3. German Movement Decay

Context

At the end of the 19th century, the German workers movement had the reputation of being among the most powerful forces of its kind. However, this power had always been more fractured and complicated than both its reputation at the time and its subsequent retrospective romanticisation. From a history of splits and unions, ardent conflict and compromise, the SPD had emerged as one of the largest institutions of the working class. Throughout being persecuted and criminalised during the Bismarck Era, it had kept close ties to the union movement and built a solid support base in among the working class. At its early 20th century prime it had also constructed a range of organisations from publications, news outlets, educational facilities, recreational clubs, unions, legal support structures and many more. To no surprise it had been labelled as a state within the state.

These aspects of its political power also came along with their own problems. Positions of authority were prone to consolidate around cliques of professionals and the question whether victory for the working classes could be won through collaboration with bourgeois parliaments were issues already noticed at the time. Additionally international frictions emerged with the SPD trying to sway the 2nd International to confirm to a lot of its own preferences in terms of political leanings. A feat difficult to accomplish considering the continuous contentions about tactics and strategy within the party – such as the mass strike and revisionism debates. The delicate balance that had kept all the diverse elements within the party under the same banner though, would start to dramatically collapse with the onset of the first world war. With few honourable exceptions and despite the explicit position of large parts of their constituency, the German SPD went against the line of the 2nd International and voted dominantly for war credits, supporting the bourgeois parliament in their drive for war.

From this point onward the revolutionary factions within the SPD started distancing themselves from the party, leading first to the formation of the Spartacus Bund, later to the foundation of the KPD. These counter-tendencies would not rise to such prominence as the SPD had achieved in their prime for a variety of reasons. One among them being the continuous sway the party still held via their functionaries and organisational branches over the everyday life of working people. Another reason may be that within the revolutionary alternative movements, there were plenty of splits and tensions as well, oftentimes keeping them from consolidating the same power that the SPD could
muster.

Post-War Ruins

Premise

After the second world war the links between the working class and its political organisations had become further strained. German citizens, now had to manoeuvrer an incredibly diverse range of experiences made with the Third Reich. A heterogeneous spectrum covered everything from a large section of passionate supporters, to a broad range of collaborators, with a sizeable portion of complacent hanger-ons, down to pockets of quiet resisters, and finally those that had been driven to exile, rallied to the frontlines or fought a struggle in clandestine underground structures - as well as those sent to die in the camps. All the most influential and combative organisations of the German working classes laid scattered under this mountain of corpses. Some of the most active and reliable cadres had been ground down by fascist brutality, others fled to the Soviet Union where they were oftentimes tossed into the complex inner-political upheavals in the Bolshevik party. The entire population had to confront the question of how to go on with this war-torn slab of land in the middle of Europe. But they of course weren’t the only ones asking this question. Their position toward this problem was placed in the midst of a web of tensions between the allied powers administering the country in different zones. The burnt out and depleted Soviet Union was desperate to see a neutral unified Germany as an unaligned buffer zone between the hardening fronts that had existed in the now allied blocks even far before the war had broken out.

Global Interests

Amidst these tensions one gravitational force was the U.S.’s need to avoid recession and crisis. The other force field was the Soviet bloc trying to recover from the devastation and loss the war had wrought. These interests turned out to be fundamentally opposed to each other. Stabilisation of the capitalist system meant prying open large swathes of territories to its dynamics. First on the list of fruitful investment was the capitalist restauration of Western Europe from war economies and destruction. In the Eastern Block though the tendency toward a Soviet model was observable, potentially closing the doors to capitalist valorisation of markets and production capacities in that sphere of influence. This strategy of Western-European capitalist restauration under US leadership found its expression in the Marshall Plan, trying to subordinated those nations in large part to US investment interests. This process somewhat foreshadowed the cleaving apart of the German territory into two distinct units.

