POLICE snatching Palestine solidarity demonstrators from the annual march to the tombs of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht showcased an authoritarian new Germany.

Junge Welt, the Morning Star’s German sister paper which organises the annual Rosa Luxemburg Conference which took place last weekend, has been on the sharp end of this repression.

It has fought in the courts against its designation as “extremist” by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution: this does not ban the daily paper, but restricts its ability to advertise and sees access to it denied online at many universities and libraries.

But a Berlin court ruled in October it was indeed extremist on the grounds it seeks to “establish an anti-constitutional socialist-communist social order according to a classical Marxist understanding.”

The problems are mounting, we heard from director Dietmar Koschmieder. The Rosa Luxemburg Conference — like Junge Welt’s circulation, uniquely for a German print paper — has grown and grown, with over 3,500 attending the 2024 conference.

This year they were unable to secure a venue capable of holding the 4,000-plus attendees who wanted to buy tickets, with event centres rejecting them on political grounds.

The warehouse complex that housed the conference, the simultaneous cultural festival (including live jazz performances and a play about German revolutionary Clara Zetkin) and the adjoining spaces for stalls (including the Morning Star’s, staffed by Dumfries supporters, which took €255) and food kiosks in the end held 3,000, but the German left’s biggest event is having its growth stunted by the authorities.

The state’s increasing intolerance is linked to economic decline, a dissatisfied public needing tougher handling. A youth podium of trade unionists discussed recent industrial battles on the railways and in public services including nurseries, as well as the crisis gripping much of German manufacturing including flagship auto maker Volkswagen.

Too often, though, unions’ initial militancy when faced with cuts and closures is worn down as company bosses blame global economic circumstances. As IG-Metall Youth member Henrik put it, “we start out a tiger and end up a carpet.”

Germany’s economic problems are real, tied to the Ukraine war and sanctions on Russian energy, as well as Europe’s growing technological lag behind both China and the United States.

Reversing the decline would require an overhaul of the system, which is why unions need a more radical political vision: as a member of the German Communist Party’s youth wing the SDAJ put it, “the class struggle is about more than wages. It’s about the permanent securing of our interests. We don’t need socialism tomorrow — we need it today.”

This demand is relevant in Britain too: we see the far right advancing because the left doesn’t offer a systemic alternative to an exhausted political order, even where lists of individual policies, from wealth taxes to public ownership, command majority support. As a recent reader’s letter in the Morning Star argued, we need to talk more about socialism.

German politics is full of talk of the “Zeitwende,” or “turn of the times,” the new era announced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Scholz signalled a shift towards militarism, and Germany’s expanding military budgets were linked by speaker after speaker to its deteriorating railways, hospitals and kindergartens, and attacks on workers’ rights including a current assault on sick pay.

Naturally the Zeitwende as defined by the Establishment parties is something opposed by the left, but keynote speaker Peter Mertens, of the Workers Party of Belgium (PTB), characteristically demanded a bolder response. “Marxists should not fear the turbulent times to come. We should grasp the will for radical change that exists.”

Mertens’s book Mutiny, whose English edition was published last year, senses opportunity in the simultaneous revolt of the global South against US domination and the disillusionment of people in the West with their political systems.

At the conference he argued that the left needs to break decisively with any idea that aligning with centrists can defeat the far right: the supposedly liberal and welfarist EU was not only increasingly anti-working class in character, but had exposed its vicious imperialist nature by conniving at the Palestinian genocide and seeking to prolong war in Europe even as the United States begins to lose interest.

Political crisis engulfs state after state, and the centre’s response is consistently to do deals with the far right.

The new authoritarianism that sees freedom of speech restricted, harsher crackdowns on protest and elections cancelled as one has just been in Romania is not just coming from populist rightwingers like Trump: it is coming from the liberals. “The EU is not reformable,” Mertens summarises simply: “we need a complete overthrow.”

