In the past two articles, I hope that I have established that the function of the commissar class was to revolutionize production for the owner class through the extension of work discipline technologies first into the immaterial space of the human psyche. And that, as the class charged with revolutionizing production by the previously dominant class, it has come to compete with the owner class for global hegemony.
In the East Bloc, the contest for power between commissar and owner came within a century of industrial capitalist work discipline arriving in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the shift was so rapid that many of Russia’s first factory workers were unemancipated serfs coercively urbanized by the Boyars who owned them.
But in the West, there was a longer period of synthesis and symbiosis between the two classes. The commissar class was more pliant, more cooperative, more servile in its relationship to the bourgeoisie, likely because a smaller portion were direct government employees, as was the case in the Russian and Chinese worlds. I think Bezmenov is correct in suggesting that KGB subversion propaganda helped to create the hippie movement and radically alter the class and racial composition, not to mention the objectives of 1960s radicalism.
The shift in leadership from a Martin Luther King Jr. to an Abbie Hoffman was not just a shift in class and race; it was a shift from the materialism (ironically of a Christian) to immaterialism (ironically that of an atheist). Organizations like Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) ceased making material demands for changes in domestic and foreign policy and increasingly moved into efforts to change “hearts and minds.” And since the mid-1960s there have been waves of left-immaterialism, each led by aspiring bourgeois commissars and based in elite universities.
Over time, these movements have performed an important coming-of-age function among aspiring commissars. A moment of radicalism is followed by an effort to incorporate aspects of its logic into the expanding world of professionalized commissar work. What might begin as a student boycott at Brown University could easily be the seed of a new form of management consulting, like Equity, Diversity and InclusionTM. What might begin as a small encounter group/personality cult in California might transform into the Landmark Forum.
What this means is that the world has seen a two-phase contest between the owners and the commissars. The first, the 1917-91 Cold War, established the conditions that gave rise to the second, 2000-present. That is because, in order to best the commissar-led world, bourgeois capitalists in the West produced more and better managers than the East Bloc did, beginning with the Truman Administration’s GI Bill, which massively expanded economics, commerce and social science departments in universities in the mid-1940s.
The East Bloc, being poorer and more ravaged by the effects of the world wars, was less efficient in producing commissars and those it produced had less reliable data and less effective communications technology at their disposal. But by far the greatest handicap to the East out-managing the West was the illusion under which the Cold War commissars laboured: that they were the proletariat, that acted in the proletariat’s interests and that they shared the class consciousness of the working class.
For instance, the reason Russians (and present-day Chinese) “communists” invest so much in over-producing steel is that steel is not the end-product; Communist Party members are and steel mills appear to produce the best ones and the largest number. But, as with so many brilliant commissar plans of the twentieth century, the insight comes packaged with a massive inefficiency. Steel mills produce unionized steel workers because of their higher pay, stronger shop floor organization and lack of technological change in production structures, which produces labour aristocrats more efficiently. And it is labour aristocrats who make the best and most Party members.
Consequently, we are seeing developments in the tactics and worldview of the commissar class early in its open conflict with the traditional bourgeoisie in the West that it took decades longer to develop in the East. Partly by having a longer and better-nourished incubation period and partly, no doubt, due to the diffusion of commissar class consciousness through subversion, we are already facing tactics not developed in the East until the Soviet-led system was entering its terminal phase. But this is all the more reason to be attentive to points of cultural, strategic and tactical similarity between our own present and the terminal phase of the Brezhnev era (the period of economic contraction 1973-84).
East Germany: the Most Sophisticated Commissar State
Of all the Soviet vassal states in the Warsaw Pact, the most economically and politically successful in this period was Erich Honecker’s East Germany (1971-89). It had the highest rate of economic growth, highest per capita income and was the most successful at rivaling the West in offering a widening diversity of consumer goods. Doctrinaire capitalists were strongly inclined to view these things as evidence of its greater freedom.
For this reason it was widely considered the least repressive and most democratic of the East Bloc states, one that conferred on its citizens not just greater associational and political choice but greater consumer choice, by focusing primarily on consumer goods in its import substitution industrialization programs.
Why couldn’t violent strongmen like Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu and Albania’s Enver Hoxha, with their extra-judicial killings, show trials, public beatings and theatrical repression of protests, be more like Honecker? liberal media in the West wondered. To an extent, this grudging approval on the part of Western liberals and social democrats was produced by a positive feedback loop from the subversion propaganda diffusing outwards from Moscow. But a more significant one, in my view, was the slow convergence, that continues to the present day, among regional commissar class cultures into a global commissar class consciousness. It is for this reason, especially, that East Germany merits our special, focused attention.
Before visiting Honecker’s elaboration of the East German system, let me begin by noting the ways that the country was already ahead of its neighbours in building the most elaborate and sophisticated system of political and social control in Eastern Europe.