Divergent Development Paths

Another tendency could be observed in the structural shifts that had happened between the different administration zones. In the territories that were administered by the allied Western powers, capitalist tendencies were merely put on halt. Economic capacities of the major corporations, landowners and industrialists were restricted, even though there had been talk of collectivisation in these cases as well. Such collectivisation however, was political reality in the Eastern Zone. The Soviets didn’t fuck about with appeasement policies. Among all the other occupational districts the Soviet administration pushed most rigorously to purge the leading elites from Nazi collaborators, expropriate vast properties and put in place extensive land reform. In the capitalist sphere of influence most of the institutional infrastructure remained in large parts as it had been but was slumbering under a veneer of immediate restriction.

Already before the war had been over, the new Cold War conflict had started to simmer. This also played out in the restructuring of Germany’s working class politics. With many of the most prominent organisations dissolved, criminalised and persecuted in the Third Reich, they first needed to be rebuilt. But the overall tensions of the time deeply impacted the splits that ran through unions and parties. Already in the immediate post-war period a mostly South-Western wing of the SPD around Kurt Schuhmacher spoke of a reconstitution of the party in allied sectors only – emphasizing a clear distance to the Soviet Union. This was fundamentally at odds with the USSR supported attempts by socialist factions to unify SPD and KPD into a unity party called SED on a Germany wide scale.

SPD & Unions as Stage for Struggle

While certainly not all unions and SPD factions in the South-West were opposed to unification with the KPD, their influence could not hold. It is unsurprising that the relation between KPD and SPD had been characterized by a struggle over a working-class constituency. But along these conflicts, their internal fractures had grown more severe as well. Aside from the fact that many of their most capable socialist cadres had been killed in the Nazi regime, the purges and the Soviet domination of the ComIntern had also further alienated left-communists, councilists and other factions, with new divisions like Titoism vs. Stalinism already emerging.

Along the same lines, the immediate post-war period saw efforts to reconstitute the German unions. Already before their official reconstitution, such battles for influence ensued. Reform, centre and conservative trade unionists – prime among them the Christian unionist wing with its class collaborationist convictions – scathingly accused Socialist and Communist organisers of subverting the unions as a mere tool for their political goals. These socialist and communist forces weren’t very unified either though. While a large segment of the metal workers unions was considered a KPD and thus Soviet friendly stronghold, there were multiple elements scattered throughout all unions pushing for a different course. Those socialist organisers gathered around the program of the umbrella organisation’s economic institute and figures like Viktor Agartz and drawn to the the milieu of Ernest Mandel, Wolfgang Abendroth and others often described as Linkssozialistisch / Left-Sociaist. It was clear from the get-go that, whichever way the new union structures would sway, firm position within in them would be a significant advantage over the other.

Bourgeois liberal and conservative parties therefore equally exerted their influence on those developments. The right wing of the SPD together with the liberal and conservative parties decided ultimately in the interests of a weakened German capitalist class. That meant in effect siding with the occupational forces trying to reestablish industry. The CDUs leading man in these efforts Konrad Adenauer should become a major figure in the development of the western federal republic, while some of the liberal party’s cadre basis was thoroughly riddled with committed ex-NSDAP members. Additionally, the SPD had a strong right wing, pushing for rigorous anti-communism and opposing the party factions that had radicalised in political exile. ‘49 to roughly ‘55 the fractured socialist forces went into dispersed unconnected offensives. Left-socialists tried to establish a foothold in the unions, pushing a widely popular class struggle program and resistance against remilitarisation. Similarly, the Soviet aligned forces adjacent to the KPD furthered unification into the SED as well as strengthening their demands within their own union strongholds, sometimes overlapping with left-socialist agendas. These offensives trying to organise a radical base in the working classes through the unions and political parties were met with a fierce resistance however.

German (Dis-)Unity

While the immediate post-war period was marked by brief surges of popularity for socialist politics like democratic socialization of industry, expansive wage politics with a class struggle outlook, resistance to remilitarization, demands for land reform and social planning, another significant question should enter the stage for the movement as early as ‘49. And it was the issue of German unity. A division of Germany into two parts was by no means predestined. First designs for a new order under the provisional control council had already achieved major parity agreements between unions – later re-organized under the umbrella association DGB – and corporations socialisation measures, as well as demilitarisation and denazification which were politically popular. It seemed reasonable at first that the Soviet preference for a more or less neutral Germany would supersede, especially considering the multi-party (communist included) federal parliaments established at the beginning, that had pointed toward a post-war period more like that of say France. A position marked by support among the left-socialist factions as well.

