SINCE October 3, 1990, the absorption of East Germany by West Germany is an accomplished fact. This involves the restoration of capitalism on the territory of East Germany, the West German bourgeoisie taking political power over the ruins of the Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorship — which collapsed as a result of a formidable democratic and popular movement in the fall of 1989 — and the reinforcement of the German imperialist state.
1) A political defeat
This outcome of the evolution unleashed in the fall of 1989 is the most negative of the possible perspectives advanced by the United Secretariat resolution of March 5, 1990: "The restoration of capitalism under the rule of a bourgeois state and by the submission of the economy to the hold of big capital...." There has not been a political revolution in the sense of a seizure of power by the working class, the establishment of socialist democracy and democratic planning. Nor has there been a "process of convergence by stages" of the two Germanies enabling the working class and the popular masses to develop liberating political perspectives, rejecting bureaucratic and big capitalist regimentation.
We have pointed up the gravely negative effects of the "Anschluss," both in Germany and internationally, for the working class and all the oppressed. The facts confirm the correctness of our determined opposition to German capitalist reunification and our warnings to the German and international working class:
• Economic effects: The dismantling of the bureaucratic planning structures in favor of the "free market" has so far only led to the destructive effects of capitalism. There is no basis for any optimism about the economic outlook on the territory of the ex-GDR. The "costs of reunification" are rising every month. The West German government to this day has been careful to give no exact figures. The Fiduciary Company run by West German directors, managing 8,000 enterprises employing 6 million wage earners, has done nothing but wipe out jobs and transform the leftovers into appendices of the big capitalist trusts. The West German capitalists' investments have remained meager, while they control the market for immediate consumer goods. Among other things, they have created a grave crisis in agriculture for the rural producers organized in cooperatives, who can no longer sell their products. The future facing the ex-GDR is one of becoming an "underdeveloped" region inhabited by second-class citizens.
• Social effects: While the prices of goods payable in marks are the same as in the West, the wage earners of the ex-GDR earn only half of what those in West Germany do. The blackmail of threatening to shut down enterprises, the lack of a credible alternative to the "hope" of attracting capitalist investments, and a feeling of insecurity limit the ability of the working class in the East to create a favorable relationship of forces for immediate demands. Mass unemployment, affecting more than 1.5 million, compounded by "partial unemployment" of more than a million people (at zero time in 90% of the cases), is already a fact in the ex-GDR. All the established political forces, including the social democracy, declare that mass unemployment is inevitable for an indefinite "transitional" period leading to a chimerical state of "accelerated economic growth." What remained of the social gains — full employment, low rents, social security, day-care centers, subsidized prices for necessities — are being destroyed step by step. Women are being driven to rediscover their "natural destiny" as housewives and mothers. They are the first victims of layoffs. The growth of unemployment in the framework of the united state is degrading the relationship of forces between the classes in the country as a whole.
The German bourgeoisie, which claimed until only yesterday that unity could be paid for from the state coffers, is more and more openly demanding "national sacrifice" in order to finance it at the expense of the wage earners.
• Political effects: After the victory of the East and West German bourgeois parties in the March 18 elections, all the democratic gains of the mass movement of the fall of 1989 have been destroyed. The East German government was only a puppet of the Kohl government, and was more and more openly insulted as incompetent and superfluous. The new state was created by a simple integration into West Germany and its state structures. The majority of elected representatives in East Germany were not present in the common parliament formed on October 3 in the old Reichstag building in Berlin. The united German state was formed without elections. Its constitution, with a few modifications, is that of West Germany. There is no question of a constituent assembly or a popular vote on the constitution and political system. The "round tables" in the GDR are no more than a bad memory for the bourgeoisie.
The civic movements have been weakened, as well as the conscious socialist forces. The West German repressive apparatus has been reinforced. The elections scheduled for December 2 will take place in conditions unfavorable to the left forces, such as the PDS, the Left Slate/PDS and the groups that have come out of the civic movements, and favorable to the rightist forces.
Legislation against immigrants and political refugees has become worse. The criminalization of abortion has partially been extended to the East, and the plan is to extend it fully in two years.
