Why did the GDR fail?

I'm just tired of tankies shitting up this board with their non-understanding of Marx.

I refuse to believe that it failed because of muh human rights. There are a lot of states out there more repressive than the GDR and they are doing fine. This seems like a cheap liberal narrative.

What are the economic reasons for its failure? That's what leftism should focus on, to also learn from its example.

They were operating on extremely limited budget. Any online store has more personal information about you than the Stasi ever would have.

>yo fuckers get off my ass i wanna be able to say what I want and not be thrown in das Gulag
>thats not what i meant

Pretty much everytime there is a solid discussion going on here its either tankies or leftcoms.

If you want to be a leftist you should try to break out of liberal thinking patterns

Its failure was because it was state capitalism and any society build around state capitalism will fail once the flow of capital is sufficiently disrupted, as happened as early as 1979/80 with the second oil crisis and it only spiraled out of control from there.

Have you seen the size of the Stasi archive?
It's fucking enormous.
The time and money spent on that garbage would have been better spent on actually improving the lives of their citizens.

Because it never managed to gather the support of its population. Because its economy was shit and only survived on loans from the west for the last years of its life.

You gotta be fucking kidding me, right? Maybe they had such an archive because, I don't know, there were no digital means of saving data?

The NSA and even a fucking online store has more data about the Stasi, as the other guy said. If this is a problem for you, you should be freaking out, like, right now

Pretty much. Wirtschaftswunder in Western Germany made it pretty hard for them. People were thinking that's how capitalism will work for eternity.

more data about you than*

This is also true, the DDR was also hamstrung by the fact that they couldn't produce anything that the West couldn't do better, and in many cases, cheaper.

- It was capitalism.
- It had never been the most developed part of Germany, by far.
- It was exploited by the USSR.

It did an amazing job with those loans though, surviving on them for the last decade.

West Germany hat their ass blasted with money and an international investment program and profited off cheap imports from the Eastern Bloc. Now, after the fall of the wall, they are doing as shitty as everybody else with low wages and high living costs

Which is also caused by the fact that the Eastern Bloc wasn't the most exotic area of the world.

West could access exotic imports and Third World labor.

I don't mean in the sense of "people weren't free so LIBERTY AND FREEDOM BROKE OUT", but Stasi really was massive. In the mid 70s, it had 60-70 thousand employees and around 200 000 informal assets within DDR.
sage for offtopic

Apples and oranges.

The NSA doesn't break into my house and subtly re-arrange the furniture to let me know the ever vigilant hand of state security is watching me because I expressed an interest in rock'n'roll or owning a pair of bluejeans.

They know I like porn and have leftist tendencies, neither of which is a surprise to anyone in my life, and beyond that, they do not interfere in my life in any meaningful way.

Because they don't need to. Yet.

...

top lel, because you don't need this anymore. Quick access to your browser history does that job. What do you think the FBI did during McCarthyism?

Neither does the Stasi. Most people weren't even aware they were under surveillance.

It actually fucking isn't. How fucking anglocucked are you

Call me when the NSA manages to subvert a third of the population to spy on the rest of us and then you might have a point.

In theory, so are people who like rock music and own bluejeans, but that didn't stop the Stasi.

Just because the NSA exists doesnt make the Stasi any better. Having friends be pressured to spy on you is extremely disrupting.

Are you this dumb? They simply DON'T NEED TO DO THAT ANYMORE.

The NSA knows more about you than your mom. Just because it isn't your neighbour who does the spying doesn't make this better. You're a cuck

Then they literally know nothing about me that virtually everyone else in my life does.And it doesn't matter.

Dude, the fact that every state has massive surveillance implies that the moral leverage you try to get over the GDR is meaningless

Are you seriously retarded? The NSA doesn't need to subvert the population because they already subverted the tech companies. If you carry a phone then congratulations, you and everyone around you is a walking wire you fucking cuck. That's too say nothing of whatever meta data they have access to through Facebook or Google, who build files in you by proxy.

They know more than the Stasi. And that was your point, wasn't it?

If you're such a bootlicker that you happily give up all your privacy and obey, why do you dislike the Stasi?

Hollywood told him that the Stasi are evil men with grey coats and hats while the NSA are cool nerds like Snowden

As always the problem was with economy.
It simply couldn't keep up when with such military focus. That's the cardinal sin of east block countries in general.

I use a dumb burner phone.
It has no internet capabilities whatsoever.

Facefuck is bread and circus tier garbage I've never wasted my time on.
Google has nothing on me but whatever innocuous search history they can build on someone who has no Google accounts.

There's plenty of ways to limit whatever info the gubment has on you, and I guarantee you they have nothing that can incriminate me or be used to pressure me in any way.

What would you have done? Porky will invade or subvert you if you aren't vigilant. I know this is a problem but unless there isn't spontaneous world revolution this problem will remain for any socialist state

So we are all supposed to live like Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State? Fucking great, there sure is nothing wrong with the NSA.

