A Remembrance of Things Past: The GDR

For an old Cold-Warrior like Der Spiegel – the influential German newsweekly, recent opinion polls in Germany brought considerable alarm. After nearly two decades of German re-unification, pollsters found that a majority of citizens living in the former German Democratic Republic – what Westerners call “East Germany” – defend the former socialist state.

In the face of a continuous onslaught of triumphal propaganda demonizing the GDR, eastern Germans still hold a positive view of that country. In Germany – as in the US – every aspect of life in the GDR is painted as evil: GDR border guards killed border-crossers, as though US border guards never killed border-crossing Mexicans (the crucial difference, I guess, is which direction they are going!). The Stasi spied on GDR citizens, as though the odious berufsverbot and political snitching never occurred in The Federal Republic (not to mention the many domestic surveillance and blacklistings that have befallen US citizens). It was not enough that the achievements of German socialism were never acknowledged in the West, the end of the Cold War brought a savage assault on every feature of life under the “dictatorship”. Even The GDR’s most celebrated cultural gems – like Bertolt Brecht – were transformed into unhappy captives of Communism (in spite of the consistent content of his works).

But the people of the Ost, after a constant bombardment of thought control and twenty years of capitalism, think differently. According to Der Spiegel:

…57 percent, or an absolute majority, of Eastern Germans defend the former East Germany. “The GDR had more good sides than bad sides. There were some problems, but life was good there,” say 49 percent of those polled…

Instead of taking these results as a serious reflection of popular sentiment – perhaps re-examining some of the Cold War assumptions – author, Julia Bonstein, embarked on a mission to diminish the poll results. She found a ready ally in Klaus Shroeder, director of an academic institute that studies the GDR. He, too, is alarmed that “Not even half of young people in eastern Germany describe the GDR as a dictatorship, and a majority believe the Stasi was a normal intelligence service” – a finding he relays from his 2008 study of school children. He faults them for defending the GDR based upon family conversations rather than the official textbooks. Imagine challenging textbooks! “These young people cannot, and in fact have no desire to, recognize the dark side of the GDR,” he remarks.

Schroeder received over 4000 responses to his study, many outraged at his outrage. A sampling provided by the Der Spiegel article:

"From today's perspective, I believe that we were driven out of paradise when the Wall came down," one person writes, and a 38-year-old man "thanks God" that he was able to experience living in the GDR, noting that it wasn't until after German reunification that he witnessed people who feared for their existence, beggars and homeless people.

Today's Germany is described as a "slave state" and a "dictatorship of capital," and some letter writers reject Germany for being, in their opinion, too capitalist or dictatorial, and certainly not democratic.

The audacity of these former citizens of the GDR! Undeterred by these rebuffs to the official media line, author Bonstein sought some personal responses to the unpalatable poll results. In the cock-eyed contemporary media version of “balance and fairness” she located some prosperous former GDR citizens who would surely share her shock at the attitudes of the misguided multitudes. Surely Germans who were successful after the Wall came down would see the vast superiority of capitalism over the “drabness” of socialism.

Not so.

Thorsten Shoen, a 51 year old with creature comforts sufficient to impress Bonstein, vigorously defends the GDR:

"In the past, a campground was a place where people enjoyed their freedom together," he says. What he misses most today is "that feeling of companionship and solidarity." The economy of scarcity, complete with barter transactions, was "more like a hobby." Does he have a Stasi file? "I'm not interested in that," says Schön. "Besides, it would be too disappointing."

His verdict on the GDR is clear: "As far as I'm concerned, what we had in those days was less of a dictatorship than what we have today." He wants to see equal wages and equal pensions for residents of the former East Germany. And when Schön starts to complain about unified Germany, his voice contains an element of self-satisfaction. People lie and cheat everywhere today, he says, and today's injustices are simply perpetrated in a more cunning way than in the GDR, where starvation wages and slashed car tires were unheard of. Schön cannot offer any accounts of his own bad experiences in present-day Germany. "I'm better off today than I was before," he says, "but I am not more satisfied."

