Major Parties, Political Apathy and the Echoes of Rosa Luxemburg
I got wise to the works of Rosa Luxemburg way too late, considering my political orientation. What made me commit to reading her Accumulation of Capital was an interview on RevLeft Radio with Kate Evans, the author of a graphic novel biography on Luxemburg, that also gave me the missing piece to draft this essay. Next to all the useful information for self-taught mini-Marxists like myself, and the episode being played out by Kae Tempest's Europe is Lost, it nudged Luxemburg up on my reading list. It's however somewhat long, not unlike that other book with the word "Capital" in the title, so it'll take a while before I can properly talk about that work. Instead, this time I want to lay into some more topical observations that tend to pop up in recent times around my neck of the woods and annoy me.
For context, in the 2020 election for the German chancellorship, the CDU, the resident major party, finally didn't get a majority. Even better, they went into the opposition. The chancellor for the next four years was going to be from the SPD, the other major party. Of course following that, a balding man threw a hissy fit and sat on a really long table, pouting at foreign diplomats and something weird and horrible began.
Nation wars is one of almost everybody's least favourite things. With good reason, mind you, but often the conversation around one of these events end up being about blame and rationalization. Due to the ongoing pandemic at the time, everybody was really well warmed up for this particular game at the time said balding man started a nation war, and immediately the new chancellor was somehow partially responsible for that fact. I was never a great fan of Olaf Scholz during his days in the Merkel cabinet, but the claim that Merkel's mere presence - presumably under threat of German military intervention - would have stopped Putin from doing whatever he wanted is laughable. Not just because Putin has shown that he couldn't give less of crap by annexing Crimea after almost ten years of uninterrupted Merkel regime, but also because of the conceit that Germany would have either the military resources, or the economic leverage to stop a man who has gotten everything he wanted for the better part of 20 years from doing something everybody but him would rather he didn't. This specific claim is purely anecdotal, but it's not really anything I want to focus on for too long, my actual point being, that the SPD is shafted, despite being not technically worse than it's main competitor and occasional partner in crime.
The way politics is being addressed in the population is often mired in accusations. What makes that of political apathy interesting is that it's one also leveled by usually progressive media. Politics isn't exactly a refreshing topic in the way an in-depth discussion of a favourite movie might be, but people disliking it, and the people involved in it purely by association is a problem. The blame is laid on bad public officials, alienation to the political body, or a vague "complicated thing make voter brain ouchy". I'd like to take this apart a little, because like most things, this is partially an education issue, partially a communication issue, and partially a propaganda issue.
Propping up Political Education
First they came for the communists.... begins the Lutheran Martin Niemöller circa 1946. You've definitely heard it at least once in modern political education in the public school system. This can be in history class, a politics elective, maybe in some language class, but it's everywhere. Of course, in very modernist fashion it's concise, and strikes true, as confessionals should. In that aspect, it's very good. But what I'd really like to know is why they actually came for the communists first. Generally, they (meaning fascists) seem to really like coming for the communists first (and not in a fun way, unfortunately). Mussolini's Italy, Portugal's Estado Novo, France's Parti Populaire Français, and of course the one we're all familiar with, chose to do so, by way of violence, because they're not good enough at legislation to get rid of them otherwise.
Public consensus is that the answer to the rise of fascism in the 1930s was representative democracy, which should be odd to anybody confronted with the idea, considering more often than not representative democracy is the system that came directly before the fascists came along to indulge in their weird revisionist murder LARP. Why then, would they go for the communists first, and not for the representative democrats?
Comrades with emergency molotov cocktails in their fridges might be muttering the answer under their breath right now, but to keep it short: Most flavours of communist tend to have the better ideas, and similar audiences. It's not a coincidence that communist parties and fascist parties tend to crop up around the same time, usually a time when the population isn't doing great, economically and/or socially. Of course the fascist's answer tend to be shorter, and is also not coincidentally wrong on its face, if applied into a system. On the opposing end, Marxists for example have a long history of works with the word "Capital" in the title that span 800 pages, and a good number of them never even get to the point of formulating a solution. The point is, Marxist theory is hard. But then, I think maybe it should be taught as a proposal to improve current political systems, seeing as the ones we have now obviously aren't working properly.
