October 7 was for four decades the “Republic Day,” the national holiday of the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik). The date refers to the official founding moment of the GDR, based on the adoption of its constitution on October 7, 1949.
On the occasion of this day, we present an article by Tibor Zenker, chairman of the Party of Labour of Austria (PdA), who examines the essence of the GDR:
On October 7, 1949, the German Democratic Republic was founded. The first attempt in the German-speaking world to establish a socialist community lasted forty years, before falling victim to counterrevolution three decades ago.
The constitution of the GDR was a response to the conditions and problems of its time and prehistory: German fascism, in the service of monopoly and finance capital, had shattered the workers’ movement in Germany, dismantled bourgeois democracy, and established an overt dictatorship together with a system of terror.
The Nazis launched an imperialist war of conquest and destruction, which laid waste to much of Europe, murdered tens of millions of people, and carried out multiple genocides. It was not the German people who needed new living space, but capital that needed room to expand — raw materials, resources, cheap labor, spheres of influence, geostrategic footholds and access points — in order to re-emerge as a contender in the struggle for imperialist hegemony. In passing, the aim was to destroy the USSR, the first socialist state.
But things turned out differently: the peoples of the Soviet Union, the Red Army, the political and military leadership of the USSR, anti-fascist resistance groups and partisans throughout Europe overcame the fascist beast at immense losses. The murder squads of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS and their allies were driven out of the USSR, pursued into Germany, and brought to trial in Berlin — it is the indelible merit of the USSR and the communist movement to have freed the greater part of Europe from fascism and defeated the Nazis.
But if one truly wants to overcome and keep fascism at bay, one must eliminate its roots — and these lie directly in capitalism and imperialism. When, after the Second World War, it became clear that the Western Allies would create an anti-socialist front state with the FRG, rearm it, reinstate many fascist elites, and station NATO atomic weapons and forces aimed eastward, it was evident that the ruling elites in Washington and London had definitively abandoned their “purpose alliance” with Moscow, the Anti-Hitler coalition, and had again made socialism their principal enemy.
That was hardly surprising — fascism and world war had discredited capitalism in its entirety, including American and British capitalism. The peoples wanted peace, security, and a dignified life — things capitalism might temporarily feign but can never sustainably provide for all. That in countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe — and also in China — “people’s democratic” states were established and socialist transformations carried out was the only correct and necessary response. The question was posed more clearly than ever: socialism or (a relapse into fascist) barbarism. The GDR was the clear socialist and antifascist answer, as far as was possible in the Soviet zone of Germany.
It promised peace, social security, equality and justice, work and housing for all, and state guarantees in education, health, and pensions as a matter of course. But it promised nothing impossible. This is the mistaken yardstick often applied to the GDR and other socialist countries: soon after capitalism had laid Europe in ruins, one provocatively expected socialism — which actually had to rise from the ruins — to deliver an earthly paradise, a realization of some utopia in which everyone would instantly be perfectly happy. But socialism is not that and cannot be that. Nor is socialism a fool’s paradise in which everyone can do exactly as they please — such a kind of individualism has nothing to do with freedom. The socialist revolution is no magic trick that solves all the world’s problems in the blink of an eye — it only creates the possibility, the conditions, for doing so.
Socialism, to be consciously built, shaped, and realized, arises on the foundation inherited from capitalism; it means transformation and rebuilding within the realm of the possible. And part of the “possible” is determined by the adversary — in the case of the GDR, a powerful, heavily armed imperialist bloc, which endeavored to strangle socialism in its infancy, continuously threatening it via military alliances such as NATO, with thousands of nuclear warheads and hundreds of thousands of troops on its borders, with economic blockades, sabotage, and hostile propaganda — for that was the content of the continued class struggle, of the counterrevolutionary efforts by the capitalist West. Under these difficult conditions the GDR was founded and socialism was built in the eastern part of Germany.
