East Germany Rebrands as the Freest State in the East
When Erich Honecker assumed power in East Germany in 1971, he sought to remake the image of his brutal dictatorship in the minds both of its citizens and of the West, to achieve hitherto-elusive diplomatic recognition among members of the NATO alliance and to emerge as the most successful Soviet vassal state in the Warsaw Pact.
This plan contained two central elements, both innovative within the Soviet bloc. The first was to use a highly effective strategy for economic development that had not previous been attempted in a planned economy:
- Import substitution industrialization, an economic development model most thoroughly explained and propounded by revisionists like Andre Gunder Frank and the other “dependency theorists,” that had been most successful in Cold War Turkey and Brazil; and
- Developing less violently coercive and more “inclusive” means of suppressing dissent and maintaining political and social control over the population so that the unanimous elections and staged applause of the regime would be seen less as a show of power and more as a show of popularity
While the latter could not have been successful in persuading the West of the regime’s exemplary character without the former also succeeding, this piece will concentrate exclusively on the second element: social control.
The Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, were already among the most feared of the secret police forces of the Warsaw Pact and their playbook was largely that developed by the KGB, the USSR’s secret police, during Joseph Stalin’s purges of the 1920s and 30s. Show trials were used not to convince the public of dissidents’ guilt but to demonstrate the power of the state to rig its own judicial system and turn every verdict into a foregone conclusion. Torture, similarly, was widely practiced and efforts at denying it were transparent and perfunctory because the point was to make torture a public secret, an unacknowledged fact that nevertheless shaped everyone’s expectations of what happened if they stepped out of line. Knowledge of torture was as universal as its formulaic denial. The odd street beating was thrown in as well, so that the state’s violence could erupt anywhere, any time, again conditioning everyone’s expectations.
Honecker was faced with the problem of how to reform the Stasi without damaging the hegemonic social control it exercised on behalf of the state. The innovations he made should sound eerily familiar to anyone navigating our present society’s profoundly dystopian turn.
First of all, the Stasi were successful because of the large number of volunteers for every Stasi agent in East German society, there were two civic-minded volunteers who helped the agency do its work by informing on their neighbours, friends, family members and co-workers. Taken together, including both direct employees and volunteers (these include only regular volunteers). Those who simply cooperated or fed information to the Stasi occasionally, or at their convenience, was likely about 2 million people, or 12% of the population. But those who made Stasi activities part of their day-to-day lives were closer to 250,000, around 2% of the population. These numbers peaked in the 1980s, having steadily increased through the 70s.
Stasi operatives, paid and unpaid, were disproportionately concentrated in the caring professions, such as doctors, nurses and teachers. Stasi personnel, both paid and voluntary, were also disproportionately concentrated in institutions wielding what we might call “syndical power.”
By “syndical power,” I mean institutions that exercise direct control over key aspects of society unmediated by conventional legislative bodies like parliaments, cabinets, central committees, legislatures, etc. medical associations, nurses’ colleges, societies of engineers, law societies, bar associations, self-governing professions with the power to unilaterally impose new protocols on society at large, unmediated by the state. These modern guilds are also spaces in which the commissar consciousness is at its purest, spaces in which one’s financial success is explained based on the syndical groups’ monopolization of expertise, one state power is used to defend but in which state power is not permitted to intervene.
Theorists inspired by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci had long drawn attention to a specifically Marxist understanding of “hegemony,” noting that Marxists achieving state power means little in society in which capitalism continues to enjoy hegemony. Simply controlling the state means little when the major institutions of a society, its churches, its schools, its universities, its courts, its culture, etc. are firmly in the camp of the dominant ideology and where the dominant ideology conditions people’s understandings of fairness, justice, balance, reason, etc.
The control of key social institutions, especially educational and judicial institutions, confers long-term power on those who have captured these entities. And those seizing control of them through claims of meritocratic expertise and political deal-making are those most likely to have the class consciousness of commissars functioning, as they do, as senior gatekeepers and managers in society’s most venerable institutions. Furthermore, technocrats from the commissar class who gain power in the apparatus of the state find, in these institutions, natural, powerful allies with whom to engage in mutually burnishing one another’s power.
Because of their program of controlling these syndical systems, these institutional chokepoints in East German society, the Stasi had a unique and uniquely indispensable role in functioning as the connective tissue between state power and syndical power in creating and maintaining hegemony.
