I can only talk from my own subjective life experience, but my feeling was that the puppet government thing feels a little overblown. (Not saying that it was not tightly controlled in some instances, but the same could be said for West Germany and the US)Machinesworking wrote:I don't think East Germany was anywhere near a good example of socialism. From the start you had a Stalinist led Soviet Union taking over a country that killed 24 million of it's people; an occupation with malice. East Germany never had the feeling of independence and unity it would take to make a socialism work to begin with. I think in the end it takes a feeling that you're part of something greater than yourself and greater than a normal political system to make a socialism work. Being a wall of defense against the west with essentially a puppet government wouldn't give you that feeling.TomViolenz wrote: Not much that I would disagree with in here!
The "Real existierender Sozialismus" thing was not my framing, just the one used by many here. So I don't think we were cheated out of real Socialism.
The problem with Socialism in my mind is (and don't believe I wouldn't like this to be different!), that it is an idea, that is not really based on scientificly observable facts about human nature. There were quite a lot of things people in east Germany liked about Socialism (even if it was not the real one, I actually think that a lot of the leadership believed in what they preached!). But what never worked was to get the people motivated to work for the common good! I was just old enough to witness work ethics in the state owned industies (all of them).
It was appalling!!! People were fucking taking two hour naps on their work benches after getting a nice buzz on from breakfast beers...
If it was not for personal gain, people just said: fuck it! And, as sad as it might be, this is why Socialism in its pure form will always fail!
For capitalism to work people have to believe that everyone is essentially out for themselves. Basically capitalism works because people believe negatively about each other. It's kind of sad that it's the best we've been able to do so far.
Also regarding the choice of system after the war, you shouldn't forget that before the war up to 17% were voting for the communists(KPD) directly and up to 30% for the SPD (social democrats, but the system change to socialism was still an important part of there platform till the 50s). So there was actually wide spread willingness to change to Socialism at the time. Also many of the early developments where admistered by locals that were very convinced of Socialism. This only changed slowly when people realized how little say they had in the developments. But by that time, some of the niceties of Socialism were already showing, so now it turned to many normal people being open to it, while the idealists were frustrated and often became the systems strongest opponents.
(This is obviously only one side of the coin, but the other side gets talked about so often that I feel it is needed to mention this to keep some balance)
The problem with Socialism in my mind is, that it only works if you have close to a 100% of idealists, but that number never, in no system ever rises above 10%. But with 90% of the people looking mostly only out for themselves and their extended family, this can't work.
). And you get a continuum there: from a situation where every single economic sector is completely nationalised to a situation where there is a significant space for small private enterprises and co-ops.