Like all Warsaw Pact states, East Germany technically had a multi-party political system and held regular elections based on fixed, four-year terms of office. But, of all of the East Bloc, East Germany’s fake parliamentary system featured most the largest number of political parties and the widest diversity of putative party ideologies. Since the 1950s, the parliament had featured members of nine registered political parties including not just the Socialist Unity Party (SUP, the actual governing party), Free German Trade Union Federation, Democratic Farmers’ Party, Free German Youth and Democratic Women’s League, parties with equivalents throughout the East Bloc’s fake democracies but also, some more surprising political formations. East Germany’s Volkskammer.
Even before Honecker’s seizure of power, parliament also included the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), National Democratic Party (NDP) and the Cultural Association of the German Democratic Republic (CAG). A number of those were holdovers from the Weimar Republic’s party system or were supposedly East German affiliates of West German parties. Every registered party (no party actually opposing the Socialist Unity Party’s absolute control of East German society could maintain a legal registration) was a member of the National Front electoral alliance, meaning, in practical terms, that there was no way to cast a vote against the government. One just showed up and voted for one’s preferred National Front party and candidate; but as the awarding of list-based parliamentary seats was determined by the “agreement” governing the Front, so that voters exerted little control over the composition of the Volkskammer from one election to the next.
But the National Front was not fixed; parties could be demoted within the Front’s seat allocation and new parties could be added, as the official ideology of the state shifted, as happened in 1986 with the addition of the Peasants’ Mutual Aid Association (PMAA) and demotion of four other parties to make room for the Association’s fourteen parliamentary seats.
While citizens’ actions could have little effect on the number of parliamentary seats held by their party or their party’s subservience to the central committee of SUP, that does not mean that citizens were mere spectators in the regime’s parliamentary politics. Each of the parties was a mass organization with its own membership rolls and held local, regional and national meetings at which members selected candidates, elected members to internal office and passed resolutions. The parties had their own leaders and the combined membership of the various parties exceeded a million East Germans.
Much like trade union and political conventions in present-day Canada, the resolutions that were passed and the candidates and officials descended from above. Pre-approved lists of resolutions to support, candidates to endorse, officials to elect were presented to delegates who knew what to do. This meant that party conventions were not a site of democratic decision-making or leadership selection but an opportunity for the state to surveil party members and ensure that they were publicly voting and speaking in favour of approved state ideology, and for those who passed ideological tests, an opportunity to seek patronage or promotion within the party or the larger East German state.
In some ways, present-day Canadian practices are more egregious. Party members still voted for lists of pre-approved candidates for office in East Germany. In today’s Canada, most of our candidate selection decisions are made by secret committees of party apparatchiks that do not release the reasons for their decisions nor the names of committee members. Party members are not even required to rubber-stamp these decisions. The secrecy is likely motivated by the over-representation of members of the commissar class who are concurrently employed by lobbying and PR firms like Hill and Knowlton. But even the veil of secrecy is starting to slip with the direct appointment of BC’s premier last month, by a committee of one, a single Hill and Knowlton employee, former finance minister, Elizabeth Cull, now representing Royal Dutch Shell as a lobbyist.
This may help to explain to puzzled readers why there were parties “representing” the notoriously anti-communist yeoman farmers (PMAA), Nazi supporters (NDP), artists and writers (CAG), adherents to Catholic modernism (CDU) and liberals (LDP). It was especially important to surveil such people’s politics, force them to take loyalty oaths, force them to condemn the West and ensure that there was a group willing to “represent” i.e. control these groups in alignment with the state. The conventions’ function was simply to acclaim the pre-selected stooges of the regime.
The BC Federation of Labour convention that is taking place down the road from me right now is little different from these conventions. At this convention, delegates gave a standing ovation to BC’s new premier, who was appointed by a fossil fuel industry lobbyist who, as the BC NDP’s Returning Officer, disqualified the other candidates permitting an acclamation. This is less different from East Germany than many of us would like. There is political change but the political parties (including Canada’s counterfeit conservative parties) and their conventions are little more than spectators. Power changes hands at an elite level, based on decisions taken among a few dozen elites, not by the thousands who attend conventions to stand and applaud these faits accompli.
Unlike most Cold War authoritarian regimes, which saw mass participation in civic life and mass membership in organizations, especially ideologically diverse organizations, as threatening, East Germany shared with the pro-US Brazilian dictatorship the opposite strategy: the capture and depoliticization of mass cultural events and organizations.
Much as I had hoped this would only be a three-parter, I see that just describing the East Germany that Erich Honecker inherited has taken much of this post. Next time, I promise: Honecker’s East Germany and the politics of the late Cold War Stasi.
