[WS:] I am not in disagreement, but that is not how I would argue it. I would use an argument proposed by Max Weber in "The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism" in which he uses what geographically was East Germany after WW2 as an example of "pre-modern" society. The main reason is that the junkers retained their power east of the Elbe to the end of WW2, when the Soviets wiped them out. In other words, east Germany was far more feudal and pre-modern (but not as much as Poland) than the industrial west. See Barrington Moore "Social origins of dictatorship and democracy" (pp. 461ff and Robert Brenner, Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe, Past & Present, 1982).
I short, East Germany was very much different than West Germany in terms of modernization due to very different historical development going back to middle ages.
Wojtek
On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 1:37 PM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
> SA s11131978 at gmail.com
>
>
> Can you be more specific? Can you point to some of the characteristics
> of E. German socialism that marked it as a type of "backward"
> socialism? You seem to be saying that nationalized industries and
> central planning are proper socialism but the way they were
> implemented was improper because it was colored by the backward
> Russian experience. How exactly?
>
> As far as I can tell, nobody seemed to notice this at the time. You
> didn't hear socialists in, say, the 60's claim that East German
> socialism was not a "modern" type of socialism because it had been
> imposed by backward Russia. In the late 50's, Aneurin Bevan, the
> British Labour socialist leader (father of the NHS) used to say that
> Britain should learn from Soviet planning in order to modernize its
> economy. I have to say, this has the smell of an ex-post-facto
> rationalization to me.
>
> SA
>
> ^^^^^^^
> CB: The other point is that E. Germany was too poor to be a very
> advanced socialist country. After the war , it's economy was destroyed
> , of course. The SU , having been economically destroyed , too, was in
> no position to do a Marshall Plan , there as the US did in W. Europe.
> And most of the industry of pre war Germany was in West Germany.
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