Schön's reasoning is less about cool logic than it is about settling scores. What makes him particularly dissatisfied is "the false picture of the East that the West is painting today." The GDR, he says, was "not an unjust state," but "my home, where my achievements were recognized." Schön doggedly repeats the story of how it took him years of hard work before starting his own business in 1989 -- before reunification, he is quick to add. "Those who worked hard were also able to do well for themselves in the GDR." This, he says, is one of the truths that are persistently denied on talk shows, when western Germans act "as if eastern Germans were all a little stupid and should still be falling to their knees today in gratitude for reunification." What exactly is there to celebrate, Schön asks himself?

Hmmm… This is not the picture paraded in the media. But, of course, who knows more about life in the GDR, Cold-warriors or the citizens of the former socialist country?

Another younger man, Birger, interviewed in a café, also defends the GDR: "Most East German citizens had a nice life… I certainly don't think that it's better here." He goes on to subtly prick the smugness of the Der Spiegel writer: "I know, what I'm telling you isn't all that interesting. The stories of victims are easier to tell… In the public's perception, there are only victims and perpetrators. But the masses fall by the wayside." Indeed, they do, especially when viewed through the eyes of privileged capitalist commentators who find a cause in every dissident, every unpublished poet, or every café intellectual crowing about the lack of freedom. But dry figures of income distribution, employment, social security, education and cultural participation make for boring copy… except to the masses.

The Cold Warriors at Der Spiegel will never grasp the meaning of the poll results, but hopefully their message will not be lost on those who seek a better life for working people in the US.

(The full Der Spiegel article is available on-line at the MLToday website: http://mltoday.com/en/majority-of-eastern-germans-feel-life-better-under-communism-642-2.html)

Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

The Pace of Exploitation Quickens...

Folks on the political left mock The Wall Street Journal. True, the editorial pages contain some of the most scurrilous, ugly commentary imaginable. The papers editorial stance would win praise from Benito Mussolini, if not Josef Goebbels.

Yet the economic data, analysis, and reportage is unmatched by any other English language mainstream news source, including The Financial Times and The New York Times. A friend once offered the explanation that “the ruling class needs hard facts to make informed decisions while propaganda is left to The New York Times and the other mainstream news outlets”. Perhaps that is so, but I can attest that I’ve found no better source for pertinent economic information even under its ownership by Rupert Murdoch. Part of the answer lies in their staff of 700 researchers, reduced under Murdoch, but surprisingly unfettered by editorial imperatives. Of course a reader must dig through or behind many of the articles to grasp the meaning of the proffered analyses, but its there to be mined by the diligent Marxist.

A case in point is a recent article by Ellen E. Schultz carrying the title “Top Earners’ Pay Is Seen Eroding Social Security” published on July 21, 2009 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124813343694466841.html). This remarkable article is based upon a clever examination of Social Security data on payroll taxes. Generally, salary and wage data are not distinguished by class when collected by our capitalist-friendly government fact-collectors. Consequently, separating income by class becomes a somewhat speculative and contentious issue among commentators. But the Social Security Administration, in its wisdom, excuses the wealthy from paying SS taxes on income above a certain level, arguing that this would be an onerous burden on the high income class. WSJ researchers take this divide as a credible break between “executives and other highly compensated employees” and the rest of us. They then sort the SSA salary and wage data using this divide, an unspoken, but most suggestive cleavage between the working class and the ownership class. They draw the following conclusions:

● Over one-third of all wages go to the “executive and other highly paid employee” class – the top 6%. The other 94% of employees share the remaining two-thirds.

●The portion going to the top 6% grew from 28% in 2002 to 33% in 2007, a share increase of almost 18% in only 5 years!

●The pay of the top 6% increased by 78% over the past decade while the rest of us saw a pay increase of 61%.