I'm sure the Stasi would have no info about you if you lived in a cabin in the woods as well

Stop with your whataboutism. Thinking that the Stasi was great because the NSA exists is retarded af. Or do you think the NSA is also a great thing?

It's not Whataboutism. I call you out on your false premise. It's like complaining that a banana is curved and then saying "it doesn't matter that all bananas are curved, this is Whataboutism".

If there is technology, it will be used to spy on people no matter if you live in socialism or liberalism. Although admittedly the GDR, which was under constant siege and had to defy continuous capitalist subversion, would have increased surveillance. Yet it was never as huge as the NSA, and the NSA does it for no damn reason.

Dunno what you're on about, I live in a house I own in the middle of town, I just practice the bare minimum of personal security necessary to keep the alphabet agencies off my back.

I come from a time before the internet was an all-pervasive thing that some people can't seem to live without, and consequently, it never became all that important to me, meaning I can limit my interactions with it and not feel like I'm missing out on anything.

I post here and in a few other places, read news articles and opinion pieces, and once in a great while, check my e-mail.
And that's all.

90% of the population is checked on by alphabet soups through the Internet. Yes there are like some edgelords like you who are vigilant about this, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter to theme, the same way it didn't matter for the Stasi when some people managed to withdrew themselves from the surveillance. It's simply the technology which has changed.

But guess what, what if the NSA perceives you as a threat? The FBI will access your online activity and your computer. Let's assume they can't do that: They would just resort to old school methods and do the exact same shit the Stasi did.

Because it was only half a country. Part of the reason it fell besides it being a puppet of the Soviets in which if the Soviets went under they went under, is that the country was still literally divided.

It wasn't unpopular since I've personally seen more people like the GDR then oppose it. It seems that the problem was that half the country was in the NATO bloc and the other half in the Soviet bloc and in the end the NATO bloc won out and asorbed the GDR.

Kys

Mondragon Cooperative has been around for 50 years now.

wew

Didn't mean to sage

No, not all of them. Just worker cooperatives.

It was bland, boring, generic…and there was a wall around it so that the people could never see what was on the other side. It doesn't matter how good relative material conditions are, people thirst to see what's going on in the world, people are curious and thirst for knowledge. The GDR really should be framed as the greatest failure of the Soviet Union, on paper it should have been fine, in reality it was just a cold colorless machine that drove people to want more.

You've heard countless stories from history of the bored princess escaping her luxurious palace. It should be no wonder why these much less luxurious Soviet states didn't hold up.

It failed because state capitalism can't compete with regular capitalism. The GDR was a gigantic totalitarian shithole.

...

Eure Fragen: 1989 - Warum scheiterten alle Staaten gleichzeitig?
youtube.com/watch?v=nsILN0iBShA
(german video by KPD)

Only in western germany and Nazis, majority of those who actually lived there has a positive view on the GDR

Stasi did nothing wrong.
mfs-insider.de

NATO spent just as much if not more on its military, yet it still out competed the Warsaw pact.

It's just dialectics m8. Every action produces its opposite. Repressive totalitarian surveillance states produce an unhappy and belligerent populace.

It was a state

NATO also had the U.S., which had something like a third or more of the entire world's GDP in 1945. When talking about the Cold War it's very important to remember just how uneven the starting positions of the U.S. and USSR were. Even today NATO countries can neglect military spending because they can just rely on the Americans for it. The Eastern Block meanwhile had to completely rebuild on their own while keeping pace with Western military might.

it was a poor economic performance thanks to Einheit von Wirtschafts und Sozialpolitik, however it was far from broke, that's a myth constructed by the Treuhand that destroyed the economy of the annexed eastern germany on purpose.
This is widely accepted by the mainstream in the west nowadays, but still not common knowledge because of propaganda saying otherwise. People just don't care to look it up.

This. Die Linke is the successor party to GDR's ruling communist party, and their strongest support is in the East.

All over the Eastern Bloc people seem to have more complicated feelings about communism. The only places where it's unambiguously hated seems to be Poland and the Baltic States.

Eastern Europe was offered Marshall Aid, but Stalin made them refuse it. Yugoslavia accepted it and it benefited them tremendously. It should also be pointed out that western Europe grew faster than Eastern Europe, even poor shitholes like Greece.

This sure looks like a trustworthy site

in the Baltics and Poland anticommunism mixes with old and new strains of russophobia, much like in Russia 'communism' mixes with great russian chauvinism

Nah, that's a meme. Material conditions shape that. I'm sure the Arab population of the UAE are quite happy because they don't even have to work.

Good. We need countless waves of millions of footsoldiers to protect the revolution. Collectivize and militarize them.

Nig I work at a workers coop

It ain't socialism

People tend to be nostalgic regardless of circumstances. The people you are talking about have mostly spent their childhood and early youth in the GDR. Of course they are now going to view it more positive than others, since the notion of "childhood" is almost always a positive one.