• Ideological effects: In order to get "national sacrifice" accepted, all the divisions among the oppressed have been reinforced. Racist, anti-foreign, anti-feminist, anti-Communist and even anti-semitic ideology is being advanced more strongly than ever since 1945, and sometimes backed up by violent attacks. Symbols and forms of mysticism referring to the past "Reich" are becoming commonplace. The proclamation of a "right to forget" the crimes of Nazism is more and more becoming part of accepted political discourse. Today a state premier of the Rheinland Palatinate, Wagner of the CDU, can say without touching off a wave of protest: "Never since 1933, perhaps since 1914, has the German people been able to look forward to such a brilliant future as today."
• International effects: The dismantling of the East German "people's army" has not brought on a similar process in West Germany or for the united Germany. The slightly reduced West German army is extending its authority over the territory of the ex-GDR. The united Germany is a member of NATO, which thus extends its operating range to the Polish frontier. The united Germany now openly aspires to share in the role of world gendarme alongside the other imperialist forces. It is starting down this road by gaining the right to use its armed forces even outside NATO territory, under UN cover, by participating in the imperialist intervention against Iraq in the Gulf. The united Germany will play an economically and politically predominant role in the EEC of 1992, reinforcing all its reactionary tendencies against the third world, against immigrants and political refugees, reinforcing political repression and social inequalities within the Community itself. At the same time, this united Germany is well placed to play a predominant role in the capitalist conquest of the East European countries.
• To sum up: The working class and popular masses in Germany and in the world, aspirations for emancipation, have been dealt a grave defeat by the capitalist unification of Germany, which reinforces the power of capitalism and imperialism.
2) The obstacles proved insufficient
The main obstacle to this negative evolution would have been an East German working class capable of contending for power and endowed with a high level of democratic self-organization and having enough confidence in its own strength to aspire to run industry itself in accordance with the needs of the population. This would also have supposed a West German working class capable of active class solidarity not only with the masses that rose up against Honecker but also with the wage earners of the GDR against West German capital. That was the precondition for the development of a credible alternative going in the direction of socialist democracy.
The subjective conditions for such an outcome were not assembled. The workers' self-confidence had too long suffered the devastating effects of the Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorship, which had deprived them of elementary democratic and political rights, strangled their creativity, their sense of responsibility and their critical spirit. The false alternative between "totalitarian bureaucracy" (largely identified with socialism) and the "free market" (a euphemism for the dictatorship of big capital) had made too deep an impact on people's thinking. The conformism of the Western social democracy, dominant in the workers' movement, made impossible any development of class solidarity on a mass scale that would have helped generalize the aspirations for emancipation against disarray and resignation. It is because we did not take sufficient account of such delays and deficiencies that we underestimated the tempos the offensive could take and its possibility of success.
Other obstacles that we mentioned in the March 1990 resolution proved insufficiently effective:
— The contradiction between the EEC-1992 project and rapid German reunification did not have political consequences amounting to a real "dilemma" in the short term. The other European states accepted unification because of the weight of German imperialism, thereby reinforcing the latter as a leading force in the Community. This test has obviously not yet been decided, since it involves the bourgeoisie winning out in social struggles that are probable, especially in West Germany, where the working class is highly organized and very much attached to its standard of living. But the bourgeoisie has chosen to take the risk.
— The contradiction between a rapid reunification and the interest of the other imperialist forces in détente with the Kremlin led by Gorbachev did not operate. The Kremlin even accepted the new Germany becoming an integral part of NATO. The reason for this is the gravity of the crisis in the USSR, and Gorbachev's choice to combat this crisis with the maximum aid from international big capital. He is ready to dump any principle to get that. He is acting in that way because the USSR, its economy and its state unity seem to be crumbling under his eyes.
— The problems that some capitalist leaders in West Germany saw more clearly than the government, the dangers of destabilization arising from a rapid absorption of East Germany, were, and remain, real. But this has not been consolidated in a line of more cautious convergence, because the adventurist line of "you get involved and then you see," the tempting possibility of taking power, rapidly got the upper hand.
