Peter C. Caldwell. Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. x + 220 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-82090-5.
Reviewed by richard Maguire (School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK)
Published on H-German (November, 2003)
Taking Marxism-Leninism Seriously
Taking Marxism-Leninism Seriously
Two theoretical notions run through Peter Caldwell's excellent work on the GDR. One is that in order to comprehend the policies and activity of the East German state one must understand, and accept as genuinely held, the Marxist-Leninist theory that served as an underpinning for the discussions and arguments among its academics, politicians and bureaucrats. The second is that the problems and issues facing the leaders of the new German state throughout its short life were not unique. Because they were instead difficulties faced by the ruling elites of all modern states, the solutions chosen in the GDR, although Marxist-Leninist in nature, were strongly linked to currents of European thought that had existed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Caldwell examines these issues through a thoroughgoing scrutiny of the idea of "the plan." Working from the premise that planning, in a variety of forms--from First World War Germany to contemporary American monetary policy--is a fundamental activity of the modern state, he argues that, under state socialism, "the plan" had three closely-linked roles: first, as a technical method of organizing an industrial economy; secondly, as a political ideal of total governance; and, most importantly, as a means to achieve a qualitatively different world. The consequence of this approach, he argues, was that the plan assumed a "quasi-metaphysical" status as the foundation of an entire world (pp. 1-2).
Caldwell suggests that idea of the plan was not merely a Soviet imposition. Belief in it grew from the tenet among German Marxists in the years after 1945 that capitalism was deeply implicated in the Nazi tragedy. When this conviction was combined with their general view that the autonomy of capital was the major destabilizing influence of the modern world, their conviction that the real foundation of future advances was the conscious plan was genuine and profound. As such, the notion of the plan was immune from criticism, however, what Caldwell shows is that the techniques of planning were not sacrosanct. He examines the attempts by intellectuals such as Fritz Behrens, Hermann Klenner, Ernst Bloch, and Georg Klaus, working in the fields of economics, legal theory, political philosophy and cybernetics respectively, to explore planning from a critical Marxist-Leninist perspective. Caldwell proposes that these academics were not attempting to undermine the GDR; on the contrary, they were genuine in their aim of improving the functioning of the planned economy. Nevertheless, their application of Marxist theory caused them to come to conclusions that led them, almost inexorably, into conflict with the repressive aspects of the regime, because it led them to question the claim of the party to direct social development and, therefore, to challenge the legitimacy of the Communist order.
Caldwell begins with an examination the field of economics. Economists saw themselves involved in an avant-garde project to overcome irrational capitalist economics and create a different form of human society. He argues that in this they were part of a strong European tradition. The plan-market distinction is seen as a reiteration of that between state and society which, Caldwell argues, has dominated recent European thought. In the context of the GDR, he suggests that the Marxist-Leninist approach to this problem contained what he terms "a contradiction between the law of value and planning" (p. 15). While the plan aimed to create a non-capitalist economy, the tools available to economists in the early years of the GDR were those of capitalism, from notions of wage labor to profit. Yet, because they were capitalist in origin, these tools became increasingly suspect as the Cold War intensified. Furthermore, their meaning and efficacy altered as they became entangled in the propaganda requirements of the regime. Economists were caught between the need to justify the planning regime and the need to provide accurate information for the planned economy.
Moreover, attempts to find alternative methods of providing information to assist in planning failed. Increasingly, some intellectuals came to favor a radical answer, to alter the functioning of the planned economy by allowing firms to respond to economic conditions without state direction, in essence a return to the market. The difficulty with this approach was that it posed a challenge to the state-approved vision of the plan that saw the economy as one enormous factory guided by the single consciousness that was the party. Fritz Behrens and others argued that the essence of planning was to use "objective laws" and to embrace local spontaneity. Crucially, Behrens went on to argue that the Soviet model of state-directed socialism was no longer viable. The "objective laws" of socialism required that the state should "wither away" with the spontaneous action of the masses replacing the state in decision-making. Furthermore he proposed that the idea the state could, or should, control everything was "Prussian." Given that the official ideology blamed an alliance between Prussian elites and monopoly capital for the Nazi regime, this latter conclusion was too much for the party hierarchy and Behrens was removed from his post in higher education to become a low-level manager at a cable factory in Berlin. Caldwell argues that this response was not simply the result of the comparison with Nazism but also a consequence of the implicit message of the work of the revisionists. In arguing for local spontaneity they challenged the notion that the interests of the party and the workers were identical, and in doing so contested the party's version of consciousness. Marxist-based economics had provided the means to challenge the entire social order (pp. 50-55).