● In the 5 years from 2002 to 2007 – “recovery” years of strong growth – the “executive and other highly compensated employee” class enjoyed a 48% gain while the working class employees’ wages grew by only 24%, half the growth of the wealthy.

●The data on the top 6% vastly underestimates the growth in income of the ownership class by excluding unvested employer contributions, unvested interest credited to deferred-pay accounts, unexercised stock options, unvested restricted stock, incentive stock options, “carried interest” income, income categorized as benefits, and undoubtedly many other actuarial categories of hidden income.

●Elimination of the SS tax ceiling would guarantee, by the most conservative actuarial projections, the Social Security trust funds’ solvency for the next 75 years.

After digesting the shock of the extreme inequality of wage differences, special note should be taken of the trends in inequality demonstrated by the SSA numbers. Inequality has actually accelerated over the last decade, with the widely hailed “recovery” from the dot-com recession generating an even greater disparity of wages. Note, also, that SSA data does not reflect the economic crisis of 2008/2009, though the previous trend would suggest strongly that an even greater increase in inequality is in store for the lower 94% of employees in any coming recovery.

The trajectory of the incomes tracked in The Wall Street Journal study demonstrates a decided and growing partition of the fruits of labor in favor of the ownership class and its minions. In Marxist terms, this indisputable fact signals a parallel increase in the rate of exploitation. For workers, the only remedy will be found in determined, class-conscious militancy. Based upon the accelerating rate of exploitation, one is forced to conclude that the leadership of organized labor has failed to abate this class offensive against labor. The approaches of the past will fall far short of what is needed to win social justice for working people.

Attention must be paid to The Journal’s final point about Social Security which suggests a simple, painless solution to the contrived, exaggerated crisis of Social Security: eliminate the cap on the Social Security tax. I am reminded every day – as I glance at an old button circulated by the inestimable, late labor activist, Fred Gaboury – of the demand for an elimination of the cut-off on the flat tax funding the Social Security trust fund. Fred’s button read: Scrap the Cap. When the button was produced the tax was voided for incomes above $72,600. Today that limit has reached $106,800. Years have passed and we still can’t generate the political will to take this small step for justice and fairness. Shame on our corporately-owned politicians…

Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Clinton’s Ghost

The US was among the last industrialized nations to offer citizens a basic income guarantee – welfare – and among the first to dispose of it. When the Clinton administration succeeded in “ending welfare as we know it” in 1996, nearly 5 million families were receiving relief under the Aid to Dependent Children program. As of September 2008, welfare recipients were pared down to 1.6 million families under the Temporary Relief for Needy Families program created to replace welfare.

Historically, government stances toward the poor have been shaped by several approaches: neglect, punishment, charity, forced employment (public and private), the labor market, human rights and social duty, depending upon the class nature of government and the prevailing societal notion of the nature of poverty.

With the rise of capitalism, much attention was paid to the effects of poverty upon labor markets: the necessity of employment as opposed to idleness and self-worth defined by productive effort. For the capitalist system to advance, able-bodied persons were necessarily herded into the work force and away from independent, though perhaps sustainable activities. A new template was created: the citizen defined by his or her place in the work force.

As government became dominated by the capitalist class, the posture towards the poor took on a punitive face, branding those outside of the work force as lazy and undeserving of any compassion. Neglect and forced labor (vagrancy laws and the poor house) were prescribed for the able-bodied and charity for those unable to work. Both effectively deepened the work ethic and labor discipline among the population.

Socialists, on the other hand, advocated an income minimum for everyone as a human right or collective, social duty.

The mass misery of the Great Depression and the determined struggle of millions of working people forced a modest welfare program upon the capitalist class with the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935. Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) – later, Aid to Families and Dependent Children (AFDC) – offered the poor a modest guaranteed income base, though allowing little more than a subsistence life. Nonetheless, this constituted the US welfare system until 1996.

