From The Pages Of "Women And Revolution"- Women and the East German Deformed Workers State

Workers Vanguard No. 976
18 March 2011

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Women and the East German Deformed Workers State

Part One

(Women and Revolution pages)

The following article was translated from Spartakist No. 185 (October 2010), which is published by the Spartakist Workers Party, German section of the International Communist League. It is based on an International Women’s Day 2010 presentation by Barbara Köhler in Hamburg.

In Berlin, we held our forum on Women’s Day, and on my way to it the subway TV ran a news item that Alice Schwarzer, Germany’s icon of bourgeois feminism, had spoken. She stated that she was against Women’s Day, a “socialist invention” having something to do with striking women textile workers. In her own words: “It’s got absolutely nothing to do with feminism!”

Occasionally even this reactionary lady says something true. As a bourgeois movement, feminism makes men the hindrance to achieving women’s equality. Thereby it deepens the division of the proletariat fomented by the capitalists, setting men against women. We communists know that the oppression of women is inextricably tied to class rule and exploitation. We fight for mobilizing the entire proletariat, men as well as women, against the special oppression of women. Without women, no socialist revolution; without socialist revolution, no liberation of women!

Schwarzer was expressing the hostility of the bourgeoisie to the proletariat—International Women’s Day marks the strike of women textile workers in Manhattan on 8 March 1908. But what we think of above all is 8 March 1917 (February 23 according to the old Russian calendar)—the women textile workers strike in St. Petersburg. That was the beginning of the February Revolution in Russia. For us communists, March 8 commemorates a day of struggle by the entire working class.

Over the entire past year, we ran articles and gave forums counterposing our communist program to the bourgeois propaganda marking 20 years of counterrevolution in the former East German deformed workers state, the DDR, with which we were inundated all year long. It was with this same program that we intervened in 1989-90 in the incipient political revolution in the DDR. The central issues were defense of the DDR against imperialism, proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy as well as socialist revolution in the West—the fight for a Red Germany ruled by workers councils (soviets).

The bourgeoisie would like to lay the DDR to rest once and for all, but it is still obsessively fixated on it. In German bourgeois circles, one of the most devastating labels you can apply is “DDR methods” or “socialism.” When Ursula von der Leyen was still Minister of Family Affairs, she came out for more kindergartens, but only because the German bourgeoisie wants to raise the low birthrate and simultaneously have well-trained women in professional life. And for this sin, even this top-echelon Christian Democratic display model of a mother was accused of DDR methods.

So everybody talks about it, but what was it really like for women in the DDR? As communists, we apply programmatic standards in order to understand and explain things. Thus we cite the utopian socialist Fourier as an authority on the woman question. Fourier stated, “The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by women’s progress towards freedom.... The degree of emancipation of woman is the natural measure of general emancipation.” Marx cites Fourier very approvingly in The Holy Family (1845). This is one of our guidelines. But at least equally central is Engels’ important insight in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) that women’s oppression is rooted in the institution of the family, which is characteristic of all class societies. Engels explains that the first condition for the liberation of women is their integration into public industry and thus into public life, leading to “the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.”

The DDR arguably constituted the most advanced society for women so far in the history of mankind. In important respects it was even more advanced than the young, revolutionary Soviet Union. While the Bolsheviks advanced a revolutionary program for women’s liberation aiming at replacing the functions of the family by socializing housework, the material poverty of the young workers state was a huge obstacle to actually putting this into practice. The DDR even at its founding, despite having emerged out of the Second World War and despite the reparations claimed by the Soviet Union, nonetheless possessed the basis for a highly industrialized society. This made a big difference.

At the end of the 1980s, over 90 percent of women in the DDR worked or were in training or ongoing education. They really had lots of economic and genuine personal independence. Women and men both acquired broad scientific training, with women working at highly skilled jobs, much more so than in the West. Among people up to 40 years old—all of whom were raised in the DDR—there were as many women as men in every form of training and education. And single mothers could be professionally active and have children because there was an extensive system of childcare facilities, often linked directly to the factories.

What made this possible in the DDR was the victory of the Red Army over Nazi Germany in 1945. The state machinery and economic power of the German bourgeoisie was smashed in the East and a state was founded based on socialized property forms—in Marxist terms, a workers state. However, this workers state was, as we Trotskyists say, deformed from the beginning because political power did not rest with the working class but with a Stalinist bureaucracy.

On the one hand, there was all this economic independence because women were active in production. But at the same time the institution of the family, which according to Engels is an institution for the oppression of women, existed in the DDR. Not only did the family exist, it was singled out and hailed. This is a contradiction that requires explanation. As Trotsky said in 1940 in regard to the Soviet Union, and is equally true of the DDR: “The workers’ state must be taken as it has emerged from the merciless laboratory of history and not as it is imagined by a ‘socialist’ professor, reflectively exploring his nose with his finger” (“Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events,” In Defense of Marxism).

