The Berlin Wall: your views.

[LOLseph Stalin]

This is something I rarely see discussed on revleft and i'm curious to see what everybody's views are on it. Personally I think it was a bad idea as it greatly restricted the mobility rights of DDR citizens.

P.S- excuse my short post. I really need to sleep. I haven't had a decent night's sleep in days...

[NecroCommie]

It stopped the recreationist influence from the west. I wonder if it was its original purpose though.

[Pogue]

Barbaric. What sort of regime needs to build a wall to hide itself behind? The Israeli one, for example.

[Bright Banana Beard]

Barbaric. What sort of regime needs to build a wall to hide itself behind? The Israeli one, for example.
So does USA and Mexico. The point of the wall was to held the political influence, if isolationist was socialist, would you support the infiltration by the west or let the people decide whom they want to reign?

[Pogue]

So does USA and Mexico. The point of the wall was to held the political influence, if isolationist was socialist, would you support the infiltration by the west or let the people decide whom they want to reign?

DDR wasn't socialist. Nor was it democratic in any respect. This is shown by how many people tried to escape and were shot dead as they tried. This wall is unjustified, people have the right to move freely wherever they want.

[Rebel_Serigan]

The wall was yet another big mistake of the USSR (Its first was allowing Stalin to be a part of it) the wall was there to keep people in because they screwed up those who benevelent occupyer thing and started killing and raping German citizens. The wall was bad because it truely made them look weak. I do not believe any country should have a huge wall around it unless it has invaders on all sides, people looking for help and a better life are not ninvaders contrary to the American belief.

[Dust Bunnies]

DDR wasn't socialist. Nor was it democratic in any respect. This is shown by how many people tried to escape and were shot dead as they tried. This wall is unjustified, people have the right to move freely wherever they want.

This described it pretty nicely. If people want to leave to West Germany, let them, why hold them back when being against holding back Mexicans going to the US? What makes the US-Mexico and German border issue any different besides the fact that East Germany called itself "Communist".

[manic expression]

This described it pretty nicely. If people want to leave to West Germany, let them, why hold them back when being against holding back Mexicans going to the US? What makes the US-Mexico and German border issue any different besides the fact that East Germany called itself "Communist".

Not to make a full statement on the wall, but there were some reasons not being considered here. First, the wall wasn't built on the West-East German border, it was built around West Berlin. West Berlin was being heavily subsidized by the US, British and French (in declining order, of course), to the point where many denizens of West Berlin barely worked because they were paid just to live there. If you put that environment next to ANY city, be it New York, Buenos Aires, Paris or what have you, people are going to try to get inside because the lifestyle is so appealing. Further, the denizens of West Berlin were, in addition to getting most of their life subsidized, routinely going to East Berlin to shop in the subsidized (read: really cheap) shops there, which disrupted the East German system of central planning (more consumers than there were supposed to be, etc.). That imbalance was one of the reasons the wall was put up.

I don't think the wall was a good solution, and the 180-so deaths of people trying to cross (far less than most people think) were certainly tragic. However, it's a big mistake to think as though there weren't serious pressures on East Germany from the capitalists that demanded some sort of response. The wall was tragic, but in some ways valid, and we can never forget this in favor of comfortable black-and-white platitudes.

[Vendetta]

If you gotta build a wall to keep your people leaving, you're doing something wrong.

[manic expression]

If you gotta build a wall to keep your people leaving, you're doing something wrong.

Perhaps, but like I said, if you stuck West Berlin during that period next to the Vatican, people would be trying to get in. Everything was subsidized.

[CHEtheLIBERATOR]

It was two imperialist nations dividing a country as if it were pie.

[dez]

The wall was yet another big mistake of the USSR (Its first was allowing Stalin to be a part of it) the wall was there to keep people in because they screwed up those who benevelent occupyer thing and started killing and raping German citizens. The wall was bad because it truely made them look weak. I do not believe any country should have a huge wall around it unless it has invaders on all sides, people looking for help and a better life are not ninvaders contrary to the American belief.

If you think a wall would make them look weak, what do you think thousands of people leaving en masse would make them looK?




With saying that, I never really understood why the soviet union wasnt more adamant about bringing people there (to live, not to be trained and come back).
There is the whole risk of spies, cold war and all, but that has never prevented immigration. And its not like they already hadnt got some nationality issue.

[Comrade Anarchist]

i think that it was a bad idea and now has become a symbol against communism.

[Brother No. 1]

It was two imperialist nations dividing a country as if it were pie.

you hate Stalin's CCCP, so much so you call his regime "Impeiralist", yet you have Che, who was a Anti-Revisionist, quotes and your name is Che. The Berlin Wall was created by the Soviets to either keep Western influence out and maybe it was because the Soviet Troops and the Allied troops almost chot each other near Western Berlin. But remember the whole Cold War? Tensions rose and I'm pretty sure both the CCCP and the US were prepared to invade the other. Besides the Berlin wall wasnt built around the West/East border or else it would have been called the German wall. It surrounded Western Berlin for lets not forget the Soviets blockaged the Western Berlin for some time.

[Os Cangaceiros]

It surrounded Western Berlin for lets not forget the Soviets blockaged the Western Berlin for some time.

Ah, yes...who could forget THAT little temper tantrum?

As for the wall, yes, it was a disgrace. As an anarchist, I don't have the luxury of engaging in the kind of moral relativism that some of our anti-revisionist friends seem to enjoy. But hey, at least the soldiers who manned the wall were only ordered to shoot to disable...gotta be thankful for the small things...

[Cooler Reds Will Prevail]

Not to make a full statement on the wall, but there were some reasons not being considered here. First, the wall wasn't built on the West-East German border, it was built around West Berlin. West Berlin was being heavily subsidized by the US, British and French (in declining order, of course), to the point where many denizens of West Berlin barely worked because they were paid just to live there. If you put that environment next to ANY city, be it New York, Buenos Aires, Paris or what have you, people are going to try to get inside because the lifestyle is so appealing. Further, the denizens of West Berlin were, in addition to getting most of their life subsidized, routinely going to East Berlin to shop in the subsidized (read: really cheap) shops there, which disrupted the East German system of central planning (more consumers than there were supposed to be, etc.). That imbalance was one of the reasons the wall was put up.

I don't think the wall was a good solution, and the 180-so deaths of people trying to cross (far less than most people think) were certainly tragic. However, it's a big mistake to think as though there weren't serious pressures on East Germany from the capitalists that demanded some sort of response. The wall was tragic, but in some ways valid, and we can never forget this in favor of comfortable black-and-white platitudes.

Manic, I was aware that many West Berliners were crossing into East Berlin to shop in the subsidized stores and that it was a large factor in the construction of the wall, but I wasn't aware that West Berlin was so cushy... Do you know of any material I could read to get a little more in depth on that?

[Pogue]

you hate Stalin's CCCP, so much so you call his regime "Impeiralist", yet you have Che, who was a Anti-Revisionist, quotes and your name is Che. The Berlin Wall was created by the Soviets to either keep Western influence out and maybe it was because the Soviet Troops and the Allied troops almost chot each other near Western Berlin. But remember the whole Cold War? Tensions rose and I'm pretty sure both the CCCP and the US were prepared to invade the other. Besides the Berlin wall wasnt built around the West/East border or else it would have been called the German wall. It surrounded Western Berlin for lets not forget the Soviets blockaged the Western Berlin for some time.

All accounts of CHe Guevara later in his life after he'd experienced the world more point to him being icnredibly critical of Stalin. He wasn't an anti-revisionist, he was simply a communist. Some have even alluded to him being a Trotskyist.

[dez]

All accounts of CHe Guevara later in his life after he'd experienced the world more point to him being icnredibly critical of Stalin. He wasn't an anti-revisionist, he was simply a communist. Some have even alluded to him being a Trotskyist.


Saint trotsky, now saint guevara, right?

As much as I like laughing at trotskyst propaganda, Guevara wasn't even close to a trotskyst. He was critical of stalin, as well as everything else (that and his libertarian socialist perspective of a revolution lead people to associate him wrongly with anarchism, which is much more accurate than an association with trotskysts), but his later life accounts show that he was incredibly critical of cuban proximity with the soviet union. Che's account of the revolution was that the cubans were to be free, not colonized by a new state.





"You know what he did? He torn Trotsky's books apart and threw them in the trashcan. There was no way to maintain a dialogue with Che Guevara. Then we left him on his own. We didn't report him to the authorities, they themselves found him and killed him."

Professor Francisco Carafa, trotskyst, on account of his last meeting with guevara in bolivia.

[Killfacer]

Barbaric. What sort of regime needs to build a wall to hide itself behind? The Israeli one, for example.

This.

[Stranger Than Paradise]

I'm sure everyone here will profusely disagree with it. All you can expect from an authoritarian capitalist regime.

[Communist Theory]

I don't think this belongs in chat.
Also I think the wall wasn't a bad idea it kept out the capitalists.

[dez]

I don't think this belongs in chat.



It was only moved to chat after 13 days.
Take a wild guess why.

[Djehuti]

This is something I rarely see discussed on revleft and i'm curious to see what everybody's views are on it. Personally I think it was a bad idea as it greatly restricted the mobility rights of DDR citizens.

It was a bad idea but it had a purpose.

One must understand that it was very difficult process trying to build socialism in eastern germany. Much had been destroyed by the war, millions of communists had eastern germany did not have much natural resoruces (the Soviet Union had given Stettin and Silesia (where the coal mines were) to Poland. The Red Army also took rails, factories etc. back to the Soviet Union after the war because it was even moore needed in a Russia devestated by the nazi invasion.

While the Soviet Union took what it needed from eastern germany the western imperialists sent billions to western germany, they wanted west germany to become a shop-window for capitalism.

The western imperialists divided Germany in 1948 with the currency-reform. They created a westgerman currency under the dollar and the german mark did suddenly become useless in west because of the extreme exchange rates: If eastern germans wanted to buy commodities in west (where the shops were allready getting filled with products) they were pretty much forced to pay ten times the price. So the imperialists had allready in 1948 raised a dollar curtain through Germany.

