Sahra Wagenknecht and Sevim Dağdelen retreated from their leadership positions within the party. Basically the leadership in the Left party is in the hand of rightwinger now who aim to make a coalition with third way socdems and librul prog greens. Working class people are now unrepresented as of now. What started as an euphoric party turned now into an infighting nightmare and with the two ladies above gone, I have absolutely no reason to vote for them anymore.
Fuck this shit. It's all bullshit. I am voting Die PARTEI now. Go Martin!
WTF is Wagenknecht doing now? What happened to Aufstehen? I was under the general impression Aufstehen was Wagenknecht's attempt at scratching together the left wings of all the big centrist parties into something capable of forming a big left-wing party in no small part due to the fact that leftists were already a minority within even Die Linke itself?
It got torpedoed to the ground by virtually everyone who is not leftist.
Colton Garcia
To further elaborate. If it was only a shitstorm by the corporate press and the other parties, it would've been no problem. The problem is; do you ever wonder, why 65% of the entire party supports Corbyn, while he has only 20% support of Labour within the parliament? The same fucking shit is happening with the Left. They are socdemising themselves to make themselves more approachable to SPD and the Greens. And somehow, despite being a minority, those powerhungry rats manage to occupy every peak position at the top of the left, expect Wagenknecht and Dağdelen of course. So they started to bully them and the fucked up shit is that Bernd Riexinger openly called it that. "Bully Wagenknecht until she fucks off". Another nutcase is Katja Kipping who managed to sic her IDpol goons on her. IDpol in general is infesting the party right now and with Wagenknecht and Dağdelen (who are both women, ironically enough) they will have no problem to roam free and turn it into something retardedly similar as the Greens. Fortunately enough they have one problem. The Left party voter is not a fucking sheep. You could tell it in the last Hessen election, where the Left only acquired 6,3%, despite having a potential of around 8%. It's because everyone witnessed the election wankery that made Jan Schalauske frontrunner and the march-through of the right-wing block in general. Subordinate legislation is clearly to blame here. Somehow those rats always manage to acquire the majority of delegates, which in turn turns the entire party right-wing despite it being majorly left-wing. But all their politics could lead into nothing. Reddit applauds her removal, but they still will not vote for Linke. The other parties and the corporate press ridicule her but they will still be antagonised for what they are.
There was a time of euphoria in 2008. A time where you could feel that people had the power to actually change things to the better. All they got instead was this shitshow. What a fucking waste.
Sebastian Thompson
Is it really plausible to take control of Die Linke? Even if that happened, would it be worth the effort, given the party's laughable performance in the polls?
Can the left do something like AfD, a new hardliner party? I'm aware that its "anti-establishment" rise was founded in large part by constant shilling in the talkshow circuit, but surely this indicates there's room for such a thing to happen.
Right now? No. I am not talking about the federal or the state level. I am speaking from experience when I say that things are fucked up from the bottom. The communal leader of the left is even disliked among her fellow righteoids. But she always appears with her regular goons to outvote the other participants. The reason why they underperform is due to constant power struggles. People are not idiots. They notice this kind of things. The Left has the potential to reach 20%. But not with the current people in charge. Merging with the PDS (Eastern German Socdems who were rejected due to their SED past) turned out to be a HUGE mistake.
Have you ever thought the NPC meme is rubbish? Spend ten minutes with Dietmar Bartsch and you'll convert.
I've head so much dumb shit about this guy over the years, and I constantly forget most of it again and even his name, because I can't even properly hate him, since he's so fundamentally uninteresting, just constantly dumb and slimy, but not so dumb to be funny or slimy enough to really rage about him. Here's a good example of what kind of person he is (and something which I'll probably won't remember a few years from now): Some young guy in the party claimed to be the victim of a neonazi knife attack. He claimed they mocked him for being gay. When that happened, that struck me as strange, because he was a nobody. Of course, far right extremists may know a bit about high-ranking party members (and these are the people who are at high risk of physical attacks), but why would they know the lowly rando was gay? I pegged him (no, not like that) as somebody who wanted to draw attention away from exaggerated media circus about sexual harassment by foreigners on new year's eve and who was too narcissistic to see how implausible the story of everybody knowing his sexual orientation was.