The East German deformed workers state was Stalin’s “unloved child.” This was one instance of his betrayal of revolutionary opportunities in all of Europe and parts of Asia at the end of the Second World War, betrayals committed by Stalin for the sake of his agreements with his imperialist allies, the U.S. and Britain. For example, in Italy the Stalinist Communist Party made the partisans disarm and itself joined a capitalist popular-front government, thereby preventing a workers revolution and subjecting the workers to the U.S. command. In Germany, following the war the socialist aspirations of the proletariat were bureaucratically throttled. Initiatives by the workers to take over factories and towns and run them through embryonic workers councils—the anti-fascist committees—were suppressed.

The DDR and the other “people’s democracies” arising from these social transformations were deformed workers states that came into being as a defensive Soviet reaction to the imperialists’ escalating Cold War. Thus the DDR set out to build “socialism in one country” on the model of the Stalinist degenerated Soviet Union of the 1940s. The DDR bureaucracy was even willing to give it a try in half a country. This program of “socialism in one country” fundamentally contradicts Marxism, which states that socialism, as a preliminary stage to communism, must be an international social order with a material basis that transcends the bounds of even the most developed capitalist countries. To put it another way: You cannot construct socialism on the basis of material scarcity in an isolated country.

The October Revolution of 1917

Let’s go back to the program of the Bolsheviks that led the working class to victory in 1917. From the outset, their program posited that the revolution had to be extended internationally. They always saw the Russian Revolution as just the beginning of revolution on a worldwide scale, and it never even occurred to them that it could survive in isolation. Early Soviet legislation granted women wide-ranging equality and freedom that even today have not been realized by the economically most advanced “democratic” capitalist countries.

Some central characteristics: civil marriage was introduced, along with divorce at the request of either partner, and any and all laws against homosexuals were abolished. The director of the Moscow Institute for Social Hygiene reported in 1923 on the underlying principles of Soviet legislation: “It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured and no one’s interests are encroached upon.” And in 1920 the young Soviet Union was the very first government on earth to overturn criminalization of abortion—really and truly a gain! For the first time, women were given the right to control their own bodies and were no longer degraded into reproductive machines.

The Bolsheviks were aware of the fact that the family, along with the social functions it fulfills in class society—raising children, taking care of food and clothing, seeing to education and looking after the elderly—could not simply be abolished by decree. Trotsky spoke of the “family as a shut-in petty enterprise.” These functions have to be replaced through the socialization of housework. In the major cities of the early Soviet Union, the first steps were taken to set up facilities for socializing housework such as kindergartens, canteens and the like, but the material basis for extending them simply was not there. But the Bolsheviks in the revolutionary period of the Soviet Union told workers the truth: the liberation of women will occur once we have been able to socialize housework; at the moment we cannot simply shake this out of our shirtsleeves, but we are fighting for the extension of the revolution to the economically advanced countries—this is the way to get there!

Degeneration of the Soviet Union and Its Effects on Women

These policies of the Soviet leadership changed because the leadership changed. In 1923-24, the hopes of the Russian working class for a speedy extension of the revolution were destroyed, particularly when a great opportunity for the working class to seize power in Germany was wasted. It was the German Communist Party’s policy of looking to the Social Democratic Party and waiting for it that blew it—as well as the Communist International’s hesitancy at this point in time (for more, see “A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 56, Spring 2001). Hence this great possibility for bringing the Soviet Union out of its isolation was allowed to slide by.

With the Russian working class broadly discouraged, a conservative bureaucracy under Stalin seized political power. Its program was to settle down within the status quo, constructing “socialism in one country” and seeking peaceful coexistence with imperialism. Thus the leadership no longer sought to extend the revolution but only reacted to the pressure of imperialism. This bureaucratic layer no longer strove for the extension of the revolution to eliminate material scarcity, instead functioning as kind of a gendarme to administer the existing generalized want.

With Trotsky, we say that this constituted a political counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. But the socialized property forms still existed. This is why we fought for a proletarian political revolution in the Soviet degenerated workers state and do so today in the remaining deformed workers states. This means that the imperative task is defending the social basis, the socialization of the means of production. But it is also necessary to drive out the leadership layer, this caste, and restore the entire power of the working class, including its political power. Leading the working class to this point, however, requires a revolutionary party, as in 1917.

In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s reactionary political line quickly became directed against women. In 1936, a new constitution was adopted that banned abortion and hailed the family as the so-called unit of socialism. In his fundamental work The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky explained the underlying mechanisms:

“Having revealed its inability to serve women who are compelled to resort to abortion with the necessary medical aid and sanitation, the state makes a sharp change of course, and takes the road of prohibition. And just as in other situations, the bureaucracy makes a virtue of necessity. One of the members of the highest Soviet court, Soltz, a specialist on matrimonial questions, bases the forthcoming prohibition of abortion on the fact that in a socialist society where there are no unemployed, etc., etc., a woman has no right to decline ‘the joys of motherhood.’ The philosophy of a priest endowed also with the powers of a gendarme.”

And so it was on the model of this Stalinized Soviet Union that the DDR was constructed.

