Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [149]
East Germany also underwent the economic acid bath of privatization, which is why with Russia it offers important lessons about the shock therapy’s destabilizing impact. Under the direction of a specially constituted trust agency (Treuhandanstalt), West Germany radically trimmed down or closed much of East Germany’s industrial plant—a radical deindustrialization that eventually cost more than 3 million out of the 4.5 million jobs that had existed in the German Democratic Republic. Women who had come to expect equal treatment and equal pay as laborers and special consideration as mothers under communism (which for all its tyranny did manage to make good on a few of its boasts) found themselves at the mercy of a market that had no particular interest in gender equality.
By the time it closes down its operations sometime in 1995, Treuhandanstalt will have sold or liquidated close to fifteen thousand companies, including all of East Germany’s top newspapers and magazines, taken over by their western competitors and turned into outlets for West German—style journalism and opinion. Only a few properties remain on the block, including the Saxony town of Amerika (population one hundred), which Treuhand—clearly conscious of the theme-parking potential of McWorld—is pushing as a perfect site for a Wild West Park. The buyers for nearly all of East Germany’s industrial plant were almost exclusively from western Germany or abroad and will pay more than $122 billion for their new properties, but Treuhand had $217 billion in costs, leaving the taxpayers of Germany with an enormous debt.6 Some estimate that the deficit will soar to $275 billion before privatization is finished.7 That, along with the socially destabilizing job deficit, is likely to further inflame the politics of resentment that has already turned East against West, young against old, and German against foreign worker in the new unified Germany.8
Unified Germany’s tax system actually discriminates against the five eastern Laender whose municipalities get only 85 percent of what comparable districts in the west receive. Under federal guidelines, the western Laender can actually prevent eastern Laender from sharing in redistributed state revenues.9 This sounds like a German version of Reich’s middle-class politics of secession, where the public sector is left bankrupt by the withdrawal of the wealthy from civic responsibility.
Given this somber record, you did not have to be an ex-Communist to agree with the claim of the Party for Democratic Socialism that “Never in peacetime has so much social wealth been destroyed.” Enough Germans agreed to propel this relaunched East German Communist Party to a surprising showing in the German local elections in 1994, when 40 percent of East Berlin voters saw and voted Red and a Communist, Horst-Dieter Brahmig, was elected mayor of Hoyerswerda against the combined forces of all the other parties.10
Two years before these startling elections results, many non-Communists had joined with ex-Communists to form a Committee for Fairness, whose platform proclaimed: “The destruction of our industry and agriculture, mass unemployment, unbearable rent increases, unfairly low wages, the closing of social, scientific, cultural and athletic organizations, the selling off of what was once ‘people’s’ property, rejection of our right to occupy apartments, houses and land and the demoralization of people in the East, especially women, have destroyed many hopes that were raised by German unification.”11