The great surprise of the March 18 election in the German Democratic Republic was not that the pro-imperialist, right-wing parties obtained a landslide victory. That was a foregone conclusion. Even a casual observer of the international scene as it affects the European situation would have known that.
The counterrevolutionary trend which was sweeping Eastern Europe and which had originated with the bourgeois reforms and international initiatives of the Gorbachev administration was sure to reach the GDR, notwithstanding the resistance of the former Honecker leadership.
The real surprise of the election was that the Communists (the Party for Democratic Socialism — PDS), as the New York Times grudgingly admits, "finished a surprisingly strong third" with 16.3%. The Kohls, the Thatchers, the Bushes and the Mitterrands had all hoped that this election would deliver the coup de grace to socialism, would finish off the epoch of socialist struggle on the European arena that began with the October Revolution.
Not quite so. The vote in terms of parliamentary significance might amount to little. But going beyond surface manifestations, it holds the deepest significance for the class struggle coming at this historical point.
West German leader Helmut Kohl and his contemporary imperialist counterparts are reckoning the same way Napoleon III did after his coup d'etat in 1852. He thought that the crushing of the proletarian revolutions of 1848 had forever ended the struggle for socialism and the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society.
The Paris Commune of 1871 showed that the class struggle was alive and that Napoleon's dream of a European empire had died. Even the death of thousands of Communards did not signal the decline of the proletarian class struggle, but opened up a new era in which the class struggle was fought on a broader, more continentwide arena.
And when Otto von Bismarck took over the reins of power in Germany, did he not also think that by invoking the Anti-Socialist Laws, by imprisoning the principal leaders of the working class, by muzzling the press, by maneuvering with the counterrevolutionary Junkers and the equally counterrevolutionary liberal bourgeoisie, that his statesmanship would not only open the road for a unified Germany but would expand its frontiers and usher in a really great role for Germany as a world power?
And what of the social legislation extracted through the workers' struggles? Bismarck, who saw it as solely the product of his own genius, thought such concessions would forever end the class struggle for socialism in Germany.
How wrong he was.
What was Hitler's dream? In the name of the "National Socialist Workers Party," he thought he would so destroy the movement of the working class, root and branch, that it couldn't present a danger for the next thousand years. But that proved to be an hallucination.
What real difference is there, from the point of view of the anatomy of the capitalist system, between Hitler's dream of a unified Europe under his domination and that of Kohl, Thatcher, and Bush? Behind the exuberance of the imperialist bourgeoisie there lurk the same old capitalist rivalries, poisonous in themselves, whose toxicity is sure to bring convulsions similar to the capitalist collapse of 1929 which really brought Hitler to power.
The capitalist press unendingly refers to the March 18, 1990, election as "the first free election since Hitler abolished the Weimar Republic in 1933."
Yes, it was a free election, the same kind that bourgeois parliamentarism allowed in the historical circumstances of the early 1930s. But would the Sulzberger dynasty, the Knight-Ridder chain, the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News syndicate, or the Los Angeles Times-Newsday syndicate dare to compare it to the 1932 free election which ushered Hitler into power?
What were the conditions then? Were they similar to what has now taken place in the GDR?
In 1932, there had been a reign of terror by the Nazis, with bands of storm troopers attacking workers' leaders and even murdering leading Communists in their homes. A worldwide press campaign presented Germany as on the verge of collapse because of the economic crisis. Only a "strong Germany" could "save the republic."
The situation had reached a crossroads. Which way would Germany go? It would either choose a genuine socialist road, with the takeover of industry and the expropriation of the bankers and industrialists, or it would continue to be bogged down in bourgeois manipulation without in any way changing the economic course. Each of the principal organizations — the Communists, the Social Democrats, the Nazis, and the middle parties of the right — had already armed to one degree or another in preparation for the struggle.
In the November 1932 national election, the Nazi vote declined from the previous election in July (down to 33.1% from 37.2%), while the Communist vote increased from 14.3% to 16.9%. The Social Democrats declined slightly to 20.7%, but the combined vote for the two working class parties (37.6%) put them ahead of the Nazis.
Hitler had received only a plurality, and thus his appointment as chancellor was not at all a foregone conclusion. However, the middle right, the democratic right as it was called, veered to the side of Hitler. Hitler formed a coalition with them and opened a reign of terror against the Communists.
The president of the Weimar Republic was none other than the former commander-in-chief of the German armies, Paul von Hindenburg, referred to by the New York Times in a memorable editorial of the time as a tower of strength who would prevent fascism in Germany or a dictatorship of the Communists.
Nonetheless, in January 1933 von Hindenburg called on Hitler to become chancellor, authorizing him to form a government. Money poured into the coffers of the Nazi party from the big industrialists. Just a month later came the fire that burned the Reichstag, the German parliament. Immediately the Nazis blamed it on the Communists, and this infamous frameup became the watchword for a violent witch hunt.