Let's ignore my specific wishes of how political issues are going to be resolved in the coming years, and more on the way I'd think about them, if I were only equipped with my high-school politics classes. We are facing a series of global crises, each with their own set of intricacies and historical baggage, I'm fairly certain I'm not well enough informed on to give an actionable opinion. But I do have to have a gut feeling on who might share my interest and is willing to represent me in my country's parliament, so I'll vote for them and hope they still share my interests, when they've won the election.
Alternatively I can go the extra mile and enter a party, smooth-talk my way into local elections, get elected and do the thing I wanted to do myself, provided I can convince a party that'll take me.
This is the incrementalist approach, and the only one you've probably been taught in regards to politics. Before I can illustrate the problem with this, and why only being aware of this path of action makes engaging with politics in difficult times such a buzzkill, let me take you on a little tangent.
You're probably at least somewhat familiar with the trolley problem. I'm skipping a little to keep this short, but imagine you're standing on a bridge over some train tracks and you can see a train barrelling towards five or so people on the tracks. Say somebody tied them down and they can't escape. Now, next to you stands somebody heavy enough that pushing them into the path of the train would stop it killing the people tied onto the tracks. Now, there's nobody else that could help in the situation, and you couldn't jump yourself. The people on the tracks also can't see you, in case that's what you're concerned with. Whatever you do, it only has consequences in whether the people on the tracks die, or the person on the bridge with you die. Depending on how you engage with ethics, not pushing the person will make you at least partially responsible for the demise of several people. Pushing the person will make you directly responsible for the demise of one. But now imagine there's a red button on the bridge. If you push it, you teleport to the other side of the earth, forget about the position and makes the man on the bridge aware of the choices you had. If you push it, you no longer have any direct influence on the situation and the outcome of the situation becomes what somebody in my circles would call a Schroedinger Wave Function.
Back to the incrementalist option. Not everybody will want to become a politician. Most people will be passionate about things that aren't compatible with the lifestyle of the politician in representative democracies. That's not their fault, really, but those that don't want to become politicians, face a similar dilemma. Do they choose a life they don't want, or do they choose to let somebody force a life they don't want upon them? Do they push the man, or not? In fact, they face a similar dilemma over and over again, if they choose to engage with politics while not actually becoming a politician themselves. I'll leave this possibility for another time, and not just because requires fewer terminology, I promise. Assuming a citizen that engages in the political voting system doesn't want to enter it, they will have to cast their vote. Assuming they're not doing great, chances are that they don't actually have options that'll accommodate their needs. A class of people doesn't get neglected by accident. If they are then under the impression that there is no solution to the problem, they will take the sensible option and choose not to participate. That can be disparaging the values the system proclaims to stand for, non-participation in the democratic process, or deliberate sabotage through voting for otherwise non-valid parties. There's countless ways to press that red button.
Whether ML(M) is a solution the individual is interested in is of course up to them, but in opposition to the other popular (populist, really) alternative, this one is at least a dialectical framework that when applied doesn't shatter like an egg dropped from the third floor of an apartment building. But technically, so is geometry. For people not in the know, every geometry can be translated into a linear algebra problem, if you're willing to jump through a couple hoops, and as somebody who is infinitely more comfortable with linear algebra, I would have loved to have had the option to go out of general education knowing how to never have to do geometry again. Before being introduced to linear algebra, part of me had just accepted that I was not going to do very much math in anything more than two dimensions. Now, since I've been given the correct tools, I'm regularly confronted with problems in infinite dimensions. It's a thing physicists like to do, don't question it too much.