Peace and existential security, technological and social progress, new human and production relations without exploitation, dismantling discrimination based on gender, language, etc., a socialist cultural life, art and leisure, and last but not least unconditional antifascism as a state raison d’être are among the great achievements of the GDR — a society and an economy in which people are central, not the profits of banks, corporations, and enterprises, not the expansion of militarism and imperialism. This is only possible on the basis of public ownership of the means of production and the political power of the organized working class, mediated through its highest class organs and organizations — not least the Marxist-Leninist Party, in the case of the GDR the SED. And such a state necessarily requires protection in the existential struggle via legislation, legal institutions, policing, the military, and intelligence services — against imperialist states and their counterrevolutionary machinations, against paid or misled insurgents, hostile agents, terrorists, and saboteurs — a self-evident necessity for any bourgeois-capitalist state, yet from socialism it is twisted into a moral noose.
Of course, the GDR was not “perfect” — it could not be. It certainly had mistakes, difficulties, and problems — after all, socialism is itself only a transitional society. The goal of the Marxist workers’ movement is a classless society of full communism, which no society has yet achieved. The perfidious opponents of socialism — including the particularly clever social democrats — however only “accept” a socialism that is perfect, a fairytale land in which everything dissolves into bliss as if by magic and the proletarian state and order power caress every counterrevolutionary “dissident,” every subversive clown or class and state enemy with velvet gloves — if that does not exist, one may as well stay with capitalism.
These are boldly high standards to justify a system of exploitation and oppression, which has been responsible for two catastrophic world wars, colonialism, fascism, the Holocaust, the use of atomic weapons, the condemnation of entire regions to poverty, hunger and death — so that in the more advanced countries a minimal reproduction level of labor power is secured and the working class does not revolt. And should they revolt, one resorts — when in doubt — to repression, emergency laws, coups, military intervention and fascism. To put it bluntly: even the “worst” socialism — and the GDR was by no means that — is better than the “best” capitalism. And the social-democratic or left-opportunist pony-farm “socialism” is in any case a naïve illusion, somewhere beyond the rainbow and common sense.
Since the so-called “reunification” of Germany — which was really more the annexation of the GDR by the still-existing FRG — this has been confirmed in every respect: Kohl’s “flourishing landscapes” in the new federal states are full of industrial ruins and “market-regulated” unemployed, deserted and decaying villages with large numbers of people who are no longer sufficiently profitable to even be exploited by capitalism — they receive minimal education and state alms at the lowest possible levels, from which one cannot even properly feed oneself: at McDonald’s you get a burger for 1 euro, a can of Dutch beer is 89 cents at the finally fully stocked supermarket (and a banana 20 cents — but who wants that?) — and the daily budget for food is already used up.
The understandable despair and justified outrage of people in eastern Germany is steered into the politically extreme right spectrum, for this is an ally — indeed an immanent part of capitalism — and remains its strategic reserve in terms of an authoritarian to fascist state orientation. But socialism — and especially that of the GDR — must continue to be fought with all means: with defamation, distortions of historical truth, ridicule and derision, with mockery and scorn, with lying campaigns promoted by the media, “educational institutions” and “science,” with the constant repetition of alleged crimes and injustices up to the particularly brazen and disgusting equation with fascism. All of this must be deployed against the GDR and its memory, the entire arsenal of anti-communist propaganda. In the case of socialism in Germany — unlike in the USSR, Eastern Europe, Cuba or China — simple racism of the usual Western anti-communism does not carry the same weight, even with all the Ossi and Saxony jokes.
Well, the capitalists and imperialists may rejoice at their provisional victory — it will not last. Everywhere — even in the FRG — capitalism has cracks and fractures. It is not peaceable and neither willing nor able to guarantee all people a secure existence, work, housing, and fair prosperity within the realm of the possible. Real capitalism wages war, it oppresses humanity and exploits it — this holds for the FRG as well. With its labored references to its transparent pseudo-democracy and staged elections, to its poorly disguised arbitrary and class justice, with its celebrated “freedom” that only signifies freedom for limitless profiteering, with the pitting of ordinary people against each other, with its lying campaigns in schools and media — the FRG can only maintain its façade for a limited time. The ruling elites know this — and they fear it tremendously. Because the truth will sooner or later prevail.