The DDR: A Deformed Workers State from the Outset

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky explained the dual character of the Stalinist bureaucracy. An understanding of this is vital if you want to grasp the contradictions in the DDR’s policies toward women. The bureaucracy is a parasitic caste sitting atop the socialized means of production; it vacillates between fear of the working class and fear of imperialism, trying to maneuver between them so as to preserve its privileges. And though Trotsky’s book was written in 1936, in our intervention into the incipient political revolution in the DDR in 1989-90 we were often told it sounds like it was written about the DDR bureaucracy, as if it were an up-to-date handbook.

The proletarian 17 June 1953 uprising underlined the DDR bureaucracy’s contradictory character as a caste, rather than a class owning the means of production. With this uprising, the working class was attempting political revolution, that is, the overthrow of the leadership to gain political power while maintaining the economic foundation of the DDR. At that time, considerable sections of the Socialist Unity Party [ruling East German Stalinist party] went over to the side of the workers. One can hardly imagine a whole segment of the capitalist class going over to the side of the working class in the event of a socialist revolution! The bureaucracy was not a class but a caste, comparable to the bureaucracy in the trade unions.

Trotsky also explained in The Revolution Betrayed that the bureaucrats actually needed the family, namely for the social regimentation of the populace. Trotsky showed that families, far from being units of socialism, were units of social backwardness in which women, children and youth were held captive, an “archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death.” That was one reason the bureaucrats needed the family—as an instrument of regimentation—but they also needed it to provide the services that society was unable to provide, due to material causes. Here, of course, it is important to see that the leadership in the Soviet Union and later in the DDR generally did not have achieving this material basis as its goal, but rather constructing “socialism” within the confines of a single country.

A revolutionary leadership in the DDR would have presented an internationalist program to the working class. Like the Bolsheviks, it would have said: We want to extend the revolution, we want to expand our material basis; this cannot be done here at this point, but in the meantime we will simply do what is possible. But what is possible cannot be simply dictated by the bureaucracy. Instead, the workers, both men and women, taking the factories as their starting point, must determine the policies of the workers state through workers councils. In a struggle to construct such workers councils, a revolutionary leadership in the DDR would have based itself on the most advanced sections of the working class. That is Trotsky’s program and it’s our program as well. But of course that is just what the DDR bureaucracy did not do, since such a struggle for workers councils would have meant dissolving itself. Hence the family was pushed, presented as a fighting unit of socialism, thus reinforcing reactionary notions within society.

Over the years, kindergartens, canteens, laundries, etc. were unevenly but steadily expanded, with a significant part of these facilities directly linked to the factories. However, the DDR leadership promoted this not because they wanted to do something for women’s liberation but because it desperately needed young, well-educated women in the workforce who in return demanded that childcare be provided by society! The number of daycare slots for children up to three years jumped by leaps and bounds from a scant 4,700 in 1950 to over 50,000 in 1955.

This demonstrates the great effort to attract women into production in the early years of the DDR. There was another great leap between 1970 and 1975: from 166,000 to nearly 235,000 (Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic, 2007). This was to fulfill [Erich] Honecker’s promise to raise the living standard, which in 1975 had been termed the “unity of economic and social policies.” Honecker had replaced [Walter] Ulbricht in 1970-71 following a series of scares the bureaucracy got from working-class actions, starting with the incipient proletarian political revolutions in the DDR in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, through the 1968 “Prague Spring,” to major strikes against price hikes in Poland in 1970.

The bureaucracy talked itself into believing that under Honecker it could eliminate the DDR’s ever-worsening performance vis-à-vis West German imperialism, in regard to the economy and living standards, by running up debts to Western bankers and increasingly cutting back on investment in many areas of the economy. The result was that in 1989 only 30 percent of the country’s machines were operational at any one time, while expenditures for housing construction expanded from year to year right up to 1989. This had brought the DDR to the brink of bankruptcy in the early ’80s, temporarily averted by selling DDR-processed Soviet oil to the West. But doing this caused the efficiency of the DDR economy to collapse even further.

In 1989, there was virtually one kindergarten place available per child, and in many towns the availability of daycare slots stood at over 80 percent. But in some locations women were unwilling or outright refused to use these slots out of concern that kindergarten care was inadequate. Things were even more critical in laundries, where the clothes were damaged or washing took far too long. Trotsky explained this the following way: If workers do not really have control over and cannot determine what they produce, how they do it, how they organize it, then this will impose a sort of gray curtain of indifference upon all labor. And simultaneously this whole stuffy, backward weight of the bureaucracy enveloped society like a suffocating blanket.

Also a problem with childcare facilities was that they generally were not open around the clock. The standard time they were open was approximately 6 a.m. to 6-7 p.m. This of course made it very hard for women working shifts, leaving many women unable to take jobs they would have liked, because the childcare was not there. We are for top-quality childcare around the clock. During our intervention into the incipient political revolution in 1989-90, we often had discussions with women who saw themselves as communists but had been so deeply molded by family propaganda—this mommy propaganda that the DDR bureaucracy constantly churned out—that some were against having round-the-clock childcare, arguing that mommy really should be caring for her children in the evening. This shows how, thanks to the intervention of the bureaucracy, backward notions were preserved and became deeply ingrained in people’s minds.