In Berlin there were no borders between the sectors, many berliners were written in the east so that they could benefit from socialist advantages such as free quality education and healthcare, low rents and a good social security etc. But many prefered to spend their money in the west.
In the east the SED had to constantly convince everybody that they could and would rebuild their country and that they must have patience. The western allied presence in Berlin were though as a temporary stay until the conditions became more normal but their presence became permanent and the imperialists did not want any joint administration and the city was divided economicly as well as politically, soon only the prison in Spandau was administrated by all four victorious powers. But the west berliners had voted red in 1932 and in the last free election of 1933 and even when Berlin was divided into a "free" and a "oppressed" part they continued to vote red. But in the western propaganda West-Berlin was viewed as a brave outpost in the darkness of the Soviet zone...

Well, in the 50ies the production was getting on in the east and the stores were finally getting gilled with products, but then many people rom west berlin came to buy products in the east where the prices were low and steady, that they could sell for a higher price in the west. 1930 DDR became world champion in consuming butter, but that was because of all the people from west germany that came to the east just to buy cheap butter.

The west also sent a lot of organized infiltrators into the east. Agents working with currency could buy up cameras, radios etc. (when these first appeared the demand was much higher than the supply, and the prices were thus high) for just one fifth of the price and then sell them in the east. In Berlin this was quite common, production were bought up and sold to the west. Many shops in the east started to demand ID for buying a camera for example, but then it was written in west-german papers that in the DDR one can't even buy a camera without being registrated by the police! The west also did their best to attract the young well educated east germans, if they went over to the west they would get a job and get before in the housing queue to get a nice central appartment or whatever.

So I understand that the situation was very frustrating in the east. They offered free quality health care, education, social security, low prices and all kinds of left-wing privilegues and the western powers encouraged people to sponge on this benefits - to pretty much steal from the east and give to the west. They also sent in saboteurs and provocateurs to cause trouble.

That's why the wall was built. It was a very bad idea, but the problems they faced were real. It will always be extremly difficult trying to do anything besides capitalism, the imperialists will always do anything they can (anything!) to sabotage our struggle. We must be prepared for that.

[Os Cangaceiros]

They also sent in saboteurs and provocateurs to cause trouble.

True, but so did the East...the RAF (at least for a time) had certain connections to the DDR, for example.

[Weezer]

Let no one build walls to divide us,
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone.
-The Internationale, Billy Bragg translation

The Berlin Wall, regardless of it's purpose, was a disgusting idea, and just shows how far state capitalist regimes will go.

[dez]

True, but so did the East...the RAF (at least for a time) had certain connections to the DDR, for example.

Don't make me laugh.
The RAF was almost a spontaneous movement that was barely supported by some individual members of the STASI during its second generation.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Don't make me laugh.
The RAF was almost a spontaneous movement that was barely supported by some individual members of the STASI during its second generation.

Then my point stands.

[Wanted Man]

Why is this in Chit Chat? Now I can't thank Djehuti.


Let no one build walls to divide us,
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone.
-The Internationale, Billy Bragg translation
Shouldn't Billy Bragg be campaigning for pro-war Labour, or trying to "reclaim" English nationalism? No, apparently he still has time to butcher the classics.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Why is this in Chit Chat? Now I can't thank Djehuti.

I was wondering the same thing, actually. It should be moved back to the History forum...it's certainly a lot more interesting than endlessly discussing Stalin. :rolleyes:

[dez]

Then my point stands.

No, it doesn't, the RAF wasn't sent by anyone.
They started as a movement of their own and rallied and rallied for support inside and outside germany, support that the stasi didn't give them with the exception of a few of their members, on their own account, and after the second generation of the RAF.

[Os Cangaceiros]

No, it doesn't, the RAF wasn't sent by anyone.
They started as a movement of their own and rallied and rallied for support inside and outside germany, support that the stasi didn't give them with the exception of a few of their members, on their own account, and after the second generation of the RAF.

I never claimed that they were sent.

Let me put it this way: if there was a militant group in East Germany that was blowing up things and assassinating people, and they had connections to certain CIA agents, including monetary support, would you be singing the same tune?

[dez]

I never claimed that they were sent.


Yes, you did.

They also sent in saboteurs and provocateurs to cause trouble.


True, but so did the East...the RAF (at least for a time) had certain connections to the DDR, for example.





Let me put it this way: if there was a militant group in East Germany that was blowing up things and assassinating people, and they had connections to certain CIA agents, including monetary support, would you be singing the same tune?

Uhm, who said anything about monetary support?
As I said, it was individual members of the stasi, not the stasi itself through them for the sake of plausible deniability.
They didn't even provide weapons to the RAF, all they did was to help with logistics, provide contacts and asylum internationally.
¬¬

[Os Cangaceiros]

Yes, you did.

Point conceeded, although I didn't intend with that statement to only refer to saboteurs being sent to opposing camps.


Uhm, who said anything about monetary support?
As I said, it was individual members of the stasi, not the stasi itself through them for the sake of plausible deniability.
They didn't even provide weapons to the RAF, all they did was to help with logistics, provide contacts and asylum internationally.
¬¬

From Wikipedia:


After German reunification (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_reunification) in 1990, it was confirmed that the RAF had received financial and logistic support from the Stasi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi), the security and intelligence organization of East Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Germany), which had given several members shelter and new identities. This was already generally suspected at the time.[20] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction#cite_note-19)

Notice the word "financial" in that statement.

[dez]

RAF was quite rich with support from the leftist liberal germans (and plenty of other sources) already.
They also provided them with houses and other resources from time to time.
Will you start saying that the RAF was sent by the liberal bourgeoise to overthrow the bourgeoise from power too?

[manic expression]

Manic, I was aware that many West Berliners were crossing into East Berlin to shop in the subsidized stores and that it was a large factor in the construction of the wall, but I wasn't aware that West Berlin was so cushy... Do you know of any material I could read to get a little more in depth on that?

Hey, sorry for the late reply (why is this in chit-chat?). Here are a few things on that issue:

It was subsidized heavily by the government, which offered generous incentives for people to move to Berlin. With the institution of mandatory military service in West Germany in 1956, Berlin also became a haven for peaceniks, as Berlin residents were exempt from this service.
http://www.noaura.com/berlin/history.html

(So East German citizens who didn't want to serve in the military (which was mandatory in the DDR) could be exempt from ALL military service if they could get to West Berlin.)

The city of West Berlin was of supreme importance to the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany in their effort to fight the Cold War during the 1950s. Only by utilizing billions of dollars and (later on) Deutschmarks could the city survive in its isolated position east of the Iron Curtain. The reasons for, and the particulars of, American aid during the first years after the Berlin airlift is described in this paper as well as the West German aid, which began to replace direct American support in the middle of the 1950s.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a727191243~db=all (http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content%7Econtent=a727191243%7Edb=all)

Those are a few sources. I can't find it now, but it's essentially common knowledge that West Berlin was an artistic powerhouse because it was the perfect artists' city: so much of life was subsidized. I'll try to find something on that, though. I hope the above helps.

[LOLseph Stalin]

Interesting replies, comrades. I have to say I totally forgot this thread even existed. It's like discovering old treasures in an attic. :wub:

[DancingLarry]

Berlin Wall? Best bashed into tiny little pieces just like it was. Let's do that with the rest of the walls, to the borders, to the signs that say "no trespassing", because on the other side that sign says nothing...

No Borders, No Papers, No Homeland Security!

[Glenn Beck]

What about the factor of 'brain drain'? Does a socialist state that has invested its scarce resources in an educated populace not have the right to defend that investment from predatory capitalist interests? It's a less than ideal solution for a less than ideal situation. . .

[Oktyabr]

Saint trotsky, now saint guevara, right?

As much as I like laughing at trotskyst propaganda, Guevara wasn't even close to a trotskyst. He was critical of stalin, as well as everything else (that and his libertarian socialist perspective of a revolution lead people to associate him wrongly with anarchism, which is much more accurate than an association with trotskysts), but his later life accounts show that he was incredibly critical of cuban proximity with the soviet union. Che's account of the revolution was that the cubans were to be free, not colonized by a new state.





"You know what he did? He torn Trotsky's books apart and threw them in the trashcan. There was no way to maintain a dialogue with Che Guevara. Then we left him on his own. We didn't report him to the authorities, they themselves found him and killed him."

Professor Francisco Carafa, trotskyst, on account of his last meeting with guevara in bolivia.

What kind of jerk off are you???

You purposely trying to start another sectarian war over some stupid issue completely unrelated to the topic? What kind of Revolutionary Leftists are we if we don't even get to talking about meaningful subjects just because we argue over crap like this?

And It's likely that if Stalin had been around during the Cuban Revolution, he would have tried to suppress it. He did that to at least 3 other revolutions, what makes you think he wouldn't do it again?

[Bitter Ashes]

I see the wall as a phsyical representation of the Iron Curtain. It's possibly the best evidence out there that the working class can never be lured into supporting Stalinism, leaving the only possible expansion down to military conquest for the Stalin-doctorine to be inflicted upon a populance.

If there had been real communism in East Germany then you probably would have seen the West throwing up walls, jamming broadcasts and generaly panicing that they're going to lose all thier wage slaves. So, the wall was a defensive measure taken by the side who had more to fear from thier own working class.

[Bitter Ashes]

What about the factor of 'brain drain'? Does a socialist state that has invested its scarce resources in an educated populace not have the right to defend that investment from predatory capitalist interests? It's a less than ideal solution for a less than ideal situation. . .
Well, with the abundant suplus of products created by a greater production force, I dont believe that a capitalist country could offer a better standard of living to anyone from the outside. It's vitaly important that the trap of maintaining useless proffesions that dont produce and only exist to support currency are abolished in order to tap that resource of extra producing labourers without exploiting them like Capitalists do. What Communism should be offering every member of society is:
- Guarunteed suitable accomidation, food, education, healthcare and entertainment
- The opportunity to produce for the community without exploting the workforce
- An equal society
Captilism offers none of that to any worker, whether they're a labourer or a doctor. The only thing a capitalist society can offer that any worker might find attractice is the ability for some individuals to hold power over others' lives. If the capitalists want the minority who feel that attraction of potential power outweighs all the things that communism can offer them then they're welcome to them.

