Germany: Doubts and Dilemmas

...The Social Structure Of the German Electorate Historical phenomena can be understood and acted upon only if one relies on more than the external appearance of things...

...Even the socially inferior strata are necessarily bound to this model as long as they lack vantage points for developing an independent and critical opinion...

...Nor has anti-trust and anticartel legislation been able to alter this trend, as is shown in a recent study by Kurt Pritzkoleits of economic power relations in Western Germany...

...Is There a Way Out...

...But these illusions were soon to be shattered: the defeat of 1953 was repeated...

...Or might it be brought to an end if the SPD, as many German observes urge, were to transform itself from a party of democratic socialism into a somewhat more liberal version of the CDU...

...According to the Institute for Public Opinion Research, out of every 100 gainfully employed workers in Germany today, 44 are skilled laborers, 4 farm laborers, 19 white collar workers, 6 officials, 11 farm owners and only 13 self-employed...

...Thus, of the gainfully employed electorate, more than half are workers and only a small proportion of the white collar workers and officials can be said to belong to the higher executive strata...

...For the SPD to conduct its campaigns on the basis of hysteria rather than by trying to develop the rational political awareness of the voters which does not of course preclude an appeal to their emotions as well, would mean utterly to destroy its chances and therewith democracy in Bundesrepublik...

...It gained majorities in almost all the city Councils of the big industrial towns in these crucial states.* Data gathered in the early months of 1957 by the Institute of Public Opinion Research at Allensbach led to similar expectations for the national election just ahead...

...As for the alleged numerical importance of the intelligentsia, the following figures should be revealing: fully 80 per cent of the eligible voters in Germany have never had more than elementary schooling, while only 6 per cent hold a higher degree...

...The occupation census of 1950 revealed that 70.8 per cent of the German labor force consisted of employees, as compared to 66.7 per cent in 1939...

...For whoever reflects in his own bearing and speech the mood of uncertainty and indecisiveness of these groups loses the chance for winning their support...

...Electoral Manipulation Through Anxiety The methods used in the propaganda offensives of the CDU in both 1953 and 1957 depended primarily upon a skillful manipulation of public anxiety...

...And it dares, on such important political occasions as the Suez crisis, to provide the means for expression of popular opinion...

...As long as this manipulation continues, based as it is on the thesis that cur58 rent society knows no fundamental social contradictions, the SPD has no chance to win an election in which finance capital fights it with all the economic means at its command...

...The British Labor Party has managed to create, though under more favorable circumstances, an adequate image of such a political party in a highly industrialized, essentially capitalist society...

...And only in part can this failure be attributed to the smaller financial means available to the SPD...

...The regime could present itself as the saviour of the stability of the DeutschMark, even though its policy of rapid armament would inevitably lead to a devaluation of the DeutschMark in the face of higher prices for consumer goods...

...No matter how deeply this thesis has penetrated into the thinking of large portions of the working class nor how eagerly it is being debated in the press and by the intellectuals, it is as far removed from the facts as the previously cited assumption about the numerical importance of the self-employed and the intellectuals...

...The SPD can be freed from its current isolation only if it consciously adopts the British Labor Party as its model and if it realizes that it must become the leader of the workers in their political and social opposition to finance capital...

...Secondly, the CDU exploited public anxiety over a decline in the economy whose development and prosperity had been falsely attributed to government policy...

...Then, as now, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) entered a national election with some reason for hope...

...By contrast the Social Democrats, in the midst of abandoning their own principles and not daring to defend their proclaimed goals, cannot hope to attract this fluctuating segment of voters...

...This is particularly true for those segments composed of white collar workers, officials, and the wives of workers, whose politics resemble, if not sociologically, then psychologically, the politics of the socalled independent middle classes...

...the Christian Democrats won 50.2 per cent and gained an absolute majority in the Bundestag, a situation with few parallels in German electoral history...

...The SPD failed even to challenge effectively the notion of sustained economic stability...

...The BLP maintains its character as the instrument through which the workers can express their political awarness...

...Had the SPD systematically engaged in socialist education during the past decade, this gap might have been overcome, but since it did not, a large number of workers have come to feel as they did after 1933: since they are the objects of decisions made by others, they might as well live for the moment and not bother their heads about social goals or ideas...

...Thus, the unconscious anxiety of the masses over Communism and economic crisis lent itself to the successful manipulation by Adenauer propaganda...

...But if the SPD loses the capacity to act as a political counterbalance to the CDU, then the equilibrium on which West German democracy rests will be destroyed and the road to the authoritarian and, at the slightest social upheaval, the totalitarian state will again be open...

...The SPD leadership did not know how to organize the only spontaneous mass reaction which has occurred in Germany since the Adenauer "restoration," namely the popular feeling against the rearmament that has repeatedly been manifested since 1951, nor did it know how to make use of this issue in order to create a more enduring social conscious59 ness...