Neither linear algebra nor Marxist theory was taught during my time in school, but while linear algebra was never mentioned, because we learned how to do geometry, we didn't skip Marxist theory, because we were too busy. I don't want to state explicitly what we did, but suffice to say, I think the time would have been spent learning dialectics, because knowing me, had I not been exposed to somebody who explained the basics of Marxist theory to me, I too, might have pressed the red button.
Echoes of Forgotten Revolutions
The First World War is notorious for being kind of a mess to put into a clean narrative. Either way, Germany came out of it as the universally agreed upon loser, and thus was barred from doing any more colonialism, mainly so everybody else could do just a little more of it, but before that decision fell, there was actually an attempt to pull the country out of the war from within.
The November Revolution of 1918 consisted of German workers, military men and communist internationalists of several stripes united under the banner of the Spartacus League (ignore the modern descendants claiming that banner for themselves for this piece). Among these were two particular people I'd like to mention. Friedrich Ebert, the then head of the SPD, and Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacus League. The stated goals of the revolutionaries included workers access to the means of production, and they succeeded for a time. Some admittedly somewhat funny shenanigans ensued after the surrender of bourgeoisie, and the military started trying to regain control, forming the "Freikorps", while the SPD tried similarly to regain control over the political body of the state. They did so employing state violence, killing the several prominent members of the Spartacus League, including Rosa Luxemburg. Today, schools are named after Friedrich Ebert, Luxemburg and her body of work rarely gets a mention. I find this odd, since by all means the revolution might have failed, but it was technically in support of something that in hindsight should have been taken place. The fall of the revolution would later facilitate the rise of the NSDAP, and the previously mentioned Freikorps would turn militant allies to the fascists that it's acceptable to shoot in the face in games and movies to this day. Rightfully, the social democrats have had difficulties living down this betrayal of their own revolution. Wer hat uns verraten? Die Sozialdemokraten (Who betrayed us? The social democrats.) is the considerably catchier parallel of the recurring meme The SPD killed Rosa Luxemburg. Forgive, but never forget, as they say.
As little actual impact as the November Revolution ended up having on contemporary politics, the betrayal does show something that still holds true to some extent. Social Democrats are still capitalists at the end of the day. Their solutions will amount to band-aids, which is all well and fine for paper-cuts, but not for questions of social inequality or climate change politics, the life-threatening pandemic of this allegory.
The Soup of the Major Parties
Major Parties in a representative democracies are inherently problematic in that they leverage the exploitable weakness in a system in which the worst thing professionally having to man the opposition for a few years. Not having a well defined set of values is maybe inevitable, if a party is supposed to take a stance on all issues, but it also gives incentive to parrot things back to the voter that one believes they want to hear. At the same time, on all but the points the party believes in, these are empty promises. Since that can't be said out loud, least the representatives will lose legitimacy, the perception of the Major Party will reduce itself to their perceived achievements, while their political and economic goals, the things party members say and the details of their policy become a potpourri, for people to pick and choose. This can be largely beneficial to the party, if the initial perception of it is positive. Case in point, the CDU. Uninvested readers might be unsympathetic to the party, considering the "C" in that stands for "Christian", in a country where state and church are supposedly separated. Said uninvested readers might look into the party for a while and spot the vestigial tumor growing out its back, that is its Bavarian sister party, that it's been very suspiciously anti-immigrant (even in times of the 2015 refugee influx, less however during the 2022 refugee influx from Ukraine), religiously zealous and has recently developed some overlap with climate change deniers and anti-vax groups. Then they might notice that the man currently heading said sister party has once ordered every government building in Bavaria hang up a crucifix, despite religious neutrality of the state, and hence that of the job done in these buildings, and that the CDU is currently headed by a former chairman at the BlackRock investing company, a company habitually engaged in war profiteering, deforestation, shadow banking and also had "a very good pandemic". Said head of the party is also cultivating a very literal cult of personality in their junior party, Junge Union (Junior Union), that incidentally is veering so hard to the right, it's heading straight into a ditch of right-wing drivel. Such uninvested readers might then come to the conclusion that this is a not good party, on account of all the not good ideas they've been dabbling in. To a substantial part of the German population these facts don't seem as prominent as mistakes the other Major Party made. In all fairness, these aren't great. But this further proves the hypothesis.