It is interesting and important to see that there were very many women who wanted to be heard. They felt, OK, we’re told it’s a socialist society, so we have the right to get more of these facilities, which replace housework for us. There were many protests directed at various levels of the bureaucracy, very many letters were addressed directly to Honecker, in which a woman worker would complain roughly: “Comrade Honecker, it’s unbelievable that in the major factory where I work I’m unable to shop for groceries at lunchtime because there’s nothing in the store. You absolutely have to change this.” A very large number of proletarian women, of working women, thought they had the right to more and that they could organize it themselves, and better.
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Workers Vanguard No. 977
1 April 2011

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Women and the East German Deformed Workers State

Part Two

(Women and Revolution pages)

We print below the conclusion of this article, which was translated from Spartakist No. 185 (October 2010), published by our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany. Part One appeared in WV No. 976 (18 March).

The Soviet Military Administration in Germany existed until November 1949, a month after the DDR [East German deformed workers state] was founded. Already in August 1946, the goal of drawing women into production—the so-called “Order 253”—had been promulgated, banning wage discrimination based on sex or age. A comparison: in West Germany such a law only came into existence ten years later. And of course under capitalism such a law—no wage discrimination—exists only on paper. Wage differentials are part and parcel of capitalism, a means of dividing the working class, particularly male and female workers. This is a fundamental component of the economic system.

Just a few days ago, there was a report in Der Spiegel with 2008 statistics showing wage differentials of over 23 percent between men and women. And simultaneously there has been a great increase in part-time work for women, who of course cannot survive on their wages but can’t work full-time, since they can’t get their children taken care of, etc. This law “against wage discrimination” has been in force in West Germany since 1956, but that signifies absolutely nothing.

Certainly, wage differences between men and women did exist in the DDR as well, but first of all they were not as shameless, since the wage range was not as wide and even the lowest wage groups had a secure living standard. It stemmed from bureaucratic misrule and was not inherent to the system. A government of workers soviets would have immediately annulled any wage differences, even if this would have meant opposing more backward elements in the working class.

Taking a look at the Democratic Women’s Federation of Germany (DFD) is instructive here. It was founded in the DDR in 1947, having originally emerged out of the anti-fascist women’s committees, i.e., out of committees that clearly in their own view—and by their very name—embraced a broader horizon. But the East German Stalinist party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), increasingly tasked the DFD with dealing with “women’s matters.”

The DFD was affiliated with the so-called “National Front,” an attempt by the DDR bureaucracy to mimic West Germany’s “democratic” multiplicity of parties. This DDR formation contained all possible parties, from the Peasant Party to the Christian Democrats, but with the Stalinist bureaucracy setting the tone via the SED. In contrast to the situation under capitalism, this simply parodied a capitalist popular front, which always consists of a class alliance of bourgeois parties and workers parties. In the DDR, however, the bourgeoisie as a class had been overthrown and the National Front had only the appearance of a popular front.

Popular-frontist politics are a deception of the working class, politically disarming the workers by creating the illusion that they have no independent class interests and talking only about an undifferentiated “people.” Internationally this meant that the Stalinist bureaucracies cozied up to bourgeois forces. For workers following Stalinist leadership, all too often this meant deadly defeats—as in the Chinese Revolution in 1927 and the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s, to cite only a couple of examples. For Marxists, the DDR was a dictatorship of the proletariat—albeit bureaucratically deformed —that rested on socialized relations of production, since the bourgeoisie had been expropriated. Within this framework, the National Front was one part of the programmatic propaganda of the DDR bureaucracy, which did not want its working class to come up with the idea that it had its own class interests, namely running the workers state itself via workers councils.

Nonetheless, the following is interesting as a fact: In the DDR, the DFD was a mass organization. These anti-fascist committees and DFD groups had originally existed in all of Germany. In the West, an association arose out of individual state associations in 1952; it was unceremoniously banned by the German bourgeoisie in 1957.

A couple more facts comparing the situation of women in these two countries, East and West Germany. In 1965, a compendium of family law appeared in the DDR stating: “Both spouses must do their part in the education and care of their children and running the household. The relations of the spouses to each other should take such a form that the woman can reconcile her professional activity and her activity in society with motherhood.” While this meant exalting the “holy family,” it still emphasized the equal status of women. In a 1966 report, the government of West Germany set forth that: “A care-giver and comforter is what women should be; an image of modest harmony, a factor for order in the uniquely dependable private sphere; women should enter into gainful employment and social engagement only when the demands placed on them by the family permit them to do so.” In accord with this is the fact that up till 1977 a West German law stated that a wife could not get a job without her husband’s consent.

It was, of course, the socialized relations of production in the DDR that were responsible for these differences. Furthermore, an important aspect was that inheritance played no role in the DDR, since private ownership of the means of production no longer existed. After all, Engels had explained that what had originally been central to the entire institution and ideology of the family was that the husband wanted to know unambiguously: Are these my children or has my wife been playing the field? I want to bequeath solely to my children. That is the root of it.