...When beset by irrational fears, such strata of the population always tend to obey those parties and leaders that guarantee them their social status and with it their self-confidence...

...A political party which adapts itself uncritically to poll results instead of analyzing them for what they really are, has no chance whatever precisely among those voters who lack social awareness or rationality in politics...

...Though it increased its percentage of the national vote from 28.2 per cent to 3.18 per cent, the SPD remains a minority party...

...Nevertheless, all of these sins of omission are hardly the main reason why the SPD has been defeated in all the national elections despite its good showing in by-elections...

...Moreover, the Adenauer regime with the help of ruling groups of the United States had at least proposed certain concrete policies...

...It holds fast to the goal of the democratization of society through the socialization of the central economic institutions, a goal which, far later than the SPD, it earned in the experience of battle...

...More significant is the fact that the opinions of large segments of the German working class can be manipulated in the ways just described...

...It must keep in mind that the masses can develop a stable social consciousness only through actual political participation...

...Such propaganda has behind it all the resources of modern public opinion research, the support of most of the press, and the power of those committed to the status quo...

...During the last four years it had been steadily gaining in local elections and Adenauer's Christian Democrats (CDU) as steadily losing—a trend even sharper than during the equivalent period between 1949 and 1953...

...In many instances, moreover, the SPD accepted the ideologies stemming from the "restoration," so that its concepts were frequently identical with those of the CDU...

...Without such awareness, an economic crisis even more than artificially induced anxiety could lead to hysterical mass movements under fascist leaders...

...The workers, as well as everyone else, it is asserted, gain from the steady increase in productivity by receiving higher wages and fuller social security benefits...

...Given such a resurgence of socialist consciousness among the German workers, a large number of middle class voters might then be attracted to this powerful new social force...

...It was able to do all these things because the SPD did not risk an energetic full-fledged attack...

...This is why, despite initially favorable chances, the SPD failed in its attempts to replace the issue of anxiety over Communism with that of anxiety over the atom bomb...

...In addition, it must be kept in mind that the current, though still inadequate, position of the lower social strata in the consumer goods market, was not freely given to them by those in power but was rather reluctantly granted either as a concession to pressure groups, frequently only after bitter struggles, or in order to soften pol56 itical opposition...

...They saw in the rent reform, that half-hearted concession of the regime to the Opposition, a present to the masses as well as a proof of the growth of business guaranteed by the CDU...

...Both in 1953 and 1957 the CDU 57 could count upon a general disintegration of social consciousness among the German people (partly the legacy of the Third Reich), as well as upon the fact that the portion of voters which lacks even a semblance of rational social consciousness can be expected to behave as the petty bourgeois has done throughout its history...

...What is usually overlooked is that the objective conflicts of interest revolve not only about shares in consumer goods but also and essentially about control over decision-making in high places...

...The Myth of a "Classless Middle Class" Society The majority of the German working class, it must be said, possesses only a slight awareness of its objective interests...

...Each time it played upon the understandable emotions aroused by the threat of Communism, first in regard to the East German revolt of June 1953 and then the Hungarian revolution of 1956...

...For such reasons the party is able to appeal to and attract not only the workers but also the housewives and portions of the middle class...

...Where then, it may be asked, is the reservoir of potential voters for the German Social Democratic Party to be located...

...To what can these defeats be attributed...

...The agreement of industry and the mining companies to keep prices at their current levels until the end of the election campaign, no matter how transparent a maneuver this was, sufficed to allay the gnawing suspicions of the hesitant or uncertain voters...

...A good many workers have more or less come to accept the thesis, long advocated by various German academicians and now even by several leading intellectuals in the SPD, that our highly industrialized "mass society," despite the continued existence of capitalist property relations, is "classless...

...And how important, in any case, is this middle class in German social life...

...Here it is necessary once again to relate these groups to the goal which corresponds to their own objective interests as well as to those of society as a whole: the socialization of the basic means of production...

...55 But the questions then arise: could the SPD have won even if it had had the support of a significant part of the German middle class...

...The Third Reich destroyed these vantage points and is thus responsible for the fact that those workers who were politically aware before 1933 proved unable to transmit their heritage to the younger generation or to develop further their own thinking...

...As a result, so the argument goes, there no longer exists an objective conflict of interests between the workers and those who command power...

...The SPD, at a heavy financial and technical disadvantage, cannot hope to compete with the streamlined methods of this propaganda—and particularly so if it cannot rely on a stable and rational self-awareness of the working class, traditionally the major resource of the European socialist movement...

