Title: The crisis of the German left : the PDS, Stalinism and the global economy /
Authors: Thompson, Peter, 1960 July 22-
Publisher: Berghahn Books,
Year: 2005
Subjects: Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (Germany); Communism Germany (East) History; Globalization; Germany Politics and government; Germany Economic conditions; Germany Social conditions
Abstract: "Using Nietzsche's categories of monumentalist, antiquarian and critical history, the author examines the historical and theoretical contexts of the collapse of the GDR in 1989 and looks at the positive and negative legacies of the GDR for the PDS (the successor party to the East German Communists). He contends that the Stalinization of the GDR itself was the product not just of the Cold War but of a longer inter-systemic struggle between the competing primacies of politics and economics and that the end of the GDR has to be seen as a consequence of the global collapse of the social imperative under the pressure of the re-emergence of the market-state since the mid-1970s."--Jacket.
Contents: On the uses and disadvantages of history for the PDS -- The long Cold War and the short political century -- The PCDS: Marx's baby or Stalin's bathwater.