This course began to shift rapidly with the on-ground implications of the Truman doctrine. First the British and US administration zones got merged into one economic zone. Despite mediation attempts, and especially fired up by the West-German SPD, inclusion of the French district into this zone under the Marshall Plan hardened the fronts further. It was ‘48 that most likely drove the final nail into the coffin for a united post-war Germany. With the currency reform of Ludwig Erhardt a decisive path toward a liberal market economy – a fully capitalist economy – had been set. Any option for elements of economic planning or socialistic reforms in the western districts had therefore been thrown shut, effectively excluding the Eastern Zone on the very basis of its distinct development after ‘45. In parts to contain the currency reform from jumping over to the Soviet Zone and in parts to exert political pressure on the US driven turn toward separation, the USSR cut connections to western territories and cleaved Berlin in half. Hence forward we will therefore be speaking about the West-German developments.

Execution of the Marshall Plan was not without resistance. The DGBs Frankfurt Congress in 1954 was a massive milestone in the left-socialist campaign to establish a presence in the working class through the unions. After a notorious three-hour speech by Viktor Agartz the congress saw the inclusion of several radical demands into the union agenda. This success was of little condolence however, considering that west German workers had until ‘52 suffered defeat after defeat in their struggles for influencing the course of reconstruction and ultimately had to abandon the demands for far reaching socialization. Industry flourished with the export-oriented upswing that production experienced in context of the US-Korea war. By 1953 capitalist powers had reestablished to a degree that enabled restrictions on the right to strike. Simultaneously, the campaign against remilitarisation was utterly lost with temporary establishment of the European Defense Community. Within the party the reactionary functionaries had won out, fired up by US supported anti-communist fervour. Yet, radical elements still remained and struggled over control of the SPD for a while after, trying to latch onto strike-waves like the metal worker strike in ‘54 to attempt reconsolidating their position in the party.

Nonetheless, with electoral failure, disunity of oppositional forces and growing economic comforts, the inner-party platform for socialist politics shrank significantly. With only a spurt of growth that was to follow, fired up by the repression. The hardening fronts of the Cold-War had whipped up anxieties about the threat from the East and anti-communist sentiments were on the rise. This paired with the disunity and splits in the left milieu and lead into dramatic purges of the opposition by the newly formed West-German state. Finally, ‘54 became a watershed moment for the West-German left. Multiple factions rallied to a disjointed last stand on vastly differing platforms. In reaction to the continued influence of the group around prominent labour organiser Viktor Agartz and his defence of a radical Marxist strategic outlook at several occasions, the right wing of the union movement decided to start a counteroffensive.

Repression, Anti-Communism & Godesberg

As the second attempt to capsize remilitarization plans in ‘54 started up, the SPD withdrew support, leaving DGB organisers and other civil society elements out in the open. The attack against Agartz and the wider network of left-socialist organisers followed soon after. Exerting pressure on higher ranking union leadership, against the resistances from membership and rank-and-file, a reactionary unionist clique started targeting the radicals in an extensive campaign. In common cause with the conservative Adenauer government leading socialist union organisers were purged from their positions. The struggle over the unions had thus taken more and more the path of functionaries along social partnership lines from union radicalism to economistic activism, strongly supported by the right drifting SPD. This rise to dominance of reactionary leaders in the SPD similarly provokes organised left-socialist and Trotskyist factions to either split with the party to form a variety of independent journals, magazines or newspapers (at the beginning still with moderate readership) or isolate themselves within the party such as the JUSO youth wing and Falken scout’s group. But with the purges of radical unionists the unaffiliated groupings around socialist papers such as AZ also began to waver.

