Now about the most conspicuous in his attacks. He raises his accusations first of all in the context of the SPD‘s and the Greens‘ action concerning the so-called emancipation of homosexuality. So we shall refute this first.

The author straightfaced asserts that "German Marxism has always had a proud history of defending homosexuals against attacks by the bourgeois state." When and where is this supposed to have happened? There is no statement in favor of the homosexuals during the First International and the time of Social Democracy until 1914. This is bare invention. And neither later there was anything of this kind, neither with the KPD. This subject is entirely new. Only since the beginning of the seventies some allegedly Marxist organisations picked this up. As for Marx, he made fun of some people demanding that the labor movement should give its support for homosexuals. For that he was even attacked by so-called representatives of homosexuals. Engels expressed his disgust regarding homosexuality.

We only can once more request the author to prove his assertions. There will not be left much of them.

Further, about the assertions about the Bolsheviks. Known to us is only that the Soviet government annuled the whole section on sexual criminal law in tsarist criminal law, which concerned several questions. But there is not a single statement by Lenin about homosexuality, not even a single remark. With regard to Lenin, it is an invention that Lenin ever gave his support for such a cause. If Schreader is a director of a Lenin-internet-archive, he should just give some proofs for his views. The Soviet Union in the further development certainly had its reasons when it excluded such phenomena of decadence from social life.

Furthermore, where is it here about criminal law? With the SPD; the Greens and also the mass media it is about the so-called equal rights, even about so-called "marriages" of homosexuals, and even about the right to adopt children. Where, at any time, something like that was demanded or only thought in the former Soviet Union, in China or in a revolutionary state, where in the former history of mankind! It is nothing but perfidy to insinuate something like that to revolutionary states. And equally it is nothing but perfidy if today‘s society which is ruled by the great finance and capital oligarchies wants something like that to become law. There is nothing like that in the revolutionary labor movement.

"Equal rights for oppressed people, in this case homosexuals" - what kind of a slogan is this supposed to be? It is a persiflage of Marxism, a very bad one.

It is possible to be oppressed for very different and contradictory reasons in capitalist society. There are revolutionaries who are oppressed, a broad spectrum of progressive people who however must unite in struggle. There are also reactionaries who are oppressed, there are religious sects which are oppressed, there are sometimes fascists who are oppressed, and there are varied criminals who are treated repressively in this or that way, or are downright repressed. 

Also the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes oppresses: the forces of bourgeois and feudal decay, among them also their cultural representatives. Is it possible for revolutionaries to put all these "oppressed" on a par and demand "equal rights for oppressed people"? You have understood absolutely nothing of Marxism and Leninism. The "liberation of all oppressed" is anarchism at its worst, a back door of reaction. 

And Schreader dares to remind us of ultra-rightists? Doesn‘t he know that, e.g., Hitler essentially leaned also on homosexual circles in his rise? That many circles in the USA which belong to the ultra-rightists are homosexuals, too, former FBI-Chief Hoover included, for example? Schreader makes white out of black, and black out of white. Once more we firmly request him to give at least one proof that speaking up for or furthering the homosexuals has occurred in the labor movement in the past. 

We attacked the elections and the so-called electoral campaign because they mean an extortion against the population. The term "population" here means the overwhelming majority of all who do not belong to the top of this political system. This statement "Results from the Election Campaign" attempts to mark the extortion in it and to attack the stealthily manoeuvres which are underway without the population. What has Schreader to object against such a statement? If the green measures are taken as planned, above all German as well as foreign workers will be hit. They are directed against almost all working people, but very especially the poorest strata will be pressed down further. So what about his remark that we didn‘t mention the emigrants? Today the emigrants in Germany are to be found in the whole social spectrum, as workers, labor aristocrats, petty bourgeois; they are to be found among the low-sunk, the dirty dealers, the traffickers and also long since among the bourgeoisie. The times when "foreigner" could largely be equated to "lower worker on the assembly line" have gone for more than twenty years. The deep split within the working class is above all between the long-settled, the "gestandene" workers, and those who have come new, from Eastern Europe, for example, but also from many other countries and even from certain strata of the German working people who partly work for the lowest wages. Also these will be strongly hit by rising energy prices.

Finally some remarks about the general characterization of our statement. One has to consider that today we have a very weak domestic working class, which is virtually without representation of its interests and even sometimes without a political will of its own. The restructurings and the transfers of production have had consequences. The position of the working class and also of all other classes is moulded much more by the international interrelation than before. We cannot direct abstract appeals to the working class which go unheard into the void. The frauds of the system meet the resistance of very broad sections of the population, this is not specific to the working class. If we attack these frauds we help the international revolution. It is typical for certain Trotskyites to attack exactly such concrete steps. We only can request the author to show us where our view contradicts the material situation in the country and on the international level. And the agreement with reality is after all the decisive criterion. 

Finally it is completely insufficient to portray the Greens only as a bourgeois party. They in fact mark that side of the bourgeoisie which wants to keep labor on the lowest level and even drag it back. The revolutionary development of the productive forces in fact threatens the borgeoisie‘s rule itself. What else do the Greens express than the extremist position to stop this development? The bourgeois rule has an ambivalent relation to technology, for it is not able to exist without growth. This is not new. It can be found in Marx already, but today we find it to go much further. The fanatism of the bourgeoisie and the other out-dated classes leads to the negation of civilization, to a fundamentally pessimistic position, and finally to disparaging man in general.

Group Neue Einheit
Oct. 2, 1998