Germana Demokratia Respubliko

Beyond it being state capitalist, the mass surveillance was a huge problem, and not just propaganda invented by the West.

Is State Capitalism worse than Corporate Capitalism?

Well after the collapse of socialism literally everybody took the neoliberal pill, so even traditionally left wing parties swung hard to the right. Even so, it's no coincidence that Die Linke, the direct descendent of East Germany's ruling communist party is most popular in the East.

The USSR would have had to have been majorly reformed to be properly called socialist, and they imposed their deeply flawed system on the rest of Eastern Europe, so I doubt it was really a possibility. The best hope would have been something like Hungary in '56 if it could have avoided both Soviet attempts to crush it and Western attempts to co-opt it.

What sort of reforms can transform a state capitalist country into a socialist society?

Having per person gauranteed goods rather than a wage and fixed prices
More Democratic control of workplaces
Civil rights

idolizing often means emphasizing any positive aspects of GDR

I once argued with one leftcom about the dissolution of the east german industry
to my example of how VEB Robotron was torn apart and sold to Siemens for nothing, was his snarky remark "so what? it was state capitalist anyway"

that is what your "not idolizing" amounts to

You mean the same West that has databanks about what I purchased in the store yesterday and when I'll skype my parents?

The same West that monitors pretty much every digital activity and telecommunication in my entire life? Who would give a flying fuck about the Stasi tapping your phone then.

That actually existed in the GDR as to the degree in which it was feasible

What do you mean by this? The GDR was a constitutional state. They even had the same private law code than West Germany

At the time what the Stasi was doing was both extreme and, due to the hands on nature of the surveillance, far more feared. We are more surveilled now, but it's automated and people are far more accepting of this kind of bullshit.

Stasi surveillance also had a very automated character. Most of the times they just created files and archived them. Literally the same thing the NSA does today.

Before the digitalization surveillance in the West was very real as well. McCarthy era comes to mind or the countless bullshit American, British and French secret services pulled off. The only difference was that you could be arrested for stuff in the GDR which you couldn't be arrested for in the West. But then again, in 2017 Germany I get arrested when I have a YPG patch.

Forgot this one thing: Many people forget that the GDR was the frontline in the Cold War, and countless attempts of Western subversion were documented (this isn't propaganda, these things existed). I really can't blame them for building a wall and propping up surveillance.

Nothing out of the ordinary here.

I'm not blindly defending the Stasi. I'm trying to make an argument on why the Stasi existed and what it actually did. Sure, some aspects of it were kind of shitty but the paranoia was comprehensible and it's in no way different from what the West did. It makes for good propaganda, sure, so now we have movies about it where people in grey hats arresting liberal authors while sad piano music plays in the background. Give me a fucking break.

At least the Stasi had a reason for surveillance, the USA literally just does it for the lulz

c

Yep, not being an apologist at all. Totally objective. I must be the revisionist! kek

~95% of which failed because surprise surprise it's much harder to subvert a police state where something like 1% of the population are informers for the secret police.

But really if even autistic krauts can't forge a successful transitional socialist state I'm not sure who could

hey maybe they could've if they didn't have stalin and then as bad at socialism as stalin except in the opposite direction looking over their shoulder ready to send in the tanks

Most problems the GDR stem from the fact that East Germany is traditionally the agrarian part of Germany with a lack of industry while at the same time the few factories which existed were destroyed or demounted. It certainly didn't help that the USSR brought every scientist to Russia. Brain drain + no industrial base = overproduction of bread + lack of cars.

I'd like to see what would have happened if the GDR didn't fall, wasn't boycotted and were digitalized. They'd probably had to use that wall to keep people out, looking at the neoliberal state of West Germany right now.

You think the Western narrative about the GDR is objective?

wrong. that was/is true for silesia, east prussia, meck-pomm, schleswig-holstein, niedersachsen and particularly bavaria, but not for berlin/brandenburg, sachsen-anhalt, thüringen and sachsen. until 1945 brandenburg and sachsen were along with nrw and bawü the most industrialized and wealthy regions in germany. my city was actually germany's wealthiest city back then and used to issue 6 times more patents per capita than the german average during the early 20th century. for example both audi and bmw were actually founded in sachsen, siemens and a number of other big companies in berlin/brandenburg. yet sachsen was nicknamed "red kingdom" because it was a stronghold of leftism and the worker's movement most of the time. that ended with the end of wwii, soviet occupation and the cold war. another blow was the aftermath of the so called "wende", which forced deindustrialization due to forced privatizations of people's property by the "treuhand anstalt" and sudden implosion of the rgw market, which was deadly because the ddr ran an export-oriented economy just like the brd.
here's why the ddr lagged behind in terms of average living standard compared to the brd (it was still the world's 12th richest country in 1989 according to the un though).
- serious war damage
- war reparations to the ussr and eastern block, adding up to a multiple of the total marshal development funds the entirety of western europe received
- stalin might have been a good military commander, but otherwise he sucked ass and was a general prick. he neither had an idea about how to manage an occupation efficiently nor how to transform an advanced, industrious capitalist economy into an advanced, industrious socialist or communist economy, infact i think he didn't give a fuck about the well being of the ddr at all and neither did his successors. moscow's main concern regarding the ddr was apparently how to use the ddr's assets best for the ussr. as a result the ddr suffered a *massive* drain of wealth and brains since 1945, which benefitted western germany's economy greatly.
- trade embargos and sanctions imposed by usa + nato
- running obligations to the ussr. basically when the ussr fucked up something, moscow would just tax us more, as it was the case during the 1970s oil crisis
- heavily centralized economy. a few blockheads in berlin, would literally make detailed decisions on how to run any given production plant in the whole country, even though they would knew fuck all about the very specific production processes there
- in the 80s assholes like schalck-golodkowski would make highly disadvantuous production contracts with capitalist companies in western europe, basically selling goods and services to the west way under value. these goods would then just get another label there e.g. some danish clothing company would sell expensive clothes that were entirely designed and produced in thüringen.
schalck-golodkowski was one of the few ddr politicians who would not get trial for some dumbshit made up reason in 1990. the cunt got a nice property on starnberger see instead.

there's more but i don't want to type more right now

...

youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL1EKAPC-HQ2kYHrvv7TIcJO8_rohxL0w

Nothing is worse than the Soviet Union.

Bump

reported

How can a capitalist country be transformed into a socialist country in general?
Market socialism?

Maybe I'm indoctrinated by my family but I would much rather live in the USSR than the US.

worldwide violent revolution

any attempt to create a socialist state will fail so long as it attempts to do so within the confines of a remaining capitalist earth

You think pointing out that the western narrative is shit makes your shit narrative somehow less shit itself? Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler pls

inb4 fuck off anarkiddie hurr durr

I'm socialist

Stasi surveillance also had a very automated character.
I wouldn't call my family and mates from school writing reports about me with a regular re-assessment of my character and speculation about my motivations a very automated process.

The stasi was bad, BND were the good boys

Weren't the Stasi like REALLY fucking good at their job? From people I've spoken to and things I've read, they put the NSA, FBI, and Gestapo to shame.

The Stasi do not stand a chance against today's tools of mass surveillance.

How do we make any of these Great Again?

Germans are massively classcucked, probably the most classcucked country in Europe.