[Andropov]

The wall was a necessity.
It wasnt black and white where people are saying that Germans immigrating into West Berlin was an indication that the DDR was a failed state etc.
It merely shows us that when the West pumps billions into an economy beside a sustainable Socialist economy people will leave.
Its inevitable becase West Berlin was offering better living standards because of it being bank rolled.
It was a propaganda stunt by the west to show on the tellys of the west Germans "fleeing" East Berlin.
But when put into material context we can analyse that East and West Berlin wasnt an even playing field, one was attempting to establish a sustainable centrally planned socialist state and the other was merely being fed billions in aid by the west.
Isnt it odd how there wasnt a massive wall built along the East/West German border if the DDR was that oppresive?
Its sad to see Leftists here buying into Cold War propaganda without looking at the material context of the situation.

[Wakizashi the Bolshevik]

Perhaps it was not clever to build the Berlin Wall. However I fear it was necessary to prevent reactionaries to infiltrate the DDR. Remember it was a situation with extremely high tensions, as DDR and BRD have often been on the brink of war.

Be that as it is, but the destruction of the Wall was a terrible,n terrible mistake. We have all seen what the consequence of the destruction in 1989 was: the occupation of the DDR by the BRD, the Anschluss of Germany.
Regardless how wrong the Wall could be, it stood, and they should have let it stand untill the reasons of its construction were no longer there.

[dez]

What kind of jerk off are you???


I am an evil stalinist, and I am here to purge revisionist jerks.




And It's likely that if Stalin had been around during the Cuban Revolution, he would have tried to suppress it. He did that to at least 3 other revolutions, what makes you think he wouldn't do it again?

Stalin wasnt around during the cuban revolution, and alternative history is nothing more than a tool for one to promote his/her agenda, like revisionism. Or claims that stalin worked to suppress revolutions, specifically considering that he was a pragmatist and that supressing revolutions was only the best interest of his enemies.




You purposely trying to start another sectarian war over some stupid issue completely unrelated to the topic? What kind of Revolutionary Leftists are we if we don't even get to talking about meaningful subjects just because we argue over crap like this?


Its funny that you say what you said on the quote above altogether with this.
I will tell you something, if you think you can go along with false notions of history under my watch and that I will not say anything with fears of being called sectarianist...

[redSHARP]

walls never really work

[mykittyhasaboner]

Originally Posted by Oktyabr
And It's likely that if Stalin had been around during the Cuban Revolution, he would have tried to suppress it. He did that to at least 3 other revolutions, what makes you think he wouldn't do it again?Mind explaining what you mean here? How the hell would Stalin have tried to suppress the Cuban revolution if he was still alive when it took place? Even though its ultimately pointless to speculate about this; the fact is that a socialist revolution in Cuba would have been something Stalin welcomed with open arms (just like the Soviet Union did after his death), you know since it provides a great buffer against the US being so close.

Also, what were these 3 supposed revolutions suppressed by the Soviet government during Stalin's leadership?

[Random Precision]

Also, what were these 3 supposed revolutions suppressed by the Soviet government during Stalin's leadership?

I would guess the Spanish Revolution and the Greek Civil War, though I wouldn't technically call either of those revolutions. The one was a revolutionary situation that was aborted by a reformist trade-union leadership, then repressed by the Stalinists in cooperation with the government, and the other was a straight-up Cold War proxy conflict where all the Communists wanted was positions in the new government. Perhaps also the workers' uprisings in East Germany and Poland, but I'm not sure what this user is referring to exactly.

[Agrippa]

One must understand that it was very difficult process trying to build socialism in eastern germany.

Regardless of whether or not what was being built in Eastern Germany was "socialism", it was definitely not communism. Eastern Germany was a capitalist state, complete with wage labor, money, rent, taxation, bureaucratic armies and police forces, centralized education and medicine, etc. "Social" capitalism is still capitalism, because all capitalism is "socialist" (in the sense of state intervention, bio-political programs, etc.) to some extent.

I'm not criticizing the RAF for recieving funds from the stasi, nor claim the destruction of the Berlin wall "progressive". (it was actually disastrous for many people, especially immigrants and women) Nor am I going to deny that, at some point, some sincerely communist political project might build a wall to keep people out for legitimate reasons. And of course liberals love to point to the Berlin Wall as an example of the exceptional totalitarianism of Marxist-Leninist regimes while ignoring the thousands massacred on the Israeli-Palestine and Mexican-American borders, many more that were ever killed in the enforcement of the Berlin wall.

Still, the East-German/West-German border was clearly nothing more than something imposed to protect the dominion of capital. I don't see how a genuine communist could see it any other way....

[Verix]

Communism is supposed to be for the people, if the people dont like what your doing and want to leave and you build a wall to stop them and shoot them your no longer for the people which means your no longer a true communist country

[Poppytry]

walls never really work

My bedroom one is doing a pretty good job :)

[LeninBalls]

Communism is supposed to be for the people, if the people dont like what your doing and want to leave and you build a wall to stop them and shoot them your no longer for the people which means your no longer a true communist country

Oh the irony.

[LOLseph Stalin]

Communism is supposed to be for the people, if the people dont like what your doing and want to leave and you build a wall to stop them and shoot them your no longer for the people which means your no longer a true communist country


How was Germany "no longer" a Communist country? :) There has never been Communism.

[Sergeant Cribb]

The wall was a necessity.
It wasnt black and white where people are saying that Germans immigrating into West Berlin was an indication that the DDR was a failed state etc.
It merely shows us that when the West pumps billions into an economy beside a sustainable Socialist economy people will leave.
Its inevitable becase West Berlin was offering better living standards because of it being bank rolled.
It was a propaganda stunt by the west to show on the tellys of the west Germans "fleeing" East Berlin.
But when put into material context we can analyse that East and West Berlin wasnt an even playing field, one was attempting to establish a sustainable centrally planned socialist state and the other was merely being fed billions in aid by the west.
Isnt it odd how there wasnt a massive wall built along the East/West German border if the DDR was that oppresive?
Its sad to see Leftists here buying into Cold War propaganda without looking at the material context of the situation.
This.:thumbup:
I wonder how many people here if being put in Ulbricht's position would have acted differently.

[Kwisatz Haderach]

Not to make a full statement on the wall, but there were some reasons not being considered here. First, the wall wasn't built on the West-East German border, it was built around West Berlin. West Berlin was being heavily subsidized by the US, British and French (in declining order, of course), to the point where many denizens of West Berlin barely worked because they were paid just to live there. If you put that environment next to ANY city, be it New York, Buenos Aires, Paris or what have you, people are going to try to get inside because the lifestyle is so appealing. Further, the denizens of West Berlin were, in addition to getting most of their life subsidized, routinely going to East Berlin to shop in the subsidized (read: really cheap) shops there, which disrupted the East German system of central planning (more consumers than there were supposed to be, etc.). That imbalance was one of the reasons the wall was put up.
Very good point. The Wall goes against communist principles, and it was a public relations disaster, but it answered a very real problem that had to be fixed somehow. I just wish they had found another way of fixing it.


Well, with the abundant suplus of products created by a greater production force, I dont believe that a capitalist country could offer a better standard of living to anyone from the outside.
Capitalism cannot offer that to the worker, true. But it offers much, much more to the bourgeoisie. And though a socialist society will eventually develop the forces of production to the extent that workers in socialism will be better off than the bourgeois in capitalism, this will take a long time - at least a couple of generations. In the short run, workers in socialism will be much better off than workers in capitalism, but clearly worse off than the bourgeoisie in capitalism.

This presents a serious temptation for those people who are workers in socialism but, due to their specific training and skills, stand a very good chance of becoming bourgeois if they were to move to a capitalist country. They are few (because few workers have a real chance of becoming bourgeois under capitalism), but they exist, and they may be valuable professionals.

As such, I think a socialist society is justified in putting some restrictions on emigration. In particular, since education is free under socialism, any person who has benefited from it should be required to pay back the cost of that education to the state before they can leave.

[Communist Theory]

I held a piece of it today.
I enjoyed it.

[marxistcritic]

I am against the berlin wall because it was a symbol of state-capitalist isolationism, and an embarresment to all who call themselves communists.

[Wakizashi the Bolshevik]

The Berlin Wall was an unfortunate necessity.

[LOLseph Stalin]

I am against the berlin wall because it was a symbol of state-capitalist isolationism, and an embarresment to all who call themselves communists.

I was just thinking. Instead of putting all that energy into building walls they could have been trying to promote Revolution in other parts of the world, beginning with West Germany. There were active revolutionary movements worldwide too. Sure tensions were tight and the US would surely try to interfere, but East Germany was able to put the wall up without too much opposition.

[Wakizashi the Bolshevik]

Evil and immoral. The Berlin Wall was a symbol of the oppression of Communism and the fall of the wall was one of the most glorious days in human history.
I think we have a troll here. Ban please.

[pranabjyoti]

Communism is supposed to be for the people, if the people dont like what your doing and want to leave and you build a wall to stop them and shoot them your no longer for the people which means your no longer a true communist country
Do you think tha all citizens of DDR want to flee to West Germany and therefore abolishing DDR as per "peoples will" be the true communist duty?

[Muzk]

Fuck the wall, the shootings, the murders, the 'socialist' party behind it. They arrested communists because they knew the SED was wrong. They called random people 'class enemies' simply to have a reason to arrest them.
It was state capitalism with a full-scale observation of the people.
It's a shame that the same party that did all the bad things are now rising again.
Goddamn, I feel like I'm the only one with a brain out here


Reminds me of Stalin. He thought he's right.

[Wakizashi the Bolshevik]

Fuck the wall, the shootings, the murders, the 'socialist' party behind it. They arrested communists because they knew the SED was wrong. They called random people 'class enemies' simply to have a reason to arrest them.
It was state capitalism with a full-scale observation of the people.
It's a shame that the same party that did all the bad things are now rising again.
Goddamn, I feel like I'm the only one with a brain out here


Reminds me of Stalin. He thought he's right.
You're more of the only one who is revisionist around here, and the only one who still believes capitalist propaganda around here.

[Random Precision]

Wakizashi, please don't make posts consisting only of an attack on someone's politics.

