To some political commentators, the metaphorical fall of the Berlin Wall when it was breached by thousands of East Germans on 7th November 1989 is considered one of the most important events of the 20th century. Two questions immediately present themselves; why and for whom? If the two questions are applied to the working class and working class interests the answer is not the one to be found in the history books written by the winners of the Cold War.
Workers have long stopped dancing on the streets of Leipzig and other East German cities, chanting out “we are the people”. The workers who escaped the DDR and its secret police did not escape from capitalism. The working class remained a working class with all the attendant social problems of living within the exploitive wages system no matter on what side of the wall they happened to live. Millions of workers in Eastern Europe took the promises of a bright new dawn at face value, only to confront unemployment, economic hardship, and social turmoil.
In fact, even some Capitalist politicians, like the late Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister and Francois Mitterrand, the French President, wanted the Berlin Wall to stay up, fearing a powerful political and economic unified Germany.
The winner was the capitalist class in West Germany with access to a pool of cheap labour and a potentially more powerful and effective German capitalism through its dominant position in the European Union and its competitive edge on the world capitalist market. In a recent book, German Europe, the sociologist, Ulrick Bech, commented on Germany’s growing economic and political power in the EU. He said that a unified Germany now differs from the 20th century in one important respect: “Germany has no need to invade, and yet it is ubiquitous”; it no longer unleashes a blitzkrieg but a Troika. The political response in Europe to the increasing imposition of German political and economic power is violence and an unpleasant nationalism, not Socialism.
Socialists have been told by intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama that the collapse of “Communism” signified the “end of history”. But where would we locate the “end of history”? One place to start would be where Marx’s political ideas are reputed to be buried; under the rubble of the Berlin Wall.
Although most of the wall dividing East and West Berlin has long been swept away to be replaced in many places by smart and expensive commercial developments and luxury flats, its memory still carries powerful political myths and illusions. Standard European History books celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, at whose periphery some 136 people died while trying to escape, as a defining historical moment when a totalitarian political and economic system disappeared for good. The received wisdom from the academic historians is that the fractured and fragmented wall represents a “tomb stone” for the political project begun by Marx and Engels with the publication in 1848 of the Communist Manifesto.
The economist, Stephanie Flanders in her recent television programme on Marx, for example, tried unsuccessfully to link Marx’s critique of political economy outlined in his three volumes; Capital with the former DDR regime.Ms Flanders was shown ominously walking around the bleak and forbidding rooms of the former Stasi headquarters (now a museum), located in the Lichtenberg locality of East Berlin, where political prisoners were routinely beaten, tortured and killed, as through Marx’s writings on capitalism were instrumental in what happened there (Masters of Money, BBC2 October 2012).
And for many other opponents of Socialism, the fall of the Berlin Wall represents a freedom where millions can now enjoy the consumer utopia of Western capitalism with its “free markets” and shopping malls.
Capitalism; the instant gratification society with its illusionary but childish advertising mantra of “I, I, I, “me, me, me” and “I want, I want, I want”. A social system whose only core aspirational value is “to have and to consume” rather than “to be and to become”; a society which pursues the illusion of money breeding more money as if by magic and whose role models for the young are the rich and privileged minority whose often empty and vacuous lives fleetingly pass across the pages of the Sunday supplements or Hello Magazine.
Walking along the Berlin Wall heritage trail with its graffiti-sprayed fragments of concrete and twisted reinforcement bars as well as bumping into the obligatory commemorative museums and art installations, are we really tracing out a temporal contour leading to “the end of history”? The reality of Berlin gives an altogether different answer to the image of Berlin presented by the German State authorities who host “The fall of Communism” jamboree with other European government leaders every decade or so.
The City of Berlin is itself bankrupt mirroring the bankruptcy of economic liberalism which had sketched out a capitalist utopia of aspirational smiling and happy consumers living out fantasy lives offered to them by the advertising industry, that is, before the economic crisis of 2008 with its subsequent trade depression and austerity programmes of pay cuts, unemployment and deep reduction in living standards. If Berlin’s yearly interest payable on its 68 billion Euro debts is represented by individual 100 Euro notes it would be 97 times higher than the Brandenburg Gate. There are few smiles and whoops of joy from the German capitalist class, who has to pay the interest of this debt out of their profits.
As for the working class what freedom do they currently enjoy? There is the constant attack by employers on their wages and working conditions, the problem of unemployment, the intense competition for jobs and the constant exploitation of labour-power within the productive process with the generation of what Marx called “surplus value”. And there is the daily struggle to make ends meet; with a working class forced to carve out an existence in between pockets of unimaginable wealth and privilege – a Berlin which is now “a global magnet for the fashionable and the rich” (BBC News 27th March 2013).
Correspondingly, 32 percent of former East Berliners now want to return to the days of the GDR; from the frying pan into the fire and back again. In the bleak housing estates which scar the Eastern sector of the City, an ugly and growing nationalism is rife.
One of the fastest growing political groups is the neo-Nazis, like the 6,000 member National Democratic Party (NPD) who march through East German towns feeding off social alienation, anti-Semitism, fear of immigrants, no jobs and no future.
