Capitalist restoration in East Germany no success story 'After the anti-socialist revolution there could be a social revolution

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Demonstrators in Saxony: Sign says: "The copper-silver foundry must live or else 1400 people will be out of a job." 'Increasingly, the question is being raised of whether the unification is going in fact to strengthen West German capitalism or undermine it.' 10 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 1991 The shiniest example so far for the heralds of the "end of socialism" has been the reunification of Germany under capitalism. It removed one of the most developed of the noncapitalist countries, the world's tenth largest industrial power.

It offered the spectacle of large sections of an industrial working class voting for a right-wing free-enterpriser party, the Christian Democrats, who got nearly 42 percent of the vote in the former East Germany in the Dec. 2, 1990, elections for the now allGerman parliament. It conjured up a vision of a capitalist great power dominating East and Central Europe.

One index of how quickly the fruits of this apparent capitalist triumph have proved sour is that in less than four months (according to a poll conducted by the very pro-free enterprise German weekly Der Spiegel) support for the Christian Democrats in the former East Germany has fallen to 34 percent, while that for the Social Democrats-the big losers of the first all-German elections-has risen from 23.4 percent to 33 percent.

Another sign is cries of alarm from the pro-capitalist politicians themselves, such as Alfred Gomoka, the Christian Democratic premier of the new federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. He was quoted in the March 11 Der Spiegel as saying that the mood in the the five states carved out of the old East Germany "could very quickly turn into social disturbances."

Peter Radunski, former national administrator of the Christian Democratic party and now Berlin senator for federal affairs, warned that by the fall of this year unemployment in the Berlin area could be higher than it was the year before the Nazi seizure of power. In that case, he said, "it's going to get hot."

So, more than 787,000 people (out of a total population of around 16 million) are already unemployed in the former East German territories. The German minister for labor, Norbert Blüm, predicts that the jobless total will rise to 3.6 million by the fall, that is, about half of the economically active population of the old East German territories.

Blessings of capitalism

The head of the West German political police, the Office for Defending the Constitution (Bundesamt fûr Verfassungsschutz), Eckart Werthebach, was quoted in the March 11 Der Spiegel as complaining about the weakness of his service in the old East German territories. "We are not nearly so much in the know there as we should be," he said.

The only political threats that he talked about were the neo-Nazis and the antiforeigner rabble-rousers of the Republican Party. But it is hardly likely that the West German political police force is concerned only about them.

Moreover, to judge from a statement by the manager of an East German brewing enterprise; Jûrgen Funk, quoted in the New York Times of March 12, the administrators of' the imploding industries are carrying out an important part of the neo-Nazis' program: "First we got rid of the foreigners, then the old people, and now we are encouraging masses of early retirements." This is another of the blessings of capitalism— the elbowing out of the vulnerable.

Working mothers are being especially hard hit. Los Angeles Iimes statt writer Tyler Marshall noted in an article published March 16 that whereas day-care centers were a free service in the old East Germany, they now charge up to a third of the average woman's income per child. The middle-aged and elderly are also getting a rude introduction to life in a market economy.

The Los Angeles Times staff writer referred to drastic rent increases for pensioners, such as one 72-year-old woman with a monthly income equivalent to $400, who found her rent hiked from the equivalent of $40 to $940.

In the March 18 issue of International Viewpoint, members of the East German group of the Fourth International, the world socialist organization founded by Leon Trotsky, wrote:

"People over 45 who lose their jobs will have practically no opportunity to get rehired; the re-introduction of capitalism literally makes them into a 'no future' generation. After putting most of the immigrant workers from other 'socialist' countries on the dole, it is women who are now bearing the brunt, especially in the southern regions of Saxonia and Thuringia, with their highly vulnerable industries relying on manual labour and on women."

Migration and rip-off

Another aspect of the capitalist principle of the "survival of the fittest" is that in the context of a law-of-the-jungle economic system regional disadvantages tend to be perpetuated and to grow worse.

Commentators in the capitalist press have begun to compare the old East German territories to chronically underprivileged regions, such as southern Italy, which suffer a steady drain of the population to the better-off areas.

It is estimated that since the currency union between East and West Germany in July 1990, 110,000 Easterners have moved West, and the migration is continuing. According to John Tagliabue in the New York Times of March 11, some 8000 to 10,000 are leaving Saxony, the industrial :.0.00.0.0.0.0.0.

heartland of the old East Germany, every month for the West.