The final historical verdict on the GDR will be delivered not by the old or new FRG, but by the working class and the peoples who make their own history. They will prevail, even in Germany. As a result, the GDR — the best German state that ever existed — will not be resurrected, but a socialist Germany still better may come about, and it will honor the memory of the great efforts, experiences and achievements of the men and women who built the GDR.
The Nazis launched an imperialist war of conquest and destruction, which laid waste to much of Europe, murdered tens of millions of people, and carried out multiple genocides. It was not the German people who needed new living space, but capital that needed room to expand — raw materials, resources, cheap labor, spheres of influence, geostrategic footholds and access points — in order to re-emerge as a contender in the struggle for imperialist hegemony. In passing, the aim was to destroy the USSR, the first socialist state.
But things turned out differently: the peoples of the Soviet Union, the Red Army, the political and military leadership of the USSR, anti-fascist resistance groups and partisans throughout Europe overcame the fascist beast at immense losses. The murder squads of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS and their allies were driven out of the USSR, pursued into Germany, and brought to trial in Berlin — it is the indelible merit of the USSR and the communist movement to have freed the greater part of Europe from fascism and defeated the Nazis.
But if one truly wants to overcome and keep fascism at bay, one must eliminate its roots — and these lie directly in capitalism and imperialism. When, after the Second World War, it became clear that the Western Allies would create an anti-socialist front state with the FRG, rearm it, reinstate many fascist elites, and station NATO atomic weapons and forces aimed eastward, it was evident that the ruling elites in Washington and London had definitively abandoned their “purpose alliance” with Moscow, the Anti-Hitler coalition, and had again made socialism their principal enemy.
That was hardly surprising — fascism and world war had discredited capitalism in its entirety, including American and British capitalism. The peoples wanted peace, security, and a dignified life — things capitalism might temporarily feign but can never sustainably provide for all. That in countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe — and also in China — “people’s democratic” states were established and socialist transformations carried out was the only correct and necessary response. The question was posed more clearly than ever: socialism or (a relapse into fascist) barbarism. The GDR was the clear socialist and antifascist answer, as far as was possible in the Soviet zone of Germany.
It promised peace, social security, equality and justice, work and housing for all, and state guarantees in education, health, and pensions as a matter of course. But it promised nothing impossible. This is the mistaken yardstick often applied to the GDR and other socialist countries: soon after capitalism had laid Europe in ruins, one provocatively expected socialism — which actually had to rise from the ruins — to deliver an earthly paradise, a realization of some utopia in which everyone would instantly be perfectly happy. But socialism is not that and cannot be that. Nor is socialism a fool’s paradise in which everyone can do exactly as they please — such a kind of individualism has nothing to do with freedom. The socialist revolution is no magic trick that solves all the world’s problems in the blink of an eye — it only creates the possibility, the conditions, for doing so.
Socialism, to be consciously built, shaped, and realized, arises on the foundation inherited from capitalism; it means transformation and rebuilding within the realm of the possible. And part of the “possible” is determined by the adversary — in the case of the GDR, a powerful, heavily armed imperialist bloc, which endeavored to strangle socialism in its infancy, continuously threatening it via military alliances such as NATO, with thousands of nuclear warheads and hundreds of thousands of troops on its borders, with economic blockades, sabotage, and hostile propaganda — for that was the content of the continued class struggle, of the counterrevolutionary efforts by the capitalist West. Under these difficult conditions the GDR was founded and socialism was built in the eastern part of Germany.
Peace and existential security, technological and social progress, new human and production relations without exploitation, dismantling discrimination based on gender, language, etc., a socialist cultural life, art and leisure, and last but not least unconditional antifascism as a state raison d’être are among the great achievements of the GDR — a society and an economy in which people are central, not the profits of banks, corporations, and enterprises, not the expansion of militarism and imperialism. This is only possible on the basis of public ownership of the means of production and the political power of the organized working class, mediated through its highest class organs and organizations — not least the Marxist-Leninist Party, in the case of the GDR the SED. And such a state necessarily requires protection in the existential struggle via legislation, legal institutions, policing, the military, and intelligence services — against imperialist states and their counterrevolutionary machinations, against paid or misled insurgents, hostile agents, terrorists, and saboteurs — a self-evident necessity for any bourgeois-capitalist state, yet from socialism it is twisted into a moral noose.
