> However it seems to me that what you're trying to do
> here is retrospectively justify the former system by arguing for how
> wonderful *some* of its characteristics were.
Please quote me retrospectively justifying anything.
> So apparently the problem
> wasn't with the system itself but rather with the way it was wound up: if
> only the 'destalinisation' process had preserved the revolutionary kernel of
> this wonderful system, German workers would be OK today.
Yet another boring straw man argument. The fact is, imo, that de-Stalinisation had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet collapse than Stalinism, this does not mean that Stalinism was good, or that collapse could not have happened in a different way otherwise.
Obviously you are not interested in trying to understand what really happened and content with meaningless generalizations and fallacies.
I repeat what I said at the beginning:
IMO, internal dissent within the DDR was related to a comprador capitalist class, this class was made possible by the treaty of rome and extended by the Vodka-Cola pact, a component of "De-Stalinisation" and the Khrushchev-Nixon "thaw."
Are you interested in understanding this, or is barking banalities like "Stalin is bad" or "these parties have no new ideas" enough to satisfy you?
-- Dmytri Kleiner <dk at telekommunisten.net> editing text files since 1981
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