The final blows are dealt in ‘56. Communism and communist organisations like the KPD are officially outlawed and criminalized as anti-constitutional, pushing the already marginalized party even further to the fringes and isolate them from any remaining base in the unions. Left-Socialists fail to show considerable solidarity or unity in reaction. The already purged around Agartz are further dragged into a show-trial of high-treason around alleged connections to East Germany. The communist party subsequently retreats into a Stalinist leaning dogmatism and shuts itself off from further interaction with the West-German left. This split is additionally entrenched by first by the Secret Speech and then by the discontent between factions over the Soviet reaction to the Hungarian Uprising of ‘56 and other similar events. The purged and shattered left-socialist offensive, in the aftermath of the Agartz-Trial forms a tapestry of smaller projects around newspapers, journals and other grouplets, lacking a large and organized constituency, but certainly not experience and expertise at this point. Those groupings of left-socialists, disillusioned communists and other prominent Marxists will constitute the early germ-seed for the New-Left movement to follow.

By 1959 the capitalist re-constructtion had been mostly achieved. This showed in the SPD’s so-called “Long March to Godesberg” particularly vividly. From the take-over of anti-communist cadres, remainders of Marxist or socialist politics had been subjected to critique under the mantle of anti-stalinism and were purged. A new focus on “political freedom” was emphasized over allegiance to a socialist program and planned economy as leading principle. Class-struggle positions were abandoned wholesale and “democratic” and “ethical” socialism free of Marxist leanings became leading program. Instead, the party started prioritised influence in West-German parliamentary processes, but failed repeatedly to achieve successes in electoral politics. Ultimately, even aims of national unification were abandoned alongside any further rhetoric of “liberation”. These processes playing out through the fifties finally manifested in the Godesberg Program 1959 which ultimately broke with any pretensions to Marxist politics and social analysis.

End of a Failed Mobilisation Cycle - A pattern of fractioning

To conclude this section: following a series of defeats, socialist and communist forces were fully estranged, alienated and pushed to the margins of all major working-class institutions within which they were previously active. Resulting from this a variety of tendencies came into being crystallized in particular strategies, that should become characteristic for the post-war sectarian organisations that were to emerge through the 20th century.

• Conversion to reformism and a conformity to established institutions, describing those radicals that remained in the unions and SPD, bowing to the new program.

• Complete retreat and seclusion from practical political life. Often resulting in previously held stances becoming more of a personal opinion or an academic interest.

• Formation of smaller group-lets or sects orbiting the official opposition with and applying tactics of entryism – both open through attempts of thorough infiltration or through open participation in movements. An outlook particularly popular among the Trotskyist tendencies.

• Re-Orientation to outside of one’s own circumstances. Either to the Eastern Bloc or to nations of the Third World (the latter being the tendency which will manifest through the Trotskyist and Student Movement sects as well as later Maoist Groups)

Second Cycle: The New-Left & the Student Movement

Historical Developments

The political climate leading up to the '60s was escalatory. NATO policies became more aggressive and the Soviet Union continued testing how far they could go in support of East-German and other allies. Simultaneously a further global disunity in the Socialist World had escalated. The Sino-Soviet Split had manifested its international consequences with active military conflict between allied states and an anti-soviet Chinese foreign policy. On the other hand a fresh wave of revolutionary fervour radiated out of China with the Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as well as on-going anti-colonial struggles often with clearly defined socialist elements active within them.

Evidently the German Question had remained unsolved, with continued denial of the BRD to accept East-German legitimacy and constant border frictions. The remilitarisation and rearming that had already been pushed through against all opposition in the mid of the decade, now extended to making Germany a state with nuclear capacity. SPD and DGB mobilised their base and the fractured non-parliamentary forces – later summarized under the term APO – sprung to action in what showed potentials of a mass movement. When the notoriously centrist to right leaning Spiegel newspaper criticized the ruling coalition that they were not ready in their military capacity to follow NATOs Forward Strategy, repression cracked down hard on the paper. Accused of high treason the author of the article was promptly arrested. It was in this context that German citizens glimpsed for the first time the repressive apparatus of the German Secret Services and police staffed to the hilt with former Nazis.

