Meeting with young Trotskyists: Trotsky regulates

“You can choose: do you take a yellow ticket or a red ticket?” You can win cinema tickets from the man standing in downtown Leipzig. Nick says that he already drew a ticket earlier - a red one. The man said to him that young people always draw the red tickets. Never the yellow ones. Nick grins. The young people choose the red, the left, i.e. the socialist version, and not just when it comes to cinema tickets. This is good news for Nick. Nick is a member of the left-wing group “Socialism from Below”. With her he is waiting for the “revolutionary break”.

Socialism from below, or SVU for short, is part of the Left Party's current success. But definitely part of their problem. After years of crisis, the party has doubled its membership. Young, activist people in particular joined. But in recent months, certain groups have repeatedly put the party leadership in the unpleasant situation of having to explain themselves on talk shows: What is the left's relationship to anti-Semitism? And about Israel? If you ask leading left-wing politicians why these incidents keep happening, a word that sounds 1920, dusty and like small glasses has long been mentioned behind closed doors: Trotskyists.

Nick and Leon are sitting on a sofa in a bakery in downtown Leipzig on an October afternoon. They don't want to read their real names in the newspaper. They take turns answering the taz's questions, which is what they agreed on beforehand. Whenever one speaks, he slides forward while the other sinks deeper into the sofa. Nick is 22, wearing red tights under knee-length cargo pants and a black scarf wrapped around his shoulder. He is studying. Leon is 27, keeps his softshell jacket closed during the conversation and buries his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans. He says he works in the social sector. Both come from East Germany, from the countryside. They were politicized by neo-Nazi marches and the head of the ethnic wing of the AfD, Björn Höcke, who marched through Nick's hometown with 1,500 people.

The two young men tell the story of their politicization the way many of their generation would probably tell it: how the crises came to a head, how they first became active in the climate movement, how Corona came, the war in Ukraine, then Gaza and how they searched for a “theoretical compass”.

The Left Party, protest movements and trade unions repeatedly wrestle with Trotskyists. These refer to Leon Trotsky, a Russian revolutionary who lost the power struggle against Stalin. He later had him murdered. Trotskyists believe in permanent, worldwide revolution. So they constantly want to overthrow the prevailing conditions.

For the left, this means: There are few of them, but they annoy the party because, as revolutionaries, they fight its “reformism”. However, and perhaps because of this, they seem to be particularly successful with young people.

Leon explains the revolution as the SVU group imagines it: It does not come from above, from parties, but from below. He calls this “self-liberation of the working class.” And what could Germany look like after the revolution? “A model for a form of social organization after a revolution could be the Soviet Republic of 1918/19,” says Leon.

The closer you get to the Trotskyists, the more diffuse the picture becomes. There are many small groups that are constantly splitting off from each other in the old left-wing tradition. A well-known Trotskyist network is Marx21, which is particularly active in Berlin-Neukölln.

When the Left expelled Marx21 member Ramsis Kilani from the party in 2024 because he relativized Hamas' terror, several members of the Left split off from Marx21. They founded “socialism from below”. Officially, the group recommends that all of its members leave the Left Party because the party does not formulate a “visible system alternative” and does not fundamentally question capitalism. It is not known how many SVU members actually left the party. Leon and Nick themselves are not party members.

However, there are still close connections. For example, Leon and Nick want to go to Berlin for the SVU's nationwide Zündfunke congress. In mid-November, prominent left-wing members such as Vanessa Emde will speak there alongside influencers. The Berlin MP is criticized, among other things, because she said, with a clear reference to Israel: “States have no right to exist.” The Left currently sees “no common working basis” with Emde. Hannah Bruns is also invited to the congress. A party expulsion process is currently underway against her on the Left.

When Nick and Leon moved to Leipzig, they didn't immediately end up at SVU. First they were active in the SDS, the Socialist-Democratic Student Association of the Left, one of the official youth organizations. “My impression was that the SDS had increasingly aligned its politics more towards the left,” says Nick. Both Nick and Leon realized at some point that they were looking for a “revolutionary break” that they did not find in the SDS. Then “a comrade poached her,” says Nick. They moved to SVU. Since then, Nick and Leon have no longer been active in the SDS, but one can now hear from other parts of the party that the youth associations of the left have been “infiltrated” by Trotskyist groups. A call from the taz to the SDS and the question as to whether the SDS knows people from SVU in its own ranks ends after a few seconds. No time, you don't know anyone.

A look at Instagram shows that SDS and SVU sometimes cooperate closely with each other. There, SVU and SDS regularly call for demonstrations together or sit together on podiums. The influence of SVU can also be seen in protests against Björn Höcke in Jena, against a weapons factory near Leipzig or at the “Gen-Z regulates” demos. Last weekend, thousands of young people took to the streets for a better future. Leon and Nick also look at these protests with hope. Also because they reached so many people in France. How do you assess the issue of violence during the protests? Nick laughs – it was clear that the question was coming. Nick and Leon do not want to authorize the answer they give afterwards.

But the Trotskyists also seek direct confrontation with the party. Members of “Socialism from Below” protested against the Left party conference in Berlin last weekend: While a large majority of delegates voted for coalition talks with the SPD and the Greens, the party's internal state working group for Palestine Solidarity stood outside the hall together with Ramsis Kilani and Vanessa Emde.

They criticize: The Left has made too many compromises with the SPD and the Greens, and the coalition is not “in solidarity with Palestine” enough. Meanwhile, the crowd raised banners above their heads: “Reason of State = Genocide.” They repeatedly shouted “Shame on you” towards the left’s leading candidate Elif Eralp. When asked by the taz, no one from the left wanted to comment on the Trotskyists by name. The reasoning always sounds similar: These are problems that the party needs to clarify internally.

A left-wing politician tells the taz: “There are people from these splinter groups who are great to work with,” and they are pragmatic. But there are others who are not interested in the real conditions in life. It's all about Israel and "everything that has to do with it is bad."

Particularly when it comes to these issues, one can observe how SVU members repeatedly get involved in internal party conflicts. For example in March in Lower Saxony. The Palestine Solidarity Lower Saxony AG published a video there. Men with Kufija are happy because all of their proposals were passed at the Left Lower Saxony party conference. Applications in which the “genocide in Gaza” is described as a result of Zionism – Lower Saxony is now the first “anti-Zionist regional association,” says one. SVU officially shows solidarity with the regional association and celebrates the video.

The conversation with Nick and Leon has already been going on for an hour when they also start talking about Israel. "Israel is a colonial settler state. Resistance to permanent occupation and disenfranchisement is justified - including by Palestinians," says Leon. And how do you rate October 7th? The day on which Hamas murdered almost 1,200 people and kidnapped around 250 as hostages. Nick and Leon also later withdraw their answer to this question. On the website, her organization writes: October 7th “in our view falls under the right to armed resistance against occupation.”