The forensic expert of the police was skeptical because of the wound patterns (on the elbow looking like self-inflicted) and the police aired her doubts in public. The young man said his jacket protected him somewhat. Police: Can we see the jacket? Young man: Ääähm, the nazis stole it. Because who doesn't want a defective jacket? Take your sweet time after your failed attempted murder to take that jacket, don't continue with the murder attempt and don't run away, the defective jacket is just that valuable. Yep.
To the media's credit, they reported early on about doubts regarding the alleged victim. But guess who immediately jumped on twitter with our thoughts and solidarity with the poor nazi victim I cri errytime blahblahblah? (The alleged victim's name was Julian Kinzel, he admitted to making up that shit and got a few days in jail for that.)
Bartsch isn't nearly as bad as Ramelow or Lederer (vice mayor of Berlin). At least Bartsch says something leftist once in a year, but these guys got voted into power and sold out faster than a flash of lightening. Ramelow privatised highways in exchange for money from the federal government, and Lederer is so high on liberalism that he keeps going on about stuff like Russiagate and gets buttmad about Jugendwiderstand (you know, The Maoist bodybuilders).
Have you guys seen the interview with Kipping today? Absolute dumpsterfuck including being a warhawk against Vuvuzela and Syria, and denouncing Heike Hänsel, one of the few genuine leftists in the PdL. What I found funny is the playbook these guys follow everytime: First, the regurgitate blatant liberalism and milquetoast SuccDem shit, and when an authentic workers movement arises (Yellow Vests in France) or if someone actually wants to do something (aufstehen), they suddenly turn into ultraleft armchairs and criticize that this is "verkürzte Kapitalismuskritik" ("shortened critique of capitalism"), a term usually used by Antideutsche, and that this isn't far enough and start nitpicking. It's always the same: Acting like a liberal when talking to liberals, and acting like a holier-than-thou armchair when talking to leftists.
Considering how retarded the German normie is, you might not have much more success with a leftist line either. Ever checked these hellholes like r/de on Reddit? If you want to see a NPC go there. Literally Facebook boomer tier.
Wagenknecht was bullied from all sides into submission, to the point where the mainstream media called her a literal NazBol, and she got fire from all sides. Some LGBT group called her a homophobic Nazi for not including trans rights in the aufstehen manifesto or something.
However, she isn't blameless. Aufstehen was badly organised. I think she would have been better off to create a new party and ditch the PdL - which is inevitably going further center in the upcoming years.
Michael Miller
You know what? Die Linke had SocDems. It's the same with the bloody tankies. It seemed like a bright idea until they got popular. Those rats are good at playing power games and rise through the ranks despite not having the majority. Right now they are mellow but they are always a time bomb.
Jace Perry
Sahra said a long disease caused by stress and overload was the main reason for her retreat. However, she is a labour-fetishist anyway who sticks to the merit principle and supports national boarders. A reactionary leftist. But I couldn't find a source about Sevim retreating? She seems like a progressive leftist (i.e. call for solidarity with Rojava).
DIE LINKE mainly consists of SocDems and has their program is mainly SocDem. This is one reason why I am no longer a party member of it. And within DiEM25, I try my best to argue against any SocDem notion. But as objected, parlamentarism kills any progressives but the SocDems.
Austin Perez
She hides her powerlevel and argues for some kind of market socialsim. She's for borders because of the migration IdPol that alienates many working class voters.
They also have a communist platform. It's a big tent party. You're right that the current leadership is SocDem.
How is that going within an org of people that think Brexit was organised by evil right-wingers and that the EU can be reformed, we need to give more power to the (overwhelmingly conservative) EU parliament?
Jackson Morgan
The PDS did. The reason the PDS exists, is because the SPD refused to accept them within their ranks unlike the other bloc parties. They used to be more right wing on certain topics back then until the merger with the WASG happened.
Brayden Butler
I'm just an American, but is that really an accurate characterization of DiEM25? My general impression of them is of a platform being offered as the last, best hope for the EU, the final olive branch from parties such as the French LFI & Greek SYRIZA whose rank-and-file are themselves on the brink of following the UK out of the EU if things don't change. Also because migration, refugees/foreign aid/militarism, and EU enlargement under the current neolib/neocon program being pursued both in Germany and across Europe are materially harmful to the working class in both the 1st & 3rd world, wrapped in placebo pseudohumanitarianism.
