{"id":414292,"date":"2025-09-10T22:56:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T22:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/414292\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T22:56:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T22:56:09","slug":"no-east-germany-wasnt-socialist-and-neither-is-democratic-socialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/414292\/","title":{"rendered":"No, East Germany Wasn\u2019t Socialist \u2014 and Neither Is \u201cDemocratic Socialism\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

First published on The Left Berlin<\/a><\/p>\n

Heidi Reichinnek of Die Linke is\u00a0more popular<\/a>\u00a0among people under 45 than chancellor Friedrich Merz. Admittedly, that\u2019s a low bar to clear\u2014but the 37-year-old politician with the Rosa Luxemburg tattoo, co-chair of the Left Party\u2019s parliamentary group, rocks Tiktok with passionate speeches against the Far Right.<\/p>\n

What kind of system does she want? In an\u00a0interview with\u00a0Stern\u00a0magazine<\/a>, she was asked about the German Democratic Republic, better known as East Germany, and answered:\u00a0 \u201cWhat we had in the GDR wasn\u2019t socialism. At least not the kind my party envisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Every single right-wing influencer in Germany responded:\u00a0 socialism can only mean a repressive dictatorship. Following a\u00a0famous method<\/a>, let\u2019s define what socialism is not, in order to figure out what it is.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Definitely Not Socialism<\/p>\n

Reichinnek says she is for \u201cdemocratic socialism.\u201d She calls that a \u201cutopia\u201d (literally:\u00a0 a\u00a0non-place<\/a>), but a \u201cfirst step\u201d would be \u201cto bring public services back into public ownership,\u201d including \u201chousing, transportation, health care, and education,\u201d alongside a \u201credistribution of wealth.\u201d She does not mention what any further steps would be, but she explicitly rejects \u201cnationalizing everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Reichinnek is describing is more or less what West German capitalism looked like in the 1970s, before the neoliberal offensive. Prior to the age of privatizations, public services were mostly run by the state. Reichinnek simultaneously defends the Basic Law, which\u00a0guarantees private property<\/a>. So even in the golden age of the \u201csocial market economy,\u201d the means of production were still monopolized by a handful of\u00a0Nazi billionaires<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Just like \u201cdemocratic socialists\u201d Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the other side of the Atlantic, Die Linke envisions \u201csocialism\u201d as capitalism with more protections for workers. The problem is that such a regulated capitalism is inherently precarious\u2014it\u2019s only possible when capitalism is growing and the ruling class is forced to make concessions.<\/p>\n

As we\u2019ve seen for the last 50 years, competition between nation-states forces them to claw these concessions back. The only way to win lasting improvements for working people is to break out of this system by expropriating the bourgeoisie. Society\u2019s wealth should be under democratic control\u2014not the exclusive property of a few oligarchs who inherited billions from war criminals. Anything less is not democratic and not socialist. As\u00a0Rosa Luxemburg put it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWhat was considered equality and democracy until now:\u00a0 parliaments, national assemblies, equal ballots, was a pack of lies! Full power in the hands of the working masses, as a weapon for smashing capitalism to pieces \u2014 this is the only true equality, this is the only true democracy!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Also Not Socialism<\/p>\n

The GDR, in contrast, did nationalize just about everything. So was it socialist? Also not. Because socialism\u2014which\u00a0Marx described<\/a>\u00a0as a \u201cfirst\u201d or \u201clower\u201d phase of communism\u2014is not simply about state ownership. Socialism refers to a society in which the working class holds political power; as workers increasingly administer their own lives and society as a whole, class divisions and the\u00a0state wither away<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The GDR existed for just over 40 years, and in that time, the state did anything but wither; the Ministry for State Security grew incessantly, and surveilled, harassed, and imprisoned workers and young people they considered to be \u201cenemy-negative forces<\/a>.\u201d This wasn\u2019t just an insult to human dignity\u2014it was also an enormous waste of resources.<\/p>\n

With a planned economy, and without the need to constantly generate profits, the GDR made accomplishments that sound fantastical today. They completely eliminated homelessness and allowed\u00a090 percent of women<\/a>\u00a0to join the work force:\u00a0 the highest rate recorded by any country ever. They came up with innovations likenear-unbreakable glasses<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0hyperefficient prefab concrete housing<\/a>. Yet a privileged bureaucracy, obsessed with control, produced constant inefficiencies and alienated workers from what was supposed to be \u201ctheir\u201d system.<\/p>\n

In a recent video, the\u00a0YouTuber Fabian Lehr refutes Reichinnek and argues<\/a>\u00a0that the GDR was socialism, because despite any and all shortcomings, East Germany\u2019s economic base was socialist. The history of German capitalism shows that the very same bourgeoisie can rule via an imperial monarchy, a bourgeois democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a different bourgeois democracy. But this is because capitalism needs a state with a certain autonomy.<\/p>\n

Under a planned economy, no division exists between the political and economic spheres. \u201cThe economy\u201d does not act like a mythical force hovering above society\u2014it is subject to conscious planning. So decisions about who will produce what for whom are directly political. That\u2019s why it is no secondary question if the working class is directly exercising power or not.<\/p>\n

Lehr points to the GDR\u2019s accomplishments, but offers no explanation for why millions of people wanted to leave this supposedly socialist society\u2014or more generally, why productivity growth remained far lower than in the West. As\u00a0Leon Trotsky argued<\/a>\u00a0in the 1930s, socialism must increase human productivity, or it has no historical justification. And one irony seems to escape him:\u00a0 due to his long association with Trotskyism, comrade Lehr could have easily faced a long prison sentence in the GDR, as did many communists with similarly \u201cproblematic\u201d backgrounds. This does not speak for a particularly civilized society.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Real Socialism<\/p>\n

Socialism is fundamentally different from both Die Linke\u2019s magically reformed capitalism, but also different from the GDR\u2019s bureaucratically planned economy. A society can only be described as socialist if it meets Marx\u2019s criteria of evolving towards the abolition of classes and the state. It\u2019s a dialectical category defined not by an abstract checklist, but development and contradictions.<\/p>\n

A planned economy needs broad, constant democracy to function. There is no other way to accurately judge what producers can do and what consumers need. By suppressing all criticism, Stalinist states like the GDR denied themselves the possibility of good planning.<\/p>\n

There is a lot more in Reichinnek\u2019s interview to criticize. As a \u201csmall step,\u201d she thinks Die Linke should form coalition governments alongside the SPD and the Greens, \u201cto achieve what is achievable at a given point in time.\u201d In Berlin, we have seen what this looks like:\u00a0 \u201cleft-wing\u201d ministers privatizing public housing, deporting thousands of immigrants, and cutting wages for public sector workers. Small steps indeed! Recently, we saw leading members of Die Linke voting to\u00a0give \u20ac500 billion to the German army<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rosa Luxemburg, whose face is tattooed on Reichinnek\u2019s arm, rejected the idea that reforms to capitalism were the \u201cfirst steps\u201d toward socialism:<\/p>\n

\n

[P]eople who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform\u00a0in place and in contradistinction to\u00a0the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a\u00a0different\u00a0goal.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And while Reichinnek emphasizes her goal of joining government coalitions, Rosa Luxemburg took the opposite view:<\/p>\n

\n

[T]he role of [a socialist party] in bourgeois society is essentially that of an opposition party. It can only enter on scene as a government party on the ruins of bourgeois society.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"First published on The Left Berlin Heidi Reichinnek of Die Linke is\u00a0more popular\u00a0among people under 45 than chancellor…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":414293,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[42439,2000,299,1824],"class_list":{"0":"post-414292","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-die-linke","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-germany"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115182474717699227","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}