Several factors contributed to the destruction of this system, including the active, often violent attack upon welfare rights organizations (they were largely destroyed by 1976) and the rise to dominance of the neo-liberal doctrines beginning in the late 1970’s and capped with the winning of political power by Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US. The crude rhetoric of “welfare queens” and “welfare fraud” and the wide-spread racist edge was amplified with the public through media megaphones who dutifully restored the stigmas attached to the poor, stigmas that well serve capitalism.

When competition with the Socialist world receded after 1991, the US ruling class lost any incentive to present a human face to the rest of the world. Despite costing annually only $24 billion at its peak (roughly the program cost of 20 Stealth Bombers), welfare was doomed and President Clinton and Congress eagerly killed AFDC in 1996.

The TANF program, which replaced AFDC, limits income relief to a maximum totaling five years and gives the states a fixed amount to be mixed between job training and cash payments. Immigrants were largely excluded. Today, the average monthly cash payout to a family is an indecent $372.

When adopted, states scurried to force recipients into low-paying jobs while placing strict job-seeking requirements on assistance applicants. With a reasonably buoyant economy and an expanding low-wage service sector, supporters pronounced the changes a success.

But now, with jobs disappearing and unemployment exploding, the TANF program is failing to keep up with the needs of an increasing jobless work force. In June alone, 358,000 people exhausted unemployment benefits and essentially departed from the labor force. Public assistance is the only recourse for these people and millions like them.

According to The Wall Street Journal (6-22-09), 23 of the 30 largest states, accounting for 88% of the US population have seen increases in cases from a year ago. Unfortunately, observers have noted an ominous sign: welfare case increases frequently lag far behind the unemployment rate and the increases in food stamp usage. Many believe this lag reflects the draconian barriers placed in front of applicants, barriers designed to force job-seeking in a labor market where there are no jobs. For some it is a mystery: “…how can there be such a rapid increase in unemployment and long-term unemployment and not show up in the welfare [system]?” asks Mark H. Greenberg, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy (WSJ, 06-22-09). For others, it is an early sign of the collapse of Clinton’s final solution to welfare, a measure that will now leave an indelible stain on his accommodation of neo-liberalism.

Michigan is a case in point. With the dubious distinction of having the highest unemployment rate in the US (14.1 by the most conservative government tally), welfare caseloads were actually down 4.8% in April from a year earlier! Since food stamps are relatively easy to secure, recipients were up 13% in April, totaling 1.4 million people (There are only 70,000 families on welfare). But to receive assistance, an applicant must often look for work for a month before seeing a caseworker. The threshold for eligibility has remained the same for the last twenty years and benefits can only be received for two years in a lifetime. Should one qualify, the assistance is a mere $492 a month for a family of four. This forebodes a real human catastrophe in the not too distant future, a disaster only too avoidable.

The emerging welfare crisis shamefully has received little attention from the media (with the exception of The Wall Street Journal – giving credit where credit is due!) or politicians. At a time of escalating human suffering, it is outrageous that neglect and a medieval punitive posture continue to dominate the US approach to relief for the needy. Labor should be reminded that forcing the poor into competition for dwindling, low paying jobs only weakens the struggle for a fair days pay. We urgently need to raise the call for a minimum guaranteed income for all citizens including immigrants, along with a full employment bill similar to the Employment Act of 1946, but with a federal mandate to achieve a target, low rate of unemployment, a rate secured by federal hiring on socially useful public projects. If the money was there for bank bailouts, the money should be there for human needs.

Rapacious banks or human lives? The choice should be easy…

Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

A response to Looking Back...

In response to my post Looking Back..., Melinda wrote:

I hope this call for an independent progressive, better socialist organization will be followed by an analysis as to WHAT political elements of North America are capable of such an organization. I do not see any. But I am a foreigner and hope to be dead wrong about this.

Would anyone like to take a crack at this challenging question?