The social democracy did not develop an alternative to the breakneck pace of the Anschluss. It limited itself to criticizing details, and completely accepted the logic of rapid capitalist reunification, although that led to reinforcing the political dominance of the conservatives and liberals. It should not be forgotten that it was the SPD that launched the slogan of "Germany, a united fatherland" in East Germany. In particular, it was difficult for the social democrats not to be outdistanced by the bourgeois parties in leading the real process. The SPD cannot now criticize the consequences of the tempo of a capitalist unification that it itself wished for.
The need for a socialist revolution remains on the historic agenda more than ever after the annexation of East Germany by West German capital, because the capitalist reunification bears the signs of regression. The perspective of a defense of a sovereign East Germany as a framework for the aspiration for a road of development alternative to capitalism was not realized.
Nonetheless, capitalist and state unity do not mean real unity. The nationalist rhetoric poorly conceals the divisions. One of those will remain the difference between the real situation of the populations in the East and West.
The unity that we want is built from below, through solidarity, through a common struggle for social equality and development of the creative forces of individuals freed from the material constraints of capitalist society and the political constraints of the state apparatus.
This struggle, thus, involves a special defense of the interests of the wage earners, women, youth and elderly people in East Germany in order to build real class unity.
It is important in Germany to form links among consciousness adversaries of the new capitalist and imperialist Germany, those who deplore the undemocratic way in which it was formed and those who rebel against its antisocial and reactionary consequences.
3. The underlying causes of the defeat
East German society lost its potential for development in the 1980s and slid toward a hopeless crisis. The middle and lower strata of the bureaucracy first lost confidence in their leaders and then in the system itself. In the final phase of the death agony of East Germany, they no longer defended the state.
Parallel to this breakdown of the ruling bureaucracy, an opposition developed that was weak at first but persistent and able to act publicly. Its democratic demands and socialist references seemed to represent a political alternative for the masses.
The start of the political revolution that took form in October 1989 was a revolt of subjects without political rights, who had been tightly regimented for decades, with a level of freedom and real consumption lower than capitalist West Germany. Finally, they swept away a regime that they considered intolerable.
The "people on the top," that is the ruling SED bureaucracy were incapable of putting up armed resistance to the mass movement (the Soviet leadership forbade them to resort to this ultimate means, although such recourse was indeed envisaged by the Honecker leadership).
This weak resistance from the bureaucracy facilitated a rapid expansion of the mass movement, but did not push this movement, and in particular the workers, to form strike committees, to call unlimited strikes, to set up organs of dual power or to begin to organize self-defense.
The working class did not contend for power. The mass democratic movement did not lead to a social radicalization beginning to pose the question of the direct rule of those who went into the streets. What had appeared to be a beginning of the reconquest of the East German trade-union movement by the workers rapidly gave way to an offensive by the West German trade-union bureaucracy.
If the leadership of the SED was unable to met the mass movement with large-scale repression, it was also unable, once the enormous mass mobilizations started, to take the initiative of self-reform and of economic concessions to the masses (the large East German reserves of foreign currency were not used to buy great quantities of Western products, which would have made it possible to raise the standard of living of the masses immediately).
A vanguard that was both anti-bureaucratic and anticapitalist could have taken advantage of this. But the weakness of the nuclei that were both anti-bureaucratic and anticapitalist made them incapable of forming an alternative to the SED leadership and the West German bourgeoisie (represented by the SED's satellite parties). They were also unable to win the leadership of the civic movements. The offensive of the main West German capitalist political force, Kohl's CDU-CSU, did the rest.
Since the West German capitalist system seemed to the masses to be manifestly superior to the Stalinist regime, both in the economic and the political fields, and since the media frenetically prettied it up, the democratic socialist alternative did not acquire any immediate political value for the workers.
The socialist forces in East Germany proved too weak, too poorly organized and too indecisive. The West German left, far from firmly supporting them, acted in a skeptical, if not outright hostile, way toward them. Only a tiny minority in West Germany offered real and active solidarity.
All this led to a result that the March 1990 USEC resolution sketched as a possibility, and even the most likely one.
If the political evolution did not quickly offer a perspective for the masses, they would come finally to accept the capitalist unification of Germany as a lesser evil. This turnaround in the consciousness of the East German masses began to take place in the third week of November 1989.
