CPA - The Guardian

I assume you saw the celebrations organised by the capitalist ruling class to commemorate the “fall of the Berlin Wall”. You could hardly miss it, after all. The anniversary was big news on the bourgeois media everywhere.

After reunification workers in the East who had never known unemployment suddenly discovered it.

Of course, like all things capitalist, great pains were taken with the terminology. They deliberately refrained from calling it the anniversary of the Anschluss when capitalist West Germany successfully took over socialist East Germany (GDR). That would have carried too many remainders of that earlier Anschluss when Germany under Hitler absorbed Austria.

Nor did they mention the stream of West German political leaders and assorted celebrities who flooded into the East of the country to campaign on behalf of “unity” in the referendum, all of whom were loud in their assurances that the people of East Germany would only benefit from unity.

Their jobs would not only be secure, they would multiply; they would retain every social advantage they already had (health care, job security, guaranteed education and housing, etc) but would have the added advantage of lots more political parties to choose from. In other words, they were told, you will have freedom!

Having no experience of political promises that were never actually meant to be kept, the people of East Germany, enveloped as they were in an overwhelming cloud of triumphalist propaganda that was already proclaiming that the Cold War was over and capitalism had won, voted yes to unity with West Germany.

Immediately, they were given a harsh lesson in the realities of capitalism. The GDR had had one of the most advanced agricultural sectors in Europe. It was effectively killed off by the new united government.

The vast agricultural co-ops of East Germany found their traditional markets handed over to product from West Germany’s private farms, while they themselves were starved of markets. Instead of exporting food they were importing it.

The country’s shipyards were shut down, its factories either handed over to the corporate successors of the companies that had owned them when they were nationalised after WW2 or simply sold off at bargain basement prices. The GDR’s economy was gutted, for the benefit of German capital.

Workers who had never known unemployment suddenly discovered it. Some at least must have realised “this wasn’t what those Western politicians promised”, but the country was flooded with consumer goods, ads for foreign travel were everywhere, as were car dealerships.

Propaganda about the good life that was supposedly opening up was everywhere. If some people were missing out, that was presumably their own fault, or perhaps just bad luck.

As well as unemployment and factory closures, the return of capitalism to East Germany meant the reappearance of neo-Nazis and other racists on the streets, and attacks on Soviet war memorials and on monuments to murdered Communist leaders like Ernst Thalman, secretly done to death in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1943.

However much people might deplore what is happening in their society, without political leadership they will seldom do more than grumble. Occasional spontaneous riots or demonstrations are the most that normally occur.

Concerted political action needs political leadership if it is to take place. In Germany after unification, the party of the former GDR communists, the Socialist Unity Party, demoralised by the pace of the events that had overwhelmed the GDR, succumbed to Gorbachev-inspired revisionism and embraced social democracy.

That left the banner of Marxism-Leninism to be held aloft by the relatively tiny German Communist Party (DKP), previously limited to West Germany.

I have written before about the propaganda war against the GDR. It is worth remembering some basic truths about efforts to build a socialist state in Germany.

More even than the Soviet Union, the GDR was a nation under siege. Imperialism attempted to block the GDR’s participation in international gatherings, never for one moment ceased offering GDR athletes or cultural workers inducements to defect to the West, even manipulated the commercials that played on West German TV (but which of course could be picked up in East Germany) to ensure that they always gave a positive slant on life in the capitalist West.

Something like seventy Western intelligence services had a station in West Berlin. Every step taken by the GDR government to develop its economy was promptly met from West Berlin by a counter campaign, taking advantage of West Berlin’s open border with the GDR: if the GDR planned to enlarge its petrochemical industry, say, then before long, persons working in that area of industry in the GDR would start to receive letters posted in Berlin offering them jobs in West Germany.

If enough took advantage of such offers it could cripple attempts to move the GDR economy forward. The only solution was to fence off West Berlin.

As I have pointed out before, the Wall was not built to keep people in but to keep other people out. And it worked extremely well. From the construction of the Wall onwards, the GDR’s economy took off; what had been the agricultural part of pre-war Germany, now became in terms of production the seventh industrial country of Europe.

Capitalism has much to celebrate in the overthrow of socialism in the GDR and the rest of Eastern Europe. Let them gloat. The world continues to turn inexorably towards the Left, and no matter how much it may shudder, falter or hiccup along the way, the general direction does not change, a fact that imperialism is all too aware of.

We can say with confidence that the future – of Germany as well as everywhere else – will be socialist.

No amount of capitalist rejoicing can change that.

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