The FSU is in the process of compiling a major report on debanking: the financial exclusion of ‘undesirable’ clients by the companies they rely on to keep going. It’s a cause that’s been close to our hearts since 2022 when PayPal orchestrated a wave of high-profile account terminations, withdrawing its services from organisations and individuals whose views challenged dominant political orthodoxies.
We were among those targeted – and when our account was shut down without warning, we received only a generic message citing PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. No specific clause was identified, and no examples of offending content were provided. We were left to wonder if the company had confused our role of defending free speech in general with the views of some of the people whose right to speak out we support.
Either way though, PayPal was one of our primary donation channels and the platform through which we sold memberships and merchandise. The sudden and wholly unexpected loss of service placed real pressure on what was then still a fledgling organisation. Our financial viability – and with it, our ability to continue operating – was put in jeopardy.
In many of those 2022 cases, personal accounts were terminated alongside organisational ones. Indeed, that’s what happened to our Director Lord Young, whose own account was closed at the same time as the FSU’s. In the end, it took an intervention from the UK government to get both reinstated.
Our recent research has confirmed how widespread the practice of financial exclusion has become – and if we believed in trigger warnings, we might alert readers of our forthcoming report to the presence of some pretty hair-raising examples.
The report will concentrate mainly on the UK, where financial exclusion has been largely directed at organisations that might be perceived as right-leaning. However, we’re well aware of how international the practice has become – and of how left-wing ‘threats’ to political orthodoxy can be deplatformed too.
And now comes further proof of both of those things. At the end of May, Postbank, owned by Deutsche Bank, terminated the business account of Mehring Verlag, the German-language publishing house of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), the Socialist Equality Party and the works of Leon Trotsky. Perhaps significantly, Mehring Verlag has published numerous books on contemporary issues as well, taking a solidly Marxist line on such matters as Zionism, “the resurgence of fascism in Germany” and “the eruption of American militarism under President Trump”.
In an echo of the FSU’s experience with PayPal, Deutsche Bank also terminated the personal account of the company’s managing director, Wolfgang Zimmermann – and offered no explanation of either closure.
The shutting down of the business account is, the WSWS convincingly argues, “clearly aimed at sabotaging Mehring Verlag’s work and impeding the distribution of its books. No other plausible explanation exists. Mehring Verlag and its predecessor have maintained an account with Postbank for 45 years without a single incident.” Equally persuasive is the site’s suggestion that: “The closure of the managing director’s private account, entirely unrelated to the publishing house, constitutes personal harassment.”
German banks have for some time targeted dissenting voices by terminating their accounts. While this initially focused on right-wingers, conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccine groups, it now appears to be the lefties’ turn. Last year, Deutsche Bank closed the account of the Socialist Equality Party itself – and Berliner Sparkasse Bank terminated that of the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, while also demanding a full list of its members and their addresses.
“Organisations denounced as ‘left-wing extremists’ for opposing austerity, war and capitalism,” the WSWS understandably laments, “risk losing the financial basis for their operations and livelihoods.”
More (quite Marxist) analysis of the story here.
