The German Democratic Republic’s location on the periphery of the Soviet bloc and its constant confrontation with one of the most powerful economic forces of the Western world, the Federal Republic, has had its effect on the formation of internal opinion and dissent. In contrast to its East European neighbours, there is no sustained civil rights movement and manifestos of ‘opposition’ have appeared in official publications. As the country celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, however, there are signs that the East German leadership cannot re-establish with the population an understanding similar to that which existed in the early 1970s.
A new, tough orientation on the regime’s part is linked to a challenge to the Communist Party leader Honecker’s authority. His failure to manage the economy over the last few years (and what some see as his dangerous concessions to consumerism) have laid him open to attack from sections of the leadership who fear a general decline of political controls. Since the spring, the government has sought to link political repression against writers directly to its drive against the ‘grey’(Deutschmark) market. Sharply rising prices for raw materials and a deterioration in the terms of trade with the Soviet Union have led to demands for greater effort, without the Party being able to provide adequate rewards. Wages of East German workers have risen faster than the supply of consumer goods, with private savings at the beginning of last year standing at a record level of 80,000 million marks. A reluctance to respond readily to yet another call by the Party for increased production, voluntary shift work and rationalisation points to further clashes.
Although rents, electricity, transport services and basic goods like bread, potatoes, sugar and salt are relatively cheap, their sales price does not cover production costs — the low prices of these products correspond to the extremely low wages drawn by the majority of the population. The state takes its subsidies, which maintain the price of necessary goods at a low level, from the enormous differences which exist between the production costs of luxury items and the sales price to the consumer. For the majority, then, there are low wages, and therefore necessary goods are cheap and permit the reproduction of their labour power, while the privileged receive high salaries and have access to luxury items. ‘Illegal work’, normally undertaken at weekends, brings more income than a whole week of regular work in state enterprises.
Additionally, the suicide rate in the country is striking. According to the most recent figures it stands at 35 for every 10,000, while there are 22 for every 10,000 in the Federal Republic.
Widespread anger and resentment exists, on the one hand over the privileges enjoyed by the ruling elite in the form of exclusive shops selling Western goods, and on the other over the scarcity of items such as cars, television sets, good clothes and furniture. Recent strikes in the Fritz-Hekert-Werke in Karl Marx- Stadt, the Narve electric lamp factory in Berlin, and demands for payment in hard currency (Deutschmarks) for workers who are employed in export production for the West, indicate the scope of the difficulties with which the Party is faced. An ‘affluent society’ similar to the West is not just the ambition of the rulers anxious to perpetuate their power, but also corresponds to the immediate interests of the ruled.
While the size of the country and the thoroughness of police surveillance have prevented the growth of a significant underground, the last two years have seen the coming into the open of the first dissident, inner-Party opposition in Eastern Europe. Coping with such internal critics has posed more of a problem than would be the case with religious/ ethical reformers and ‘anti-Marxists’.
At the beginning of 1978 a manifesto purportedly drawn up by the ‘League of Democratic Communists of Germany’ was published in the West German magazine, Der Spiegel (2 and 9 January). Predictably, the document’s main concerns were with the establishment of a pluralist democracy in the East and the reunification of Germany. Attacks on the Soviet Union and the corrupt and inefficient system in the GDR were the manifesto’s other main thrusts:
No ruling class of Germany has ever sponged so much and secured itself against the pepple as those two dozen families who run the country like a self-service store. None has ever had such excessively golden ghettoes built in the forests which are guarded like fortresses. None has so shamelessly corrupted and enriched itself in special stores and private imports from the West, through decoration, bonuses and special clinics, pensions and presents, as has this caste.
Calling the Soviet leaders ‘Red Popes’, Communist leaders generally ‘Red-lacquered Nazis’, and the East German Party’s Politburo ‘Polit Quislings’, the League seek an end to what they call “the Asian production method of bureaucratic state capitalism”.
The most telling attack on the Party in the 1970s has come from a middle ranking cadre, Rudolf Bahro, presently serving an eight-year sentence after being found guilty of ‘treason’ in July 1978. Published in West Germany in 1977 (and in England last year), The Alternative in Eastern Europe is a left-Communist critique of the GDR system and what he calls a “strategy for a real communist alternative”.
