The fall of the Berlin Wall

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The fall of the Berlin Wall
9 November 2009

November 9 marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin
Wall. Since 1989, pictures of rejoicing people, hugging each other and
dancing on top of the Wall after the opening of the border crossing,
have been used as symbols for the collapse of the GDR (German
Democratic Republic) and the other Stalinist regimes that had come to
power in Eastern Europe after the end of the Second World War.

Numerous celebrations are being held in Germany to mark the event.
Thousands of visitors from throughout the country and abroad are
expected to attend a “Festival of Freedom” around the Brandenburg Gate
in Berlin. Amongst others, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Russian
President Dimitri Medvedev, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and US
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will take part in the ceremony.

Popular enthusiasm for the event, however, is limited. According to a
recent opinion poll, some 23 percent of eastern Germans consider
themselves as losers in German unification. Another 30 percent see
improvements in travel, housing and freedom, but consider developments
in the area of income, health, social security and social justice to
be negative. Only 32 percent assess their economic situation as
“good”, compared to 47 percent in 1999.

The contradiction between official enthusiasm and public discontent
speaks volumes about the real significance of the events of November
1989. The efforts of the media to glorify them as the beginning of a
new epoch of democracy, freedom and peace grow all the louder the more
obvious it becomes that they were nothing of the kind. There are few
events in recent history that have been as thoroughly mystified as the
end of the GDR.

The fall of the Wall initiated the end of a dictatorial regime that
oppressed any sign of opposition, particularly from workers, employing
a host of secret service agents. However, it was replaced not by
democracy, but by another dictatorship—the dictatorship of capital.
Following the fall of the Wall, the lives of East Germans changed
dramatically—without any consultation or democratic participation of
the people.

A total of 14,000 state-owned enterprises were sold, broken up or
liquidated by the Treuhandanstalt (Trust Agency), whose leading
figures consisted of representatives from western German big business.
Some 95 percent of the privatized companies were acquired by owners
from outside eastern Germany. Within three years, 71 percent of all
employees had either lost or changed their jobs. By 1991, 1.3 million
jobs were destroyed and another million disappeared in the following
years. The number of workers in productive industries today amounts to
a quarter of the number in 1989.

Large sections of the eastern German population soon lost hope in the
future. The declining birth rate is a telling indicator of the social
significance of this process. It sank from 199,000 newborn children in
1989 to 79,000 in 1994.

The consequences of this industrial and social devastation persist to
this day. The total population of the new federal states amounts to 13
million, significantly less than the 14.5 million in the GDR. Twenty
years after the fall of the Wall, an average of 140 eastern Germans
still move across to western Germany each day.

For years, the unemployment rate hovered around 20 percent. Only in
the last five years has it dropped to the current 12 percent. However,
this reduction stems not from the creation of new regular jobs, but
from the spread of low-wage and part-time jobs. Every second employee
in eastern Germany works under the low-wage threshold of €9.20 per
hour. The average gross wage is €13.50 per hour, far below the western
German level of €17.20.

The demand for “open elections”—at the heart of the demonstrations
against the GDR regime in the autumn of 1989—has given way to
disappointment about bourgeois democracy. During the last federal
elections, just over 60 percent went to the polls in eastern Germany.
In state and municipal ballots, the turnout was even lower.

Another myth about the autumn of 1989 is that the people overthrew the
regime of the SED (the Stalinist Socialist Unity Party of the former
GDR) in a “peaceful revolution”.

The mass demonstrations that spread through the whole country in the
two months prior to the fall of the Wall did contribute to the rapid
collapse of the GDR. But the decisive impulse came from elsewhere. The
demonstrators were knocking down an open door. As the first of the
“Monday demonstrations” moved through Leipzig on September 4, the end
of the GDR had already been sealed.

The decision was taken in Moscow, where Mikhail Gorbachev had risen to
head the Soviet Union in 1985. As part of “Perestroika”, he had set
the course for the restoration of capitalism. He was looking for the
support of the Western powers, and severed ties with the eastern
European “brother” nations by giving absolute priority to Soviet
economic interests and demanding world market prices for Soviet exports.

This drove the GDR—critically reliant on energy supplies from the
Soviet Union—to the brink of bankruptcy. Under the pressure of
financial problems on the one hand and a disaffected population on the
other, the SED turned to the West German government, on whose
financial loans it had long relied.

Günter Mittag, responsible for the GDR economy for many years, later
admitted to Spiegel magazine that he knew as early as 1987 that “the
game was up”. And Hans Modrow, the last SED prime minister of the GDR
from November 1989 to March 1990, later wrote in his memoirs that he
had considered “the course towards a unified Germany to be
irreversibly necessary” and “had decisively taken that course”.

Contrary to official mythology, the initiative to introduce capitalism
into the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the GDR came from the ruling
Soviet bureaucracy itself. This privileged caste had usurped power in
the Soviet Union in the 1920s by displacing, suppressing and finally
physically exterminating the Marxist opposition.

After the Second World War, this bureaucracy extended its rule into
Eastern Europe, with the acquiescence of Moscow’s Western allies. It
suppressed every independent movement of the working class—as on June
17, 1953, when it crushed the workers’ revolt in the GDR.

The Stalinist bureaucracy based its rule on the property relations
established by the October Revolution in 1917. But it did so like a
parasite that drains and finally destroys its host. By suppressing all
forms of workers’ democracy, it strangled the creative potential of
social ownership. On an international level, it and the Communist
parties under its sway stifled every revolutionary movement. After the
Second World War, it became a crucial pillar of the status quo,
stabilising capitalist rule on a global scale.

