Solidarity with the victims of State spying in Germany!

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On November18, the lawsuit of the Sozialistischen Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) against the Federal Republic of Germany opens at the administrative court of Berlin. The party defends itself against its watch by secret services and its designation in the chapter “left-wing extremism” of the report on the protection of the constitution.

The publishing of names of organisations or of publications in the report on the protection of the Fundamental Law (Constitution of the FRG) is tantamount to an invitation not to support the named persons or not to participate to common initiatives with them. In the case of the SGP, it is particularly paradoxical to claim at the same time that their activities are strictly legal. It is thus an attempt at intimidation.

The SGP is only one in many organisations, initiatives and even journals (Junge Welt) that fell into the radar screen of German secret services as “left-wing extremists” because they refer positively to Marx and to Marxism.

For instance, the German government replied to a protest by Junge Welt against State spying by the following statement: “So, the division of a society according to the characteristic of belonging to a class oriented towards production is in contradiction with the guarantee of human dignity”. The reply of the government to the lawsuit of the SGP is that “the thought in class categories” and the “belief in the existence of competing and irreconcilably opposed classes” are anti-constitutional and justify thus State surveillance. In the Verfassungsschutzbericht 2020 (Report on the protection of the Constitution 2020), it is stated openly: “The SGP bases itself on a Marxist class thought incompatible with the Fundamental Law, as well as on a propagation of class struggle”.

It is thus not surprising that for the guardians of the bourgeois Constitution, even the electoral participation of parties invoking Marxism should be suspect: “The far-left parties participate regularly to elections at the federal level or at the level of Lands. The participation to elections gives them the occasion to speak directly to old and new partisans during the electoral campaign, to indoctrinate them with far-left themes and ideological fragments, and to recruit new members.

All organisations of the labour movement must firmly reject crime of opinion, for this is the point. In the years 1970, such quibbles served as a basis for bans from exercising a profession against members of organisations of workers and youth. All serious academics must also make a stand against this justification of surveillance policies by the State, especially as some of them recognise the existence of social classes in their research and teaching domain.

Everywhere in the world, reactionary governments attempt to restrict freedom of expression of the exploited by bans or obstructions (for instance, “the ban on communist symbols” in Poland).

Solidarity with all organisations and all medias of the labour movement in Germany hit by spying by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution!

Hands off freedom of organisation, of meeting and of expression of workers’ organisations!

November 15, 2021


International Bureau of the Permanent Revolution Collective