[Das war einmal]

The wall was a simple result of circumstances and the only logical option at that time. Stalin tried to prevent a split Berlin, but the Americans prevented this by air droppings.

[Andropov]

Fuck the wall, the shootings, the murders, the 'socialist' party behind it. They arrested communists because they knew the SED was wrong. They called random people 'class enemies' simply to have a reason to arrest them.
Links please, and I dont consider the Bourgeois sources youread this claptrap from as a source.

It was state capitalism with a full-scale observation of the people.
Funny how with such obvious widespread observation as you have said that they Stasi were not capable of forseeing the Bourgeois elements who set about dismantling the state?
How odd.

It's a shame that the same party that did all the bad things are now rising again.
Or maybe the German people themselves realise that all the Bourgeois propaganda in the world cannot re-write their own personel experiences under the DDR, which in the whole were positive and progressive.
Or maybe you can dictate to the Germans that in your Bourgeois History books its says differently.

Goddamn, I feel like I'm the only one with a brain out here
Absolutely breath taking.

Reminds me of Stalin. He thought he's right.
Sorry what does Stalin have to do with this debate?
No doubt this shall be interesting.

[GatesofLenin]

It was two imperialist nations dividing a country as if it were pie.
I'm saving this quote. Well said comrade! :thumbup1:

[Muzk]

I'm saving this quote. Well said comrade! :thumbup1:

this thread is.. how old?

[khad]

All accounts of CHe Guevara later in his life after he'd experienced the world more point to him being icnredibly critical of Stalin. He wasn't an anti-revisionist, he was simply a communist. Some have even alluded to him being a Trotskyist.
LMAO. Che was even more of a hardliner than Stalin. The reason he started falling out with the Soviets was because Cuba didn't go down in a blaze of nuclear glory in the missile crisis.

On the issue of political economy, he criticized the Soviets for being too "liberal"--yes, "revisionist." He wanted absolute centralization and the command economy.

You people need to stop making Che into your leftwing Santa Claus.

[GatesofLenin]

I recently signed up.

[robbo203]

Fuck the wall, the shootings, the murders, the 'socialist' party behind it. They arrested communists because they knew the SED was wrong. They called random people 'class enemies' simply to have a reason to arrest them.
It was state capitalism with a full-scale observation of the people.
It's a shame that the same party that did all the bad things are now rising again.
Goddamn, I feel like I'm the only one with a brain out here


Reminds me of Stalin. He thought he's right.


Spot on Muzk. The Stalinists in here can rant for all they care about you succumbing to "bourgeois propaganda" but isnt it curious that this same deluded bourgeois propaganda holds that the state capitalist dictatorship was actually an example of "socialism" if you please?

[Muzk]

Spot on Muzk. The Stalinists in here can rant for all they care about you succumbing to "bourgeois propaganda" but isnt it curious that this same deluded bourgeois propaganda holds that the state capitalist dictatorship was actually an example of "socialism" if you please?


Yes, but it's needed if you want to keep the masses away from things such as socialism, you won't see some conservative explaining such things. You can make people stupid, but at least I hope there's still a little bit of common sense in everyones mind! :D

btw when I did that old reply I had pretty low knowledge of the GDR

[The Red Next Door]

You're more of the only one who is revisionist around here, and the only one who still believes capitalist propaganda around here.
I am a revisonist and there more.

[The Red Next Door]

A symbol of totalitarian stalinism and a rather fuck up system.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Yet another mistake, another being the very existence of the DDR without popular revolt from the workers, which has come back to haunt the Socialist movement.

Very short termist in its outlook. I can understand why it was erected; the reasoning was very faulty, treating workers as units of labour rather than a phsyically, emotionally and psychologically developed species.

[Drace]

Doesn't the US have borders too?

[ComradeRed22'91]

Well once again, and i know this is said all the time, but it surprises me how many people take history at face value. My view on it: you've gotta do what you've gotta do.

[bailey_187]

Yet another mistake, another being the very existence of the DDR without popular revolt from the workers, which has come back to haunt the Socialist movement.

Right up to the 1950s the Soviets were trying to reunify Germany, similar to how Austria was. This was not accepted by the USA, so in the end the Soviets had two choices 1) Hand over the people and resources of East Germany to the Capitalists 2) Create Socialism (lets not debate if its "real" socialism, lets just say what the USSR and I consider Socialism) in the GDR.



Very short termist in its outlook. I can understand why it was erected; the reasoning was very faulty, treating workers as units of labour rather than a phsyically, emotionally and psychologically developed species.

The loyal GDR citizens would have suffered pysyically if their doctors kept fucking off to the West. The wall was not good, but other than reunification or allow the GDR to collapse, it was the only option. The wall was approved by Krushchev, but only after requests from the East German leaders first.
The wall then allowed GDR citizens to have an increased standard of living. IIRC, its economy grew on average faster than the Wests (i may be wrong, but i think it said so in A.Murphy's book, even so, the economy grew at a good level).

As nice as it is to view "phsyically, emotionally and psychologically" each person, its not really possible in a nation of millions.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Well, if it isn't actually Socialist, it isn't worth keeping as an outpost of the Soviet Union, just so it can be said to expand the so called sphere of Socialist influence.

The wall, and the other less attractive features of the GDR, have done more long term damage to the Socialist movement than they did good. The wall served to protect something which was at best a dodgy variant of Socialism for a few decades, something which is vastly outweighed by the propaganda victory gained by the West, in being able to use the Wall as a 'symbol of oppression'.

[bailey_187]

Well, if it isn't actually Socialist, it isn't worth keeping as an outpost of the Soviet Union, just so it can be said to expand the so called sphere of Socialist influence.

The wall, and the other less attractive features of the GDR, have done more long term damage to the Socialist movement than they did good. The wall served to protect something which was at best a dodgy variant of Socialism for a few decades, something which is vastly outweighed by the propaganda victory gained by the West, in being able to use the Wall as a 'symbol of oppression'.

The reason the wall is remembered and not the benefits Socialism bought is because leftisits are too scared to defend it. The bad parts are remembered because its all that is known. We need to make the good parts known.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Th left is a pretty intellectual bunch, especially compared to the reactionary right, and the principle void neo-liberal movement which has rising out of the traditional Social Democracy of yesteryear. If the judgement of the wall was based on sound intellectual judgement, you would have thought that it would be defended by the overwhelming majority of Socialists, as we generally have the ability, when we have the exposure, to win the minds of the people. Our problem is often the lack of exposure.

However, the wall divides even the left. It is therefore difficult to say, with any measure of confidence, that the benefits of the Wall outweighed that which detracted from it. You are entitled to your opinion, which I completely understand.

[KurtFF8]

Here is something I posted in another thread about the GDR:

By the way, I don't know if this has been posted already in this thread or not (I apologize if it has and I missed it) but here's a relatively new article by John Green in the Morning Star about the GDR. He also has a new pamphlet called Stasi Hell Or Workers' Paradise? Socialism In The German Democratic Republic - What Can We Learn From It?


Looking back at life in the GDR (http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/features/Looking-back-at-life-in-the-GDR)