All this simply played no role anymore in the DDR: There was nothing to bequeath, and thereby this function of the family under capitalism essentially dissolved. But the Stalinist leadership, these backward types, nonetheless kept trying to maintain the ideology of the family, attempting again and again to glue its ideological fragments together. One further aspect of the family is the regimentation of children, and this eroded as well in the DDR due to the socialized relations of production. In the DDR, since 1950 the age of majority had been set at 18; in West Germany this has been the case only since 1975!

Women’s Day was always celebrated with flowers, accompanied with calls for the husband to make his wife a super-duper breakfast on this day and generally to be very supportive, etc. Such calls only made more obvious what was generally the rule: that women had to work a second shift to keep the household going and look after the children. The DDR leadership was truly seeking to drain International Women’s Day of any trace of its being a day of struggle for the entire working class.

When protests from proletarian women over their overly heavy burden of work and the “second shift” got too loud, there were divergent reactions. On the one hand, the bureaucracy sought to make more consumer goods available to lighten the burden of housework, particularly from the early 1970s on. For example, production of family washing machines was promoted. Perhaps it would have been more rational to massively increase the number of public laundromats and equip them better. There were also widespread campaigns for the husband to do more around the house. In fact, for the husband to help in the household was far more widespread in the DDR than in the West. Since 1952, a “Household Day” had existed in the DDR—one free day per month for household chores, but typically granted only to women. Only from 1977 on was it partially accorded to men as well.

“Socialism in (Half of) One Country”

Housing was a scarce commodity in the DDR. The essential reason was that the resources to build adequate housing simply didn’t exist in this half a country, under siege by vengeance-seeking German imperialism, which was continually brooding over how to regain this territory in which it no longer had the say. It is also important to recall that after 1945 West Germany had been beefed up by U.S. imperialism. Moreover, heavy industry plus the entire Ruhr region—i.e., the center of industry—were in the West. That is an important factor.

But the Stalinist bureaucracy in the DDR was unwilling to utter this home truth, instead making a virtue of necessity. “Socialism in one country” meant that the bureaucracy wanted to produce as “autarkically” as possible. Thus 70 percent of the products available on the world market were produced in the DDR, often of poor quality and at inflated cost, while the imperialists could base themselves on a division of labor in the world market, which they dominated. Married couples had first dibs on apartments, again putting pressure on people to get married. The bureaucracy did not proceed linearly here and kept changing its procedures; officially, single mothers and unmarried couples could also lay claim to an apartment. But the feeling among young people was generally that they had greater chances if they got married, strengthening the functions of the family within society.

An important and particularly unattractive aspect of the Stalinist bureaucracies’ program of “socialism in one country”—in their own individual countries and apart from all others—is that it meant nationalism. While the DDR bureaucracy campaigned strongly for marriage and having children, this generally did not apply to contract workers from Mozambique, Cuba or Vietnam: these had no citizenship rights and were often segregated in specific residential areas. If a Vietnamese woman became pregnant, she usually had to get an abortion or return home, leave the country. This was a genuine, major, true piece of piggishness on the part of the bureaucracy. For us communists, it goes without saying, the central slogan is always “full citizenship rights for all immigrants,” as was true for the early Soviet Union: anyone who lived and worked there had citizenship rights.

Down With Paragraph 218!

The notorious [anti-abortion] Paragraph 218 constitutes an extremely important aspect of the woman and family question. This paragraph has existed since the time of Bismarck, since 1871. In the Weimar Republic, the Communist Party [KPD] was well known for its fight against Paragraph 218. There are some expressive posters, for example by Käthe Kollwitz, who for a couple of years was a member of the International Workers’ Aid, the defense organization linked to the KPD. In the Weimar Republic, the KPD repeatedly introduced motions in the Reichstag [parliament] demanding: Down with this paragraph! All were quashed.

The first alteration after 1871 occurred in 1926, through a Social Democratic Party (SPD) motion that did pass. Abortion continued to be punishable under law, both for the woman and for the person performing it, but now it was “only” punished by a jail term and not by sending the perpetrators to a high-security prison. The fact that under the Nazis the death penalty was imposed for abortion—unless it served to prevent the “reproduction of inferior racial groups”—demonstrates the power exercised by the bourgeoisie via Paragraph 218 and just how deeply it cut into people’s lives.

In 1945, the Nazi regime was smashed by the Red Army, through incredible sacrifice by the Soviet soldiers and people. After 1945, in both the East and the West, the Nazi law—i.e., the death penalty—was rescinded, but otherwise the old paragraph in the penal code was left standing. In the East, that is, in what became the DDR, this occurred with a direct reference to the legal code in the Soviet Union, where abortion had been forbidden by the 1936 Soviet constitution. In the areas under the Soviet Military Administration, the 1926 version of the paragraph was in force. Additionally, in some East German states, there was an “indication system,” requiring that certain social or medical conditions be met, e.g., citing rape. There were a couple of minor different possibilities for how a woman might get an abortion, but they still fell under criminal law.

