Kohl besmirches Germany's democracy

[Johannes Schneider]

Chris Burford wrote:
> Kohl has admitted accepting 2 million Marks  for CDU campaign funds
between
> 1993 and 1998 in secret accounts.
>
> The significance of this scandal is that the purest of the bourgeois
> democracies, the Federal Republic of Germany, like almost all the others,
> now has scandals about the funding of political parties.
As I told you, now that the gates are broken more and more details are going
to resurface. Thanks to Kohl Germany now is, in the eyes of an ordinary
Germany, on the same level as Italy. When admitting the illegal funding Kohl
tried to use the old-style anticommunism, when saying:
"I needed the money urgently. In the East the CDU was weak and without any
funds, wheras the PDS was gaining power".
But even in the 80ties, when someone tried to defend himself by saying it is
more honourable to accept money from a German businessman than from Russian
communists, this defence did not hold.
> This is one of the front lines in the battle to turn bourgeois democracy
> into socialist democracy.
But what political forces are going to lead the battle? Certainly not the
SPD. Recent polls reveal that a vast majority believes the SPD received the
same illegal funding. The PDS, you are going to say? Ok, they are good
Social Democrats. But when it comes to money they are vulnerable too,
because they certainly saved some SED fund from the German state and used it
to maintain the PDS.
Certainly the current situation opens some good propagandistic chances for
revolutionaries. Its obvious political parties are the agents of social
classes and the state is the appparatus for class rule. Any talk about
democracy is just decoration.
But since there is no revolutionary alternative today any talk about turning
'bourgeois democracy into socialist democracy' is just utopian.
It might well be that the CDU falls apart, but another (or several)
bourgeois parties will take its place. Look at Italy the Christian Democrats
are now scattered over several tiny parties, but bourgeois rule is not
threatened at all not to talk about socialist democracy.
Given a missing alternative the result of the current scandal might well be
a growing cyniscm and depolitication: "Politics is a dirty business and all
politicians are crooks". This will be hardly a starting point for gradually
transforming bourgeois democracy.
Johannes