Sixty years ago the German Democratic Republic was created out of the Soviet Zone of occupied Germany in response to the introduction of a separate currency in the Western sectors and the go-it-alone creation of the Federal Republic in September 1949.
It lasted until 1990 when the people voted to accede to the Federal Republic.
The first GDR government was composed of individuals with a track record of active opposition to the nazi regime. Many had spent years in concentration camps, prison and exile.
They returned determined to build a democratic, anti-fascist Germany. It began life at a great disadvantage compared with West Germany. It comprised only a third of German territory with a population of 17 million, as against 63 million in the west, and was considerably poorer, having little heavy industry and few mineral resources.
One of the GDR's greatest achievements was the creation of a more egalitarian society. Measures were introduced to counter class and gender privilege and increase the educational and career prospects of working-class children.
As a result, the GDR became probably the most egalitarian society in Europe. Full gender equality and equal pay were also enshrined in legislation.
Pay differentials between different groups of employees were minimal so that even top managers or government ministers were hardly wealthy in Western terms.
Even in terms of housing, economic and class difference played little role. All areas contained a mix of professional and working-class people.
This lack of large wealth differentials and class privilege made for a more cohesive and balanced society. For some such egalitarianism was not amenable and the lure of higher salaries and business opportunities in the West remained strong. This led to a steady haemorrhaging of skilled workers and professionals before the wall was built in 1961.
The GDR was a society largely free of existential fears. Everyone had a right to education, a job and a roof over their head. Emphasis was placed on society not on individualism, and on co-operation and solidarity.
This process of socialisation began with nursery children and continued through school and into the workplace and housing estates.
The government argued that the workers who produced the commodities that society needed should be placed at the forefront of society.
Those who did heavy manual work, such as miners or steel workers, enjoyed certain privileges - better wages and health care than those in less strenuous or dangerous professions such as office work or teaching.
There were workplace clinics, doctors and dentists attached to large factories and institutions.
The workplace and trade union were largely responsible for ensuring medical care, the provision of leisure and holiday facilities and childcare, even down to the most personal issues of finding accommodation.
The trade union owned and ran a whole number of rest homes, sanatoriums and holiday accommodation used by the workforce and their families for nominal prices.
This system helped to solve working parents' problems of caring for their children during school holidays.
By the 1980s around 80 per cent of the population was able to go on some form of holiday, although most of these would be taken in the GDR itself, many in one of such centres at very low prices.
No worker could be sacked, unless for serious misconduct or incompetence. However, even in such cases, other alternative work would be offered.
The other side of the coin was that there was also a social obligation to work - the GDR had no system of unemployment benefit because the concept of unemployment did not exist.
Pay levels in general were not high compared with Western standards. But everyone knew that the profits they created would go into the "social pot" and used to make life better for everyone, not just for a few owners or shareholders who would pocket the surplus.
Most people recognised that the surplus they created helped increase what was called the "social wage" - subsidised food, clothing and rent, cheap public transport and inexpensive tickets for cultural, sporting and leisure activities.
The idea of a social wage is a vital concept for any society purporting to be egalitarian. It was instrumental in ensuring the implementation of greater social equality, undermining privilege and class hegemony.
Although most people lived in rented accommodation at controlled and affordable rents, a considerable minority owned their own houses and some built their own privately owned houses.
Rents remained virtually unchanged over the life of the GDR and no-one could be evicted from their home. There was therefore no homelessness or fear of becoming homeless.
From a country with few raw materials and an underdeveloped industry devastated by the second world war, the GDR rose to become the fifth strongest economy in Europe and among the 10 strongest in the world.
The economy was characterised by central planning. This enabled the government to plan growth, set priorities and determine where to invest, but there was the downside that such centralised planning on such a scale could be inflexible and cumbersome.
However, a vital factor holding back the GDR economy was a strict boycott by Western governments, preventing the export of advanced technology.
Over 90 per cent of all assets in the GDR were owned by the people in the form of "publicly owned enterprises" (VEBs).
By contrast, in the Federal Republic a mere 10 per cent of households owned 42 per cent of all private wealth and 50 per cent of households owned only 4.5 per cent.
After the war, large estates owned by the former landed aristocracy, the Junkers, were broken up. Five hundred estates were expropriated and converted into co-operatives or state farms and thousands of acres distributed among 500,000 peasant farmers, agricultural labourers and refugees.
Later the government encouraged, sometimes cajoled and pressured farmers to join co-operative farms, but farmers retained ownership rights to their land.
By 1960 nearly 85 per cent of all arable land was incorporated into agricultural co-operatives.
In 1989 there were 3,844 agricultural co-ops and these were one of the big achievements of the GDR, proving to be efficient and better for the workforce.
For the first time in history, agricultural workers were freed from round-the-clock work just to make a living.
With agricultural co-operatives run on an industrial scale, workers enjoyed fixed-hours working and shift systems, had regular holidays, childcare, training opportunities and workplace canteens. All this certainly helped stem the flight from the countryside to the towns.
For the first time in Germany, women enjoyed completely equal rights with men, both in their personal sphere and the workplace.
They were provided with the means and opportunities of developing their careers and personalities beyond or instead of their traditional roles in the home, as wives, mothers and daughters.
Some 91 per cent of women between the ages of 16 and 60 were in work. Most women viewed success in their careers as a main source of fulfilment - this is about the same percentage as for men.
Some 88 per cent of all adult women worked and a further 8.5 per cent were in full-time education.
Most women were also highly skilled. Only 6 per cent had no qualification at all, whereas in the Federal Republic 24 per cent had none.
Despite these figures, in the top echelons of government and party male patriarchy still persisted.
The country's record on internationalism was exemplary. It took the idea of solidarity with other, struggling nations seriously.
It sent doctors and other medical staff to the front line in Vietnam, Mozambique and Angola. It gave engineering, educational and military support to many countries.
It also gave numerous foreign students from countries struggling to free themselves from the legacy of colonialism free training and education in the GDR.
Of course the GDR had a whole number of serious shortcomings and in terms of individual rights and democracy left a lot to be desired.
But to dwell only on these aspects as the mainstream media in the West has done, is to ignore its genuine achievements.
Since its demise, many have come to recognise and regret that the genuine "social achievements" they enjoyed have now been dismantled.
Unfortunately, the collapse of the GDR and "state socialism" in 1989 came just before the collapse of the highly lauded "free market" system in the West.Also, Zizek wrote an interesting piece in the NYT about it on the anniversary of the fall of the wall (odd that the NYT would have one of the most prominent Marxist-Leninists write an op-ed for them for the occasion):

Source (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html?_r=1)


By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Published: November 9, 2009
TODAY is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During this time of reflection, it is common to emphasize the miraculous nature of the events that began that day: a dream seemed to come true, the Communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards, and the world suddenly changed in ways that had been inconceivable only a few months earlier. Who in Poland could ever have imagined free elections with Lech Walesa as president?
[/URL]
However, when the sublime mist of the velvet revolutions was dispelled by the new democratic-capitalist reality, people reacted with an unavoidable disappointment that manifested itself, in turn, as nostalgia for the “good old” Communist times; as rightist, nationalist populism; and as renewed, belated anti-Communist paranoia.
The first two reactions are easy to comprehend. The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, “Better dead than red!” are now often heard mumbling, “Better red than eating hamburgers.” But the Communist nostalgia should not be taken too seriously: far from expressing an actual wish to return to the gray Socialist reality, it is more a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past. As for the rise of the rightist populism, it is not an Eastern European specialty, but a common feature of all countries caught in the vortex of globalization.
Much more interesting is the recent resurgence of anti-Communism from Hungary to Slovenia. During the autumn of 2006, large protests against the ruling Socialist Party paralyzed Hungary for weeks. Protesters linked the country’s economic crisis to its rule by successors of the Communist party. They denied the very legitimacy of the government, although it came to power through democratic elections. When the police went in to restore civil order, comparisons were drawn with the Soviet Army crushing the 1956 anti-Communist rebellion.
This new anti-Communist scare even goes after symbols. In June 2008, Lithuania passed a law prohibiting the public display of Communist images like the hammer and sickle, as well as the playing of the Soviet anthem. In April 2009, the Polish government proposed expanding a ban on totalitarian propaganda to include Communist books, clothing and other items: one could even be arrested for wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.
No wonder that, in Slovenia, the main reproach of the populist right to the left is that it is the “force of continuity” with the old Communist regime. In such a suffocating atmosphere, new problems and challenges are reduced to the repetition of old struggles, up to the absurd claim (which sometimes arises in Poland and in Slovenia) that the advocacy of gay rights and legal abortion is part of a dark Communist plot to demoralize the nation.
Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength from? Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many young people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new anti-Communism provides a simple answer to the question: “If capitalism is really so much better than Socialism, why are our lives still miserable?”
It is because, many believe, we are not really in capitalism: we do not yet have true democracy but only its deceiving mask, the same dark forces still pull the threads of power, a narrow sect of former Communists disguised as new owners and managers — nothing’s really changed, so we need another purge, the revolution has to be repeated ...
What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the image they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the most abused traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which formal democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy minority. In other words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.
One can also argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, the disillusioned former Communists were effectively better suited to run the new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While the heroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to dwell in their dreams of a new society of justice, honesty and solidarity, the former Communists were able to ruthlessly accommodate themselves to the new capitalist rules and the new cruel world of market efficiency, inclusive of all the new and old dirty tricks and corruption.

The Berlin Wall fell, but capitalism did not necessarily rise.(Emphasis at the end added by myself)


Now I'm not necessarily a huge supporter of the GDR, but I think that the framework of the discourse, apparently even within the contemporary Left, needs a radical rethinking. We can't place the GDR into one of two categories (Evil Stalinist Authoritarian State or Worker's Paradise) but instead should try to fit it into its proper historical context, just like we should do with the USSR, China, Cuba, etc.


Simply appealing to how there's nothing good about it or pointing out only one aspect of it isn't what honest discourse should look like, and those who were pro, anti, or even neither about the GDR should be a little more charitable to their detractors.


Oh and there's one more interesting article I suggest (this one is an all out apology for the wall and the GDR):


Democracy, East Germany and the Berlin Wall (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html?_r=1#secondParagraph)




The GDR was more democratic, in the original and substantive sense of the word, than eastern Germany was before 1949 and than the former East Germany has become since the Berlin Wall was opened in 1989. It was also more democratic than its neighbor, West Germany. While it played a role in the GDR’s eventual demise, the Berlin Wall was at the time a necessary defensive measure to protect a substantively democratic society from being undermined by a hostile neighbor bent on annexing it.
By Stephen Gowans
While East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) wasn’t a ‘workers’ paradise’, it was in many respects a highly attractive model that was responsive to the basic needs of the mass of people and therefore was democratic in the substantive and original sense of the word. It offered generous pensions, guaranteed employment, equality of the sexes and substantial wage equality, free healthcare and education, and a growing array of other free and virtually free goods and services. It was poorer than its West German neighbor, the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG, but it started at a lower level of economic development and was forced to bear the burden of indemnifying the Soviet Union for the massive losses Germany inflicted upon the USSR in World War II. These conditions were largely responsible for the less attractive aspects of life in the GDR: lower pay, longer hours, and fewer and poorer consumer goods compared to West Germany, and restrictions on travel to the West. When the Berlin Wall was open in 1989, a majority of the GDR’s citizens remained committed to the socialist basis of their society and wished to retain it. [1] It wasn’t the country’s central planning and public ownership they rebelled against. These things produced what was best about the country. And while Cold War propaganda located East Germany well outside the ‘free world,’ political repression and the Stasi, the East German state security service, weren’t at the root of East Germans’ rebellion either. Ultimately, what the citizens of the GDR rebelled against was their comparative poverty. But this had nothing to do with socialism. East Germans were poorer than West Germans even before the Western powers divided Germany in the late 1940s, and remain poorer today. A capitalist East Germany, forced to start at a lower level of economic development and to disgorge war reparation payments to the USSR, would not have become the social welfare consumer society West Germany became and East Germans aspired after, but would have been at least as worse off as the GDR was, and probably much worse off, and without the socialist attractions of economic security and greater equality. Moreover, without the need to compete against an ideological rival, it’s doubtful the West German ruling class would have been under as much pressure to make concessions on wages and benefits. West Germans, then, owed many of their social welfare gains to the fact their neighbour to the east was socialist and not capitalist.
The Western powers divide Germany
While the distortions of Cold War history would lead one to believe it was the Soviets who divided Germany, the Western powers were the true authors of Germany’s division. The Allies agreed at the February 1945 Yalta conference that while Germany would be partitioned into French, British, US and Soviet occupation zones, the defeated Germany would be administered jointly. [2] The hope of the Soviets, who had been invaded by Germany in both first and second world wars, was for a united, disarmed and neutral Germany. The Soviet’s goals were two-fold: First, Germany would be demilitarized, so that it could not launch a third war of aggression on the Soviet Union. Second, it would pay reparations for the massive damages it inflicted upon the USSR, calculated after the war to exceed $100 billion. [3]
http://gowans.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/img_0094a.jpg?w=300&h=225Courtesy of Brendan Stone