This condition could not last forever. Leon Trotsky, leader of the
Left Opposition against Stalinism, had already in 1938 posed the
alternative futures of the Soviet Union. In the founding program of
the Fourth International, he wrote, “Either the bureaucracy, becoming
ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state,
will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back
into capitalism, or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and
open the way to socialism”.

Fundamental changes in the world economy, appearing in the early
1980s, sharpened the contradictions in the Stalinist countries to the
breaking point. The globalisation of production, together with the
introduction of computers and new communications technologies, left
the nationally based economies of these countries far behind.

Signs of imminent social rebellion increased, especially with the rise
of the Solidarity movement in Poland. As Trotsky had predicted, the
bureaucracy reacted by overturning the new forms of property relations
and throwing the country back into capitalism. This is the
significance of Gorbachev’s rise to power. It also sealed the fate of
the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe that owed their power
exclusively to Moscow.

The demonstrators, marching through the towns and cities of the GDR in
late 1989, were unaware of this context. They were venting their
pent-up rage towards the ruling bureaucracy and a feeling of economic
and political impasse. The movement originally began as a flight to
the West. It was socially heterogeneous and politically confused, and
had neither a clearly defined aim, nor an understanding of the social
forces it was confronting. It thus lent itself easily to manipulation
and exploitation.

The spokesmen of the protests came from the citizens’ rights movement.
They were priests, lawyers and artists whose demands were limited to a
reform of, and dialogue with, the existing regime. As soon as the
regime made a few initial concessions—replacing Erich Honecker with
Egon Krenz and Hans Modrow—they worked closely together with the SED
in order to bring the protest movement under control and hand over the
initiative to the West German government of Helmut Kohl. First they
participated in the "Round Table" talks with the government of Modrow,
and then they joined it.

With its agreement to a monetary union with West Germany in the spring
of 1989 the Modrow government sealed the end of the GDR. The
introduction of the D Mark was a poisoned chalice. It created access
to sorely desired West German consumer goods, but at the same time led
to the complete collapse of the East German industrial base. Priced in
D-marks, East German products were no longer affordable in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union, with which the East German economy was
closely intertwined, while, due to the lower level of productivity,
Eastern products were not competitive in the West.

There were many workers taking part in the demonstrations in the
autumn of 1989, but they lacked any perspective of their own to defend
their social gains, which were intrinsically bound up with socialised
property in the GDR. They had been cut off completely from the
tradition of Marxism and only knew—and despised—its Stalinist perversion.

Their lack of perspective was itself a product of the decades-long
domination of Stalinism, whose greatest crime was the systematic
obliteration of the socialist traditions of the working class. Long
before the founding of the GDR, Stalin had organised the liquidation
of an entire generation of revolutionary Marxists in order to secure
his regime.

Victims of the "Great Terror" of the years 1937/38 were not only the
leaders of the October Revolution, but also most of the German
communists who had fled to the Soviet Union in order to escape the
Nazis. Those who survived were servile bootlickers who had betrayed
their own comrades to the Stalinist hangmen. They later constituted
the leadership of the SED.

Only the Trotskyist movement fought against Stalinism from a Marxist
standpoint. While the Western media and politicians had access to the
people of the GDR, the Trotskyists remained banned and were regarded
as public enemy number one until its very end.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) not
only fought against Stalinism but also against all those who adapted
to it, such as the United Secretariat led by Ernest Mandel, which
regarded the emergence of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe as
proof of the capacity of Stalinism to play a progressive role. Under
the most difficult political conditions, the ICFI defended for decades
Trotsky’s standpoint that Stalinism could not be reformed but had to
be overthrown by a political revolution.

In the autumn of 1989 the German section of the ICFI intervened in the
GDR in order to provide the mass movement against the SED regime a
revolutionary orientation. The Socialist Labour League (Bund
Sozialistischer Arbeiter), predecessor organisation to the Socialist
Equality Party (Partei für Soziale Gleichheit), was the only
organisation to warn of the disastrous results of a restoration of
capitalism, without making the slightest concessions to the SED.

In an appeal distributed on November 4 at a mass demonstration in
Berlin, the BSA explained, "Political freedom and democratic rights
can be won only through a political revolution in which the working
class overthrows the ruling bureaucracy, drives it out of all its
posts and establishes independent organs of proletarian power and
democracy, workers’ councils, elected by the workers in the factories
and neighbourhoods, accountable to them and based solely on their
strength and mobilisation."

At the time, Ernest Mandel travelled personally to East Berlin in
order to defend the SED against the critique raised by the Trotskyists
of the BSA. His German co-thinkers took part in the Round Table and
later in the government led by Hans Modrow. In this way, they played a
vital role in cutting off the working class from the tradition of
Marxism and setting course for the restoration of capitalism.

The end of the GDR, the Eastern European regimes and the Soviet Union
unleashed a wave of triumphalism within the capitalist class, which it
is now trying to revive with the current anniversary celebrations.
However, such efforts cannot disguise the fact that capitalism all
over the world finds itself in a profound crisis.

The contradictions between world economy and nation state—between the
global character of production that has welded together millions of
workers all over the globe in one socially unified process of
production, and the division of the world into rival nation
states—broke the back of the Stalinist regimes two decades ago. These
contradictions, however, also lie behind the growing conflicts between
imperialist powers, the escalating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
unceasing attacks on the social gains of the working class and the
arrogance and greed of the financial elite.

These contradictions will inevitably lead to the eruption of fierce
social conflicts and revolutionary struggles. Workers must prepare
politically by drawing the lessons from 1989 and adopting the
international socialist program defended by the ICFI against Stalinism.

Peter Schwarz

Copyright © 1998-2009 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/nov2009/pers-n09.shtml

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