...And if the SPD did abandon whatever remains of its claim to socialism, it would irrevocably lose any chance for electoral victory, first because such a move would alienate the most politically aware segments of the working class who thus far have constituted the party's most reliable supporters, and second because the voters who have come to believe that this is "the best of all possible worlds" would then, understandably, see no reason for abandoning the CDU...

...For even if the SPD were to "leave a door open to the right" or to give up its goal of the socialization of the means of production, it is not likely that the political strategy of big business would change...

...Through their generous financing of the Adenauer coalition in both 1953 and 1957, big business and finance have shown that they at least have a firm grasp of the realities of power...

...That the "classless middle class" notion, whether in its liberal and neoliberal or in its Christian Socialist forms, has come to be the ruling ideology of Western Germany, seems indisputable...

...As a result, it would be a grave error for the SPD, traditionally the agency of independent political opinion within the working class, to refrain from criticizing the ideology which the rulings groups impose upon or help spread in the lower social strata...

...By 1956, according to statistics from the Bureau of Unemployment Insurance, this proportion had risen to 75.4 per cent...

...Its warnings of a rise in prices were simply not heeded...

...Is the rule of Adenauer and his CDU the inevitable fate of the West German Republic...

...Translated from the German by SUZANNE FELLER 60...

...The SPD did not dare shake this belief in 1957, much as it had not dared in 1927 when both the official economic spokesmen and the leaders of the Social Democrats believed in the invincibility of the market...

...Only by continual discussions within the party, conducted in the public eye, can it give the German electorate, fixated as it is on the anti-democratic principle of the leader, an example of living democracy and sound critical self-awareness...

...By contrast, • The recent Social Democratic victory in the Hamburg municipal elections seems to confirm the pattern of local gains that cannot be carried over into national elections...

...Continual education in party democracy is maintained by internal political conflict without thereby sacrificing, through the inevitable formation of splinter groups, the authority of the party leadership...

...And furthermore, the true representatives of economic power are now the managers who have increasingly taken over control of industry from its formal owners, the stockholders...

...They argue that as long as the SPD remains a class party holding fast to socialist goals which, by their nature, alienate the intermediate layers of the population, it can only expect defeat...

...The SPD "reformers" who set the tone for the last campaign, and who comprise a large segment of the party's intelligentsia, insist that the defeat suffered in both national elections is a result of the party's inability to win the votes of the independent middle class and the professionals...

...In October 1956, for example, the SPD became the dominant party in the most industrialized states of Western Germany, polling 44 per cent of the vote in Northrhine-Westphalia and 47 per cent in Hessen...

...Despite the myth of a "people's capitalism," it is evident that economic control is now the monopoly of an ever narrowing stratum of men...

...In any case, the actual political behavior of finance capital has been clear enough...

...Editors...

...Even an economic crisis might not change the situation...

...For only if the workers had already attained a certain degree of self-awareness would such a crisis give both them and the SPD a chance...

...It must be motivated to make visible this opposition in the day to day social and economic struggles, in internal as well as in foreign affairs, and in political and cultural activities...

...The reigning consciousness in a society is always that of the ruling class...

...That the latter could be used as an electoral issue a year after its occurrence was primarily due to the success of the CDU and its sympathetic press in keeping the parallel activities of the Western powers in North Africa and the Middle East from reaching the depths of public consciousness...

...Is there no way for the German Social Democracy to gain a majority...

...Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to conclude that the possibilities for creating a firm social consciousness among the workers have been eliminated —provided, that is, that the SPD makes itself a focus for crystallizing this consciousness...

...Still another reason for this kind of response among the workers was the recreation of the German army, under pressure from the United States and in response to the methods of Stalinist rule...

...One thing is certain: the SPD will never be able to iterate with greater piety the myth of the "Christian West" than the professional formulators of this ideology, the leaders of the CDU...

...Only if it lets practical experience demonstrate that the interests of the workers coincide with those of the whole society but are distinct from the special interests of the men who currently have economic power (who, for example, promised, in the heat of the election campaign, that prices would stay at their current levels but who casually allowed a rise in prices a few weeks later) can it effectively appeal to the middle classes...

...it gives the impression of being a real political force and not the belated echo of the discarded theories of the conservatives...

...The outlook for victory is dimmer still if the SPD should decide to surrender even more to the fluctuating opinions of the lower middle class or of those segments of the working class that have accepted the thesis of a society in which class conflict has been eliminated...

...From 1939 to 1956 the proportion of self-employed had fallen from 14.9 to 13.5 per cent and that of members of their families in business with them, from 18.4 per cent to 11.1 per cent...

...The sole chance for the German Social Democrats lies in systematically and purposefully changing this situation by recreating the social consciousness of the largest and most decisive group in Germany, the workers...

...And so long as this ideology governs the thoughts and feelings of the majority of the voters— that is, a large section of the working class—they will be particularly vulnerable to carefully designed propaganda...