November 9 marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall...
Numerous celebrations are being held in Germany to mark the event. Thousands of visitors from throughout the country and abroad are expected to attend a “Festival of Freedom” around the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Amongst others, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Russian President Dimitri Medvedev, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will take part in the ceremony.
Popular enthusiasm for the event, however, is limited. According to a recent opinion poll, some 23 percent of eastern Germans consider themselves as losers in German unification. Another 30 percent see improvements in travel, housing and freedom, but consider developments in the area of income, health, social security and social justice to be negative. Only 32 percent assess their economic situation as “good”, compared to 47 percent in 1999...
The fall of the Wall initiated the end of a dictatorial regime that oppressed any sign of opposition, particularly from workers, employing a host of secret service agents. However, it was replaced not by democracy, but by another dictatorship-—the dictatorship of capital. Following the fall of the Wall, the lives of East Germans changed dramatically-—without any consultation or democratic participation of the people.
A total of 14,000 state-owned enterprises were sold, broken up or liquidated by the Treuhandanstalt (Trust Agency), whose leading figures consisted of representatives from western German big business. Some 95 percent of the privatized companies were acquired by owners from outside eastern Germany. Within three years, 71 percent of all employees had either lost or changed their jobs. By 1991, 1.3 million jobs were destroyed and another million disappeared in the following years. The number of workers in productive industries today amounts to a quarter of the number in 1989.
Large sections of the eastern German population soon lost hope in the future. The declining birth rate is a telling indicator of the social significance of this process. It sank from 199,000 newborn children in 1989 to 79,000 in 1994...
The consequences of this industrial and social devastation persist to this day. The total population of the new federal states amounts to 13 million, significantly less than the 14.5 million in the GDR. Twenty years after the fall of the Wall, an average of 140 eastern Germans still move across to western Germany each day.
For years, the unemployment rate hovered around 20 percent. Only in the last five years has it dropped to the current 12 percent. However, this reduction stems not from the creation of new regular jobs, but from the spread of low-wage and part-time jobs. Every second employee in eastern Germany works under the low-wage threshold of €9.20 per hour. The average gross wage is €13.50 per hour, far below the western German level of €17.20.
The end of the GDR, the Eastern European regimes and the Soviet Union unleashed a wave of triumphalism within the capitalist class, which it is now trying to revive with the current anniversary celebrations. However, such efforts cannot disguise the fact that capitalism all over the world finds itself in a profound crisis.
The contradictions between world economy and nation state—between the global character of production that has welded together millions of workers all over the globe in one socially unified process of production, and the division of the world into rival nation states—broke the back of the Stalinist regimes two decades ago. These contradictions, however, also lie behind the growing conflicts between imperialist powers, the escalating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the unceasing attacks on the social gains of the working class and the arrogance and greed of the financial elite...
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/nov2009/pers-n09.shtml
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