In his view, the right currently has the initiative because the left is weak. This is not a tautologous statement, nor even a reference to the roll-back of mass left movements like Jeremy Corbyn’s in Britain.

These movements themselves were weak because they were neither class conscious nor Marxist, and thus lacked the ideological framework or organisational discipline to confront capitalist states. His answer is to rebuild: “Can we rebuild communist parties? Can we rebuild Marxist parties? Yes we can,” he declared. “It takes time, effort, discipline, five and 10-year strategies, but it can be done.”

He speaks with authority since the PTB is one of the few examples of a communist party that has gone from the margins to become a major political player in the last decade, rising from 2,800 members in 2008 to over 25,000 today, with a contingent of MPs in the Belgian parliament and two in the European.

He has spoken before of how it achieved this renewal, combining an explicit commitment to working-class liberation through the replacement of capitalism by socialism with an industrial focus prioritising trade union work. “There is no way out of this crisis involving capitalism,” he concluded. “It can only be resolved through socialism.”

Inspiring words and in the spirit of the conference’s tagline, “Das letze Gefecht,” the “last fight” we are called on to face in the Internationale, which will usher in a new, socialist world.

The Rosa Luxemburg Conference’s internationalism always helps to break out of West-centric analyses and speakers like Kwesi Pratt of Ghana, who addressed the global difficulties of imperialism including in west Africa where peoples are rejecting French and US military and economic domination, remind us that the world is full of hopeful signs of the end of imperialist hegemony even if European lefts seem in disarray.

But there’s a catch, which is that the “last fight” we end up facing could be a world war launched by US imperialism to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world.

The crumbling world order is marked by devastating wars, with two, Israel’s against Palestine and its neighbours in the Middle East and the Nato-Russia war over Ukraine, risking escalation into global nuclear conflict.

German repression, like that we see this week in Britain with attempts to restrict a national mobilisation for Palestine, is focused more than anything else against the peace movement.

Former Irish MEP Clare Daly’s call on us to be the Rosa Luxemburgs and Karl Liebknechts of today, which opened the conference, reminds us of the opprobrium heaped on those socialists who in World War I remained loyal to working-class internationalism and refused to line up behind “their” imperialism.

Liebknecht alone voted against the war credits granted by the Reichstag to fuel imperial Germany’s war: when we think how isolated voices for peace are in Parliament today, we should remember who was right and who wrong about the war fever that gripped Europe in 1914.

The presence of his granddaughter Marianne at the conference was a special reminder of that history.

Peace was the theme of the conference’s final session, on stopping German rearmament and preventing World War III. Mark Ellmann of the German Communist Party cited Liebknecht’s injunction to remember that the working class’s main enemy is always its own ruling class.

Speakers pointed out that demands such as Donald Trump’s for Nato states to spend 5 per cent of GDP on the military would, in Germany, see military spending approach 50 per cent of the federal budget, turning the crisis across German public services into catastrophe.

Social Democrat member Petra Erler called for a return to West German chancellor Willy Brandt’s recognition that “peace is not everything, but without peace, everything is nothing.” Ulrike Eifler of Die Linke described her party’s retreat from explicit pro-peace positions as a “strategic mistake.”

It was positive to see anti-war voices remain in these parties, but the gulf between them and their party leaderships could not be ignored either. (Germany’s most consistently anti-war party, Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW, was not on the platform, though I was able to catch up with its lead spokeswoman on foreign policy, Sevim Dagdelen, a couple of days later, for a discussion that will feature in a future article).

Industrial decline, savage spending cuts and a drive to war: Germany’s crises are all too familiar to a British observer. Its left is, like ours, divided and trails the far right in the polls.

But there is hope there too, and the continued growth of the Rosa Luxemburg Conference and Junge Welt show the appetite for a different direction is there, just as in Britain we sense it in the huge movement in solidarity with Palestine.

Ultimately though, the left will not make much of these opportunities unless — as Mertens stressed — we raise our sights from concessions within the existing system to a challenge to that system’s very existence. A movement towards socialism.