Kennedys shift to draw the front line against communism in the third world, also allowed the newly flourishing arms industry of West Germany to breach into lucrative markets, especially regarding tank production, as the US were dominating air and naval armament markets (this provided an influence which among other things was yielded to extort dependent nations into non-recognition of East Germany) In contrast the strict refusal to approach Europe’s East and the hesitancy to integrate any further with other Western European powers, were against the interests of industrial capital at the time. Old sectors were contracting while industry experienced an upsurge. The already existing economic integration into a European market had inflated agricultural prices and the influx of oil reduced coal usage. Hence many workers previously employed in these sectors shifted into a more and more export oriented industrial setting.

Despite this shift and West Germany approaching levels of near full employment the demand for labour power could hardly be covered. In this beneficial situation the unions won concessions in wages, working time and social welfare. Most of these were achieved without resorting to escalations of class struggle. This situation of prosperity lead to a strengthening of class peace and collaborationism commonly referred to as Burgfrieden. However, in parallel more and more labour power got imported from abroad and excluded from the unions. The only major issue, paid sick leave, became a major bone contention even for otherwise non-militant unions. On this issue, the metal workers went on a six-week strike. Even though paid sick leave was instituted thereafter, the punishment exerted on IG Metall for resorting to class struggle tactics was immediate and the union was taken to court for disturbing the social peace. To avoid a crushing fine, the union saw itself forced to sign an agreement for automatic mediation procedures, significantly weakening the legally possible arsenal of class struggle for future strikes. The only opposition in the DGB, which had continued to rally against a fully class collaborationist program were remnants of socialist demands coming out of the IG Metall union, now defeated and humiliated.

APO & SDS - Decay of the SPD

For the SPD further drift toward the right was unavoidable. Accepting the base premises that the full market liberalisation had presented them with, and the KPD outlawed, there remained no legitimate social force to the left of the SPD that in the parliamentary arena. This positioned it with an overwhelming power to suppress socialist elements within the party, locking them effectively in place. To leave the party and threaten to take any constituency with, put anyone in immediate danger of being suspected communists and thus viable targets for full force repression. Such a full conversion to "Reformed Capitalism" was seemingly rewarded electorally.

After a long streak of failures through the 50s and 60s electoral upwind came in '61-'63. While many within the party had just accepted this development, other factions revived their activities in non-parliamentarian movements. One of those was the SDS, the party’s official student organisation. After refusing to step back from their Marxist commitments and continuation of activities outside party purview, their funding was cut and a rival association formed. Lastly, the SDS was declared irreconcilable with SPD programs. Following the declaration the faction split off to integrate into a landscape of non-parliamentary opposition, for which it became a new constituency. This was a formative combination for socialist politics during the infamous 60s.

A new movement formed, comprised of students, pupils and apprentices with connections to the dispersed old guard organizers that had assembled in magazines and newspaper projects established during the previous decline period. Two core considerations emerged from this milieu. First was a generational critique of the restored Western German capitalist system and its inheritance of Nazi structures. The second was a more complicated intertwinement of anti-imperialist sympathies, left-socialist traditions, demands for individual and political freedoms and many more dynamics that had preoccupied the left-socialist factions since their previous defeats. Some other historical factors are also often credited with producing this cross-section. One was the material conditions at universities, where lectures were overcrowded, structures and staff inadequate for post-war educational demands and more students from diverse class backgrounds confronted with the sorry state of higher education. Another factor was the on-going trials of war criminals by various courts including the Eichmann trials, all taken in by a generation who had at the first time heard of Nazi crimes through school education. Finally, the re-integration of West-Germany as a power into the global imperialist system, which had already started with export booms during the US-Korea war had become a heightened point of focus with the escalating war in Vietnam. All these collided with the political atmosphere characterised by SPD and union class collaborationism, contentment, remilitarisation and state of emergency clauses amended to the constitution. These aspects resulted in a particularly rebellious mood among younger generations.

