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Chipping Away at the State: Workers' Resistance and the Demise of East Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Jeffrey Kopstein
Jeffrey Kopstein
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
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Abstract

This article is a study of everyday resistance and political protest among East German workers under communism. It develops and adduces evidence for two hypotheses based on evidence from Communist Party and state archives. First, in contrast to the standard explanation for the revolution of 1989, which emphasizes intellectual and popular mobilization against the regime, this essay emphasizes the long-term capacity of otherwisepowerless workers to immobilize the regime through nonpolitical acts of everyday resistance. This resistance, coupled with the rare act of political protest, rendered ineffective the conventional methods of labor discipline and undermined any hope of meaningful economic reform. The second hypothesis concerns the motivation for working-class behavior. Two models of social action have dominated studies of subalterns: rational choice and moral economy. The models are evaluated against the archival record. While the evidence is not overwhelmingly in favor of either model, the moral economy approach provides a better account of the sporadic acts of rebellion and the myriad acts of everyday resistance.

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Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , April 1996 , pp. 391 - 423
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1996

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References

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49 This source of managerial motivation became more pressing after 1948, when the numbers of people leaving the Soviet zone for the West shot up dramatically. Ewers (fn. 29), 75–77.

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52 Tribune, May 8, 1948, quoted in Ewers (fn. 29), 52.

53 Exactly who came up with this idea remains unclear. Some discussion of it occurred among experts in the DWK in early February 1948. SAMPO-BA (fn. 32), SED IV 2/602/85.

54 Ewers (fn. 29), 64–65.

55 SAMPO-BA (fn. 32), SED IV 2/2027/27; SAMPOBA (fn. 32), SED NL 192/922.

56 Ibid.

57 SAMPO-BA (fn. 32), SED IV 2/2027/22.

58 By the end of 1948 there were four thousand Aktivists, by the end of October 1950, one hundred forty-six thousand. Roesler (fn. 47), 85. These inflated numbers strongly suggest the dilution of what it meant to be an Aktivist.

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65 By the end of 1951, only 10% of norms could be classified as “technically grounded.” Ewers (fn. 29), 119. The sensitivity of workers to the rationalization bureaus is indicated in a report from September 1950. A rationalization official arrived at an enterprise and two days later offended workers and management by starting time and motion studies “with watch in hand” before consulting Brigade leaders. SAMPO-BA (fn. 32), SED IV 2/5/232.

66 The fact that the tight labor market gave workers the power to resist appears to support the strand of the rational choice argument which holds that resistance is most likely to occur when risk to workers is lowest. Everyday resistance, however, did not subside after the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. In fact, it increased. Moreover, the reason for resistance, the pseudomarketization of production relations under conditions of shortage, remained unchanged.

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77 Posusney (fn. 14) identifies this trait as constitutive of moral economy protests.

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100 Ibid.

101 Posusney (fn. 14).

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103 SAMPO-BA (fn. 32), SED IV 2/611/66.

104 BAP (fn. 75), SPK E-l 51770.

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107 Ibid.

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109 During the initial years of the reform in the 1960s, the GDR's economic performance improved significantly. Leptin, Gert and Melzer, Manfred, Economic Reform in East German Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).Google Scholar The upswing stalled as soon as working-class resistance impeded the broadening and deepening of the reforms. Put differently, if by 1989 East Germany's economy had been performing near the level of the West, the regime might have allowed its people to travel, secure that they would return. To extend the counterfactual, if reasonable economic parity could have been achieved, how many ordinary East Germans would have joined the pampered intellectual counterelite and risked their lives and futures by demonstrating against the regime, all in the name of an abstract political freedom that would not have altered their life chances by very much? I suspect depressingly few.

110 Thompson (fn. 16).

111 For a good summary and evaluation of this literature, see Cook, Linda, The Soviet Social Contract and Why It Failed: Welfare Policy and Workers' Politics from Brezhnev to Yeltsin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

112 Tim Mason makes a similar argument for Nazi Germany. By 1939 the working class had the Nazi regime so paralyzed that the only way to break the back of everyday resistance and thus reimpose labor discipline was to go to war. Mason, , Social Policy in the Third Reich (Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1993), 275–331.Google Scholar Extrapolating Mason's analysis to the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe (and the Soviet Union itself), one might argue that the only possible route to imperial salvation would have been a military adventure of some sort in Western Europe or China.

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