Martin Suchanek
This year’s “revolutionary May Day” was a remarkable political event in Berlin and a huge political success.
In recent years, this annual evening demonstration, organised by far left, mainly autonomist, groupings, has become a large mobilisation, often of youth and also many migrants.
In Berlin, the “revolutionary May Day” now attracts at least twice as many people as the official May Day demonstration organised by the DGB trade union federation. Moreover, the DGB demonstration is a march of bureaucratic and reformist routine with less and less attendance beyond officials or elected representatives of the trade unions and work places, reformist party functionaries and the organised far left. The final rallies on DGB-May Days are more like super-sized beer gardens than working class demonstrations.
In its own way, this illustrates the political weakness of the German trade unions and their commitment to the “German model” of social partnership, a model, which the union leaders stick to with more and more desperation and determination, the less it offers to the mass of the workers.
However, the over the last few years, the “revolutionary May Day” was itself far from offering a coherent political alternative. Its radical, militant, anti-capitalist public stance attracted tens of thousands but, because it has been dominated by a range of different currents such as the anti-fascists, autonomists and anarchists, the demonstration usually lacked political direction and focus. It often ended by being broken up by the police. For example, in 2012, it could not even march as far as the city centre, but was stopped half way. Because it was badly organised, it ended up with hundreds being “kettled” and others being forced to scatter in small groups. In short, it ended in complete confusion.
Many of the anarchist groups and libertarian strands of autonomism do not see this as a problem. For them, the more cars that are burned or the more stones are thrown or windows smashed, the more “liberating” the event is. For them, the “riot”, the expression of “militancy” appears as a “revolutionary act” in itself. In their enthusiasm to confront the police, they lose sight of the difference between a demonstration and a revolution.
This year, the demonstration was different. It succeed in marching into the city centre along the main street “Unter den Linden”. The 20,000 participants were much better organised and militant and were not broken up by the police. There are three key reason for this:
1. The demonstration did not only present a clear commitment to revolution (“One solution, Revolution!”) but also focused on the political and social crisis in Europe and the need for a united class struggle across the whole continent. This was expressed not only in the press releases and conferences, slogans and speakers, but also in the line up of the demonstration itself. The first rows were formed by Greek trade unionists, amongst them a leader of the occupation of the steel plant vio.me, as well as members of the Greek left in Berlin (SYRIZA and Real Democracy Now). Even the liberal bourgeois media reported that this year’s “Revolutionary May Day” put emphasis on the class struggle in Europe, as well as important social struggles in Berlin itself , such as the movement against rent rises and evictions as well as the struggle of refugees against deportation and the inhuman system of “hosting” them by the German state.
2. The demonstration was supported by a broad alliance of forces in the best sense of the word and thereby succeed in overcoming, at least to an important extent, the character of a demonstration of the autonomist “scene”. Behind the Greek comrades, at the head of the demonstration, groups of the “NAO-process”, (that is, the New Anti-capitalist Organisation initiative) amongst them Arbeitermacht (German section of the L5I) and REVOLUTION, organised the first blocks of the demonstration together with left autonomist groups like ARAB (Antifascist Revolutionary Action Berlin) as well as Turkish and Kurdish migrant organisations and the “solidarity committee for Greece”. So, the head of the demonstration was a “red”, rather than a “black”, block. The incorporation of a broad spectrum was also reflected in other contingents on the demonstration: the trade union youth; anti-racist and refugee blocks; tenants’ initiative; Blockupy (the alliance to block the financial district of Frankfurt/Main at the end of May/beginning of June).
3. The demonstration as a whole but, in particular, the first dozens of rows, was much better organised than in the previous years – so that the demonstration not only made a militant appearance with flags, dozens of rows marching in ranks, but that it also could be protected and held together much better in case of police provocations. We are proud that Arbeitermacht and REVOLUTION played an important role in organising large contingents and in the leadership of the front part of the demonstration.
These three factors, we think, are important to learn from so that we build on them and be able to repeat the success we had on May Day. Obviously, a shift in the political orientation of the demonstration did not fall from heaven, but reflects a certain shift in parts of the autonomist movement, who now orient more towards workers’ struggles and organisations, but also by the fact that more socialist or communist organisations have involved themselves in the preparation of May Day.
This has already led to slander campaigns from anarchists and libertarians on the web. They complain that May Day was not “militant” enough and argue that the fact that it could go to the end of the demonstration and that only a few were arrested was not a sign of success, but of the “harmless” character of a demonstration. The fact that the Greek workers and Left Party members could be won to march at the front of the demonstration, they see as a concession to reformism! No wonder, these people brand the left and the more working class autonomist groups like ARAB as “social-democrats and Leninists” and some anarchists have already called for May Day to be “taken back from the Cops and the Communists”!
Build on success
In any case, we need to build on the success of this year’s demonstration. If anything, we need to strengthen and develop the measures taken this year to ensure that the demonstration was well organised. Of course, even the most “revolutionary” demonstration is, in a sense, a symbolic act, it is a rallying point for our forces, literally an opportunity to demonstrate publicly the support for our politics. The fact that, just in Berlin, 20,000 militants, amongst them many young people, were prepared to join such a demonstration shows the potential to build a strong, fighting organisation that reaches far beyond the existing organised “far left” in Germany. It is a huge milieu, that the Left Party (to say nothing of the SPD!) is unable to organise.
It is our task – the task of all those who want to build a genuine anti-capitalist and revolutionary working class party in Germany – to reach out to those layers, to turn this potential into a reality.