A similar story is unveiled in Caldwell's review of the discussions among legal theorists about the issues raised by the apparent right of the state to take measures that violated written law, and the simultaneous need for a codified, fixed set of legal rules, a debate he places in the European tradition of raison d'etat. Caldwell finds that, once again, in their quest to address this issue through Marxism, certain theorists eventually challenged the legitimacy of the system. As the planning regime developed, the 1949 constitution was increasingly ignored; for example, in the aftermath of the uprising on June 17, 1953, Minister of Justice Max Fechner was sentenced to eight years in jail after calling upon judges to take account of the constitutional right to strike when sentencing those involved. Gradually, the argument was made that the constitution did not provide a set of rules for state action; rather, it described the achievements of the state. This argument linked to the general status of the plan, which required acceptance of a unified, conscious planning apparatus controlled by the omniscient party. Nevertheless in the mid-1950's a number of legal theorists, including Hermann Klenner, attempted to formalize the relationship between legality and planning. They argued for a basic distinction between law and administration and for the acceptance of general norms by state officials. Furthermore, Klenner suggested that the law existed outside politics and social norms, with the consequence that it was necessary for the state to be bound by the principle of legality. Such ideas were deemed unacceptable and dismissed by the regime's preferred legal theorists, such as Karl Polak, who supported party claims to be the "master interpreter of socialist legality" (p. 59). Klenner was transferred to the post of mayor of a small town on the Polish border, while Polak went on to dominate legal theory in the GDR until 1989.
The dialogue between Ernst Bloch and the orthodox philosopher, Rugard Otto Gropp, is the focus of the third chapter, in which Caldwell discusses the challenge posed by Bloch's work on the relationship between subject, object and history. Once again Bloch was dedicated to the socialist ideal, yet his unquestioned ability as a philosopher ensured that his approach to Marxism-Leninism produced difficult questions for the regime. The major complication posed by Bloch's ideas was that they could lead to doubts about the party's claim to possess a higher consciousness. If, as Bloch argued, history created conscious subjects and a subject's understanding of the world was always situated, then how could such a claim be made? The party's answer was that Bloch was wrong, and it entrusted the task of showing his error to philosophers such as Gropp, "a party hack with no sense of subtlety" (p. 113). For Gropp the answer to the subject-object problem was to turn to Marxism-Leninism as a "catechism" and argue that the subject could grasp the whole because Marx had provided the tools to do so; end of problem. At the end of the 1950's Bloch's ideas were deemed unacceptable "revisionism" and were removed from public debate, while Gropp's simplistic notions became standard party fare for decades.
In Chapter Four Caldwell shows that the simple repression of these approaches did not remove the problems that they addressed. Looking at the period after the erection of the Berlin Wall, when the theme of antifascism was eschewed in favor of an attempt by the regime to gain legitimacy through technological progress, he notes that the problems with the planning regime remained. Well aware of the fate of their predecessors when proposing solutions to these difficulties, leading figures such as Georg Klaus used the apparently neutral language of cybernetics to discuss issues of the relationship between state economic planning and social actors, the relationship of the party to law and how the party could claim a higher consciousness. Cybernetics was presented as having an identity with dialectical materialism, as both were antidotes to idealism and mechanical materialism. Indeed, Klaus claimed that Marx was "the first cybernetician" (p. 153). Yet, the very malleability of cybernetic language ensured that it could be used to justify both radical changes and orthodox policies, and most refrained from using such theory to challenge the party's claims. The irony Caldwell finds was that, despite this self-censorship, cybernetic theory gradually undermined the planning regime and the wider claims made for state socialist planning by showing the limits of consciousness and knowledge.
Caldwell's overall claim for the importance of the work he discusses is that it played a material role in the gradual, and largely unintentional, weakening of the legitimacy of state socialism in the eyes of the population the party claimed to represent. He accepts that the state socialist project failed for many concrete economic reasons, such as cost inflexibility and disincentives for meaningful technological development; however, as he points out, economic failure is rarely enough to cause the end of an entire nation. He believes that the difference between the GDR, as well as the rest of the Eastern Bloc, and countries facing bankruptcy elsewhere was that the Communist states were founded on the claims of the Marxist-Leninist tradition to know the truth. As these claims were undermined, in a process of "hollowing-out," so their ability to survive was weakened. The outcome was that, when economic disaster finally occurred, these regimes were unable to respond, because no one, even within the various ruling parties, still believed in the ideology upon which they were founded (p. 188).