At this time, West Germany often had even stricter penalties for abortion. But before the erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, women from the DDR went to West Berlin for abortions! The West Berlin Senate, usually in the hands of the SPD, obviously kept its eyes closed in the hope of damaging the DDR. This is such an utterly damning judgment on the Stalinists, for women to have to go to the capitalist part of Berlin for an abortion! And later women from the DDR went to Poland and Hungary for abortions: In Poland, a first-trimester law existed, while today, following capitalist counterrevolution, Poland has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, with ongoing attempts to ban abortion entirely. This is a result of counterrevolution. But before first-trimester abortions were permitted in the DDR, women really did go to Poland and Hungary, where abortions were more readily available, as well as better and safer.

The question of the pill is also important and interesting. In the West, Schering introduced the pill to the German market in June 1961. In the DDR, there was a lengthy research period, with the pill appearing only in 1965. But it was then distributed free of charge, which made a huge difference. In West Germany in 1965, years after the pill had already been on the market, doctors were still denouncing this “state-promoted lack of restraint.” In the DDR, Professor Mehlan was one of the pioneers of birth control. In 1965, the West German magazine Stern asked him the provocative question: Now tell us honestly—is it true that where you come from, abortion really is not murder? This is the way West Germany was in the 1960s, and even today this is far from being the unfortunate distant past. The Catholic church and other bigots continue to call abortion “murder.” In the U.S., doctors who carry out abortions have been murdered. This rests on the notion purveyed by all churches that the will of God has already endowed the fertilized egg with the “soul” of the future human being.

In general, the Stalinist leadership in the DDR wobbled on the question of abortion and the pill. On the one hand, it cited the KPD in the Weimar Republic, which had fought Paragraph 218. On the other, it pushed the institution of the family; it needed population growth and additional labor and had to attract women into production, which in turn generated problems if women had no access to rational family planning. With their conservative program, the Stalinists were reacting on the one hand to pressure from the proletariat, including proletarian women, on the other to imperialism—they were, so to speak, attempting a wall-balancing act before the Berlin Wall even existed. Here again it is important to state that we Trotskyists defended the Wall, a bureaucratic measure (after all, that’s how the bureaucracy works!) but also, however, a defensive measure to stop the DDR from being bled white of acutely needed skilled workers. Thus we defended the Wall against imperialism.

The DDR bureaucracy’s program of “peaceful coexistence” entails the rejection of workers revolution and the illusory search for “progressive” bourgeois forces in the imperialist countries. The Stalinists always thought and hoped that the SPD—the SPD in West Germany of all things!—might perhaps be an expression of such “progressive forces.” The Stalinists tended to fix their gaze on the SPD in the West the way a rabbit looks at a snake.

When first-trimester abortion was finally introduced in the DDR in 1972, it was also an attempt to trump the imperialist West and the SPD in the minds of women. For in the West in the summer of 1971, a well-known campaign had commenced with major involvement of SPD supporters: “We’ve had an abortion.” Women accused themselves of this “criminal act.” In all probability hastened by this, termination of a pregnancy in the first three months was finally allowed in the DDR. Incidentally, first-trimester abortions were introduced in West Germany in June 1974, only to be nullified the very same month by the Federal Constitutional Court on the grounds that abortion was in principle violating the constitution. Since May 1976, an “indication system” with all its contempt for humanity and with compulsory consultation, often carried out by church officials, has been the rule in West Germany. We communists fight for the unlimited right of women to free abortion on demand, with the best possible medical care!

As recently as 1988-89, a witchhunting trial took place in Memmingen, West Germany, where Dr. Theissen was hauled into court for having performed abortions—safe abortions, fine medical work. He felt that women had the right to decide for themselves. He was hauled into court and put in prison, and we intervened in his defense.

We also intervened for our position for the unconditional right to abortion in major demonstrations that took place in the former DDR following counterrevolution. These demonstrations were protesting introduction of West Germany’s “indication model,” where some guy poses inhumane questions and can judge you. These protests were for maintaining the DDR’s first-trimester laws. And they were so strong that even two years after the counterrevolution two different laws continued to exist in East and West. The bourgeoisie feared this question could spark stronger protests against the Anschluss [annexation] of the DDR. Two whole years, and then the indication system was pushed through in the former DDR as well.

DDR Bureaucracy Capitulates to SPD, Church

Twenty years after counterrevolution in the DDR, both state churches [Catholic and Protestant], whose church taxes are automatically collected by the bourgeois state, were complaining that too few people were attending church in the former DDR.

In the first years of the DDR, there was still quite a lot of support for the church, above all among women in the countryside. One of the first campaigns the church waged was for preservation of the old system of midwives, who attended families at home, and against the new state health centers. Women naturally realized the real advantages of obtaining better, more comprehensive medical treatment in a health center than a midwife could provide at home, and bit by bit the midwives were integrated into the health system. Between 1952 and 1959, in-hospital births rose from 50 to 86 percent. So the churches really lost out with this probing action. And then the churches intervened again massively over the DDR’s family legislation, namely against women in production—women had to remain with the family. This naturally did nothing for the church’s popularity, since women increasingly grasped how their participation in the production process led to more independence.

