Germany: The rise and fall of a model socialist city.
45 replies, posted
[img]http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/74393000/jpg/_74393974_eisenhuettenstadt_map_624.jpg[/img]
[quote]Eisenhuettenstadt still has an imperial feel about it. Even though many of the windows are boarded up and the streets are relatively empty, the big apartment blocks have retained a sense of the city's former grandeur.
It is spacious, green - and oddly full of public clocks. The big steel factory - so vital to the rise and fall of this city - can be seen puffing out steam from the main shopping street.
Located in the east of Germany, close to the Polish border, Eisenhuettenstadt was built in the 1950s as a model socialist city by the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). And in many ways, the story of this town - once called Stalinstadt - is the story of East Germany.
In 1989 the factory employed 12,000 people. Nearly every family was in some way linked to it. After the fall of the Berlin Wall it was privatised - and now it employs just 2,500, leading many of the citizens of Eisenhuettenstadt to experience unemployment for the first time.[/quote]
[url]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26992084[/url]
Interesting article about the failure of a lot of these "model" cities. Quite a few were built in the USSR and her puppet states, many of them built miles away from anywhere useful or nice to live in, and after the collapse a lot of these places went down the toilet. The return of the market economy and democracy has done much to help mitigate the damage, although it will take many more years for East Germany to recover completely from Socialism.
privatization fucking people over, who could have seen that coming?
[QUOTE=Lachz0r;44662395]privatization fucking people over, who could have seen that coming?[/QUOTE]
Well to be honest if I were German I'd have preferred privatisation to living under an authoritarian dictatorship.
[QUOTE=Sobotnik;44662409]Well to be honest if I were German I'd have preferred privatisation to living under an authoritarian dictatorship.[/QUOTE]
it's not like it's one or the other
[editline]28th April 2014[/editline]
long term unemployment seems like a strange recovery from socialism
[QUOTE=Lachz0r;44662443]it's not like it's one or the other
[editline]28th April 2014[/editline]
long term unemployment seems like a strange recovery from socialism[/QUOTE]
Well it was a showpiece city build in an uneconomic area, required all of the workers to move there, and was firstly named after Stalin.
I am wondering to whose benefit the city and the industries within were built.
[QUOTE=Sobotnik;44662471]Well it was a showpiece city build in an uneconomic area, required all of the workers to move there, and was firstly named after Stalin.
I am wondering to whose benefit the city and the industries within were built.[/QUOTE]
well i'm sure it benefited the 9500 who are now unemployed
It shows government can't think for everyone. Some things you just need to leave up to the people such as market, city construction, and community planning.
[QUOTE=Lachz0r;44662481]well i'm sure it benefited the 9500 who are now unemployed[/QUOTE]
Well the West German government did try its best to accommodate the East and to improve the lives of those who suffered under the Communists. Wages in East Germany were originally less than half of those in the West, and when reunification happened thus began a huge migration west.
Cities like these are not designed to last in a functioning society. People moved there because it was the only place to actually get a half decent job, as it was heavily subsidized by the East German government. Now that thats gone, the city is returning to its natural state (i.e not a city because one shouldn't have been built there in the first place).
Had a friend who was a former East German NVA, gave me his former serving flag.
Told me life there was shit.
[QUOTE=Lachz0r;44662481]well i'm sure it benefited the 9500 who are now unemployed[/QUOTE]It was destined to fail one way or the other. Its not sustainable by any means.
-snip-
[QUOTE=Vasili;44662627]Had a friend who was a former East German NVA, gave me his former serving flag.
Told me life there was shit.[/QUOTE]
What's worse is that out of the commiebloc countries, East Germany probably was the best.
Unless you were politically well connected (mine was connected and corrupt enough to have it comfortable).
[QUOTE=Lachz0r;44662395]privatization fucking people over, who could have seen that coming?[/QUOTE]
More like the city was being propped up by the USSR Government and when that failed, so did the city.
Even the city's name literally means "steel works city", I'm not surprised it has not enough economy to actually accommodate all the people there.
[QUOTE=JohnFisher89;44662483]It shows government can't think for everyone. Some things you just need to leave up to the people such as market, city construction, and community planning.[/QUOTE]
It shows the GDR's government couldn't think for everyone.
Communism has always failed, but that doesn't mean it needs to.
[QUOTE=Lachz0r;44662395]privatization fucking people over, who could have seen that coming?[/QUOTE]
What generally fucked East Germans over was the fact that East Germany's economy was lightyears behind the west, and East German assets weren't worth shit for being integrated into capitalism.
Full employment meant "companies" working extremely inefficiently.
So of course, when you bring that into a state where full employment isn't enforced by law, you're gonna end up with a lot of people out of a job.