ZZ

The Demise of an Old Friend

Friends tell me of the recent decision of the National Committee of the Communist Party USA to discontinue the print addition of the Party’s newspaper, The People’s Weekly World. The paper, the successor to The Daily World and People’s World, The Worker, and The Daily Worker, has been the public voice of the Communist Party since 1924. I remember well old timers – victimized by the extreme anti-Communist repression of the nineteen fifties – recalling how the paper was the only means for the CPUSA to reach outside of its own ranks during that raging tempest.

The legacy of The Daily Worker includes the treasured “Woody Sez” columns penned by Woody Guthrie and the sports reportage of the legendary Lester Rodney who did more to integrate professional sports than any of the self-congratulatory sports moguls celebrated by the media. The labor reporting was always unabashedly partisan and grounded in rank and file activism. On the cultural front, the paper’s writers often offered a contrarian view, welcome in times of conformity and timidity in the mainstream. Similarly, international reporting provided a refreshing departure from the big media’s subservient spin on the official US government line.

From the nineteen thirties, The Daily Worker and its off-spring were the public face of labor radicalism and socialist advocacy. Through the twists and turns of the US political landscape, the paper remained a place to find ideas that would be expressed no where else. Writers – from Theodore Dreiser to Herbert Aptheker – used the pages of the paper to express views denied in the capitalist media. For most of this period, the CP press was the leading “alternative” mouthpiece for socialism.

Through most of its life, Party leaders understood that the paper played a larger role than determined by paid subscriptions or financial health. It was conceived as an organizational instrument - a spark for activism – to be distributed at mill gates, shop floors, picket lines and mass meetings. Even during its hey-day in the thirties and forties, the Party paper exerted an influence far beyond its mail circulation. Stalwarts like the incomparable Jim Dolson delivered the paper through neighborhoods for decades, serving as a passionate missionary for the Party’s ideas.

In recent years, The People’s Weekly World has sadly followed a script issued by the Party’s leadership towards accommodation with both the Democratic Party leadership and the top rungs of the AFL-CIO hierarchy. For the most part, Marxist and class conscious commentary have given way to shallow, liberal writing and an obstinate, rigid defense of the most timid oppositional forces. More and more, one reads reprints from the liberal press in place of serious, challenging Marxist analysis. Stubbornly, the Party’s top leadership refuses to connect the decline of the paper’s following to the sapping of its traditional militancy.

I am told that the Party leadership has assured the members that the print edition will be replaced by a glitzy, state-of-the-art website that will be more in tune with twenty-first century fashion. But will it reach the millions of unemployed, the striking workers, the massed protesters? Will it demonstrate the passionate commitment of dedicated revolutionaries to the cause of those forgotten by the Democratic Party and left out of decisions taken by the far-removed leadership of organized labor? Will the internet or twitter speak to them or for them? Will it build a cadre of activists interacting with, conversing with, and leading working people?

What was once a powerful tool of agitation and education will become a small, soft-spoken voice in the vast universe of the internet. Where activists brought the Party’s views to the masses through distribution of the print addition, a Google search may now bring those views to the attention of the curious surfer wondering if the Communist Party is still around.

One can only hope that Party members will bring the leaders to their senses.

Zoltan Zigedy

Looking Back...

At the risk of alarming steady customers, inured to a weekly diet of apocalyptic pessimism, I must confess that I am becoming optimistic. This may seem in its way perverse. Just when a new President sends Congress a first message filled with perilous tidings at home and abroad, your Washington reporter suddenly begins to see hope ahead. I even feel a little embarrassed, like the prophet Jeremiah caught giving three lusty cheers... The appointments, the policy positions, have something in them for everyone.

Necessity may make his course tortuous but the direction is clearly towards peace. I feel that for the first time since Roosevelt we have a first-rater in the Presidency, a young man of energy, zest, and ability. It is a post in which any man of any quality must grow, but when a man starts out with the gifts [the President] so clearly has, we have the right to hope he will grow to greatness, and perform valiantly in the cause of mankind.

Are these the words of a Washington blogger caught up in the euphoria of the Obama Presidency? A national columnist?

