Unemployment, deindustrialization, and ‘community economy’ in eastern Germany

Abstract

Drawing from an evening of fieldwork at an eastern German Protestant churchin the rapidly deindustrialized city of Leipzig, this article finalyzes a discussion among church leaders, former ‘dissidents,’ and unemployed workers on the subject of ‘community economy’ (Gemeinschaftsökonomie), a concept people interpret to represent a potential solution to the crisis of mass unemployment. Such local debates on unemployment offer a frame for understanding the re-negotiation of labor and social welfare in eastern Germany following socialism's end. finalyzing this discussion within the context of theoretical debates on ‘civil society,’ I follow Burawoy's and Gramsci's lead in fillustrating that the imagined economic sphere of ‘community economy’ is an ideological battle ground, where hegemonic discourse supporting economic neoliberalism may be either reinforced or subverted.

Keywords:

• Postsocialism
• community economy
• civil society

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the men and women in Leipzig who offered their time, knowledge, and enthusiasm for this project. The research for this article was supported by a Chancellor Scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Michigan State University and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/ Saale) offered support for writing the dissertation from which this article stems. I would also like to thank William Derman, Elizabeth Rudd, Lewis Siegelbaum, Mark Graham, my anonymous reviewers, and the University of Michigan Anthropology Department's postsocialist reading group for their incisive comments on various drafts of this essay.

Notes

1. The Evangelical Church's membership in the GDR slipped from 80 percent of the population in 1949, to just 25 percent in 1989. Protestants represented by far the largest religious group in this region. To make a comparison, 11 percent of GDR citizens were Catholic in 1949, but only 4–5 percent in 1989 (Pollack 1994 : 271–272).

2. For an account of church activism in Leipzig during the Wende, see, for instance, Wayne Bartee's A Time To Speak Out (2000), and David Rock (ed.) Voices in Times of Change (2000).

3. Two months before this meeting bmw announced the decision to make Leipzig its new production center, bringing an estimated 5,500 jobs and creating additional employment through the supply industry. Although the production plant will open in early 2005, and many employees have already been hired, Leipzig's official unemployment rate has not sunk. On the contrary, in the summer of 2004 it has gravitated slightly upward, to 21 percent.

4. This conceptual division of ‘first’ and ‘second’ job markets still exists in Germany, although some of the social welfare policy terminology has changed with the application of recent social welfare reffirms. In 2005, under Germany's multi-phase Harz Commission Plan, long-term unemployed are currently being offered short-term ‘One Euro’ jobs rather than short-term ‘abm’ jobs. As of January 2005, unemployment and welfare offices have been merged into Job Centers in Germany, and it is here that these One-Euro zweiter Arbeitsmarkt positions are being distributed.

5. Detlef Pollack argued that it was the East German Protestant Church's strategy of simultaneous conformity and resistance that had made it so attractive (1994 : 285).

6. In her ethnography of an East German border town, Daphne Berdahl described the egalitarianizing act of ‘being able to sit together’ as an important part of people's nostalgic memory of work and social life in the GDR (1999a :135).