[QUOTE=Lachz0r;44662395]privatization fucking people over, who could have seen that coming?[/QUOTE]
None of those factories were really competitive. It's not as much privatisation fucking people over, as the communist regime fucking countries over.
Also remember an important thing. All of these factories could only exist due to the low taxed tradiging within the soviet sphere of influence. The moment they tore off, these trading partnerhips pretty much evaporated and a lot of these factories were left either with no market, or they couldn't get their base goods as cheaply anymore.
[QUOTE=Lachz0r;44662395]privatization fucking people over, who could have seen that coming?[/QUOTE]
wow a borderline angsty and toxic opinion about privitization, here on facepunch? who could have seen that coming?
collectivisation and welfare models too have a tendency to "fuck people over".
wow someone with nothing of substance to say calling other people angsty who woulda seen that coming
[editline]29th April 2014[/editline]
call me edgy next
[QUOTE=Lachz0r;44665882]wow someone with nothing of substance to say calling other people angsty who woulda seen that coming
[editline]29th April 2014[/editline]
call me edgy next[/QUOTE]
Next thing you know, the international community will be calling Mao's great leap forward a huge failure that will cause mass starvation.
the only great leap here is the one where you take me being critical of privatization to mean i'm in favour of communism or maoism
you literally said that privatization fucks people over
like, universally
and thats a bad opinion
it does fuck people over. privatization only benefits businesses and business owners
[editline]29th April 2014[/editline]
i guess this angsty bad opinion must mean i support mao's cultural revolution
yeah well shit you could say that governmental owned institutions only benefits the government with the same amount of credibility
[QUOTE=Lachz0r;44665931]it does fuck people over. privatization only benefits businesses and business owners
[editline]29th April 2014[/editline]
i guess this angsty bad opinion must mean i support mao's cultural revolution[/QUOTE]
Woah woah. Hold your horses. There's a large difference from the cultural revolution and the great leap forward. The great leap forward had to do with the greatness of state collectivism that this city was a model of.
Like the cultural revolution was literally five years after and was an attempt to create a cult of personality as a direct result of the failure of state collectivism.
[QUOTE=Kentz;44665939]yeah well shit you could say that governmental owned institutions only benefits the government with the same amount of credibility[/QUOTE]
i dunno i think the people with jobs get benefited just a teeny bit too
[editline]29th April 2014[/editline]
[QUOTE=Paul McCartney;44665944]Woah woah. Hold your horses. There's a large difference from the cultural revolution and the great leap forward. The great leap forward had to do with the greatness of state collectivism that this city was a model of.
Like the cultural revolution was literally five years after and was an attempt to create a cult of personality as a direct result of the failure of state collectivism.[/QUOTE]
okay cool i was more just referring to you thinking i must endorse some of these whacky communist ideas because i'm against privatization. sure if like what you guys say is right then this city never should have been made, but it was made, it exists, and now because of it's main industries being privatized heaps of the people have been fucked over and are unemployed and that's what i have a problem with
The main thing is that it could work if someone keeps supplying money, but the problem is that if the state is unwilling to keep moving money when the trains move east, since now there's a white and red country in the east (Poland); where's the iron going to go to?
It's just a casualty of the fact that cash needs to come from somewhere. Be it a factory owner or the state.
which is why privatization is bad in my opinion, a factory owner only has an obligation to his wallet and the wallets of investors, the state has an obligation to it's people
Entirely depends. The money at least goes to the workers and circles around with private system, where as the money goes to the state and some fuck else in the country which is being seen a lot in Russia.
More and more companies are becoming state owned Oligarch corporations and it's a huge joke.
In the case of this city. Privatization didn't kill it. Having a single export killed it. Single export economy was what killed detroit; a city needs diversity or else it fails when the jobs move. If the city had Steel, then some other type of factory works, it would continue to exist as a community. You can see stuff like this in western german realms where VW is located I believe.
but thats my point
your opinion is so one sided claiming that privatization only "fuck people over". its as bad of an opinion as saying that governments are the only whom benefits from publically owned institutions.
privatization does not only benefit businesses and business owners, it benefits every single one whom participates in the market, thats the whole point of it. if you buy a video game, you benefit from the market as well as the business owners. indirectly you are also creating more jobs by buying commodities.
like yeah its a shame people lost their jobs in the factory but the same thing could literally happen under other circumstances but you just had to shove in dogmatic politics in there for some reason
except it doesn't go to workers or circle around when the factory owners decide to lay off half their staff for a few extra bucks. also i really don't think russia is a fair example to use
[editline]29th April 2014[/editline]
privatization isn't about politics it's about economics. you're the ones accusing me of being a communist i didn't bring up politics
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