Workers and Intellectuals in the German Democratic Republic Patty

Abstract

It is supposed to be a goal of communism to achieve a classless society. The working class becomes the universal class: both because it has taken power in order to abolish private ownership of land and industry, which is the basis of class domination, and because now everyone will be a worker of one kind or another. Society may need to curtail some freedoms to achieve it, but the commitment to equality is unequivocal. If socialist societies are in transition toward communism, we expect to find a deliberate process of gradual abolition of class difference; certainly we expect there to be less antagonism than in a capitalist society. But my experience of the GDR over the past 30 years was that despite rhetoric and impressive programmes designed to bring the classes together, social distinctions were quite rigid, more rigid than I was used to in the capitalist USA.