The People's State by Mary Fulbrook

Author:Mary Fulbrook
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-14424-6
Publisher: Yale University Press

Part II

Class in a classless society: Power, work and social inequality

Chapter Eight

The withering away of the state? Ruling elites

The alleged ‘ruling class’ – the workers – were not the ruling class. Although the ‘peoples' own factories’ were at least formally owned ‘by the people’, all key decision-making was concentrated at the top of the political pyramid, by members of a party ruling, on good Marxist-Leninist principles, ‘on behalf of the people’. Power, which also entailed effective control of economic resources, replaced ownership of property as a key determinant of stratification under East German communism. Analysis of power and political processes is thus indispensable to any understanding of the system of social inequalities in the GDR.

It would be easy enough, then, simply to assert that power displaced class. But it did not, in any simple sense. While power was a key determinant of social stratification, participation in the exercise of state power spread, as we have seen, in all manner of ways beyond the rather small group who can be characterised as the core ruling elite. Moreover, it was possible for participants in the extended power structure to have straddled a whole variety of positions with respect to occupational class and to consumer lifestyle. It was not merely possible to rise high in the power structure from a very humble origin in the socio-economic structure; with the officially ordained inversion of the traditional class-prestige hierarchies of bourgeois capitalist societies, it was indeed easier to rise up in the power hierarchy from a working class or peasant background than from a bourgeois background. Although to a greater degree in some periods than others, a very high value was placed on being able to claim humble social origins, even when this meant stretching the truth of the biographical details rather far. The duality of power structure and social stratification, and the inversion of inherited prestige hierarchies, thus further complicated the class structure of the GDR.

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