East Germany: A Doubtful Future

The events in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as in the rest of Eastern Europe, have come at a time when the world market dominates as never before the various national economies. The reign of capital is today less open to challenge: it is mobile and easily governed by the great central banks and the American Treasury Department, acting in concert; it is sustained by “neoconservative” ideologies; and the advocates of workers’ rights, in Germany as elsewhere, are on the defensive. The East German parliamentary elections last March and the communal elections of May, giving a majority to the right-of-center Christian Democrats and their right-wing allies, affirmed this situation, as it did the belief that prosperity ...