The SPD really shit the bed. It brands itself as a worker's party, so the bourgeoisie will never be completely in favour with them, if there's an alternative (neoliberals, typically). At the same time, they did very literally stab an icon of the socialist revolution in the back, and haven't made any motions to help the actual worker, so sympathies with the left and historically literate are thin as well. Their perception is largely murky, and of course they haven't been perfect by any stretch of the word. For example, the much maligned Agenda 2010 was an SPD brainchild, and made things objectively worse for members of the proletariat and the petit bourgeois. It's still in effect, despite criticism of it starting almost the day it went into effect back in 2003. The fact that the governing parties could have gotten rid of it, while Merkel and the CDU were in power is often comfortably overlooked. However, the SPD currently has no members with very public and publicly known pictures arm in arm with Neonazis dressed in neonazi apparel in parliament.
The SPD is not a great party, with a not-great history and at best incrementalist ideals. Unless this changes, they are not the future. I'm aware the JUSOS, the young socialist, have interesting ideas that may tangibly improve the lives of all citizens, at the price of maybe taxing the millionaires a little bit, which is great. I hope they prove me wrong and make living tenable, avoid the climate catastrophe and de-fuck the system. What I'm absolutely certain of however, is that the CDU, in all its forms is not the answer to any problem we are facing, and will face, if their politics remain prevalent in policy decisions. Remember, Germany only decided to let the non-cis/hetero crowd get married in 2017, 12 years into an uninterrupted CDU regime, 3 years after TERF island, as well as most of the USA. There is no actual merit to keep them around, and certainly not in the size that they exist at this time.
Objection!
Progressive parties in democracies that are struggling with popular proto-fascist or straight up fascist ideas exhibit this very odd behavior where they may be in competition with said fascists, but refuse to call them the f-word to their faces. Same goes for smaller criticisms, which in the democratic process might be more detrimental to the outlook of the voter. The refusal of parties to criticise primarily their political allies for genuine mistakes they did puts these parties at an unnecessary disadvantage. It's important for allied parties or politicians to openly object, if they were overruled, as well as explain their reasoning on a public platform. Otherwise, if they reinforce their beliefs later down the line, the voters won't be able to distinguish a genuine argument made in good faith from an empty platitude that is parroted back to them in order to scrape together enough votes. Who knows, maybe it'll be enough to get that one boy with the nazi picture into parliament? Nobody has the time to trawl through every politician's social media feed to find a tweet that looks legitimate and happens to support their ideas. Especially parties with an image problem should make sure to put exclamation points on their objections, and make sure their value system is consistent with public statements. Everybody disagrees with their friends on some things, same with their colleagues, their professional superiors, their teachers, students, family, neighbors... Most children even can live down minor disagreement without needing an appeasement period. Why then, shouldn't politicians be expected to be able to disagree on decisions and still work toward a common goal?
The Hydra Still Wins
The tragedy of democratic systems with Major Parties is, that not only will they inevitably begin to crop up, it's that they keep getting elected. Not everyone has the time, patience or interest in politics to inform oneself in detail about the options all parties present. The uninformed will usually vote a major party, or not at all. This poses a problem for everyone. Those who vote for a Major Party and expect it to change, won't see the change they've been hoping for (unless they have very not good hopes), those who don't will see their party of choice under-perform, or even be excluded from participating in government completely. Any American who's tried to vote third party, will know what I mean. Major Parties gaining popularity is the onset of the system beginning a slow decline, and political apathy is the sign that the voters have noticed. Maybe if the CDU breaks apart, and the JUSOS take over the SPD, that decline can be cushioned and turned around in Germany, but ultimately, if the system is to survive, there is no alternative to a solid political education, systemic reform and a little sprinkling of anti-capitalist evolution. None that doesn't come with guillotines.