which are the worst on labor rights.

As a prominent and highly popular media figure, Wagenknecht is also very sensitive to the new phenomenon of how what Klaus Dörre called “de-mobilized class societies,” i.e., societies in which workers experience class society’s impacts without being organized and recognizing themselves as a class, erode faith in parties and the political system and create a growing desire for charismatic leaders.

For instance, in the 2017 French elections the traditional big parties were effectively absent. Emmanuel Macron just created a movement for himself. Meanwhile in Austria, Sebastian Kurz turned the long-standing conservative party into his personal electoral machine. Similarly, Donald Trump governs through his 54 million Twitter followers, outside the Republican establishment. And in Germany, half of the voters for the liberal Free Democratic Party would not have voted for it, were it not for their popular leader Christian Lindner.

As the left has long known, these Caesarist desires are very dangerous. As the lyrics of the Internationale put it, “no savior from on high delivers, no faith have we in prince or peer”; rather, it must be “our own right hand” that makes “the chains of hatred, greed, and fear shiver.” So, this climate of Caesarism is dangerous, and also very real. In this new and volatile historic situation, we will be forced to experiment, and must be ready — as Bertolt Brecht once put it — “to prepare for our next mistake.” And this includes questioning the role that popular tribunes can play in left politics, perhaps helping and not hindering the popular mobilization from below. Without this, left populism will indeed end up in the top-down social-democratic statism embodied by Chantal Mouffe. However, in Germany’s “demobilized class-society,” Wagenknecht is, even if some in the party may regret this, for many this particular tribune, the only visible left and economically populist critic of the status quo.

However, being sensitive to the problem and posing correct questions does not mean that one is also giving the right answers. As I said, the difference between Aufstehen and Die Linke’s party leadership is also about migration, but it is, in essence, a strategic divide.

Wagenknecht’s theoretical orientation is, ultimately, a state-monopoly capitalism approach. She wants to create a big-tent political coalition, a united popular movement against the big banks, the big transnational corporations, and the big insurance companies. And Wagenknecht is extremely talented in not only stirring working-class hatred against class injustices, but actually convincing her meritocratic petty bourgeois audience — which pays to see her speak because they know her from the telly and are often in awe of her eloquent intelligence — that as hard-working doctors, lawyers, and professors, and so on they will still not ever join the top 1 percent, let alone 0.1 percent. She convincingly makes the case that it is not hard work, but inherited wealth invested as capital that makes people rich. Thus, she can convincingly lay out to these voters the need to confront the question of private property in the means of production and capitalist monopolies.

Still, in her last two books, Wagenknecht actually praises productive and innovative small-business capital and juxtaposes it to unproductive, innovation-blocking monopoly capital. This is to a certain degree borne of conviction, a belief in a left-wing kind of ordo-liberalism with strong regulation and various forms of socialization and common ownership. But is also tactical, seeking to create a wide coalition against monopoly capitalism. This is problematic because not only does she end up stabbing attempts to unionize super-exploitative small businesses in the back and creating illusions concerning capitalist markets and the origins of innovation — I wish she would read Robert Cox or Mariana Mazzucato on these issues — but also because she pits struggles against exploitation and struggles against oppression against one another.

Her big coalition strategy risks becoming a short-sighted tactic. Too often it leads to an impulse of staying silent on issues of racism, because addressing them might split the unity of the class. And thus, Wagenknecht’s valuable general emphasis on class struggle and economic populism drifts towards a reductionism unable to deal with less strictly economic issues.

Unfortunately, the more Wagenknecht is attacked by liberals and the outer shores of the Left — in an often self-righteously sectarian way — this appears to reinforce her and her followers’ gut feeling that left-wing emancipation struggles, (liberal) feminism, (liberal) anti-racism etc., are an opposing or even “neoliberal” agenda. And among her followers, one can now find the same kind of stubbornness and resentful self-righteousness. We can imagine a split in Die Linke would simply reinforce these kinds of stupidities on both extremes. It, therefore, must be prevented by any means necessary, especially with a more solidaristic dialogue among the Left, less self-righteousness, and more self-doubt.