Why I Did Not Become a Leftist

I. There Is No Right Answer

The right answer does not exist and never will. There is only the more right and the better. Even if we cannot yet name it, that is no reason not to call the wrong wrong. Whoever names the wrong as wrong without knowing the more right achieves more than one who waits for the right, or worse still, tries to pray the wrong healthy.

In science this is a truism. Karl Popper formulated it: a theory cannot be proven, only refuted. Each holds until an experiment makes it fail, and then one looks for a better one. No physicist claims to possess the final truth. No doctor defends a drug that makes patients ill on the grounds that the idea was a good one.

In political thinking the opposite holds. Every ideology claims to know what is right, and when reality contradicts it, reality is to blame. Then it was not real socialism, not the real market, not real Christianity. Then come excuses, rescue attempts, the assignment of blame. Faith healing.

What is a truism in science is entirely missing from political thought. Not because politicians are more stupid than scientists, but because the political system rewards certainty and punishes provisionality.

I did not know Popper at the time. But between 1968 and 1971 I tested three organisations that all claimed to know what was right. All three failed the test. This text is about that, and about why the left that is growing strong again still has the same test ahead of it.

II. The First Test: the Church

In 1968 a colleague who had installed Reifenhäuser machinery at Montecatini Edison in Italy told me that the Church held a stake in the group and that among other things it made munitions. I left the Catholic Church.

Two years later, in May 1970, Der Spiegel ran a series on “The Vatican’s Billions”. It reported that Bernardino Nogara, the Holy See’s financial administrator, had sat for many years on the supervisory board of Montecatini, and that the Vatican held “very substantial shares” in the group. After Nogara’s death other trusted men of the Vatican sat on the board and took part in the decision to merge with Edison in 1966. And it reported that the Vatican also held stakes in munitions factories. I had known it two years before the readers of Der Spiegel, from a fitter.

A church that preaches peace and invests its money in armaments needs no opponent to refute it. It refutes itself. That was my first test, and it was simple: I compared what was said with what was done.

III. The Second Test: Herleshausen and Leipzig

In the same spring of 1968 I travelled to East Germany for the first time. I was 21, an electrician at Reifenhäuser, on a business trip about monofilament lines for a plant in Leipzig that was switching from jute to plastic. I was there twice, in 1968 and 1969. What I had was not a theory. I had open eyes.

It began at the Herleshausen border crossing. Watchtowers, barriers, the thoroughness of the inspection. This was not a system that radiated trust. It was a system that locked up its own population. First test, first falsification.

Then Leipzig. The smell first, lignite and two-stroke engines, a mixture that burns itself into memory. Then the city: run-down façades, dreariness, and in the centre buildings meant to prove the progress of socialism. They proved the opposite. The gap between claim and reality was so grotesque that it needed no analysis.

In the state-owned plant: the slackness, the party secretary no one could get past, the hierarchy of loyalty instead of competence. The chief secretary who spoke openly in confidence, because she was having an affair with one of my colleagues. Only in confidence did people speak openly about what might otherwise end in Bautzen prison. Second test, second falsification.

In the restaurants we ordered double portions because the single ones were tiny. The service was unfriendly until it noticed we came from the West. In the evenings the television news had nothing to do with what we had seen during the day. And when Ulbricht spoke, the goatee, the peak was reached.

This was not political analysis. It was falsification without Popper. The system claimed to be building a better society. Reality contradicted it. I believed reality. While West German students that same year dreamed of world revolution, I too was a 68er by birth year. But I had seen Leipzig. The 1968 movement remained for me a beautiful, unrealistic dream.

IV. The Third Test: the Watchtower

The third test was the hardest, because I carried it out on myself. I had met the colleague who brought me to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1968, just after I had left the Church. Whoever loses one certainty is receptive to the next. I was baptised and stayed from 1969 to 1971, including the time I worked for Reifenhäuser in Chittagong.

Then I did what the organisation does not expect of its members: I studied not only the Bible but also the organisation and its history. I found a chain of end-time dates that had all passed, 1914, 1918, 1925, and a new one that was just being proclaimed: 1975. Every failed date had been reinterpreted as “new light”. How that works we described in “The Office of Failure”.

A doctrine that reinterprets every refutation as confirmation can no longer fail. That is exactly how one recognises that it is wrong. Third test, third falsification. I left. 1975 came and went as well.

V. Three Times the Same Pattern

The Church, the Party and the Watchtower are very different things. But they share four features. Each has a doctrine that knows what is right. Each has an organisation that guards the interpretation of the doctrine. Each moves fulfilment into the future, into the hereafter, into communism, into paradise after Armageddon. And each has a word for whoever contradicts: heretic, revisionist, apostate.

The fourth feature is the most dangerous. Where contradiction counts as betrayal, the organisation can no longer learn. It can only defend itself. In science the dissenter is the one who brings progress. In a doctrine of salvation he is the enemy.