Bahro argues that the Soviet type system, which is a model for the GDR. constitutes a distinctive type of social formation which is neither capitalist nor socialist. He suggests a parallel to Marx’s concept of the Asiatic mode of production in which there exists a ruling class not based on private property ownership but organised as an administrative and ideological apparatus. But he ignores the hallmarks of capitalism which predominate in the GDR just as much as in the West. The fact that a monopoly of the means of production is not legally recognised is immaterial — wealth is in effect the property of an individual or group if there exists a right in fact against the other members of society to use it and control its use.
Bahro’s position is not the familiar Trotskyist one, however. He shares our view that the objective backwardness of revolutionary Russia and the weakness of the working class there led inevitably to a new omnipotent state apparatus; that Lenin and the Bolsheviks, whatever their intentions, had paved the way for Stalin’s forced industrialisation and all the “practically unavoidable consequences of a definite historical progress”. For him, as for us, the East European system is not a deformation of socialism.
In the GDR, social and political needs are subservient to the goal-rationing objectives of the state Party apparatus. The oligarchy at the top of the pyramid decides the goals for which the surplus product should be used, and subjects the entire reproduction process of economic, social and cultural life to its regulations. Bahro’s concern is with the conception of the division of labour in society, and he argues that the basic attitude of the producers to ‘their’ state is not essentially different from that of workers in Western society to ‘their’ corporations. He points out that “given the perpetuation of the division of labour, commodity production and money, nothing has altered in the principle of how work is assessed. Wages are simply the price that the appropriator state pays for the commodity labour-power.” (p.205). Just as the worker in the West not only improves his own conditions of existence by productive activity, within the given limits of the system, but above all expands capital, so in the GDR “he increases the potential for the Party and state machine’s power of disposal, and thus increases his own impotence in relation to it” (p.241).
Bahro maintains that for the last twenty years the GDR has been spending labour on a growing scale for luxury goods for the privileged strata. “We can hear”, he says, “ the director of a Berlin textile works, a factory moreover which predominantly employs female labour, say on the radio that ‘the growing needs of the population dictate to us the three-shift system’ — even if wardrobes are bursting! If you do not want to remain ‘backward’, you must throw out your furniture three times in the course of your life. We accelerate the ‘moral depreciation’ of technical consumer goods.” (p.269). This pressure on workers to keep buying is depressingly familiar, although Bahro rightly points out that while in the West trade unions are a reality, it is scarcely possible in the GDR to influence the relative level of income since it is the Party and government which adjust the proportions in favour of particular groups.
Bahro places his hopes in an accumulation of what he calls “surplus consciousness” which can no longer be satisfied and contained within the system of subordination and hierarchical division of labour. For the first time in human history, he argues, an energetic capacity is no longer absorbed by the immediate necessities of human existence. Whereas previously the scarceness of the means of satisfaction always opposed educated elites with uneducated masses, the increasing demands of technology bring about the conditions for widespread growth of individual development and consciousness.
Unfortunately, though perhaps inevitably, his ‘alternative’ programme leaves much to be desired: the abolition of all bureaucratic privileges and the democratic control of administrative processes is its extent. A new ‘League of Communists’ is to implement a series of measures, including university education for all and the rotation of manual and intellectual work, and the result (which he calls socialism) will demand the continued existence of the Party.
To be an effective opposition, however, the workers’ struggle for legal rights of political expression in the GDR must be coupled with a determination to achieve socialism, a world society where goods and services are freely available according to need; where the state, national frontiers, political parties and the wage labour and capital relationship itself no longer obtain. Only this is worth an eight-year prison sentence.
It should not be forgotten that the GDR remains a Soviet military zone, with twenty Russian divisions kept on a war footing. The three million East German workers who voted with their feet between 1949 and 1961 doubtless have few regrets about leaving what is now considered the best example of ‘socialism’ in practice. Yet it would be wrong to say that the grass is greener over the Wall; seeds on both sides have scarcely taken root.
Melvin Tenner
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