Five days after the Reichstag fire, the last "free election" took place. Even in this atmosphere of extreme violence and hysteria, the Nazi party received only 43.9% of the popular vote. However, the Nazis declared the results of the March 5, 1933, election to be a grand victory for their party.
The petty bourgeoisie in particular had been stampeded into the camp of Nazism — on fear and false promises, of course. But it was a free election, according to the bourgeoisie at the time. To them it was preferable to having a socialist overturn which would end the economic crisis brought on by the Versailles Treaty and the worldwide capitalist depression.
That was a free election, real freedom. But was there really choice in the havoc created by the world capitalist crisis?
The day after the Reichstag fire, the Hitler-Papen government issued an emergency decree suspending civil liberties. Under the constitution, this was supposed to be only temporary. But it became the basis for the establishment of an open dictatorship by the Nazis. As the first condition in the preparation for the next imperialist war, the Communist Party was illegalized, its leaders arrested and imprisoned.
The so-called free elections were really a stepping stone for German imperialist finance to embrace fascism rather than to face the possibility of a workers' state in the heartland of Europe. Nobody understood this better than the imperialist financiers from London to Paris to New York, who had been draining Germany of its capital in the post-war period by demanding reparations (the Dawes and Young plans), but sharply eased up later and paved the way for Hitler as against the Communists, whom they viewed as the greatest danger.
How is the present election to be regarded? It took place under conditions of a cold political counterrevolution, in part engineered or at the least inspired by the Gorbachev bourgeois reformers. The gates to imperialism were first opened by the Hungarian renegade communist leaders. They violated their treaty with a sister socialist state specifying that emigration could only be opened up by mutual agreement. But the Hungarian regime conspired with the Bonn authorities and with Washington, as well as other imperialist countries, opening up the dismantling of the socialist republic in the GDR.
History will show that it really wasn't the opening of the Berlin wall that accounted for the dismantling of the GDR. It was the invasion of billions and billions of marks and dollars, which resulted in the counterrevolutionary destruction of a good part of the party. Armed force could not have done a better job.
The party leadership was persuaded by Gorbachev himself and his grouping to self-destruct, an act which can only be accounted for by seeing that the party had suddenly lost its moorings under the severe double pressure of imperialism and the Gorbachev bourgeois reformers. The leaders were "persuaded" to resign, and their seconds in command were "persuaded" to denounce the former leaders.
It is said that the worst wounds are those that are self-inflicted. The party leaders took the road of self-destruction, denouncing each other in almost a bizarre manner, whereas just the other day they had been friends and comrades.
They feared an open struggle. They feared a Tiananmen Square. They were cajoled, bulldozed, threatened, intimidated and above all confused. A sad spectacle for a party which showed such confidence only a short while ago.
The counterrevolution had a jubilant heyday. Parliamentary trickery was the means to take advantage of the total confusion. Why a party should suddenly destroy its own leadership, go back on its own traditions, can only be explained by the fact that it feared civil war and was convinced it would lose. Unlike the Paris Communards, who imparted so much revolutionary energy to the world proletariat, it chose the ignominious road of self-flagellation, indictment of itself, giving false testimony against itself and its leaders.
Was it not so during the great French Revolution, whose leaders were convicted as agents of England? Need we mention the confessions during the purge trials in the USSR, which the bourgeois reformers have exposed, not to revive revolutionary Marxism but to bury it?
So the masses were driven in the direction of Bonn. There seemed nothing else left to do.
It seemed a repeat performance of how the masses were driven into Hitler's ranks. It was a free election then. It's a free election now. Nevertheless, in 1932 the Communists in Germany polled 6 million votes. The capitalist press was surprised by the size of the vote.
They are also surprised that so many people — over a million and a half — voted today for the Communists, in spite of the incipient terror being prepared for them. The capitalist press had assumed the PDS would get around 3-5%.
What did the vote really show? That at least a million and a half people didn't lose their heads. But there is also a broader lesson in the enduring tradition of socialism in Germany. The party may have changed its name, even its goal. Nevertheless, it was still the party with which they identified and the general direction was still socialist. The last thing a class-conscious worker gives up is his/her party — unless they have a choice between that and a new, more progressive and revolutionary workers' party.
Bismarck in the 1890s thought he would rub out the workers' movement with his Anti-Socialist Laws. But they ultimately proved bankrupt. Socialism was regenerated even when its leaders followed an opportunist policy. The movement grew in numbers and breadth.
There is an element of regeneration in today's surprising vote. It shows the enduring quality of the workers' movement which cannot be rubbed out. The class struggle may wane at times, may be distorted and sent in reactionary directions, but in a modern, highly industrialized country, proletarian class consciousness will be revived because the class struggle pushes it on.
You can abolish political parties and jail their leaders. The capitalist press and politicians can confuse and manipulate the electorate. That's what bourgeois parliamentarism is all about. But the class struggle arises from the utter irreconcilability of the social character of capitalist production with the private character of capitalist ownership.
This the bourgeoisie cannot abolish without abolishing itself. And it is only the proletariat that can do that.
Last updated: 23 March 2018