By Will Firth
BERLIN - "Wir sind das Volk", chanted hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in cities throughout the GDR (East Germany) in late 1989, letting the ruling socialist Unity Party (SED) bureaucrats know that "the people" was more than an abstraction in their party program. Shaken by the popular upheaval, the SED regime was tipped out of office at the elections in March 1990.
But the euphoria of the anti-Stalinist revolution was short- lived: from the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, to official unification on October 3, 1990, there was a bewildering change of circumstances. In the space of less than a year, the mass support for grassroots socialist change fell apart under a barrage of propaganda from the west. The revolution's potential for self-management was lost.
Why was the GDR's revolution from below derailed?
One aspect is that the very real chance of workplace takeovers and workers' self-management went unrealised. To a large extent this is because the workers movement was paralysed after decades of bureaucratic domination: workers' organisation independent of the SED didn't exist, and morale was low.
The GDR was a satellite of the Soviet Union, set up in the wake of World War II. The workforce was highly mobilised and militarised. Unions lost all independence and were made "transmission belts" for implementing state policy. Rigid party/state control in the economy and workplace blocked this vital avenue of social change. Not only was punishment for independent activism severe, but people were easily manipulated because of dependence on their workplace for access to many services.
The pores where people could be active autonomously were mainly outside the workplace and the economy: in subcultures, within the church (which was in many ways an umbrella for opposition). Opposition to the regime developed in a mould detached from day- to-day working-class experience, and therefore became a largely intellectual, "middle-class" phenomenon. Alliance 90, Democracy Now, New Forum and other movements which challenged the regime were concerned mainly with green, feminist and civil-rights issues. So these were given priority in the struggle, not rotten safety standards, alienation from work, "powerlessness" and management caprice.
In official propaganda, the GDR was often referred to as "the state of workers and farmers". But 40 years of Stalinist rule led to a vacuum of workers' control at work, this fundamental aspect of people's lives. The fall of the SED was so abrupt that there was little opportunity for experimentation or rediscovering traditions of non-authoritarian socialism, e.g. anarchism. Such a development would have taken years or decades.
"Paralysis" shouldn't be taken to mean that there was no grassroots industrial action in the GDR at all: even after the 3 uprising, there were sporadic strikes, but most were isolated and short-lived. The lessons are clear: the more control state and/or union bureaucracy has, the less room there is for workers' control and initiative. This has big implications. It puts the task of organising federally, from the membership up, firmly on the agenda.
Another lesson is a "cultural" one: the more attention is directed away from the processes which produce our clothes, our bread and our everyday tools, the more it furthers the cult of the "political" and the control of administrators over the affairs of society.
The rise of neo-fascism and racism in Germany is closely tied to the hegemonic aspirations of re-emerging German nationalism. However, the spark which set the SED's house on fire was not "national aspirations". Rather, the regime provoked its collapse by sticking steadfastly to its old ideology in the age of perestroika and enraging even the political "middle ground". It bestowed the prestigious Marx-Engels Prize on the Romanian dictator Ceausescu. It marked the GDR's 40th national day in a more detached and conservative way than ever before, despite perestroika sweeping the east bloc, and it had numerous Soviet publications confiscated.
These reactionary developments shocked wide sections of the population, including much of the working class, and drew them onto the streets in October 1989 as the "Monday demonstrations" in Leipzig gathered strength. German nationalism or unification was, for most people, not even on the agenda.
But at later big demonstrations, "We are the people" started running up against competition from, and was to be replace by, "Wir sind ein Volk!" (We are one people). The nationalist slogan was first spread by groups that were to become the German Social Union, the East German sister-party of a Christian Democrat alliance overlapping with neo-Nazis. After the fall of the wall, West German parties descended hungrily on the GDR.
Trade with other East European countries was declining and state funding for enterprises was threatening to drop off. Economic crisis was on the doorstep. Right-wing parties held up rapid annexation by West Germany as the way out of the jam and into golden future. The "unity of the German nation" provided the ideological justification.
Attacks on foreign workers in east Germany are to an extent rooted in frustrations and scapegoating, but these feelings were rapidly manipulated into an ideology by neo-fascist groups from the west, which have now firmly established themselves in east Germany. The mainstream media brand "Ossies" (east Germans) as potential racists, brought up under a dictatorship with no understanding of pluralism. Evidence suggests that the media campaign is orchestrated by corporate interest groups. The attempt at racist conditioning of the indigenous working class needs to be seen in the context of east Germany now being a cheap-wage zone. The media campaign was aimed at intimidating Ossies, at creating a distraction and keeping a lid on impending class struggles.
This shows how readily the virus of nationalism can catch hold. The line between ethnic pride and aggressive national chauvinism is a very fine one, especially when a majority people starts on such a tangent. And nationalism is only one form of aggressive exclusivism: distinctions based on race, religion, ethnicity, sexual preference or other particularisms are dangerous seeds of division. Even identifying overly as blue-collar or white-collar can sow division and lead to paleo-Stalinist "workerism" or uni graduate elitism. The challenge of building a heterogeneous workers' movement is on the agenda, in Germany and throughout the world. Capitalism has been operating internationally for decades; we need to, too.
The theory that the GDR was doomed to collapse through "the weight of its internal contradictions" is a neat explanation; the trouble is that it's all too easy to make neat theories about historical inertia and dynamics of political systems after the event, but the anti-Stalinist revolutions caught even most specialists by surprise.
By the late 1980s the GDR had an ever more critical younger generation, a worsening environmental crisis in particular regions, run-down enterprises and increasingly decrepit housing stock. But the regime could have overcome these problems using instruments at its disposal: mass internment camps for dissidents were in the planning stage; there could have been forced relocations of the population and a shifting of production from environmental disaster areas to less damaged ones; the state might eventually have made some improvements to enterprises and housing.
The unexpected collapse shows how difficult it is to foresee the collapse of any political/economic system, or to predict the causes of a future collapse. Material, economic factors certainly play a crucial role, but a major factor also is the conscious will of social forces (especially the "revolutionary subject"). History is not simply a railway line guiding us towards inevitable revolution, as some crude Marxist viewpoints would have it.
The propaganda offensive from West Germany during the decades of Stalinism laid some of the foundations for the revolution of 1990. Many East Germans could pick up West German radio and TV (especially in East Berlin), and the country was not hermetically sealed against all imported literature.
It was not so much the overtly political messages from the West that had an effect, but rather the consumerism. This undermined the will and ability of many East Germans to imagine a society beyond both Stalinism and capitalism. Bananas all year round, video recorders and overseas trips lured many East Germans towards grudgingly accepting the West and everything that came with it.
When people don't know the injustice and inequality inherent in the capitalist system, or when they block it out because they've known anti-capitalism only as demagogy from a hypocritical caste of bureaucrats, it's easy for them to feel that capitalism is and fair system.
This opinion is still held by much of the not-yet impoverished population in "First World" countries. In order to destroy global capitalism and replace it with humane self-managed societies, it's essential to see capitalism as a global organism. Then we need to start thinking and acting globally ourselves - economically, socially, ecologically.
[Will Firth is an Australian anarchist living and working in East Berlin.]