East Germany is a shithole of poverty and unemployment now, and of course people notice that. Compared to that, the GDR was indeed better.

That's not the problem. The problem is that the workers didn't directly control the means of production.

underrated post

You people are worse than neo-nazis.

Kill yourself.

Kinda hated in Hungary too.

This especially. The German economy was extremely integrated prior to its division, and the main reason why the Allies allowed the various occupied zones in western Germany to unify was because the separate US/UK/France-occupied states simply weren't economically viable

This wouldn't have been an issue if there was coordination among the Comecon nations. Each nation focused on its own national economy worked for rebuilding but it quickly created bottlenecks and redundancy.

only by western-backed rightwing pundits.

This is where anti-tankieism goes too far and just becomes retarded liberalism.

issues with the gdr

Jesus christ this is only the half of it. It was only a quirk of diplomatic history that Herbert Hoover and George Marshall managed to prevent West Germany from being stripped to the bone and completely deindustrialized at the hands of Henry Morgenthau, the French, and British.

By contrast, the USSR didn't changed its unforgiving stance after the US had, and treated East Germany with extreme harshness. Aside from expelling ethnic Germans from all over Eastern Europe and instituting periods of slave labor, East Germany itself was plundered of nearly all industrial machinery and other capital that wasn't nailed down, in addition to the imposition of stiff reparations in both money and commodities, and perhaps worst of all a near-complete lack of reconstruction aid. This Soviet policy of brutal sternness toward Germany shifted slowly and far too little postwar.

The failure of the GDR, at least for its first decade or two, can be blamed squarely on Russian vindictiveness, as compared with American pragmatism.

No it wasn't. Whatever wasn't bombed to trash was looted and taken to the USSR.

The aid was constructed with a lot of multilateral economic policies which were fundamentally incompatible with their centralized economies. It's not like it was just free money or something.

You are right economically. But in terms of culture, Americans indoctrinated and guilt-tripped the Germans ten times more.

Soviets and Germans were shrugging their shoulders after the war because each sides committed atrocities, contrary to that the Anglos have this terrible behavior of lecturing the loser on a moral highground. GDR was antifaschist but in a sense that it treated fascism as an abstract phenomenon unlike the West who saw fascism as something inherently German. This is why West Germans are to this day massive classcucks and lickers of the American boot.

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Stop lying.

I think that had more to do with the Jews than anything else. Since the USSR was also in the process of stomping on their own "cosmopolitans", such outcry fell on deaf ears.

Contrast that with Japan, which was treated with kid gloves, because the victims of their atrocities were either behind the Iron Curtain, or backwater client states completely at the mercy of the Security Council.

It was capitalism.

t. Engels: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm

I guess Engels really was an anarchist all along.

No, he was a Marxist. For Marxists, socialism and communism is the systematic abolition of all things endemic and systemic to capitalism. This includes the (modern) state. This is obvious to anyone who's actually bothered to read Marx, Engels and Lenin instead of the accounts of Stalin and other demagogues for opportunistic, dead-end deviations.

It didnt fail they just abandoned it because of muh soviet oppression and nationalism.

hello Holla Forums, nice BILD propaganda right there.

the GDR did not fail, we were relatively well off. the un put us 12th place in the world in terms of living standard in 1989 and rightly so. there WERE no huge debts to pay back, this is a plain lie. debt per capita was 3 times LOWER than in the burger occupid zone, which still reflects in statistics today in comparison with western regions. gdp per capita was about half the size of west germany's. currency exchange rate to the freely convertible deutsche mark was 1 : 4, that was about on par with the french franc back then. there were no unemployed people, literally everyone had a decent income that enabled EVERYONE including complete and utter dumb asses and lazy liberal hippie shits who admired the west to lead a decent life on western german lower middle class level. our healthcare system was WAY better than what we have to deal with since schröder's "reforms" and the education system was also better than in the west, a fact that eastern german states can still dwell on, eastern german states always rank top in national and international comparisons especially in STEM.

now why did everyone STILL wanted to get rid of it and doesn't want to have it back?

- the DAMN wall. we were not allowed to travel abroad and not allowed to visit our western german relatives. this divided whole families and felt like a fucking prison.
- the government was moscow's puppet and completely ignorant yet arrogant know-it-alls at the same time
- there was no democracy, the party ruled in an absolutist manner
- the stasi was very annoying, yet not as ultimately annoying as western myths make it. it was barely noticeable in daily life however if you had relatives in west germany you had 3 spies observing everything you did all the time which ws the case for my parents. my das was unpolitical, my mom convinced communist, so was my grand dad and grand mom
- there were shortages on luxury goods and building materials due to embargos and incompetent central management, however there were NEVER any shortages on groceries, clothes and similar stuff, that's western propaganda bullshit.

t. east german who was 13 when the wall fell