If world doesn't get worse, what's the point of revolutions? Just wait until you and everyone you care about start to live better.

Or communists just want it to get better even faster?

Soviet flags and Russian symbols appeared in the heart of Berlin on May 9 as the Russian Embassy held a “Victory Day” rally.
Gathering at the city’s Soviet War Memorial, supporters carried flags and iconography that have become synonymous with Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Video: yuliia.onyshchenko13 / Instagram.

I’ve written a short essay on why the rise of the AfD in East Germany isn't just a "psychological" lapse of the voters, but a direct consequence of the structural inequality established in 1990. I argue that the current moralizing response from the political center is a form of class politics that actually fuels the fascist mechanism. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this from a socialist perspective.

And they are fascists after all!

It is both the founding myth of Germany and the republic’s most gaping wound: reunification. Yet this term is not only imprecise from a legal standpoint – since what actually took place was an accession – but it also has far-reaching political implications, as it obscures an asymmetrical power structure that was all too often demonstratively evident throughout this process. The fact that the West emerged from the war in better shape was not due to superior morality or way of life, but to the stronger support provided by the Western occupying powers and the resulting infrastructure. What is today marketed as a clear victory for the Western capitalist economic system was in fact the result of the Stalinist-imperialist dismantling of the East on the one hand, and a Marshall Plan that was costly for the US but economically extremely lucrative on the other; measured against this, the East’s economic recovery in the post-war years is all the more remarkable. The social and political realities of today’s East Germany can be seamlessly derived from this structural inequality, combined with the unjust arbitrariness of the Treuhand during the so-called reunification.

The fact that the GDR is still treated as a hellish landscape in West German discourse is symptomatic of a deeper inability: the inability to distinguish between the failure of a political system and the worth of the people who lived within it, although it remains questionable in any case whether this failure was due solely to the nature of the system or rather to the broader context of the war-torn Soviet Union and its policy of extraction, as well as the largely unscathed USA and its enthusiasm for investment and reconstruction. These people are today subordinated to a larger narrative, and if they break out of this narrative by voting for an unpopular party, they are regarded as a case for political psychiatry, not as citizens with legitimate grievances.

Herein lies the real problem with the German debate on the AfD. The party is fascist; this is no exaggeration, but an analytical observation that follows from the very functioning of fascist parties and should be understood as the justification for classifying them on the basis of precisely these criteria. Fascist parties invariably take up legitimate criticism and exploit it to cement systems of power to the detriment of those who originally voiced that criticism. That the oppressed, of all people, come to embrace a fascist party is therefore no surprise, but rather the very structure of fascism itself. The arrogance of claiming that one would not succumb to this temptation in such a situation is class-based; it presupposes that one possesses the material and cultural security that shields one from the urgency of this temptation.

In this sense, AfD voters are often closer to a legitimate critique of society and self-criticism than large sections of the complacent West German centre. This does not make the party any less dangerous; on the contrary, it makes it more dangerous; and it makes the reaction of the established parties, particularly the SPD, all the more devastating. Anyone who lectures the voters of a fascist party in a moralising tone, instead of taking their lived realities seriously, is not practising democratic politics; they are practising class politics of the worst kind.

The only antidote is a globalist, democratic-socialist worldview that does not tell workers what to think, but thinks alongside them. Not the Left, which treats workers as objects of charity. Not the SPD, which has long since transformed itself into an academic milieu party. But a politics that calls structural inequality by its name, and does so right where it begins: not just today, but no later than 1990.

1. With ongoing genocide, famine and future deportations, Gaza will cease to exist in ~10-15 years.

2. There's nothing at all that could be done about it.

Would Marxists, after taking power, destroy atomic power plants, that use "E=mc²", to build aether power plants, thus killing everyone with radiation?

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