The Western powers, however, had other plans. The United States wanted to revive Germany economically to ensure it would be available as a rich market capable of absorbing US exports and capital investment. The United States had remained on the sidelines through a good part of the war, largely avoiding the damages that ruined its rivals, while at the same time acting as armourer to the Allies. At the end of the war, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the USSR lay in ruins, while the US ruling class was bursting at the seams with war industry profits. The prospects for the post-war US economy, however, and hence for the industrialists, bankers and investors who dominated the country’s political decision-making, were dim unless new life could be breathed into collapsed foreign markets, which would be needed to absorb US exports and capital. An economically revived Germany was therefore an important part of the plan to secure the United States’ economic future. The idea of a Germany forced to pour out massive reparation payments to the USSR was intolerable to US policy makers: it would militate against the transformation of Germany into a sphere of profit-making for US capital, and would underwrite the rebuilding of an ideological competitor.
The United States intended to make post-war life as difficult as possible for the Soviet Union. There were a number of reasons for this, not least to prevent the USSR from becoming a model for other countries. Already, socialism had eliminated the United States’ access to markets and spheres of investment in one-sixth of the earth’s territory. The US ruling class didn’t want the USSR to provide inspiration and material aid to other countries to follow the same path. The lead role of communists in the resistance movements in Europe, “the success of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany,” and “the success of the Soviet Union in industrializing and modernizing,” [4] had greatly raised the prestige of the USSR and enhanced the popularity of communism. Unless measures were taken to check the USSR’s growing popularity, socialism would continue to advance and the area open to US exports and investment would continue to contract. A Germany paying reparations to the Soviets was clearly at odds with the goals of reviving Germany and holding the Soviet Union in check. What’s more, while the Soviets wanted Germany to be permanently disarmed as a safeguard against German revanchism, the United States recognized that a militarized Germany under US domination could play a central role in undermining the USSR.
The division of Germany began in 1946, when the French decided to administer their zone separately. [5] Soon, the Western powers merged their three zones into a single economic unit and announced they would no longer pay reparations to the Soviet Union. The burden would have to be borne by the Soviet occupation zone alone, which was smaller and less industrialized, and therefore less able to offer compensation.
In 1949, the informal division of Germany was formalized with the proclamation by the Western powers of a separate West German state, the FRG. The new state would be based on a constitution written by Washington and imposed on West Germans, without their ratification. (The GDR’s constitution, by contrast, was ratified by East Germans.) In 1954, West Germany was integrated into a new anti-Soviet military alliance, NATO, which, in its objectives, aped the earlier anti-Comintern pact of the Axis powers. The goal of the anti-Comintern pact was to oppose the Soviet Union and world communism. NATO, with a militarized West Germany, would take over from where the Axis left off.
The GDR was founded in 1949, only after the Western powers created the FRG. The Soviets and the GDR’s leaders had no interest in transforming the Soviet occupation zone into a separate state and complained bitterly about the Western powers’ division of Germany. Moscow wanted Germany to remain unified, but demilitarized and neutral and committed to paying war reparations to help the USSR get back on its feet. As late as 1954, the Soviets offered to dissolve the GDR in favour of free elections under international supervision, leading to the creation of a unified, unaligned, Germany. This, however, clashed with the Western powers’ plan of evading Germany’s responsibility for paying war reparations and of integrating West Germany into the new anti-Soviet, anti-communist military alliance. The proposal was, accordingly, rejected. George Kennan, the architect of the US policy of ‘containing’ (read undermining) the Soviet Union, remarked: “The trend of our thinking means that we do not want to see Germany reunified at this time, and that there are no conditions on which we would really find such a solution satisfactory.” [6]
This placed the anti-fascist working class leadership of the GDR in a difficult position. The GDR comprised only one-third of German territory and had a population of 17 million. By comparison, the FRG comprised 63 million people and made up two-thirds of German territory. [7] Less industrialized than the West, the new GDR started out poorer than its new capitalist rival. Per capita income was about 27 percent lower than in the West. [8] Much of the militant section of the working class, which would have ardently supported a socialist state, had been liquidated by the Nazis. The burden of paying war reparations to the Soviets now had to be borne solely by the GDR. And West Germany ceaselessly harassed and sabotaged its neighbor, refusing to recognize it as a sovereign state, regarding it instead as its own territory temporarily under Soviet occupation. [9] Repeatedly, West Germany proclaimed that its official policy was the annexation of its neighbor to the east.
The GDR’s leaders faced still other challenges. Compared to the West, East Germany suffered greater losses in the war. [10] The US Army stripped the East of its scientists, technicians and technical know-how, kidnapping “thousands of managers, engineers, and all sorts of experts, as well as the best scientists – the brains of Germany’s East – from their factories, universities, and homes in Saxony and Thuringia in order to put them to work to the advantage of the Americans in the Western zone – or simply to have them waste away there.” [11]
As Pauwels explains,
“During the last weeks of the hostilities the Americans themselves had occupied a considerable part of the Soviet zone, namely Thuringia and much of Saxony. When they pulled out at the end of June, 1945, they brought back to the West more than 10,000 railway cars full of the newest and best equipment, patents, blueprints, and so on from the firm Carl Zeiss in Jena and the local plants of other top enterprises such as Siemens, Telefunken, BMW, Krupp, Junkers, and IG-Farben. This East German war booty included plunder from the Nazi V-2 factory in Nordhausen: not only the rockets, but also technical documents with an estimated value of 400 to 500 million dollars, as well as approximately 1,200 captured German experts in rocket technology, one of whom being the notorious Wernher von Braun.” [12]
The Allies agreed at Yalta that a post-war Germany would pay the Soviet Union $10 billion in compensation for the damages inflicted on the USSR during the war. This was a paltry sum compared to the more realistic estimate of $128 billion arrived at after the war. And yet the Soviets were short changed on even this meagre sum. The USSR received no more than $5.1 billion from the two German states, most of it from the GDR. The Soviets took $4.5 billion out of East Germany, carting away whole factories and railways, while the larger and richer FRG paid a miserable $600 million. The effect was the virtual deindustrialization of the East. [13] In the end, the GDR would compensate both the United States (which suffered virtually no damage in World War II) through the loss of its scientists, technicians, blue-prints, patents and so on, and the Soviet Union (which suffered immense losses and deserved to be compensated), through the loss of its factories and railways. Moreover, the United States offered substantial aid to West Germany to help it rebuild, while the poorer Soviet Union, which had been devastated by the German invasion, lacked the resources to invest in the GDR. [14] The West was rebuilt; the East stripped bare.
The GDR’s democratic achievements
Despite the many burdens it faced, the GDR managed to build a standard of living higher than that of the USSR “and that of millions of inhabitants of the American ghettoes, of countless poor white Americans, and of the population of most Third World countries that have been integrated willy-nilly with the international capitalist world system.” [15]
Over 90 percent of the GDR’s productive assets were owned by the country’s citizens collectively, while in West Germany productive assets remained privately owned, concentrated in a few hands. [16] Because the GDR’s economy was almost entirely publicly owned and the leadership was socialist, the economic surplus that people produced on the job went into a social fund to make the lives of everyone better rather than into the pockets of shareholders, bondholders, landowners and bankers. [17] Out of the social fund came subsidies for food, clothing, rent, public transportation, as well as cultural, social and recreational activities. Wages weren’t as high as in the West, but a growing number of essential goods and services were free or virtually free. Rents, for example, were very low. As a consequence, there were no evictions and there was no homelessness. Education was free through university, and university students received stipends to cover living expenses. Healthcare was also free. Childcare was highly subsidized.
http://gowans.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/img_0612.jpg?w=300&h=225Courtesy of Brendan Stone