Those groups actively organised into councils and factions at their workplaces for apprentices or in schools and universities for the students. There they'd try to influence the conditions of their learning environments and additionally function as educational and interest groups about international issues. Massive protests formed around the West German support of regimes like the Shah of Iran, the US war in Vietnam or even the wave of strikes in France. Other major issues for the students included the reactionary bias of the media landscape. Many of their organizations had positioned themselves in opposition to both Eastern and Western Blocs and formed often eclectic alliances. This strong protest movement met a double resistance in the streets. Organized right wing groups including neo-fascist paramilitary organisations that had recovered in clandestinity on one hand and a state apparatus riddled with Nazi holdovers on the other. The students ended up as practice targets for a more and more vicious repressive apparatus that only just learnt to take new forms. After multiple political assassinations and assassination attempts - including the murder of Benno Ohnesorg and the attempted murder of Rudi Dutschke - the disillusionment of the students took hold. When in 1969 a spontaneous strike wave rocked Germany, the SDS was utterly alienated from these events. The strikes were mostly about further pay raises, but nonetheless the utter detachment from working class organisations became apparent for the left radical wing of student organisers. While it could be argued that most fractions of the student movement had already given up on the German working class and sought for other revolutionary subjects in pariah, marginal and oppressed and excluded groups, this absolute failure nonetheless sounded the death knell for the student uprisings. Despite always portrayed as a mass movement, the SDS as one of the major forces in the landscape of New Left organisations had at its peak mere 2500 active members.

End of Second Cycle - Fracturing and the K-Groups

As with the failures of the immediate post war socialist movement to heal its divisive splits and seize on an opportune moment, similar reactions followed, albeit on a way smaller scale. Some retreated completely from political life. Others fled into the official oppositional structures. Again others projected the hope for change to other places. From the latter segment the so-called K-Groups and the Red-Terror structures emerged. While these fragmented grouplets came in a variety of programmatic leanings, they all sought for explanations of their failure and how to deal with the backlash they faced. Despite an initial pretence to critique their former generations for their silent complicity or committed support to the Nazi regime there was nonetheless an underlying methodological nationalism underwriting a lot of such grouplets. With a few having given up on the working class struggles at home, a fetishized focus on national liberation abroad and sometimes a downright insane imagination about Germany's position in the global system led to a variety of nationalisms emerging among some K-Groups. These nationalist tendencies came either by proxy to other liberation struggles or directed more clearly at German national liberation. This underlying nationalism was also a problem in groups which tried to re-embed themselves in working class organizations. Here they could often find reactionary elements that had been exposed to decades of anti-communism and had vastly profited from reintegration into the world market. Most of the K-Groups would gradually dissolve, with few remaining into the 90s and even fewer which could count over the course of their existence more than 1000 members. Similarly, Trotskyist groups barely comprised around 1200 members and oftentimes still – like the K-Groups – attempted entryist campaigns into social movements based in environmentalism, anti-war and other issues. This fit the pattern observed earlier, orbiting official oppositional forces.

In these developments a doubling down on dogmatisation could also be found. First there was the RAF and other red terror groups. They attempted an urban guerrilla struggle, with imported tactics from Brazil and inspired by the Cuban revolution, sometimes even trained by the PFLP. The tactical approach was to provoke further state repression, unmask the capitalist order, shake loose working-class complacency and support struggles abroad. Kidnappings, assassinations and bombings, but also bank-robbery and the like played significant roles in these struggles. While still finding some sympathies among the population early in their existence, the urban guerrilla tactics also created a disproportional backlash. Repressive forces in media, intelligence services, police, military and organised neo-fascist groups used the opportunity to gain momentum. Sometimes this manifested in coordinated actions, but often these efforts were done in parallel. Most notable here is the innovations created in surveillance tactics to counter those Red Terror grouplets.

Secondly dogmatisation could be observed in the K-Groups. Many of which claimed inheritance to the KPD and adhered to a variety of sectarian tendencies. Today there are some reasonable speculations about a few of those groups being founded by active intelligence informants. They mostly continued their efforts in organising small scale factions among pupils, students and sometimes in working-class environments. Among them were also groups of rowdy thugs targetting other left-wing groups. Shifting away from an immediate political enemy on the right, they deviated their attention to what they perceived as splitters and traitors. Participants in the such groups showing up at meetings of Trotskyist, left-socialist or other K-Group meetings to disrupt and at times beat up the “revisionists”. Another sub-genre dreamed of the big national liberation of Germany from US influence or of third world revolution seizing the metropole.