It really is a case of “being determines consciousness.” Any need for the church simply disappeared over time for women in the DDR. And then the church sought to rise up with a campaign against the first-trimester abortion law of 1971. For the first time, a considerable number of no votes and abstentions were cast in the Volkskammer [People’s Chamber, the DDR parliament] from the Christian Democratic Union, which had seats as a member of the National Front. But the forces of the church could not set the world on fire over this. Under capitalism, private ownership of the means of production, linked, as noted before, to inheritance laws and the bourgeois family, needs ideological sanctification by the church. Capitalism needs the church.

And in all class societies, this goes together with a more or less vigorous persecution of homosexuality. If private ownership of the means of production no longer exists, the church gradually loses its basis. Nobody has any use for it any longer, even though it may take years for its influence to diminish. In the DDR, this was such a long, drawn-out affair because the bureaucrats were hailing the family, thereby implicitly providing ammunition to the church! This glorification of the family in the DDR also brought with it ongoing, greater and lesser harassment of homosexuals, but there was a clear difference with the West and also with the East European states after counterrevolution: In the DDR there were no right-wing or Nazi bands roaming the streets terrorizing, for example, gay bars. There was some harassment, but it was really different from capitalism.

Then, in truly grotesque fashion, from the mid to late 1980s the DDR bureaucracy proceeded to provide ammunition to the church, which had basically been on its last legs with meager support—64 percent of the population did not belong to any denomination—through stupefying bureaucratic repression of all the dissatisfaction that was bubbling to the surface of society. In particular, the Protestant church, which was supported by the West German SPD right down to its last hymnal, made its “free zones” available for discussion and so was able to gain ground. While the Stalinist bureaucrats were rather hard on opponents from the left, they were oh-so-accommodating when it came to the rights and the “free zones” of the church. That’s just grotesque: they assisted the church in becoming a factor in people’s consciousness.

Drawing the Lessons: We Communists Are the Memory of the Working Class

From the outset, there were countless men and women of every age in the DDR who consciously devoted themselves to “constructing socialism,” to the extent that they understood it, even if their consciousness was often distorted. Literature, particularly from the first years of the DDR, shows people who were euphoric over the real possibilities for women and men that had suddenly become available to them, possibilities that their parents, especially their mothers, never had! In the 1960s, for example, many artists and writers sought to bring “art to the working class” and the working class to art—the “Bitterfeld Way”—with slogans like “Reach for the Pen, Mate!” or, conversely, “Writers into Production!” Even if these were in part official slogans of the DDR bureaucracy, they were often seized upon enthusiastically. There were loads of women—Brigitte Reimann, Christa Wolf, Maxi Wander, many others—who wrote very interesting stuff about the situation of women, both in the early years, in the midst of this setting off for new horizons, and afterward. It’s fascinating to read about this.

The proportion of women in the lower- and middle-functionary level in the SED and the state was quite high, among the people who actually kept things going and organized things. But the higher you went in the DDR hierarchy, in the Central Committee or the like, the fewer women there were. The essential reason was that most women in the DDR had a family and children and hence a “second shift” that rested on them like a heavy yoke, so that they simply lacked the energy to fight their way upward. The ossified DDR bureaucrats at the top also emphasized, consciously, the important role of the “mommy.” In the program of the Stalinists, the special oppression of women, which would have had to be fought through socializing housework, simply did not exist.

But the answer did not lie in making feminism palatable to the DDR bureaucracy, as suggested by West and East German feminists alike. The answer lay in counterposing a revolutionary Trotskyist program to the politically reactionary program of “socialism in one country.” This is what Trotsky did and what we did in 1989-90. In January 1990, there was a giant pro-socialist, pro-Soviet demonstration in Berlin against a Nazi desecration of the Treptow memorial to the Red Army. At this giant demonstration of 250,000, which we had initiated, our comrades stood on the speakers platform, and for the first time in all those decades it was possible for Trotskyists to deliver a speech before a mass public in a deformed workers state. We called for the defense of the DDR and Soviet Union, for a new, revolutionary party, for political revolution and for the extension of the revolution to the West.

On the other hand, look at the programmatic spirit that permeated the Stalinist bureaucracy. It was not during the counterrevolution that this manifested itself for the first time in the DDR, though at that point it became crystal-clear. The SED renamed itself the SED-PDS [Party of Democratic Socialism], later just the PDS. And once Mikhail Gorbachev had given the green light to capitalist reunification in the name of the Soviet bureaucracy, Hans Modrow, speaking for the SED-PDS, promulgated the slogan “Germany, united fatherland.” These Stalinist bureaucrats, who called themselves the leadership of the working class and who were seen by many DDR workers as such, suddenly told the workers that the sole possibility was capitalist Anschluss to West Germany.