Differences in income levels were narrow, with higher wages paid to those working in particularly strenuous or dangerous occupations. Full gender equality was mandated by law and men and women were paid equally for the same work, long before gender equality was taken up as an issue in the West. What’s more, everyone had a right to a job. There was no unemployment in the GDR.
Rather than supporting systems of oppression and exploitation, as the advanced capitalist countries did in Africa, Latin America and Asia, the GDR assisted the people of the global South in their struggles against colonialism. Doctors were dispatched to Vietnam, Mozambique and Angola, and students from many Third World countries were trained and educated in the GDR at the GDR’s expense.
Even the Wall Street Journal recognized the GDR’s achievements. In February, 1989, just months before the opening of the Berlin Wall, the US ruling class’s principal daily newspaper announced that the GDR “has no debt problem. The 17 million East Germans earn 30 percent more than their next richest partners, the Czechoslovaks, and not much less than the English. East Germans build 32-bit mini-computers and a socialist ‘Walkman’ and the only queue in East Berlin forms at the opera.” [18]
The downside was that compared to West Germany, wages were lower, hours of work were longer, and there were fewer consumer goods. Also, consumer goods tended to be inferior compared to those available in West Germany. And there were travel restrictions. Skilled workers were prevented from travelling to the West. But at the same time, vacations were subsidized, and East Germans could travel throughout the socialist bloc.
Greater efficiencies
West Germany’s comparative wealth offered many advantages in its ideological battle with socialism. For one, the wealth differential could be attributed deceptively to the merits of capitalism versus socialism. East Germany was poorer, it was said, not because it unfairly bore the brunt of indemnifying the Soviets for their war losses, and not because it started on a lower rung, but because public ownership and central planning were inherently inefficient. The truth of the matter, however, was that East German socialism was more efficient than West German capitalism, producing faster growth rates, and was more responsive to the basic needs of its population. “East Germany’s national income grew in real terms about two percent faster annually that the West German economy between 1961 and 1989.” [19] The GDR was also less repressive politically. Following in the footsteps of Hitler, West Germany banned the Communist Party in the 1950s, and close tabs were kept by West Germany’s own ‘secret’ police on anyone openly expressing Marxist-Leninist views. Marxist-Leninists were barred from working in the public service and frequently lost private sector jobs owing to their political views. In the GDR, by contrast, those who expressed views at odds with the dominant Marxist-Leninist ideology did not lose their jobs, and were not cut off from the state’s generous social supports, though they too were monitored by the GDR’s ‘secret’ police. The penalty for dissenting from the dominant political ideology in the West (loss of income) was more severe than in the East. [20]
The claim that the GDR’s socialism was less efficient than West Germany’s capitalism was predicated on the disparity in wealth between the two countries, but the roots of the disparity were external to the two countries’ respective systems of ownership, and the disparity existed prior to 1949 (at which point GDP per capita was about 43 percent higher in the West) and continued to exist after 1989 (when unemployment – once virtually eliminated — soared and remains today double what it is in the former West Germany.) Over the four decades of its existence, East German socialism attenuated the disparity, bringing the GDR closer to West Germany’s GDP per capita. Significantly, “real economic growth in all of Eastern Europe under communism was estimated to be higher than in Western Europe under capitalism (as well as higher than that in the USA) even in communism’s final decade (the 1980s).” After the opening of the Berlin Wall, with capitalism restored, “real economic output fell by over 30 percent in Eastern Europe as a whole in the 1990s.” [21]
But the GDR’s faster growth rates from 1961 to 1989 tell only part of the story. It’s possible for GDP to grow rapidly, with few of the benefits reaching the bulk of the population. The United States spends more on healthcare as a percentage of its GDP than all other countries, but US life expectancy and infant mortality results are worse than in many other countries which spend less (but have more efficient public health insurance or socialized systems.) This is due to the reality that healthcare is unequally distributed in the United States, with the wealthy in a position to buy the best healthcare in the world while tens of millions of low-income US citizens can afford no or only inadequate healthcare. By contrast, in most advanced capitalist countries everyone has access to basic (though typically not comprehensive) healthcare. In socialist Cuba, comprehensive healthcare is free to all. What’s important, then, is not only how much wealth (or healthcare) a society creates, but also how a society’s wealth (or healthcare) is distributed. Wealth was far more evenly distributed in socialist countries than it was in capitalist countries. The mean Gini coefficient – a measure of income equality which runs from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality) – was 0.24 for socialist countries in 1970 compared to 0.48 for capitalist countries. [22]
Socialist countries also fared better at meeting their citizens’ basic needs. Compared to all capitalist countries, socialist countries had higher life expectancies, lower levels of infant mortality, and higher levels of literacy. However, the comparison of all socialist countries with all capitalist countries is unfair, because the group of capitalist countries comprises many more countries unable to effectively meet the basic needs of their populations owing to their low level of economic development. While capitalism is often associated with the world’s richest countries, the world’s poorest countries are also capitalist. Desperately poor Haiti, for example, is a capitalist country, while neighboring Cuba, richer and vastly more responsive to the needs of its citizens, is socialist. We would expect socialist countries to have done a better job at meeting the basic needs of their citizens, because they were richer, on average, than all capitalist countries together. But the conclusion still stands if socialist countries are compared with capitalist countries at the same level of economic development; that is, socialist countries did a better job of meeting their citizens’ basic needs compared to capitalist countries in the same income range. Even when comparing socialist countries to the richest capitalist countries, the socialist countries fared well, meeting their citizens’ basic needs as well as advanced capitalist countries met the needs of their citizens, despite the socialist countries’ lower level of economic development and fewer resources. [23] In terms of meeting basic needs, then, socialism was more efficient: it did more with less.
Why were socialist countries, like the GDR, more efficient? First, socialist societies were committed to improving the living standards of the mass of people as their first aim (whereas capitalist countries are organized around profit-maximization as their principle goal – a goal linked to a minority that owns capital and land and derives its income from profits, rent and interest, that is, the exploitation of other people’s labor, rather than wages.) Secondly, the economic surplus the citizens of socialist countries produced was channelled into making life better for everyone (whereas in capitalist countries the economic surplus goes straight to shareholders, bondholders, landowners and bankers.) This made socialism more democratic than capitalism in three ways:
• It was more equal. (Capitalism, by contrast, produces inequality.)
• It worked toward improving as much as possible the lot of the classes which have no other means of existence but the labor of their hands and which comprise the vast majority of people. (Capitalist societies, on the other hand, defend and promote the interests of the minority that owns capital.)
• It guaranteed economic and social rights. (By comparison, capitalist societies emphasize political and civil liberties, i.e., protections against the majority using its greater numbers to encroach upon the privileges of the minority that owns and controls the economy.)
As will be discussed below, even when it came to political (as distinct from social and economic) democracy, the differences between East and West Germany were more illusory than real.
Stanching the outward migration of skilled workers
Despite the many advantages the GDR offered, it remained less affluent throughout its four decades compared to its capitalist neighbor to the west. For many “the lure of higher salaries and business opportunities in the West remained strong.” [24] As a result, in its first decade, East Germany’s population shrunk by 10 percent. [25] And while higher wages proved to be an irresistible temptation to East Germans who stressed personal aggrandizement over egalitarian values and social security, the FRG – keen to weaken the GDR – did much to sweeten the pot, offering economic inducements to skilled East Germans to move west. Working-age, but not retired, East Germans were offered interest-free loans, access to scarce apartments, immediate citizenship and compensation for property left behind, to relocate to the West. [26]
http://gowans.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/getattachment.jpg?w=300&h=225Courtesy of Brendan Stone

By 1961, the East German government decided that defensive measures needed to be taken, otherwise its population would be depleted of people with important skills vital to building a prosperous society. East German citizens would be barred from entering West Germany without special permission, while West Germans would be prevented from freely entering the GDR. The latter restriction was needed to break up black market currency trading, and to inhibit espionage and sabotage carried out by West German agents. [27] Walls, fences, minefields and other barriers were deployed along the length of the East’s border with the West. Many of the obstacles had existed for years, but until 1961, Berlin – partitioned between the West and East – remained free of physical barriers. The Berlin Wall – the GDR leadership’s solution to the problems of population depletion and Western sabotage and espionage — went up on August 13, 1961. [28]
From 1961 to 1989, 756 East German escapees, an average of 30 per year, were either shot, drown, blown apart by mines or committed suicide after being captured. By comparison, hundreds of Mexicans die every year trying to escape poor Mexico into the far wealthier United States. [29] Approximately 50,000 East Germans were captured trying to cross the border into West Germany from 1961 to 1989. Those who were caught served prison sentences of one year. [30]
Over time, the GDR gradually relaxed its border controls, allowing working-age East Germans to visit the West if there was little risk of their not returning. While in the 1960s, only retirees over the age of 65 were permitted to travel to the West, by the 1980s, East Germans 50 years of age or older were allowed to cross the border. Those with relatives in the FRG were also allowed to visit. By 1987, close to 1.3 million working-age East Germans were permitted to travel to West Germany. Virtually all of them – over 99 percent – returned. [31]
However, not all East Germans were granted the right to cross the border. In 1987, 300,000 requests were turned down. East Germans only received permission after being cleared by the GDR’s state security service, the Stasi. One of the effects of loosening the border restrictions was to swell the Stasi’s ranks, in order to handle the increase in applications for visits to the West. [32]
Pauwels reminds us that,
“A hypothetical capitalist East Germany would likewise have also had to build a wall in order to prevent its population from seeking salvation in another, more prosperous Germany. Incidentally, people have fled and continue to flee, to richer countries also from poor capitalist countries. However, the numerous black refugees from extremely poor Haiti, for example, have never enjoyed the same kind of sympathy in the United States and elsewhere in the world that was bestowed so generously on refugees from the GDR during the Cold War…And should the Mexican government decide to build a ‘Berlin Wall’ along the Rio Grande in order to prevent their people from escaping to El Norte, Washington would certainly not condemn such an initiative the way it used to condemn the infamous East Berlin construction project.” [33]
GDR sets standards for working class in FRG…and abroad
Despite its comparative poverty, the GDR furnished its citizens with generous pensions, free healthcare and education, inexpensive vacations, virtually free childcare and public transportation, and paid maternity leave, as fundamental rights. Even so, East Germany’s standard of living continued to lag behind that of the upper sections of the working class in the West. The comparative paucity and lower quality of consumer goods, and lower wages, were the product of a multitude of factors that conspired against the East German economy: its lower starting point; the need to invest in heavy industry at the expense of light industry; blockade and sanctions imposed by the West; the furnishing of aid to national liberation movements in the global South (which benefited the South more than it did the GDR. By comparison, aid flows from Western countries were designed to profit Western corporations, banks and investors.) What East Germany lacked in consumer goods and wages, it made up for in economic security. The regular economic crises of capitalist economies, with their rampant underemployment and joblessness, escalating poverty and growing homelessness, were absent in the GDR.
The greater security of life for East Germans presented a challenge to the advanced capitalist countries. Intent on demonstrating that capitalism was superior to socialism, governments and businesses in the West were forced to meet the standards set by the socialist countries to secure the hearts and minds of their own working class. Generous social insurance, provisions against lay-offs and representation on industrial councils were conceded to West German workers. [34] But these were revocable concessions, not the inevitable rewards of capitalism.
East Germany’s robust social wage acted in much the same way strong unions do in forcing non-unionized plants to provide wages and benefits to match union standards. [35] In the 1970s, Canada’s unionized Stelco steel mill at Hamilton, Ontario set the standard for the neighboring non-unionized Dofasco plant. What the Stelco workers won through collective bargaining, the non-unionized Dofasco workers received as a sop to keep the union out. But once the union goes, the motivation to pay union wages and provide union benefits disappears. Likewise, with the demise of East Germany and the socialist bloc, the need to provide a robust social safety net in the advanced capitalist countries to secure the loyalty of the working class no longer existed. Hence, the GDR not only furnished its own citizens with economic security, but indirectly forced the advanced capitalist countries to make concessions to their own workers. The demise of the GDR therefore not only hurt Ossis (East Germans), depriving them of economic security, but also hurt the working populations of the advanced capitalist countries, whose social programs were the spill-over product of capitalism’s ideological battle with socialism. It is no accident that the claw back of reforms and concessions granted by capitalist ruling classes during the Cold War has accelerated since the opening of the Berlin Wall.
The collapse of the GDR and the socialist bloc has proved injurious to the interests of Western working populations in another way, as well. From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the territory available to capitalist exploitation steadily diminished. This limited the degree of wage competition within the capitalist global labor force to a degree that wouldn’t have been true had the forces of socialism and national liberation not steadily advanced through the twentieth century. The counter-revolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and China’s opening to foreign investment, ushered in a rapid expansion worldwide in the number of people vying for jobs. North American and Western European workers didn’t compete for jobs with workers in Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Russia in 1970. They do today. The outcome of the rapid expansion of the pool of wage-labor worldwide for workers in the advanced capitalist countries has been a reduction in real wages and explosive growth in the number of permanent lay-offs as competition for jobs escalates. The demise of socialism in Eastern Europe (and China’s taking the capitalist road) has had very real – and unfavourable – consequences for working people in the West.
Going backward
Since the opening of the Berlin Wall and the annexation of the GDR by the FRG in 1990, the former East Germany has been transformed from a rapidly industrializing country where everyone was guaranteed a job and access to a growing array of free and nearly free goods and services, to a de-industrialized backwater teeming with the unemployed where the population is being hollowed out by migration to the wealthier West. “The easterners,” a New York Times article remarked in 2005, “are notoriously unhappy.” Why? “Because life is less secure than it used to be under Communism.” [36]
During the Cold War East Germans who risked their lives to breach the Berlin War were depicted as refugees from political repression. But their escape into the wealthier West had little to do with flight from political repression and much to do with being attracted to a higher standard of living. Today Ossis stream out of the East, just as they did before the Berlin Wall sprang up in 1961. More than one million people have migrated from the former East Germany to the West since 1989. But these days, economic migrants aren’t swapping modestly-paid jobs, longer hours and fewer and poorer consumer goods in the East for higher paying jobs, shorter hours and more and better consumer goods in the West. They’re leaving because they can’t find work. The real unemployment rate, taking into account workers forced into early retirement or into the holding pattern of job re-training schemes, reaches as high as 50 percent in some parts of the former East Germany. [37] And the official unemployment rate is twice as high in the East as it is in the West. Erich Quaschnuk, a retired railroad worker, acknowledges that “the joy back then when the Berlin Wall fell was real,” but quickly adds, “the promise of blooming landscapes never appeared.” [38]
Twenty years after the opening of the Berlin Wall, one-half of people living in the former East Germany say there was more good than bad about the GDR, and that life was happier and better. Some Ossis go so far as to say they “were driven out of paradise when the Wall came down” while others thank God they were able to live in the GDR. Still others describe the unified Germany as a “slave state” and a “dictatorship of capital,” and reject Germany for “being too capitalist or dictatorial, and certainly not democratic.” [39]
Much as the GDR was faulted for being less democratic politically than the FRG, the FRG’s claim to being more democratic politically is shaky at best.
“East Germany…permitted voters to cast secret ballots and always had more than one candidate for each government position. Although election results typically resulted in over 99 percent of all votes being for candidates of parties that did not favour revolutionary changes in the East German system (just as West German election results generally resulted in over 99 percent of the people voting for non-revolutionary West German capitalist parties), it was always possible to change the East German system from within the established political parties (including the communist party), as those parties were open to all and encouraged participation in the political process. The ability to change the East German system from within is best illustrated by the East German leader who opened up the Berlin Wall and initiated many political reforms in less than two months in power.” [40]
West Germany outlawed many anti-capitalist political parties and organizations, including, in the 1950s, the popular Communist Party, as Hitler did in the 1930s. (On the other side of the Berlin Wall, no party that aimed to reverse socialism or withdraw from the Warsaw Pact was allowed.) The West German parties tended to be pro-capitalist, and those that weren’t didn’t have access to the resources the wealthy patrons of the mainstream political parties could provide to run the high-profile marketing campaigns that were needed to command significant support in elections. What’s more, West Germans were dissuaded from voting for anti-establishment parties, for fear the victory of a party with a socialist platform would be met by capital strike or flight, and therefore the loss of their jobs. The overwhelming support for pro-capitalist parties, then, rested on two foundations: The pro-capitalist parties uniquely commanded the resources to build messages with mass appeal and which could be broadcast with sufficient volume to reach a mass audience, and the threat of capital strike and capital flight disciplined working class voters to support pro-business parties.
Conclusion
No one would have built a Berlin Wall if they didn’t have to. But in 1961, with the GDR being drained of its working population by a West Germany that had skipped out on its obligations to indemnify the Soviet Union for the losses the Nazis had inflicted upon it in World War II, there were few options, apart from surrender. The Berlin Wall was, without question, regrettable, but it was at the same time a necessary defensive measure. If the anti-fascist, working class leadership of the GDR was to have any hope of building a mass society that was responsive to the basic needs of the working class and which channelled its economic surplus into improving the living conditions and economic security of all, drastic measures would have to be taken; otherwise, the experiment in German democracy — that of building a state that operated on behalf of the mass of people, rather than a minority of shareholders, bondholders, landowners and bankers — would have to be abandoned. And yet, by the history of drastic measures, this was hardly drastic. Wars weren’t waged, populations weren’t expelled, mass executions weren’t carried out. Instead, people of working-age were prevented from resettling in the West.
http://gowans.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/berlin-mural.jpg?w=300&h=225Courtesy of Brendan Stone