The wider implications of Caldwell's work are many and fascinating. It seems to suggest that, as a body of theory, Marxism-Leninism in the GDR was not intellectually inert, but was capable of producing dynamic intellectual work. The idea of the plan was potentially capable of reform and change, and several thinkers worked to this end in interesting and original ways. Nevertheless, those producing this critical work found themselves continually in conflict with the other side of the state socialist world, the apparatus of repression. A great strength of Caldwell's work is that, while he shows profound appreciation of the repressive aspects of the regime, this awareness is not allowed to dominate his work. Instead he attempts to understand the enigma at the core of Marxism-Leninism, which "emphasised the creative, revolutionary power of materialist political thought yet also systematically repressed creativity with the aim of forming a uniform worldview that served the party" (pp. vii-viii). In his examination of this problem Caldwell leads us towards questions about the nature and purpose of intellectual endeavor, and the need to understand those with whom we may disagree. There is a sense in which Caldwell appears to challenge a long line of conservative critics of the GDR, who have argued that the fundamentally undemocratic and immoral nature of Marxist-Leninism could have only one result--what Klaus Schroeder and Jochen Staadt have described as a state that survived through "open and latent terror."[1] In recent years this view has tended to dominate the headlines in discussions of the GDR, and, while academic discussion has attempted to remain measured, as Corey Ross has pointed out Marxism-Leninism has been "largely consigned to the dustbin" as an explanatory tool.[2] Although he does not explore this possibility in great depth, Caldwell's work appears to imply that a potential existed within Marxist-Leninist theory for an alternative, less repressive, outcome. It may be that wholly antagonistic approaches to Marxism-Leninism fail to appreciate the potentially creative tension that existed within it as a body of thought. If this is the case, then perhaps historians should focus upon why, and how, repression triumphed in this instance, rather than simplistically building it into their critique of Marxist-Leninism.
This possibility is especially important when one considers Caldwell's attempt to set the intellectual traditions of the GDR in a wider European perspective. He suggests that the German Marxist response to the situation after 1945 was both rational and consistent with older currents of European thought. Here, it would have been desirable for Caldwell to provide greater explanation of his wider theoretical framework, which at times makes claims that seem to require greater support. For example, his argument that the plan-market distinction was a different version of that between state and society may have validity, yet it appears to make straightforward connections between the state and planning, and society and the market, that sit uneasily with the complexity of his argument elsewhere. Similarly, his discussion of the ideal he perceives to be underlying the entire Marxist project--a desire to achieve utopia through the activity of the state--also requires further consideration. He proposes that "what links all these examples is the notion that conscious decisions can lead a society toward a better future (from the point of view of the state)" and sees this in a much wider European tradition (p. 1). In this context his work has strong links to that of other thinkers such as James C. Scott, Stephen Kotkin and Peter Holquist.[3] Yet, in common with many writers in this area, he does not discuss what he means by the term "the state," tending to treat the concept as one that is both unproblematic and uncontested. Likewise, although the idea of "modernity" is central to his theoretical framework, he does not expand upon its meaning other than to aver that "modernity is not a fixed thing, a goal; it is a condition, a set of challenges--a permanent state of transition" (p. 5). This is an interesting view; yet, in a work where the author shows such deep understanding of economics, philosophy, and legal theory one is left desiring to know more about the assumptions behind his overall approach.
These issues apart, this is a marvelous piece of work: well-written, thoughtful, and challenging. This thoughtfulness is exemplified in his conclusion, where Caldwell tentatively submits that the end of the Communist bloc also saw the end of the belief in the "utopia of the sovereign, collective consciousness presented within the Marxist-Leninist tradition" (p. 196). This is a valid point; however, he refuses to be drawn into the triumphant claims of the victory of capitalism that the collapse of the USSR and the GDR has drawn from many quarters. Rather he turns his view to the possible similarities between the "prophets of both state socialism and global capitalism [who] have conceived of history as a developmental path towards a certain end." In doing so Caldwell suggests that the collapse of one such vision does not automatically vindicate the other; rather, it highlights "a sense of uncertainty and risk" (p. 194). This is an aspect of his work that might well bear further investigation, and in broaching the subject he has made an important step in expanding our consideration of the failed communist experiment, so that we can begin to see it not only as an indicator of the potential for terror existing within the human condition, but as a mirror through which the West may consider itself.
Notes:
[1]. K. Schroeder and Jochen Staadt, "Der diskrete Charme des Status-quo: DDR-Forschung in der Aera der Entspanungspolitik," in Geschichte und Transformation der SED-Staates ed. K. Schroeder (Munich, 1994), p. 309.
[2]. Corey Ross, The East German Dictatorship (London: Arnold, 2002), p. 15.
[3]. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995): Peter Holquist, "'Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work': Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Context," Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): pp. 415-420.
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Citation:
richard Maguire. Review of Caldwell, Peter C., Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2003.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8401
Copyright © 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.