Across the planet, the vicious curtailing of democratic rights has intensified as imperialism lumbers from crisis to crisis. The genocide in Gaza has seen sections of the European youth and working class revolt against state complicity, and governments have responded with harsher crackdowns. Nowhere in Europe has this repression been more intense than in Germany, where protests in solidarity with Palestine have been ruthlessly oppressed with surveillance, prosecution and police brutality.
This offensive has reached a new and dangerous stage with the German state’s open declaration that Marxism – the revolutionary science of the working class – is ‘unconstitutional’. In Hamburg, the Marxistische Abendschule (Masch), a Marxist study group known for its annual reading circles of Das Kapital, recently won a legal victory against the state. In April 2025, the Administrative Court ruled that the ‘State Office for Protection of the Constitution’ must remove the group from its ‘extremism’ report, where it had been placed in 2021. The Masch had also lost its charitable status under similar allegations.
It may sound like a victory – until you look closer. The court did not clear Marxism of all suspicion. In its written judgment of 10 July, it explicitly stated that while the Masch lacks the ‘combative attitude’ to challenge the German constitution, Marxism itself challenges the ‘liberal, democratic order’ that the German constitution upholds. To put it plainly: studying Marx is suspicious but legal so long as you never organise, agitate, or move beyond discussion. The ruling leaves any Marxist organisation in Germany exposed. The Masch is ‘okay’ only because it is deemed small, quiet, and non‑militant. But the logic is clear: once any group becomes active or ‘combative’, it could be banned. The Masch’s lawyer, Ridvan Ciftci, said this is not a win so much as a warning shot.
The State Office for Protection of the Constitution acts as Germany’s thought police, an institution tasked with dismantling threats to the German bourgeoisie and the constitution that protects them. Although many of the groups targeted are of a fascist or Islamic fundamentalist bent, these secret police have been used to target the mass organisations of the working class since the end of the Second World War, and to target the remnants of East Germany’s socialist movement after ‘reunification’.
An injury to all
This criminalisation of Marxism cannot be separated from the broader wave of repression being waged against the Palestine solidarity movement in Germany. Since October 2023, the German state has banned dozens of demonstrations, carried out mass arrests, and shut down entire organisations and student groups for expressing support for the Palestinian resistance. Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities have been surveilled, raided, and deported under the guise of ‘combating extremism’. International speakers like Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Khaled Barakat have been denied entry or blocked from speaking. In March 2025, Germany banned the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, and in August the ban was extended to all EU states in the Schengen area; under this ban, Samidoun’s International coordinator Charlotte Kates was detained and deported from Greece on 22 September. On 30 August, Berlin police were filmed assaulting protester Kitty O’Brien of the Irish Bloc, punching them in the face and breaking their arm. O’Brien was protesting against the killing of journalists by the Israeli state.
This clampdown is not about antisemitism – it is about silencing anti-imperialist politics at their root. As Germany sends weapons to Israel, it also bans the display of Palestinian flags and censures chants of ‘Free Palestine’. The state’s attack on Marxism and its persecution of Palestine solidarity are two sides of the same coin: an attempt to criminalise any opposition to imperialism, and to pre-empt the growth of revolutionary consciousness among Germany’s working class and oppressed communities.
But this repression has not gone unchallenged. Across Germany, activists continue to defy bans, organise underground, and build internationalist solidarity in the face of state violence. Students have launched campus occupations, migrant communities have rallied in their thousands, and legal victories, such as that of the communist newspaper Junge Welt – who embarrassed the state by exposing the secret police’s surveillance of their headquarters in court – show the cracks in the state’s authoritarian drive. In Junge Welt’s case, a Berlin court had to recognise that a Marxist ideological orientation does not on its own warrant surveillance and repression at the hands of Germany’s thought police.
Administrative Courts in Germany do not have to follow the precedents set by previous judgements, yet the Hamburg case will have a chilling effect on activists, as have previous judgements (see World Socialist Website, ‘Berlin Administrative Court declares criticism of capitalism unconstitutional’, 2 February 2022). Marxism is criminalised because Marxism offers a real, revolutionary alternative. Support for Palestine is being smashed because the Palestinian struggle exposes the brutal reality of imperialist power. What binds them together is the necessity of resistance – organised, principled, and militant. The working class and the oppressed have no stake in the survival of imperialism. We must respond to repression with solidarity, to criminalisation with defiance, and to the crisis of capitalism with the revolutionary politics needed to overthrow it.
Jacob O’Neill