The abridgment of mobility rights was hardly unique to revolutionary situations. While the needs of Cold War propaganda pressed Washington to howl indignantly over the GDR’s measures to stanch the flow of its working-age population to the West, the restriction of mobility rights had not been unknown in the United States’ own revolution, where the ‘freedoms’ of dissidents and people of uncertain loyalty had been freely revoked. “During the American Revolution…those who wished to cross into British territory had to obtain a pass from the various State governments or military commanders. Generally, a pass was granted only to individuals of known and acceptable ‘character and views’ and after their promise neither to inform or otherwise to act to the prejudice of the United States. Passes, even for those whose loyalty was guaranteed, were generally difficult to acquire.” [41]
Was the GDR worth defending? Is its demise to be regretted? Unquestionably. The GDR was a mass society that channelled the surplus of the labor of all into the betterment of the conditions of all, rather than into the pockets of the few. It offered its citizens an expanding array of free and virtually free goods and services, was more equal than capitalist countries, and met its citizens’ basic needs better than did capitalist countries at the same level of economic development. Indeed, it met basic needs as well as richer countries did, with fewer resources, in the same way Cuba today meets the basic healthcare needs of all its citizens better than the vastly wealthier United States meets (or rather fails to meet) those of tens of millions of its own citizens. And while the GDR was poorer than West Germany and many other advanced capitalist countries, its comparative poverty was not the consequence of the country’s public ownership and central planning, but of a lower starting point and the burden of having to help the Soviet Union rebuild after the massive devastation Germany inflicted upon it in World War II. Far from being inefficient, public ownership and central planning turned the eastern part of Germany into a rapidly industrializing country which grew faster economically than its West German neighbor and shared the benefits of its growth more evenly. In the East, the economy existed to serve the people. In the West, the people existed to serve the minority that owned and controlled the economy. Limiting mobility rights, just as they have been limited in other revolutions, was a small price to pay to build, not what anyone would be so naïve as to call a workers’ paradise, but what can be called a mass, or truly democratic, society, one which was responsiveness to the basic needs of the mass of people as its principal aim.
1. Austin Murphy, The Triumph of Evil: The Reality of the USA’s Cold War Victory, European Press Academic Publishing, 2000.
2. Henry Heller, The Cold War and the New Imperialism: A Global History, 1945-2005, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2006.
3. Jacques R. Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Toronto, 2002; R. Palme Dutt, The Internationale, Lawrence & Wishart Ltd., London, 1964.
4. Melvyn Leffler, “New perspectives on the Cold War: A conversation with Melvyn Leffler,” November, 1998. [URL]http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/1998-11/leffler.html)
5. Heller.
6. John Wight, “From WWII to the US empire,” The Morning Star (UK), October 11, 2009.
7. John Green, “Looking back at life in the GDR,” The Morning Star (UK), October 7, 2009.
8. Shirley Ceresto, “Socialism, capitalism, and inequality,” The Insurgent Sociologist, Vol. XI, No. 2, Spring, 1982.
9. Dutt; William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Common Courage Press, Maine, 1995.
10. Pauwels.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Murphy.
15. Pauwels.
16. Green.
17. Ibid.
18. The Wall Street Journal, February 22, 1989.
19. Murphy.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ceresto.
23. Ibid.
24. Green.
25. Murphy.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Pauwels.
34. Fred Goldstein, Low-Wage Capitalism, World View Forum, New York, 2008.
35. Ibid.
36. The New York Times, December 6, 2005.
37. The Guardian (UK), November 15, 2006.
38. “Disappointed Eastern Germans turn right,” The Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2005.
39. Julia Bonstein, “Majority of Eastern Germans felt life better under communism,” Der Spiegel, July 3, 2009.
40. Murphy.
41. Albert Szymanski, Human Rights in the Soviet Union, Zed Book Ltd., London, 1984
Sorry for such a long post!

[bailey_187]

That John Green pamphlet/book is quite good, worth the 3 or 4 quid it costs IMO
Austin Murphy - The Triumph of Evil is the best book i read on GDR
John Steele- Socialism with a German face, seems ok too (i just started it so cant say much)

[KurtFF8]

I'd like to get my hands on the Green pamphlet but I live in the US and I'm not sure if that would raise the price significantly or not.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

An excellent set of articles there, KurtFFB.

Even the last one, whilst I don't agree with the conclusions it draws, gives us (me!) some useful statistics (growth rates between 61-89, the economy in the West being 43% more advanced in 1949 etc.) in debunking the myths that are propagated by the Capitalists about the GDR. I am not a huge GDR fan, mainly due to the lack of initial revolution, the Stasi and the problem that was endemic in Soviet style Communism - a lack of connection between the proletariat and the leadership. Indeed, the leadership seemed to perpetuate itself from very similar circles (perhaps Nikita Kruschev is the oddity here). Against this, though, one must raise, and indeed praise, the achievements of the GDR, most notably being the social fund, gender equality, no unemployment and low housing costs.

Although, it must be said that, although yes we should praise the GDR for its achievements, what it did acheive is really what you expect any centrally planned, Socialist economy, and society as a whole, to achieve. Whilst yes, the GDR fulfilled such criteria, and should be praised for this, we should remember its many very serious shortcomings, and remember that its achievements were really the staple that any Socialist society should achieve, rather than going far above and beyond this.