East German revolution and fall of the Berlin Wall part 1

The 9th Nov 1989 the day of the Fall of the Berlin Wall is hailed as the birth of a free Europe and the end of Communism. Heiko Khoo presents an eyewitness account and an alternative view of the causes and consequences of this event.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• communism
• fall of the Wall
• Berlin 1989
• 9th Nov 1989
• Fall of the Berlin Wall
• Revolution
• 4th Nov 1989
• socialism

[heikokhoo]

I think there was a difference between how capitalist consumption and personal acquisition is regarded in Stalinist states and personal acquistion in capitalism.

[heikokhoo]

Well the fact is there was no political democracy, no meaningful economic democracy, and no meaningful culural democracy. Nor was there democracy inside the Socialist Unity Party. Public ownership could be democractically adminstered yes, but it was not.

[heikokhoo]

Well it is not a very convincing argument to say that there was no democratisation. Germany is a democratic state, there are more freedoms than there were in East Germany.

Are you saying that Lenin's concept of democratic rights (State and revolution quote below) existed in the GDR? If so this is not true.

[CommunistNewZealand]

it's difficult to understand your argument about the DDR as a dictatorship just because people with inegalitarian perspectives were deprived of owning a flash car.

What about the rich elite in capitalist countries? New zealand's prime minister has an estimated $50 million, but no one makes a big deal about this

[CommunistNewZealand]

@heikokhoo

'Ultimately, what the citizens of the GDR rebelled against was their comparative poverty. But this had nothing to do with socialism. East Germans were poorer than West Germans even before the Western powers divided Germany in the late 1940s, and remain poorer today.'

"Democracy, East Germany, and the Berlin Wall",

Stephen Gowans

Marxist Leninist web site

[Guevaristas]

'A Communist from his youth, Honecker was sentenced in 1937 by a Nazi court to 10 years' penal servitude. He was 25. He did not realise how lucky he had been in his sentence. As a Communist activist, he could have been sent to a concentration camp. There his treatment would have been harsher, and his chances of survival less good, than in the normal prison (Brandenburg-Goerdon) where he served his sentence.'

from independent uk (web page)

obituary-

erich-honecker-

1439458.html

[Guevaristas]

@heikokhoo but surely there was more of democracy in the DDR, as the majority of jobs were state, government jobs. Privatization of industry is essentially un-democratic, as it places ownership and control into the hands of a one or a couple of individuals

[COMMUNISTPHILOSOPHY]

democratisation??? What a joke

'And so in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority.'

V. Lenin "State and Revolution" (1918)