Already one can see how the Stasi possessed the power to make or break the careers of high-status professionals in their society without resort to the use of violence or the application of direct state power. University boards of governors, local law societies and medical associations, these institutions could make jobs vanish and professional certifications appear and disappear.
But the most powerful tool, and the most innovative of all of the weapons in the Stasi’s arsenal post-1971 was one we have forgotten to our detriment, well, mine anyway. Maybe that of a few of my friends.
Erich Honecker Discovers Cancel Culture
Zersetzung has no precise translation into English and certainly not one that encompasses all the new context and meaning that accreted to it during its eighteen years as the primary method of social control used in East Germany 1971-89. To carry out his foreign policy objectives, Honecker had to purge his state of virtually all extra-judicial state violence: no more public floggings, no more torture, no more extra-judicial killings. At the same time, kangaroo courts generating executions or, worse yet, political prisoners, to whom Amnesty International activists could write also had to be shut down. What could replace all the arbitrary violence on which the absolute power of the Socialist Unity Party had previously rested?
Zersetzung, roughly translated as “decomposition,” referred to a campaign of coordinated social, political, personal, reputational and professional harassment and humiliation against individuals organizing against or speaking out against the regime. Tactics might include such things as workplace harassment by superiors or colleagues and the generation of workplace grievances that might result in the demotion or ultimate firing of the target. But the primary immediate effect sought by the Stasi was simply distraction: the more time targets had to invest in saving their job or defending themselves against spurious and malicious complaints, the less time and emotional energy they could invest in battling the regime.
The family was a key site of action. Zersetzung sought to alienate its targets from their romantic partners, children and family systems or, at least, place these relationships in a constant state of crisis. By placing pressure on those who continued to associate with the target, they could leave them both materially and emotionally isolated and generate internal sources of pressure within family systems, whereby family members or romantic partners suffering from Zersetzung by proxy would place additional pressure on the target whose activities now presented a material risk to others. Family members and romantic partners would begin to see the target, rather than the Stasi, as the proximate reason for their persecution, for which there was a simple solution. Again, even if families and relationships did not immediately disintegrate, the Stasi could open a “home front,” in their war on the target, forcing them to reallocate time and emotional energy from fighting the regime to the conflicts that had erupted in their family system.
Friendships were not off the table, as Stasi operatives would go to work on any valued relationship the target had on which they might exert pressure. In addition, there were reputational attacks, through both rumour and through coverage in state-controlled media that sought to delegitimate the target. These attacks were given credibility as rumour or news story would typically mix damaging falsehoods about the individual with fact, often carefully woven together so that the falsehood and fact could not easily be distinguished.
The Stasi, themselves, described Zersetzung as follows:
a systematic degradation of reputation, image, and prestige on the basis of true, verifiable and discrediting information together with untrue, credible, irrefutable, and thus also discrediting information; a systematic engineering of social and professional failures to undermine the self-confidence of individuals; … engendering of doubts regarding future prospects; engendering of mistrust and mutual suspicion within groups …; interrupting respectively impeding the mutual relations within a group in space or time …, for example by … assigning geographically distant workplaces.
The success of Zersetzung was measured simply: did the target experience a psychological crisis or series of crises? Did the person become so bereft of reputation, friends, work, etc. that they no longer had time or energy to attack the regime?
One of the things that made Zersetzung especially effective was the reaction it engendered in those close to the target. Whereas, before 1971, Stasi activities were “open secrets,” acts of terror to be formally denied but whose efficacy was based on widespread knowledge thereof, e.g. torture, Zersetzung conducted in a more secretive way so that one could plausibly deny that it was taking place if provided with the correct incentives. Given a choice between believing that their society was liberalizing and that Stasi terror was a thing of the past and believing that the Stasi had developed an even more powerful mechanism of social control, there was a clear incentive to believe the former or at least behave as though one did.
People so wish to be free that they will cling desperately to any fiction that tells them they are free. To believe otherwise was costly. The knowledge that one is not free leaves a person a set of terrible choices: (a) to do nothing and feel oneself a coward for not fighting for it, (b) to decide that freedom is not a valuable thing and one does not desire it, or (c) to object to one’s unfreedom and court the nightmare of Zersetzung oneself. One therefore has strong incentives to believe that the fault lies with the Stasi’s target, that the target has become a bad person or, more easily, that the target has gone mad. This second explanation is hardly a stretch because targets of Zersetzung often were driven mad. And a factor in this madness was often the target’s friends’, colleagues’ or families’ disbelief in their accounts of persecution.