One can become immune to this pattern, but not through a counter-doctrine. Whoever switches from one doctrine of salvation to the next has learned nothing; he has only changed churches. One becomes immune by measuring every doctrine by what it does and not by what it promises.

VI. The Wrong Image of Man and the All-Powerful State

What makes left-wing doctrines of salvation in particular so prone to violence, although they begin with the best of intentions? The answer lies in their image of man. Man, says the Marxist tradition, is the product of his circumstances. Change the circumstances and you change man. The “new man” is not born; he is manufactured.

From this follows a construction that any engineer recognises at once. If the result is wrong, you change the inputs. If people do not become what they should after the revolution, the circumstances must be changed still more thoroughly, and who should do that if not the state? So the promise that the state will wither away becomes a state that regulates everything: what is produced, what is read, who may travel. In the end society is no longer adapted to people; people are adapted to society.

A gardener who loves his roses prunes them. A gardener who loves an idea of roses tears out every one that does not match it. The difference is not the love but its object.

In fairness: the opposing model also has a wrong image of man. The homo oeconomicus of market theory, who calculates his advantage at every moment, is as much a laboratory figure as the new socialist man. Only the market does not demand to be loved. It takes people as they are, and that is both its strength and its crudeness.

VII. The Sects and Shades

The left was never one movement but always many. After 1968 the West German student movement broke up into the so-called K-groups: the Communist League of West Germany (KBW), the KPD/AO, the KPD/ML, the Communist League and others, which fought one another more bitterly than they fought capitalism. Each possessed the only correct line, each had its own model, Mao, Enver Hoxha or the Soviet Union. The DKP was financed from East Berlin. The Red Army Faction killed more than thirty people in the name of a liberation nobody had ordered.

What became of many members is remarkable. Winfried Kretschmann was in the KBW and became Green minister-president of Baden-Württemberg; Ulla Schmidt was in the KBW and became a Social Democratic health minister. Kretschmann later called his time there a fundamental error. That is honourable. But it also shows how many clever people can take a doctrine of salvation for the right answer as long as they are young and nobody forces them to test it.

The pattern lives on. Today the “anti-Germans” on the left, who defend Israel unconditionally, quarrel with the “anti-imperialists”, who see Israel as a colonial state. In May 2025 the party congress of Die Linke in Chemnitz narrowly adopted, against the warning of its chairman Jan van Aken, its own narrower definition of antisemitism. The Central Council of Jews in Germany rejects it. In Berlin, dealing with antisemitism in the party’s own ranks has become a condition of the coalition talks. Sigmund Freud called this the narcissism of small differences: the fiercest battles are fought with those closest to us.

VIII. Has the Left Swallowed Chalk?

In the Grimm fairy tale the wolf swallows chalk so that his voice sounds gentle and the young goats open the door to him. The question is justified, because the left sounds different today. It does not talk about the dictatorship of the proletariat but about rents, prices and heating costs. And it succeeds. In the federal election of February 2025 Die Linke won 8.8 per cent. Within a year its membership rose from just over 58,000 to more than 123,000, mostly young people, drawn not least by Heidi Reichinnek, who now co-leads its parliamentary group. On 20 September 2026 it became the strongest party in Berlin with 25.7 per cent.

Whoever is fair must acknowledge: the problems it talks about are real. Anyone looking for a flat in Berlin needs no ideology to become angry. The left is not winning because people want socialism, but because the other parties have spent years administering these problems instead of solving them.

The chalk question arises with the solution. In 2021 about 59 per cent of Berlin voters backed the referendum “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co”. An expert commission found the socialisation of large housing companies legally possible. In March 2026 the Berlin parliament passed a framework law that takes effect only in two years and is first to be reviewed by the constitutional court. Whether and how Die Linke now wants to implement it is the hardest point in the talks on a new government. Here it will become clear whether the new voice is a new attitude or only a new pitch: whether one dares an experiment to be judged by its results, or whether one already knows the result and needs the experiment only as confirmation.

IX. The Indestructible

No figure embodies the transformation of the left like Gregor Gysi. In December 1989 he became chairman of the SED, East Germany’s ruling party, and turned it into the PDS. He carried the party responsible for the Wall and the barbed wire through unification, and he did so with an eloquence unmatched in the Bundestag. He is quick-witted, funny, self-ironic. In March 2025 he opened the new Bundestag as its oldest member. He won his Berlin constituency with almost 42 per cent.

Fairness includes the rest. In 1998 the Bundestag’s immunity committee concluded that Gysi, as a lawyer in East Germany, had worked for the Stasi. Gysi denies it to this day, no signed commitment was ever found, and he has won several times in court against such claims. One need not decide the matter to observe: his gift is that people like listening to him. That is a great gift. But eloquence is not falsification. It does not make a claim truer, only more pleasant.

