West Germany fails in East Germany

From a discussion list.

July 1 marks the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the deutsche mark in East Germany in the runup to full reunification. But the economic benefits that West German politicians promised failed to materialize. What went wrong?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,703802,00.html 

 

Fascinating.

But "What went wrong?" is not the right approach.

"Why has the whole project been such a miserable failure from beginning to end?" is better. With the follow-up questions: "Why do East Germans still miss the old East Germany after two decades, in spite of everything (and there are a LOT of in-spite-ofs)?", and "Why was the whole fiasco foreseeable from the start?"

It failed because it was trying to turn back the wheel of history. It's just as impossible to force socialism back into its capitalist womb as it was to force capitalism back into its feudal womb. Of feudalism back into slave-states. This is very paradoxical - the new states are "weaker" than the old states, but a thousand times more viable. The GDR, the Soviet Union, etc were getting on quite well enough thank you, in spite of the in-spite-ofs. It was the Nomenklatura bureaucrats who were most dissatisfied, not the workers. They sold the workers down the river to keep their power and privileges in the shape of capitalists.

One little example I saw in the paper today can illustrate this. The usual propaganda about Cuba, and the usual crap about the country being on the brink of collapse (all non-capitalist countries are always on the brink of collapse according to official capitalist doctrine)... BUT one tiny tell-tale detail... Things are getting so bad now that SOME workplaces are no longer going to provide free lunches to the workers. FREE LUNCHES FOR THE WORKERS! In a country on the brink of collapse, that has no right to exist according to capitalist propaganda. Way-hay! Give me that kind of poverty any day.

East Germany couldn't be integrated into West Germany without being torn down completely and built up from scratch. And the people didn't want this. And you can't say you're making a people more prosperous if you raze their lives to the ground (unless, of course, if you're the US in Iraq or Afghanistan, you can and do). It could be brought into the Western sphere of power as a reservoir of cheap labour and cheap land, and that's about it. Referring to Russia in 1990, Kissinger wrote that the West had one year to push its reforms through - while the "euphoria lasted". Before people woke up to the fact that they'd been lied to and were being ripped off.

Question two: Why the nostalgia? 5 years after 1917 (at the most) Russians had forgotten all about the Tsar and Tsarism. It was just a bad dream. Poof, gone. It took less than 5 years for the new state to seem natural, and the old state to be deep in the cesspool of history never to be retrieved. In East Germany 20 years have now passed since the return of the capitalism everyone was said to be dying to get back. And the new state is still not natural, and the old state has not been forgotten. Twenty years!! And the richest capitalist state in Europe has fucked up completely in bringing hope and prosperity to a country with the same language culture and (more or less) history. It has poured money into a bottomless historical pit. It just can't afford the requirements. It has neither the money, nor the moral, cultural or social authority for the task.

And if West Germany can't manage to restore capitalism successfully in East Germany, where the hell CAN capitalism be successfully restored?? And by who?

Cuba (In Spite Of) is a model in Latin America. East Germany is not a model in Europe. Europe has no models since Sweden lost its halo.

Question 3: "Foreseeable?" I'll dig up some old discussion contributions I made back in the day. You'll notice that the Kissinger remark fits in with an obvious scepticism towards the whole restoration project. And it should be obvious that no single part of a country can buy up that country's whole economy. Reformist socialists had this illusion in the late forties. And failed. That's not the way economies work or history works. Post-capitalist society - proto-socialism if you like - takes over what it finds and makes something viable of it. Restored capitalist society destroys what it finds and makes a squalid mess of it. 

To force a vigorous baby back into the womb you have to chop it up first. 

Capitalism and the Western way of life bring security, prosperity and happiness to all - except they don't.

And humanity won't have security, prosperity or happiness until Capitalism and the Western way of life have been tossed into the cesspool of history along with Tsarism. And we'll dump the In-Spite-Ofs too, while we're at it.