This was not a sudden, panicked transformation; there was a whole history of this. For example, already in 1987 a joint declaration of the SPD and SED was published under the charming title “The Contest of Ideologies and Joint Security,” in which the Stalinists simply crawled on their bellies before the SPD, pledging not to doubt imperialism’s will for peace and foreswearing the “process of world revolution.” Of course, they had already done this decades before, but now they put it down in writing again, emphatically. All of this was a prelude to Gorbachev’s withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in the spring of 1989, leaving women in particular defenseless before the mujahedin, who had been financed by the CIA and imperialism. When the Soviet Army marched in, we said: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan—Extend the gains of October to the Afghan peoples!” The woman question was an especially important aspect of our position. Gorbachev’s withdrawal was a criminal betrayal.

Today, the remnants of the PDS are in the Left Party, which constitutes the second reformist mass party in this country—in Lenin’s words, a bourgeois workers party. They are laboring alongside the SPD to chain the German working class to its imperialist exploiters by telling them that there is no alternative to capitalism.

Counterrevolution in the DDR, in the Soviet Union, in the East European deformed workers states hit women especially hard. This is something we have always emphasized. In the DDR, it particularly hit women with jobs in industry, which has been destroyed by an imperialist campaign of vengeance. The number of people who cannot find work and are today forced to survive on inhumanly low Hartz IV unemployment payments is particularly high in the former DDR, and it is single mothers who are especially hard-hit.

Now as before, we Trotskyists call for unconditional military defense of the states where capitalism no longer exists: today China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. These deformed workers states represent a conquest for the entire working class worldwide. Our program is for the working class—men and women—to sweep out the bureaucrats through political revolution and return to the road and program of the October Revolution. In capitalist countries, the bourgeoisie must be expropriated by socialist revolution. It is with this aim in mind that we are building our international party. We are the memory of the working class. We must carry this forward. We want to draw the lessons and learn from them, to prepare ourselves for victories. Women’s liberation through socialist revolution!

From The Partisan Defense Committee-South Korea-Free The Socialist Workers League Members Sentenced for Political Activity-Free All Class-War Prisoners!

Workers Vanguard No. 973
4 February 2011

South Korea

Socialist Workers League Members Sentenced for Political Activity

Free All Class-War Prisoners!

JANUARY 25—Eight supporters of the Socialist Workers League of Korea (SWLK) face serious prison sentences for the “crime” of supporting workers struggles and advocating socialist revolution. Charged in early December under the notorious National Security Law, they are due to be sentenced on January 27.

The National Security Law, enacted in 1948, has long been used to repress leftist and labor struggles in South Korea. Its sweeping provisions include a ban on forming or sympathizing with “anti-state” groups as well as the death penalty for activities in support of North Korea. Since right-wing president Lee Myung-bak came to power in 2008, his government has repeatedly tried to railroad SWLK activists to prison. It has also ramped up its suppression of labor struggles, including smashing a strike by workers at Ssangyong Motor Company in 2009.

These repressive moves come in the context of stepped-up U.S./South Korean provocations against North Korea and China, including last month’s joint military exercises in the Yellow Sea near the North Korean coast. Like a number of other South Korean left groups, the SWLK falsely characterizes North Korea and China as “state capitalist,” a characterization repeated by their spokesman Oh Sei-chull in his address to the court in December. In reality, these are bureaucratically deformed workers states, products of the revolutionary upheavals in Asia that followed the Second World War. The International Communist League stands for the unconditional military defense of China and North Korea against imperialism and counterrevolution, including supporting their possession of nuclear weapons to deter imperialist attack. At the same time, we oppose the privileged Stalinist bureaucracies in Beijing and Pyongyang, whose futile quest for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism undermines defense of the revolutionary gains.

It is necessary to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist party based on proletarian internationalism to lead a struggle for the revolutionary reunification of Korea: for socialist revolution against the brutally repressive capitalist regime in the South and for workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucrats in the North. Linked to the fight for workers political revolution in China, this struggle must ultimately extend to the victory of proletarian rule in the imperialist heartlands of Japan and the U.S.

The persecution of the SWLK militants purely for their political beliefs gives the lie to the “democratic” pretensions of South Korean capitalism. Leftist and labor militants internationally must come to the defense of these activists. We print below a January 22 protest letter to the South Korean Embassy in Washington, D.C., by the Partisan Defense Committee, a legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, U.S. section of the ICL.

* * *

The Partisan Defense Committee demands that the charges against members of the Socialist Workers League of Korea (SWLK) be dropped and that they immediately be released. For their defense of several strikes and their participation in demonstrations these members face five to seven years in prison for “anti-state” activities.

Oh Sei-chull, Yang Hyo-seok, Yang Joon-seok, Choi Young-ik, Park Joon-seon, Jeong Won-hyun, Oh Min-gyu and Nam-goon Won were convicted under the draconian National Security Law. This law was enacted in 1948 to suppress any support for North Korea and has been used to criminalize all political opposition to successive reactionary South Korean regimes. This is no less true of the Lee Myung-bak government which has imprisoned striking workers, launched a campaign against migrant workers and cracked down on demonstrations his administration deems to be illegal, the definition of which has expanded greatly under his administration. The prosecution of these activists is part of the continued crackdown on those who, in the face of the brutal South Korean government, stand up for basic democratic rights and is a continuation of the brutal repression against the working class and its allies.

We demand: Free the SWLK 8! Drop the charges!