X. Who or What Is Sahra Wagenknecht?

Sahra Wagenknecht joined the SED at the beginning of 1989, when others were already leaving. In the 1990s she was the face of the party’s Communist Platform and in 1992 praised the policies of the Stalin era in an essay. In 2011 she wrote a book invoking Ludwig Erhard, the father of West Germany’s social market economy, and in 2021 one against the “lifestyle left”. In 2024 she founded a party bearing her name, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), with left-wing economics and a hard line on migration and sanctions against Russia.

In February 2025 the BSW missed the Bundestag with 4.981 per cent, by about 9,500 votes. Since then it has been falling apart. In Brandenburg its coalition with the SPD ended in January 2026 after defections; in Thuringia its group lost most of its members in September 2026. Wagenknecht gave up the chair, and since 1 October 2026 the party has been called “Alliance for Social Justice and Economic Reason”. The German acronym stayed the same. In a current poll it stands at 3.5 per cent.

Who or what is Wagenknecht? Perhaps this above all: proof that one can change the doctrine without changing the pattern. From Stalin to Erhard is a long way, but the form remained the same: a person who knows what is right, and a party named after her. A party bearing a person’s name is not an organisation that can learn. It is a following. When the person stepped back, the party even had to change its name.

XI. The Man Who Left Twice

Oskar Lafontaine was chairman of the SPD from 1995 to 1999 and finance minister under Gerhard Schröder. In March 1999 he resigned from all his offices without a public explanation. In 2005 he joined the WASG, and in 2007 he became chairman of the new Die Linke. In March 2022 he left Die Linke, and in 2024 he joined the BSW. He has been married to Wagenknecht since 2014.

His influence is hard to measure and easy to underestimate. Without him the all-German left would hardly have existed in this form, for he brought it the West German trade unionists and Social Democrats disappointed by Schröder’s reforms. And without his departure the BSW would probably not have had the force to split the left. Twice he left a party, and both times the left was rearranged as a result. A man who works less through programmes than through exits.

XII. The Either-Or Trap

Whoever criticises the left is quickly asked: so you are for capitalism? That is the trap. It says: if one is wrong, the other must be right. No, thank you.

The capitalism we live in has its own design flaws. Wealth gathers in fewer and fewer hands, not because the rich are more capable, but because capital multiplies itself and labour does not. Profits are privatised and losses, as in 2008, socialised. Whoever makes an invention often loses it to whoever has the money to exploit it. And these flaws persist, not because they are unknown, but because nobody who lives off the structures wants to reform them. To name only a few of the many design flaws.

Socialism is falsified. Capitalism is falsified. To say both at once is not indecision. It is the only honest position. Whoever infers the truth of one from the refutation of the other makes the same error of reasoning as the Jehovah’s Witness who concludes from the failure of 1914 that 1975 must be right.

XIII. The Better Instead of the Right

So what instead? Not the right answer. Whoever claims to know it is lying to himself or to others or to both.

But there is the better, and there are attempts to find it. The cooperatives of Mondragón in the Basque Country are not the right answer but an experiment that has been running for seventy years, with successes and setbacks we described in “Who Owns the Deserted Hall?” and the texts before it. The purpose-economy model, in which a company owns itself, is not the right answer but an attempt at the better.

Popper called this path piecemeal social engineering: small steps whose consequences can be observed and corrected, instead of a grand plan that rebuilds everything at once and can no longer be undone. The difference is that between a laboratory that learns from failures and a laboratory in which the test animals are human beings.

XIV. The Perplexity

At the Leipzig Book Fair in March 2026 a book was presented with the title “When Thinking Changes Direction: Why We Are No Longer on the Left”, with Henryk M. Broder and Harald Martenstein among others. One participant remarked: the people gave a very perplexed impression.

That is understandable. Whoever leaves a total system of explanation loses the certainty it offered. A general perplexity seems to be the consequence, among former leftists, of former firm convictions. I know this. After leaving the Church I went to the Watchtower, because the emptiness was hard to bear.

In Leipzig in 1968 I had no theory, but open eyes and the willingness to take what I saw seriously. That was enough to falsify a system and, after the detour through the Watchtower, enough not to flee into the next one. The perplexity that results is the price of honesty. It is worth it. Yet it perplexes me when intellectuals are still perplexed after so many years.

Criticism is the beginning of thinking about alternatives, but only the beginning. Whoever after decades of thinking still only criticises or is only perplexed has not fulfilled the second half of his task.

XV. How This Text Could Be Refuted

This text claims that movements which believe they know what is right fail against reality and then blame reality. That can be tested, and Berlin will provide the test.

If a government including Die Linke sets up socialisation as an experiment, with clear targets for rents, new construction and costs, publishes the results and changes course when they are missed, then the left has learned something it has lacked for a hundred years. Then this text is refuted on its most important point, and we will gladly say so.