Boson's East Germantown Neighborhood's 'Labor Union Belt' Reputation For DDR Nostalgia - by Fanny Demp (Boson Workers) 21 Sept 2019

 


(Disclosure: Boson Workers is written, printed, and published in East Germantown)



Located in the militant "Labor Union Belt" of the Boson, Massachusetts East Germantown sits next to Quincy Bay




In the Massachusetts coastal town of Boson, many people are still raised with a few core beliefs: cod fishing and a strange nostalgia for the former Stalinist state of East Germany, also known by the official name of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik translated as the German Democratic Republic.

Located in the militant labor "Union Belt" of the Boson, Massachusetts, "East Germantown" neighborhood experiences frequent labor union problems for businesses and the general public.  

But as the conservative Heritage Anti-Union Foundation hopes to show how to turn things around.

"At this point union membership is 60 percent and that’s very high compared with the rest of the country. We are the second-highest in America," Frank Brouwer, an economics professor at Boson's ITT Technical college and a self described opponent of all labor unions and a follower of Ayn Rand's super individualistic philosophy.  "I have made it my life's work to change the attitudes in East Germantown and help employers and job creating capitalists bust the labor union mentality in the area. My goodness, can you believe that anyone would look back at the Stalinist East Germany with nostalgia?"

Like the actual 'East Germany' in Germany in Europe many people look back at the social programs and sense of solidarity of the former DDR with a sense of loss.  People in East Germantown still go to labor union meetings and social gatherings on weekends and  'socialism' plays a strong part in daily life, alongside its traditional mainstay fishing industry.  The people are not being ironic or campy when they hold the annual Workers Parade on May First International Workers Day. 

Ninety-four percent of people in East Germantown regularly go to the Labor Hall, which has traditionally supported any and all labor unions, turns out brigades of beefy worker defense guards for labor union picket lines, and believe in higher taxes on the wealthy, support for public schools, and opposition to US imperialist wars.

As right wing Professor Brouver explains, "When these people want a job they go down to the union hall and not to an employer first.  Whatever the union tells them to do, they do it.  We have a tiny little Stalinist section to our city.  Hopefully education can help the young grow up with a different view more in line with American values.

ITT Tech, which is a private for-profit college has applied to set up a college sponsored charter school to be called Ayn Rand Academy and will emphasize the philosophy of selfish individualism.  

"It's the idea that you cannot do it because it is the labor union and group solidarity will take care of everyone -- it's also the same with sickening," says Professor Brouwer. "They're rather take public transportation than drive private cars.  Uber and Lyft drivers are afraid to go into East Germantown for fares because the area only allows taxi drivers who are in a union.  Police look the other way and say they have other problems to deal with and can't escort every Uber driver while they drive through the area.

ITT Tech planned for the charter school in East Germantown to be all boys until they were informed by the locals that would not be allowed.  East Germantown has a long tradition of militant woman's liberation many immigrants brought with them from East Germany.

After the large annual International Women's Day march in East Germantown where women and men march in labor union contingents UMass Boson  professor Alice Schwarzer, of the School of Gender Studies stated that she was against Women’s Day, a “socialist invention” having something to do with striking women textile workers. In her own words: “It’s got absolutely nothing to do with feminism!”

One East Germantown labor organizer responded, "Occasionally even this reactionary lady says something true. As a bourgeois movement, feminism makes men the hindrance to achieving women’s equality. Thereby it deepens the division of the proletariat fomented by the capitalists, setting men against women. We communists know that the oppression of women is inextricably tied to class rule and exploitation. We fight for mobilizing the entire proletariat, men as well as women, against the special oppression of women. Without women, no socialist revolution; without socialist revolution, no liberation of women!"

International Women’s Day marks the strike of women textile workers in Manhattan on 8 March 1908. The event took on new significance on 8 March 1917 when the women textile workers strike in St. Petersburg  beginning the Russian Revolution.