The incipient political revolution that led to major democratic changes in a short period led to a social counterrevolution in the form of the absorption of the GDR by German imperialism.
The political responsibility for the defeat of the German, European and world working class suffered as a result of the annexation of East Germany by West Germany falls in the first instance on Stalinism, the Soviet bureaucracy and its East German satraps.
By setting up a regime in East Germany in their image, one rejected and despised by the great majority of the working class — which was, however, ready to abolish capitalism and at the same time create democratic political structures, as the whole experience from 1945 to 1947 attests — by maintaining this regime through unrelenting despotic repressive measures, by disorganizing the planned economy with irresponsible economic choices and with a total absence of workers' supervision and management of the enterprises, by permitting the SED bureaucracy to block any road to credible reforms over the past decade, the Kremlin created the conditions for the lightning collapse of East Germany.
Its political narrowness, Stalinism dogmatism, its hanging on to its political monopoly, its material privileges, its growing divorce from the working class, even in its own party, its exceptional rigidity in recent years, made the bureaucracy of Ulbricht and Honecker accomplices in the Kremlin's historic crimes.
The Gorbachev leadership played the role of catalyst in the East German crisis (cf. the "pro-Gorbi" demonstrations in the spring and over the summer of 1989), and it prevented the SED bureaucracy from resorting to a bloodbath. But since it was unable to offer a credible non-capitalist alternative to the East German masses (the economic situation in the USSR being much more dramatic than that of the GDR) and since it was up to its neck in a policy of retreat and concessions to imperialism, it, in this sense, facilitated the imperialist designs on East Germany.
The German and international social democracy also have their share of responsibility. In lining up at the head of the anti-Communist Cold War offensive, by hiding from the East German workers that the living standard of the masses in West Germany is in large part the result of a determined struggle by the workers' movement and not an automatic product of capitalism, and the participation of German capitalism in the exploitation of the so-called third world, which is itself an inevitable consequence of capitalism; by refusing to conduct any sort of common action with the workers of the GDR and never raising the perspective of a united socialist Germany, the SPD helped to undermine the class consciousness of the East German proletariat and to drive it into the political impasse of November 1989. It "worked for the king of Prussia" [for a proverbial ungrateful master], that is, for West German big capital and the CDU/FDP.
The West German bourgeoisie and international imperialism obviously worked away like beavers to do away with East Germany from the day of its birth. They did this in pursuit of clear class interests.
But this struggle could only end in success thanks to the objective help offered them by the Kremlin, the SED leadership and the SPD leadership.
4. Perspectives
After the defeat represented by the capitalist unification, the battle among the antagonistic social forces will continue. The task of revolutionaries henceforth is to work to prepare the way for the socialist revolution in the new united German state, for its destruction to make way for socialist democracy and democratic planning in accordance with the needs of the population, protecting the environment and assuming the tasks of international solidarity with the poor countries.
After the collapse of Stalinism in Germany, the rebuilding of a revolutionary socialist organization capable of winning a political majority for socialist democracy remains a difficult, complicated and long-term task.
Even to the left of the social democracy and the Greens, doubts have multiplied; the ideological pressure of the right has grown stronger.
In the short term, there is no realistic perspective for a left current with even the slightest weight emerging within the SPD, which represents electorally the majority of German wage earners. To the contrary, the SPD leadership is continuing to evolve to the right. The majority of party members are responding to the unification by rallying even more forcefully to the idea of the need for a permanent consensus with the bourgeoisie, based on a strategy of reforming capitalism, not of going beyond it and still less of overthrowing it.
Within the unions, there is a clearer differentiation. A wing of the bureaucracy accepts the strategy of permanent social partnership with the bosses.
Another wing (IG Metall) continues to resort periodically to mobilizations or even strikes controlled from above as a means of pressure for gaining concessions from the bosses. Moreover, there are not insignificant nuclei of class-struggle unionists in the rank and file.
But none of these trade-union forces is prepared for the moment to fight for a political project clearly to the left of the social democracy.
The Greens are also accentuating their reformist and gradualist orientation of integration into the bourgeois state.