Of course, the GDR was not “perfect” — it could not be. It certainly had mistakes, difficulties, and problems — after all, socialism is itself only a transitional society. The goal of the Marxist workers’ movement is a classless society of full communism, which no society has yet achieved. The perfidious opponents of socialism — including the particularly clever social democrats — however only “accept” a socialism that is perfect, a fairytale land in which everything dissolves into bliss as if by magic and the proletarian state and order power caress every counterrevolutionary “dissident,” every subversive clown or class and state enemy with velvet gloves — if that does not exist, one may as well stay with capitalism.
These are boldly high standards to justify a system of exploitation and oppression, which has been responsible for two catastrophic world wars, colonialism, fascism, the Holocaust, the use of atomic weapons, the condemnation of entire regions to poverty, hunger and death — so that in the more advanced countries a minimal reproduction level of labor power is secured and the working class does not revolt. And should they revolt, one resorts — when in doubt — to repression, emergency laws, coups, military intervention and fascism. To put it bluntly: even the “worst” socialism — and the GDR was by no means that — is better than the “best” capitalism. And the social-democratic or left-opportunist pony-farm “socialism” is in any case a naïve illusion, somewhere beyond the rainbow and common sense.
Since the so-called “reunification” of Germany — which was really more the annexation of the GDR by the still-existing FRG — this has been confirmed in every respect: Kohl’s “flourishing landscapes” in the new federal states are full of industrial ruins and “market-regulated” unemployed, deserted and decaying villages with large numbers of people who are no longer sufficiently profitable to even be exploited by capitalism — they receive minimal education and state alms at the lowest possible levels, from which one cannot even properly feed oneself: at McDonald’s you get a burger for 1 euro, a can of Dutch beer is 89 cents at the finally fully stocked supermarket (and a banana 20 cents — but who wants that?) — and the daily budget for food is already used up.
The understandable despair and justified outrage of people in eastern Germany is steered into the politically extreme right spectrum, for this is an ally — indeed an immanent part of capitalism — and remains its strategic reserve in terms of an authoritarian to fascist state orientation. But socialism — and especially that of the GDR — must continue to be fought with all means: with defamation, distortions of historical truth, ridicule and derision, with mockery and scorn, with lying campaigns promoted by the media, “educational institutions” and “science,” with the constant repetition of alleged crimes and injustices up to the particularly brazen and disgusting equation with fascism. All of this must be deployed against the GDR and its memory, the entire arsenal of anti-communist propaganda. In the case of socialism in Germany — unlike in the USSR, Eastern Europe, Cuba or China — simple racism of the usual Western anti-communism does not carry the same weight, even with all the Ossi and Saxony jokes.
Well, the capitalists and imperialists may rejoice at their provisional victory — it will not last. Everywhere — even in the FRG — capitalism has cracks and fractures. It is not peaceable and neither willing nor able to guarantee all people a secure existence, work, housing, and fair prosperity within the realm of the possible. Real capitalism wages war, it oppresses humanity and exploits it — this holds for the FRG as well. With its labored references to its transparent pseudo-democracy and staged elections, to its poorly disguised arbitrary and class justice, with its celebrated “freedom” that only signifies freedom for limitless profiteering, with the pitting of ordinary people against each other, with its lying campaigns in schools and media — the FRG can only maintain its façade for a limited time. The ruling elites know this — and they fear it tremendously. Because the truth will sooner or later prevail.
The final historical verdict on the GDR will be delivered not by the old or new FRG, but by the working class and the peoples who make their own history. They will prevail, even in Germany. As a result, the GDR — the best German state that ever existed — will not be resurrected, but a socialist Germany still better may come about, and it will honor the memory of the great efforts, experiences and achievements of the men and women who built the GDR.