Commentators in the Western press have given various explanations for the capitalists' reluctance to invest in the former East Germany, which is particulary striking in view of the lengths to which the German government has gone to sweeten the pot.

An article in the March 11 Der Spiegel stressed: "If you take all the incentives for private investments in East Germany, the German Economics Institute estimates that they amount to 700 individual measures. Never was it so favorable for investing in Germany."

It is estimated that big companies with a 50 percent tax burden get back 49 million marks from the state for every 100 million that they invest.

In the Washington Post National Weekly Edition, Marc Fischer cited other factors: Western companies did not want to assume the ecological liabilities of the Eastern enterprises, the backwardness of the infrastructure, hopeless unprofitability, and so on.

The article referred to a case suggesting that the West German capitalists were taking maximum advantage of the opportunity to loot the public coffers, specifically the holding company created to privatize the East German enterprises.

The Carl Zeiss optical company was divided by the border. The Eastern enterprise fired all but 5000 of its 69,000 workers, and even then the Western company claimed it was unprofitable and refused to buy until the state holding company, Treuhand, settled the obligations to the laid-off workers and other debts amounting to the equivalent of $1.3 billion.

The article indicated that the cost of privatizing the East German economy was beginning to weaken the West German economy, since the German Federal Bank "expressed its concern about inflationary pressure and the soaring deficit by raising its interest rate half a point."

Furthermore, "the combination of a deepening recession in many Western countries and the gulf war's drain on resources and attention have made the Treuhand's job even harder."

So, the lack of investment is endangering the whole operation of absorbing the former East Germany into the German capitalist economy. The German minister of public works, Adam Schwaetzer, was quoted in the March 11 Der Spiegel as saying that "all that we can do," in terms of modernizing the infrastructure, "is no help if the economy does not get moving."

However, investment in the former East Germany should create a sharp increase in productivity. It is clearly capital-poor, and not entirely because of the inefficiency of the bureaucratic economy. It was largely a backward region in Germany before the Second World War, and it was incorporated into a generally backward and capital-poor part of the world economy.

Furthermore, it has a well-educated workforce used to a lower standard of living than in West Germany. The failure of the capitalists to respond to this opening indicates a fundamental weakness.

Disillusion, anger, protests

Increasingly, the question is being raised of whether the unification is going in fact to strengthen West German capitalism or undermine it. That depends to a considerable extent on whether the East German workers can spit out the bitter fruits of capitalist restoration and wage joint struggles with working people in the other part of the German capitalist "miracle land."

The economic disappointments of the working people in the former East German territories inevitably go hand in hand with political disillusion; they have not gained control of their fate but have become helpless victims of forces they cannot control.

The owner of a small but profitable concern in the old East Germany, who might be expected to be a pioneer of capitalist restoration, was quoted by Marshall as saying: "We wanted this country to be the same as West Germany, but that hasn't happened. We're completely second-class people. They talk of democracy, but what do we decide? Nothing."

In the old East German territories, protests have been growing rapidly. On Feb. 19, the workers at Elektro-Physikalische Apparate Werke, the six largest producer of circuits in Europe, occupied the factory to protest against projected lay-offs. On Feb. 27, on the same grounds, workers in the Ermic electronics factory in Erfurt staged an occupation.

That same day, 50,000 people demonstrated in the streets. In East Berlin, Schwerin, and Halle, thousands of workers blocked streets; and in Magdeburg, 10,000 people occupied the down-town area. In Rostock, 5000 people came out, and in Leipzig, one of the main centers of the uprising against the Stalinist bureaucracy, 10,000 people demonstrated.

Engineering workers in MecklenburgVorpommern staged warning strikes. The state minister of the economy, Kajo Schommer raised an alarm: "After the anti-socialist revolution, there could be a social revolution, controllable by nobody."

There is obviously no lack of discontent with the results of capitalist restoration in Eastern Germany. The problem is finding an alternative to Stalinist bureaucratic management and the capitalist market. That requires party and trade-union organizations that can apply a program in the interests of the working people, a revolutionary Marxist approach.

Elements for that exist, although they are still small and relatively isolated by the discredit the Stalinist regime cast on socialism and Marxism. With the rapid disillusionment in the benefits of capitalism, however, interest in alternatives can also be expected to expand. •

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