Elements of the left wing of the West German Greens have been attracted by the Left Slate-PDS. But many of the Greens see capitalist unification and the reinforcement of German imperialism as a positive normalization, and equate it with the role of a "responsible" great power for German imperialism.
Most of the organizations of the civic movement in East Germany have chosen to ally themselves with the Greens. While developing progressive themes of a radically democratic sort, they have less sensitivity to social problems. They give priority to the fight against defeated Stalinism, and do not realize that today the enemy is big capital.
The revolutionary and socialist forces have been weakened, and are in full disarray. They are small, and at the same time many of them no longer believe that socialist revolution remains on the historic agenda, and thus they are under the pressure of reformist conceptions.
The evolution of the PDS is not finished. Debate, unity in action, electoral agreements with this party offer a possibility to gain practical experience while reinforcing the ability of socialist-oriented forces to have an impact on public political discussion.
But this can turn in a negative direction, if priority is not given to extra-parliamentary action, if cooption into bourgeois democratic consensuses is not rejected, if the PDS's rejection of the Stalinist past remains superficial and leads to a pure and simple capitulation to the dominant ideology.
5. Tasks
In these conditions, clarifying, defending and propagating the revolutionary program more than ever constitute a precondition for effective political work and for building the organization. They are long-term tasks that have to be pursued in a systematic and coherent way.
This is especially true since the struggle for socialism as a social model and the need for a democratically structured revolutionary organization placed within an international organization, as well in fact as the need for the masses fighting for their own interests through mobilizations, are more than ever being denied, put in question or neglected.
All this necessarily involves a separate organization of revolutionaries regardless of the precise form of such an organization or the tactic revolutionaries chose for building it.
Moreover, without implacably eliminating all self-justifying Stalinist and post-Stalinist doctrines, without a Marxist explanation of the degeneration and collapse of the post-capitalist states of East Europe, the revolutionary movement will not regain any real credibility.
From this overall analysis flow the precise tasks for Marxists in the period opened up by the Anschluss, tasks that the USec advises the German comrades to take up.
A. Their activity should be centered on defending the masses against the effects of growing mass unemployment, the cuts in social production and reductions in real wages, above all on the territory of the old GDR.
These tasks cannot be effectively fulfilled, even on this territory, without strong unions ready to fight, unless class-struggle trade union forces operate, playing a real and coordinating role for at least a section of the working class, and unless the masses become more and more actively involved in this struggle.
We are trying to direct these struggles toward action (strikes, factory-occupation strikes, active strikes in the public services) and radical organization (committees).
The most important objectives to be achieved are the following:
— Rejection of any "national sacrifice".
— A shorter workweek without any cut in pay, until full employment is achieved.
— Defense of public ownership, with the creation of self-management factory councils elected by the workers in East Germany. Opposition to the sell-out on the cheap of the enterprises in the ex-GDR for the profit of West German and foreign capitalists and East German speculators.
— Financing of the public sector by orders and subsidies from the public authorities.
— Immediate aligning of wages on the level of West German, a parity to be financed by the creation of a special fund for this purpose.
— Maintaining, generalizing and improving the social institutions of the former GDR, especially with respect to day-care centers, city hospitals and boarding houses at affordable prices.
— Financing these measures through a demilitarization of the country and taxing the capitalists, the highly paid and the rich.
B. With the disarmament measures being applied by the USSR and the announcement of a rapid departure of Soviet troops, the pretexts used by NATO in the past for justifying the arms race are vanishing.
In these conditions, the fact that Germany continues to be one of the most heavily armed and militarized regions in the world, as well as a threat to the freedom of many peoples, will more and more become the object of political controversy. Therefore, we must demand:
— The withdrawal of all foreign troops from German territory.
— A demilitarized Germany in a nuclear-free Europe.
— A fight against any imperialist intervention abroad.
C. Regardless of the failure of the political revolution in East Germany, the movement toward such a revolution that was unleashed in September 1989 continues to provide a democratic impetus that can be fostered, for example by taking our inspiration from the abolition of the Stasi and demanding the dissolution of all secret services and all forms of political police in Germany.