With this resolution, Linksjugend has not moved \u201cto the left\u201d; it is merely reacting to the enormous political opposition within the population, above all among young people, who are becoming radicalised and are being attacked for this by all the establishment parties and the media.<\/p>\n
Hardly had the resolution been adopted when almost all major media outlets\u2014from the tabloid\u00a0Bild\u00a0to leading newsweekly\u00a0Der Spiegel\u00a0to the pro-Green\u00a0taz\u2014launched a hysterical campaign against the youth organisation. The resolution was denounced as \u201cantisemitic,\u201d and the congress was portrayed as a hotbed of extremist activities, where pro-Israeli delegates were allegedly openly threatened.<\/p>\n
However, at the forefront of this right-wing campaign was not the extreme right Springer press, but the Left Party itself. Instead of defending its own youth organisation, it launched a sharp attack and made clear that support for Israel\u2019s war policy was non-negotiable.<\/p>\n
Party co-chairs Ines Schwerdtner and Jan van Aken declared that there was \u201cvery broad agreement\u201d within the party executive that the Linksjugend resolution was \u201cnot compatible with the party\u2019s adopted positions.\u201d These positions stipulate that any criticism of Israel must remain strictly limited and must \u201cnever delegitimise Israel\u2019s existence\u201d\u2014a formula that has for years been used to stifle any substantive criticism of Zionist war crimes.<\/p>\n
Seventeen leading Left Party parliamentary deputies\u2014including Gregor Gysi, Dietmar Bartsch, Caren Lay, Bodo Ramelow and others\u2014followed up with an open letter, warning that \u201csomething has started to slip\u201d with this resolution and that this must under no circumstances be tolerated.<\/p>\n
The message is unmistakable: the Left Party tolerates no serious criticism of Israel\u2014and certainly not the identification of its policies as genocide. In the days following the youth congress, the party resorted to aggressive censorship measures:<\/p>\n
This constitutes a systematic attempt to purge criticism of Israel from the party, thereby demonstrating that despite occasional cosmetic criticism of the government, the Left Party fully supports the foreign policy course of German imperialism.<\/p>\n The\u00a0World Socialist Web Site\u00a0has consistently shown that the Left Party is an integral component of the state and security apparatus and supports the global operations of German militarism\u2014whether in Ukraine against Russia, in the Horn of Africa, in the Indo-Pacific or in the Middle East.<\/p>\n This also applies to Linksjugend. With the adoption of its resolution, it is pursuing two aims. On the one hand, like the pseudo-left organisations in its milieu, it is desperately attempting to uphold the illusion that the Left Party can be pushed \u201cto the left\u201d from within. On the other hand, it seeks to cover its own tracks and cloak itself in an anti-imperialist mantle to capture the growing opposition among young people and to block and suppress a socialist development.<\/p>\n The actual record of Linksjugend leaves no doubt about this. It supported the Afghanistan war and the US- and NATO-led regime-change war in Syria. It uncritically adopted the propaganda of German imperialism against China. On the second anniversary of the Ukraine war, it openly called for\u00a0donations for the fascist battalions of the Ukrainian army<\/a>. And regarding Israel, it has defended the genocidal imperialist offensive and as recently as October supported\u00a0Trump\u2019s so-called \u201cpeace plan,\u201d<\/a> which envisages the permanent colonisation and destruction of the Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n Young workers and students who want to fight against fascism, militarism and social austerity face fundamental political questions and tasks. They need to understand the role of the Left Party and its youth organisation, which do not represent their interests and goals, but instead play a key role in enforcing anti-working-class government policies.<\/p>\n It is telling that the Left Party recently abstained in the vote on the\u00a0pension package<\/a>, thereby once again shoring up the right-wing Friedrich Merz coalition government at a critical moment. Previously, it had approved the government\u2019s war credits in the Bundesrat (upper house of parliament) and enabled Merz\u2019s swift election as chancellor in the Bundestag (lower house of parliament).<\/p>\n It is not the wrong decisions of individual officials that are the reason for the pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist stance of both organisations, but their social and political class character.<\/p>\n The Left Party is a bourgeois party of affluent middle-class layers, deeply rooted in the state, parliamentary and trade union apparatuses. Its existence is based on keeping oppositional moods within safe channels. The same applies to Linksjugend, which since its founding has had the task of nurturing the future leadership of a party loyal to the state. Thus, the current co-chair of the Left Party parliamentary group, Heidi Reichinnek, was state spokesperson and treasurer of Linksjugend from 2017 to 2019.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
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