Chase Nguyen
Varoufakis' heart is in the right place and he's a great economists and speaker, don't get me wrong, but he is the epitome of reformism. In front of a leftist audience he might say one or the other radical stuff, but his politics is extremely stagist. He doesn't want countries to leave, and he even has expressed support for Macron with his initiatives to reform the EU. In this way he's really idealist - why would the EU ruling class, with which he wants to work with, democratize and socialise the EU? Of course DiEM sounds good on paper, and their party structure is very democratic from the bottom up, but I honestly have more faith in movements around Corbyn or Melenchon because they can actually achieve something on a national level which coerces the EU to change, because no matter what right-wingers say the EU is still largely controlled by its biggest nation states and not by the commission or the parliament.
SYRIZA is not important like the UK and has completely capitulated so far. Why would they leave now after they basically executed all the "reforms" forced on them? If they would want to leave, they should have done it after the referendum about the loans - reform the welfare state, tax the oligarchs and align yourself with Russia and China. Of course that is a huge all-in that might even cause an intervention but the EU is not the US and doesn't have the balls for a military strike. That really was the only alternative for Greece since a Grexit without foreign support would be the equivalent of Greece becoming a literal Third World country. By the way, Wagenknecht was never the hardcore "fuck brown people build a wall" type of anti-migration populist liberals made her out to be. She didn't say refugees should be rejected, she didn't say we need to block migration all-together, she merely said that we need borders to prevent a complete dumping of the wage level by massive amounts of unskilled labour to keep the huge low wage sector in Germany running (which is needed to sustain the export economy). So all that crap people say about her being "hard on borders" or appropriating right-wing talking points is a smear. As I said, she just talked against IdPol.
The CSU in Bavaria enforces ridiculous border controls, meets with Organ, and employs proto-fascist rethoric - but nobody complains about them because they are a conservative party while Wagenknecht gets smeared as a NazBol.
Logan Parker
Literally the only members that matter are Germany and France. Every other member state could pull out, and the EU would still be viable, but if either (or both!) of those two did, the EU would instantly implode. Judging from those poll numbers I posted upthread, every single left-populist spread among the various lib parties combined with AfD couldn't possibly cause Germany to do it. France, in contrast, has massive numbers behind both Melenchon & Le Pen, either of which without any cooperation from the other could plausibly win the presidency and start engulfing the parliament. In other words, Frexit is the only genuine threat against the EU, and as such the only potential veto of any consequence on the undemocratic behavior of the laissez-faire zealots dominating the EU.
I view DiEM25 as a probably fruitless, but politically and ideologically necessary, component of attacking the EU. If they refuse our very reasonable offer of reconciliation and reform (which they almost certainly will), it will be they who destroyed the EU, not us.
Hence why I referred to their rank-and-file, not their leadership. Unlike, say, PODEMOS, I think they still might be saved by a populist coup within the party, or by splinters like Popular Unity gaining steam.
Lucas Perry
Yeah, AKL, KPF and Ökologische Plattform are good, especially the former. Sahra (and others) didn't stress the lacking funds for refugee camps near countries of origins (2011/2012) although (former) party members like me suggested it. Her political calculation went wrong. From an image adviser perspective her rhetoric was very bad. It seems you mistake individual statements from movement statements. The European parliament is at the moment the only institution which is directly elected. Therefore, within this EU it's better to strengthen it. However, the whole construct of EU is bad, so we need a new European confederation with a basic democratic constitution. This is what I fight for within DiEM25 and I'm not the only one since this is its right to exist and it can be derived from the manifesto. Brexit is a more complex project than that. Varoufakis tend to go "hurr durr it's the right-wingers" very easily, so don't stick on that. Fucking cult of personality. The reasons discussed within DiEM25 are also neoliberal impacts on euroscepticism and national souvereignity as an opportunity for more democracy within GB and much more than that.
Just check the manifesto and the website ;^) DiEM25 was originally a bottom-up coalition movement for progressive leftists.
I agree with your evaluation of Varoufakis. Officially, reforms are only a measure to adapt within a transition phase of 2 years maximum. In the light of climate change, this cannot be extended any further and radical change is needed than. But within Europe you cannot change something on the national level anymore without reinforcing repression and ecologically unreasonable policies.
No, a militant emancipatory grassroots democracy movement is also a genuine threat. In fact, this is the only progressive alternative because Frexit would lead to reactionary policies.
Luis Lee
Are there any (even personal) projections on how DiEM25's alliance is going to do this May? I searched breifly but couldn't find anything.
Mason Price
My bad, it's just because they're new so they're aggregated with other new alliances in the polling data.