No. The above was from a column written on February 6, 1961 by the doyen of progressive journalists, I.F. Stone. Stone - normally not given to effusive praise - was swept up into the magic of the Kennedy election, finding the all too familiar clarion call of hope, youth, and energy.

Nearly three years later, on December 9, 1963, following the Kennedy assassination, Stone wrote as follows:

...Kennedy, when the tinsel was stripped away, was a conventional leader, no more than an enlightened conservative, cautious as an old man for all his youth, with a basic distrust of the people and an astringent view of the evangelical as a tool of leadership.

I don't know that many will look back upon the Obama years with the same disappointment - history doesn't give us perfect parallels. But I do know that when an experienced, somewhat jaundiced progressive like Stone can be seduced by campaign rhetoric and blinded by the "tinsel" of the moment, the celebration of Obama's election may mark a similar moment of self-deception. It is a measure of Stone's integrity that he admitted it (see his In a Time of Torment).

Already there are healthy signs that many progressives have lost the blush of first love. The Nation has published several editorials both critical of and with disappointment in policy decisions and compromises taken by the Obama administration. Recently, the journal has offered a call to activism, departing from the misguided advice of not rocking Obama's boat.

Typical of jilted lovers, many will turn against Obama with a bitter sense of betrayal. This is both naive and misplaced. Like Kennedy, Obama is neither an agent for change nor a closet reactionary. Like Kennedy, Obama is the executive of a vast structure welded to interests that have little in common with the interests of the majority of US citizens. Admirers of Kennedy will recall the enormous forces arrayed against change in his time: the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defense contractors, the CIA, Southern politicians, etc. Detractors will, with equal passion, note how little he did to challenge these forces. Likewise, those still taken with Obama fever will point with disgust at the obstructionist Republicans, the "Blue Dog" Democrats, the "disruptive" left, and other evil forces, as though they are not always a part of the two-party carnival.

It is not Obama, but this corrupted, broken two-party system of governance that betrays our aspirations. It is not designed for change, but to smother it. Never in the history of this undemocratic "democracy" have the wants and needs of the citizens been so distant from the intent of its ruling elites. This reality cannot be laid at Obama's feet.

The only antidote to the rot of this system is political independence within, but especially outside of the existing two parties. There is simply no reason that activists engaged in Democratic Party circles cannot work outside - independently, uncompromisingly, and vigorously - on progressive, advanced issues with no concern for ruffled feathers. To fail to do so, betrays any commitment to real change.

But more importantly, a divorce from the Democratic Party is long overdue. Those who see the decadence of the Democratic Party - and I don't understand how anyone could miss it - need to find a new home in the anti-corporate third-party movement and the struggle for socialism.

For the immediate future, we need to press ahead - with a national rally for single payer, with picket lines around the headquarters of corporate and elected leaders who oppose EFCA, with a call for a thirty hour work week, with elimination of the social security tax cap, with anti-war, anti-imperialist actions, and a host of other urgent tasks. If Obama wants, he can come along...

Zoltan Zigedy

Some Observations on the Hungarian Press

From Anonymous

Hi Zoltan, apart from this misspelling :) , your post is 100% correct. I can tell you about the Hungarian media, that usually serviently mirrors the international main stream. In this particular case it cannot go into "omission" mode, Rozsa is a well known person in Hungary. His family members (and the families of the other Hungarian guys involved in the plot) keep the thing alive.

That's why the Hungarian press reports are somehow weird (or plainly comical). Fact after fact emerges about this tiny mercenary ring. These facts paint a fairly coherent picture of a small paramilitary/terrorist group, just as you pointed out in your post.

The unfortunate Hungarian media has to report these facts. But they try their best to show the ring innocent (or unrelated to politics or whatever). The Bolivian police always looks unprofessional/agenda driven/ridiculus in the reports, not to mention Morales himself.

The net result is weird journalism. Or simply laughable if you are aware of the political bias that is behind.