The former East Germany (DDR)  arguably constituted the most advanced society for women so far in the history of mankind. In important respects it was even more advanced than the young, revolutionary Soviet Union. While the Bolsheviks advanced a revolutionary program for women’s liberation aiming at replacing the functions of the family by socializing housework, the material poverty of the young workers state was a huge obstacle to actually putting this into practice. The DDR even at its founding, despite having emerged out of the Second World War and despite the reparations claimed by the Soviet Union, nonetheless possessed the basis for a highly industrialized society. This made a big difference.

At the end of the 1980s, over 90 percent of women in the DDR worked or were in training or ongoing education. They really had lots of economic and genuine personal independence. Women and men both acquired broad scientific training, with women working at highly skilled jobs, much more so than in the West. Among people up to 40 years old—all of whom were raised in the DDR—there were as many women as men in every form of training and education. And single mothers could be professionally active and have children because there was an extensive system of childcare facilities, often linked directly to the factories.

Just as in East Germantown in Boson, there was a distinct style of self assertive woman who had confidence in themselves that projects an air of equality.  Women in East Germantown are outspoken and unafraid.  Women in at nightclubs are not afraid to walk up to a man and ask him to dance.  Many are rumored to carry tools or weapons on them, and are not afraid to use them if someone tries to attack them physically.

Since many of the people in East Germantown have immigrant roots in Germany people from the western part of Germany who visit note many differences that have crossed the Atlantic with the residents of the Boson neighborhood.

A couple more facts comparing the situation of women in these two countries, East and West Germany. In 1965, a compendium of family law appeared in the DDR stating: “Both spouses must do their part in the education and care of their children and running the household. The relations of the spouses to each other should take such a form that the woman can reconcile her professional activity and her activity in society with motherhood.” While this meant exalting the “holy family,” it still emphasized the equal status of women.

In a 1966 report, the government of West Germany set forth that: “A care-giver and comforter is what women should be; an image of modest harmony, a factor for order in the uniquely dependable private sphere; women should enter into gainful employment and social engagement only when the demands placed on them by the family permit them to do so.” In accord with this is the fact that up till 1977 a West German law stated that a wife could not get a job without her husband’s consent.

It was, of course, the socialized relations of production in the DDR that were responsible for these differences. Furthermore, an important aspect was that inheritance played no role in the DDR, since private ownership of the means of production no longer existed. After all, Engels had explained that what had originally been central to the entire institution and ideology of the family was that the husband wanted to know unambiguously: Are these my children or has my wife been playing the field? I want to bequeath solely to my children. That is the root of it.

All this simply played no role anymore in the DDR: There was nothing to bequeath, and thereby this function of the family under capitalism essentially dissolved. But the Stalinist leadership, these backward types, nonetheless kept trying to maintain the ideology of the family, attempting again and again to glue its ideological fragments together. One further aspect of the family is the regimentation of children, and this eroded as well in the DDR due to the socialized relations of production. In the DDR, since 1950 the age of majority had been set at 18; in West Germany this has been the case only since 1975!
  
Women’s Day was always celebrated with flowers, accompanied with calls for the husband to make his wife a super-duper breakfast on this day and generally to be very supportive, etc. Such calls only made more obvious what was generally the rule: that women had to work a second shift to keep the household going and look after the children. The DDR leadership was truly seeking to drain International Women’s Day of any trace of its being a day of struggle for the entire working class.

When informed of all the complex heritage of East Germantown the ITT Tech charter school team shrugs.  "Who cares about all that.  We are in charge now, and capitalism has defeated socialism and workers are hardly interested in labor unions anymore except in backwaters like East Germantown. What are they going to do, unionize the school and go on strike?"

Labor union organizers and supporters in East Germantown have said they will organize the private for profit charter school.  "If we have to we will go on strike, that is the working classes most powerful tool.  We stop capitalists profit making when we go on strike."

The privateers at ITT Tech organizing the Ayn Rand school claim that the state will pay them even if the school is closed for a strike, and their profits will actually increase since the public has to pay them according to contract.

...............

Ostalgia Many Eastern Germans Still Mourn the Demise of Communist East Germany



                                           (5:49 min)

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