Last socialist premier of Germany interviewed

Heinz Dieterich has recently published an interview with the last socialist premier of the DDR, Hans Modrow.

When I had read through Modrows article, it struck me that it says nothing very original, which, given his own failure at the time to vocally warn the population of the danger that they faced from western takeover, was not totally surprising. His ideas on socialist economy are notably vague, whilst his ideas on democracy are little more than traditional liberalism.

What seemed to me a key issue, the disarming of the factory militias, is never mentioned.

Who, though gave the order for the disarming of the factory militias, was it him or Krenz. Once the working class was disarmed there was no hope of defending workers property in the means of production.

Modrow talks about a decision not to fire on demonstrators fair enough, but does not mention a decision to actually disarm the factory militias. Both Hungary and the DDR had such militias. According to the classical analyses of such figures as Engels and Trotsky such a disarmament of the working class is a crucial issue in deciding where class power actually lies.

In 1945 in France and Italy the militias were disarmed, but in Greece and Yugoslavia they were not, only in the latter countries was bourgeois rule in question. Once the workers in the DDR were disarmed, normal bourgeois rule was possible once more.

Who ordered the militias in Germany and Hungary to surrender their arms in 1989?

Modrow's idea of reform is entirely liberal – free contest of political parties for elected offices.

This however is nothing more than the typical form of a bourgeois republic. It is the ideal form of state for the upper classes to gain power and establish a ‘civil’ or bourgeois society.

Some of us in Scotland started emphasising the need for random lot to replace elections in the late 80s because we saw the danger that free elections would provide the ideal platform for counter revolution. The only answer is to overstep bourgeois democracy by going directly to popular democracy. One needs a system in which ordinary people not the educated elite rule. Once the people have power directly in their own hands, they would not willingly give it up for the fraud that is the Bundesrepublik's form of rule.

The only stable forms of socialist state are either peoples direct democracy or communist party dictatorship. In between is the abyss.

Modrow and the like need to go back and read their Aristotle to understand their Marx, not only Aristotles critique of Chrematistic but also his explanation of the nature of democracy. ( The Athenian Constitution and The Politics)