Both these tendencies are notorious for later on bleeding members into the far right, where a loose programmatic Anti-Americanism and the underlying German nationalism fit right into conspiratorial rhetoric. Many more came to sit in the halls of power as members of the Greens or the SPD looking back at their youth activism with mild embarrassment. While especially the RAF knew they would draw out the repression by reaction, their gamble that it may function as wake-up call was misplaced. Some sections of society certainly sympathized, but most were drawn into the fervour of the media storm unleashed against the red terror cells renewing the stream of constant anti-communism. This propaganda war was not the worst consequence though. Official structures took the chance to refine the repressive apparatus as a whole. German intelligence agencies - already build up by a substantial share of former NSDAP members and mass murderers - were unleashed, surveillance rolled out and counter-insurgency financed to unseen degrees. On the official political front the incidents were used as more kindling in tearing down any platform that was left for socialist leaning organizations and figures. One consequence among many, was the occupational ban for socialists holding public professions. This often pushed out some of the last holdovers of communist sympathizing intelligentsia that had formed a backbone for newspaper and magazine projects.

Often unmentioned in narratives about this trajectory is the utter failure of the groups and movements of the time to link up with another forming constituency among the working class. While the officially organized German unions broke the social peace to get further pay raises and the students fell into disarray from their inability to substantiate into a broader movement, a separate area of discontent had been brewing. Migrant labour that had been imported on mass since the 60s erupted into often highly political wildcat strikes. Industry had reached an industrial threshold of export economy again, in which less labour was required, additionally the oil crisis related recession of '73 had struck. Across the country migrant workers got organized with astonishing result not only looking for pay equalisation to their German peers but also campaigning for political demands like the right to stay. In some instances, like the 73 Neuss strike, these workers who had been isolated from or within official union structures, gave a glimpse of truly universalist politics. Through forging alliances and not restricting themselves to economistic demands, in ways that none of the student movement had achieved in the rest of the class, they united feminist and non-migrant workers into effective forms of struggle.

Conclusion

Our first day today was meant to set an agenda for ourselves. We have created this project faced with the necessity of having to overcome how the socialist movement is currently predominantly organised – especially at the centers of global power blocks. We have started this week showing both that overcoming of the isolated sect form is possible and how a vibrant movement can decay into fractured grouplets. We could have drawn out the histories further, showed the SPDs prime in illegality, or the decay of the British communist movement back into a sectarian cluster. What our selected oversight has hopefully pointed toward though is the challenges we will face in trying to move on and rebuild. This steadfast intention of rebuilding has guided our educational program for the coming week.

Marx's unfinished theory of capitalist breakdown, which we will cover tomorrow, will allow us to delve further into the ideological problems of the sect. On the one hand, this theory is commonly abused as a form of sect ideological reproduction, providing members an almost divine endgame in which all their special theories will be proved to have been true all along. This error begins very early in socialist history, with the SPD, and subsists in countless sects, whatever their flavour. It breeds complacency. On the other hand, breakdown theory is a necessary element of the critique of history and economics put forward by Marx and Engels. A mature theory is needed. The contradiction between the kind of breakdown theory we have, rooted in the sect, and the kind we need represents a crisis for Marxist thought.

If there is any way out of either our organisational or ideological crises, then it must be rooted in the working class, in all of its broad diversity. As we have repeatedly highlighted, the sect form is the result of organisation separate from this social basis. In day three, we'll further expand this by going into the intricacies of class analysis. With this analytical approach we hope to be able to deepen our appreciation of the sect as an historical symptom of a low ebb in the workers' movement, and examine some of the material factors involved in this low ebb.

Whether we look at the turn of major parties in the second international toward nationalistic fervor during the war, the varying chauvinisms that emerged in the post-war socialist camp or the ambivalence of national liberation struggles, as well as the prevalence of nationalist sentiment today. Overcoming the sect form will not be possible without reckoning with the immense appeal national belonging has exerted over the working classes.

The material conditions of breakdown, complexities of class decomposition and the strength of the nation-state have also produced another challenge. If the sect form is to be overcome, we will need to make collective action possible where the forces mentioned have destroyed everyday life platforms in which we could have learnt to act together. These too will need to be rebuild.

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