“Against the Nation - Anti-National Politics in Germany” by Robert Ogman, 2022
This book has several themes. The main one is the resurgence of nationalism in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the annexation of East Germany by Bonn. The other is about the more frequent blocking between so-called Leftists and right-wingers – the Red/Brown alliance – on certain issues like ‘anti-imperialism.’
If you’ve heard anti-imperialists waxing enthusiastic about
Rand Paul or Tucker Carlson ‘opposing’ the Ukraine war; if you noticed
‘leftists’ praising ISIS, al-Qaeda or the Nusra Front in the past for being
‘anti-imperialist’; if you remember people like Ralph Nader telling us rich
people will save us, or a block can be made with the right like Pat Buchanan; if
you’ve seen Putin, Khomeini, Orban or any capitalist reactionary who opposes
the U.S. from the right lauded; if Islamists like Hamas or Hezbollah are feted
as the only oppositions to the Israeli state; if you remember Adbusters initiating Occupy Wall Street
as “beyond Left and Right,” or left libertarian clown Jimmy Dore blocking with Tucker
Carlson and the rightist candidate for president of Columbia – then you know
what Ogman is talking about.
Hell, even Hitler and Tojo framed their being goaded into
war as reactions to European or U.S. imperialism – which in a way they were. Capital’s antagonisms produced the bloodiest
war in history, WWII, as it does nearly all other wars, including the present
one in Ukraine.
Fighting imperialism with ‘nationalism’ reinforces the form
of the bourgeois nation-state at this point in history, which is the connection
to Ogman’s larger argument. Ogman understands that ‘anti-imperialism,’ ‘anti-capitalism’
and ‘self-determination’ can be used by rightists or fascist forces, so some Leftists
have to be cognizant of their new bedfellows.
He calls the former method “vulgar anti-imperialism” for blocking with
the enemy of my enemy. Ogman mentions
examples of how ‘globalization’ and Zionism are opposed in binary nationalist
terms by some leftists and libertarians.
In a way, they are all forms of lazy reformism, attempting to sound
tough and ‘for oppressed people,’ but without any revolutionary, Marxist,
emancipatory or proletarian content. In fact, its not even 'anti-war.'
The
WALL FALLS
Ogman goes on to describe the consequences of the dissolution of the GDR, which engendered violent nationalism in the new, reunited Germany. Attacks on guest workers, refugees, Jews and minorities sky-rocketed after 1989. Fascist and ultra-right organizations built their membership, especially in Dresden. The press lauded the reunited Germany as a resurrection of the ‘volk.’ The State passed a new Alien Act, admitting Germans ‘by blood’ ethnicity as full citizens, while severely limiting asylum. Only after the left mobilized over several pogroms carried out against Turkish, Mozambique and Vietnamese guest workers did the State finally intervene against the fascistic mobilizations.
In response to the fall of the wall, the left under the
Radical Left / Die Radikale Linke battled this resurgence with the slogan “Never Again Germany!” They opposed reunification, even though it
was inevitable. When they realized that,
they asked for a referendum vote. Bonn
instead annexed the former GDR by fiat. In
this context the left also opposed the Alien Act, the speedup of deportations and
supported ‘open borders.’ They pointed
out that the new Germany would privatize most firms in the former GDR, leading
to massive unemployment, including women being sent back into the home. The GDR’s labor laws and women’s programs
would be abolished. They also opposed Germany’s plan to use central and eastern Europe as a
cheap labor zone. And indeed, all these
things came to pass in spite of their efforts.
In the early ‘90s a further grouping, Wohlfahrtsaussechusse,
of intellectuals, artists and political groups developed a program called “Something Better Than the Nation.” They engaged
in political and cultural work against nationalism, while physically confronting
racists and fascists. They did concerts, speaking tours, street art and
postering, a blockade of the Bundestag, but found almost no reception among the
population. I suspect this was mostly an
autonomist’ left communist movement, but I’m not sure.
POLITICS
The politics that developed out of these efforts, which continue to this day, were a reaction to the period of National Socialism in Germany and the subsequent establishment of the GDR. These groups realized that the state, the media, the fascists, the police and most of the population were to varying degrees supportive of German nationalism. A common consensus was that reunification had put Nazism and Communism in the dust-bin of history. Social Democrats and Greens were also on board with those ideas. The Wohlfahrtsaussechusse saw nationalism as a capitalist ideological project that induces citizens into supporting German capitalism’s efforts across the world and the consequent material benefits. It is the same as loyal brown-nose employees who support their corporation no matter what, because they feel they will keep their job, get rich or get a promotion. As capital is still mostly organized on a ‘state’ basis, nationalism is one of its props. So ‘internationalism’ is verboten, as it threatens capital to its bones.
As Eric Hobsbawn said of nations, they are a product of a
particular historical period. Ogman
calls the politics of these German groups “absolute, concrete, negative
universalism” which is certainly a mouthful. However, unlike some guilty New Leftists, they
did not adopt the identity of the excluded – Palestinian, African, Latin
American, Asian, Arab – as a substitute for a German identity.
After the 2007-2008 capitalist financial crash, some centrist German
Social Democrats blamed Muslim and Turkish communities for bringing about economic
ruin. This was followed by a German and EU media
campaign against lazy Greeks. Similar
rightist propaganda was found in Britain, pushed by New Labour, the National
Party and the Tories, and in the U.S., most forcefully presented by centrist
Democrats, the GOP Tea Party and FOX News. Obama was declared a ‘foreigner.’ However, Obama himself always pushed the
lying line that “all Americans” are in the same boat. Some call this “the
national competitive state” – a natural result of a man-eat-man market economy.
Ogman says this “national frame-work as a strategy to solve
… global crisis” is a dead-end. He
thinks the thinking in this book breaks with both the Old and New Left, which I
think is wrong on the former.
Proletarian internationalism does not seem to conflict with an ‘anti-national’
perspective. The ideas of ‘self-determination’
of nations in the present global context of imperialism and global capitalism
leaves almost no nation actually independent, tied as they are by political,
economic, military and cultural restraints and benefits, a web of control that binds
almost every so-called ‘nation’ together. Going back to nationalism tears the world apart and is a prelude to capitalist war and wars.
Ogman has no particular solution to the nationalist dilemma
in his historical overview of German movements.
This little book seems to be almost a PhD. thesis. It does indicate the difficult path forward for
socialists in a contracting and fearful world.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “A
Socialist Defector,” “Line of Separation,” “Leaving World War Two Behind”
(Swanson); “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism,” “The Brown Plague”
(Guerin); “Against the Fascist Creep,” “Yugoslavia: Peace, War &
Dissolution” (Chomsky); “Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate,” “Fascism Today –
What It Is and How to Fight It,” “Illegals, Migrants and Refugees,” “The Latino
Question,” “Stateless,”
And I
bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
June 25,
2022
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