With this strong system of incentives, Zersetzung targets gradually did lose the will and capacity to fight the regime and, because it was in the material interest of those around them to deny what was happening, they often ended up, like the dissidents of the previous generation, incarcerated, not in hospitals but in psychiatric facilities. When the power of the Stasi was finally broken and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, about half of the targets of Zersetzung were so badly damaged by their experience that they received lifelong psychiatric pensions from the Federal Republic of Germany.
Blairite Austerity Before Blairite Austerity
As discussed in the previous piece in this series, East Germany had long maintained the illusion of ideological and political pluralism by maintaining the appearance of a multi-party political system and a large and democratic trade union movement. Of course, these organizations were totally dependent on state patronage to even exist but within this state patronage system, there remained high levels of organizational and operational independence, spaces where apparatchiks could carve out their own personal fiefs with their own personal patronage networks.
The Stasi were integral to that system. Operating with high levels of independence Stasi agents, both paid and unpaid, within these organizations were tasked with locating opponents of the regime and coordinating and prosecuting their own campaigns of Zersetzung against the dissidents they identified. While this information was shared with Stasi headquarters and used to produce a national list of dissidents, it was not Stasi HQ that put people on the list nor was it Stasi HQ that carried out the campaigns of decomposition. Those campaigns were left to Stasi operatives in unions, churches and the fake political parties that formed the coalition government.
In other words, Zersetzung was carried out on a largely freelance basis. Officials within the civil society organizations of the regime hatched and carried out these campaigns simply based on incentives, the need to maintain or increase the level of state patronage one’s organization received, the desire to demonstrate one’s loyalty to the regime and, of course, the opportunity to use the might of the state to fight out interpersonal rivalries and resentments.
Rather than emptying civil society, as dictators often do, the crew running East Germany had instead chosen to capture and colonize the organizations that had once been the institutional backbone of civil society, churches, parties, professional associations and unions, something that did not begin in the West until Blairite austerity.
The Neoliberalization of Zersetzung
To anyone paying attention, the thing I have been writing about is what we euphemistically call “cancel culture.” But how can these things be the same if there is no Stasi headquarters coordinating all the freelance cancelation? This misunderstands the nature of the Stasi at their height. They didn’t need Stasi HQ because the individual operations were coordinated out of the head offices of unions, parties and civil society organizations.
This is where we can see how the logic of neoliberalism has collided with the class consciousness of the commissars. Zersetzung runs just as well in a peer-to-peer network as it does in a client-server network. I know that one of the lists on which I appear is maintained by Lisa Kreut, the Vice President of the BC Hospital Employees’ Union. But is Zersetzung going to be less effective if it takes a while for Kreut to notice I am on someone else’s list too? Is a campaign of cancelation going to be less effective if two or even three Woke Stasi are competing with each other to see who deals the next major disruption to my life?
The real genius of creating a modern Stasi to carry out a campaign of decomposition against enemies of the commissar class’s ideology i.e. Wokeness is the discovery that people are so terrified of Zersetzung that they will maintain a double consciousness, insisting that “there is no such thing as cancel culture” and “he deserved to be canceled.” That is, after all, how every social media argument goes when someone says “I have been canceled.” The first move of regime supporters is to ridicule the idea that anyone is ever canceled and then, seemingly effortlessly, once presented with more details, to insist that cancelation is reasonable, deserved and would have happened sooner were it not for the great forbearance and generosity of the Woke Stasi.
Now, some of you may be hoping that I will now offer some sort of theory of how information about Zersetzung was somehow directly diffused to the Baby Boom generation in the 1970s and 80s by the KGB. I will make no such claim. Rather, what I will say is this:
There is a reason that East Germany came up with Zersetzung when other Soviet satellites did not: it was the first element of Honecker’s program: import substitution industrialization focused on inducing and anticipating consumer demand for manufactured goods. To carry out this program, East Germany had to develop a more sophisticated practice of management and advertising. In other words, their commissar class necessarily became more self-conscious and sophisticated in its efforts to revolutionize production. This is what allowed them to imagine Zersetzung.
That is because a sophisticated, self-conscious commissar class will naturally develop such a set of tactics as they constitute the logical terminus of management theory. Because the commissar class revolutionizes production through the new sciences of large-scale psychological manipulation, advertising and management, it logically follows that this will be the means by which they would also revolutionize society itself. Whereas, in the case of East Germany, the commissar class developed this consciousness in order to defend their hegemony, the commissar class of the modern Global North has developed it in an effort to depose the owner class and become the hegemons.