At the end of 2012, a report found that as many as 16 per cent of former East Germans holds a “Fixed extreme right-wing worldview” (The Independent 30th March 2013). A capitalist utopia of glass and steel shopping malls is no good to someone who is unemployed or living on the minimum wage.
The political project begun by Marx is alive and well and for a very good reason. Marx’s politics of liberation for the working class has no connection, contra
Ms Flanders and the BBC, with the totalitarian politics of the East German ruling class and its secret police. The establishment of Socialism has as its subject the working class not political leaders. Freedom for the working class is not freedom to shop but freedom from capital and the wages system.
Marx did not write for governments, apparatchiks, self-serving politicians and intellectuals. Marx wrote instead for the working class; men and women forced to sell their ability to work for a wage or salary. And he set down two important
guiding political principles:
“the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself” and “the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority”
(Communist Manifesto). Acted upon consciously and politically by a Socialist majority these are principles that will make history not end it.
The working class still has to act as a “Class for itself” (Holy Family, Marx). The demonstrable failure of capitalism to meet the needs of all society presses home the necessity for the conscious and political struggle by the world’s working class for a Socialist alternative. We are not “living in the best of all possible worlds”; we have not come to the “End of history”.
Of course, when the Berlin wall did come down, politicians, academics and the media lost no time to launch themselves into a sustained propaganda campaign based around the slogan “communism is dead” erroneously concluding that Marx, the “prophet” of communism, had been finally discredited. The German State even retains a larger-than-life bronze statue of Marx and Engels, originally erected by the East German authorities in Scholossplatz in what was East Berlin, as “a warning from history” for those daring to believe there is an alternative to the profit system.
But Marx does give a warning from history; capitalism can never be made to work in the interests of the working class; capitalism creates conflict and contradictions it cannot resolve. The capitalist utopia offered by economic liberalism to the world in 1989 was an illusion masking uncomfortable truths about markets and the profit system. To borrow a phrase from Rudyard Kipling –Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew – (The Gods of the Copy Book Headings 1919).
As a result of the world economic depression and its impact on German capitalism, publishers and bookshops in Germany have all reported a surge in sales of Marx’s works. Most popular is the first volume of his major work, Capital, read because the promise made by capitalism’s politicians to the workers in East Germany of the freedom to shop is as intellectually empty and socially alienating an experience as it is for workers in West Germany; a bound and closed world of commodities and commodity fetishism.
That Marx’s books are being read again reminds us that this was not always the case. On 10th May 1933, The Communist Manifesto and Capital were unceremoniously burnt. A few miles away from the Berlin Wall, Marx’s books were taken out of libraries and thrown onto a large bonfire by university students and members of Hitler Youth. Other works burnt included the poetry and plays of Marx’s friend Heinrich Heine who had written prophetically in his play Almanstor the remark – now engraved on a plaque inset in Bebelplatz: Dort, woman Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen” (Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people). An enclosed memorial library with no entrance door and empty shelves has been sunk into the middle of Bebelplatz with a glass plate set into the cobbles to mark the place where Marx’s books were burnt. There is some irony in using Berlin to question “the end of history”. The National Socialists (sic) thought that they too were standing at the “end of history” and about to establish a 1000 year Reich on the rubble of the Weimer Republic. Hitler’s racial State lasted for a mere 12 years; the Bolsheviks totalitarian regime lasted just 74 years and Pol Pot’s genocidal agrarian utopia a mere three years and eight months. Capitalism, too, is bounded by time; moving through history with an origin and potential termination in the class struggle.
However, as propaganda “The Collapse of Communism” has had a detrimental, albeit, temporary negative effect on the spreading of Socialist ideas. Few workers, at the moment, want to be associated with what they perceive to be a failed political theory even though in reality the case for Socialism has not failed at all. And joining organised political parties has also declined in popularity with anarchism and pressure groups a more fashionable vehicle for political dissent. The direct action associated with the Libertarian Socialists, Left Communists, Council Communists and Situationists dominate the thinking of “radical” university intellectuals who, while dismissive of the politics of Lenin and Trotsky, reject out of hand the revolutionary use of the vote and Parliament by the working class. And any form of planning of production and distribution has been temporarily tarnished by the demonstrable failure of USSR five year plans, nationalisation and centralization where even the production of nails and shoes required bureaucratic approval from the Soviet planners at Gosplan.
We are not living at the end of history. Instead, we are passing through a stifling and claustrophobic political conservatism; conservatism not experienced since the end of the Napoleonic War. In 1814 a victorious aristocratic ruling class imposed the Treaty of Vienna on Europe confident they had seen off the political ideas associated with the American and French revolutions. A similarly conservative reaction exists today throughout Europe reflected in the growth of nationalism, racism and xenophobia on the one hand and an almost unquestioned acceptance of market fundamentalism on the other. However if there is a warning from the past to those who believe history has ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it is this; 37 years after the Treaty of Vienna, the conservatism in Europe ended with the Revolutions of 1848; Revolutions which bought into the world The Communist Manifesto, a revolutionary Socialist political programme and capitalism’s gravediggers; the revolutionary working class.
(photo: The Brandenburg Gate 1989)
