Part of what made the Eastern bloc countries intolerable places to live in was indeed the myriad of petty restrictions on economic and material life. Although these restrictions were one of the reasons those countries were poorer than Western ones, the restrictions themselves were a source of misery irrespective of their economic effects. The thesis I intended to endorse was that political liberty is more important than how wealthy a country is (once it has crossed the threshold of being able to feed everyone, provide them with reasonable standards of healthcare etc etc). I still think that’s right, but please don’t take me to be saying that the things that keep or kept people poor(er) than we are are therefore ok. That wasn’t what I meant at all.

Vadim:

You really can’t have your economic tyranny without political one.

Agreed. But a free society is possible at various levels of wealth and poverty.

Political liberty tends to coexist with mixed economic systems.

Societies that are more politically liberal (the Scandinavians) have actually developed economic systems that are sorta similar to more liberal communist dictatorships.

Sorry, I just couldn’t resist. One of the more ridiculous shortages in the USSR of the “well-developed socialism” stage was that of toilet paper. So how about you guys try to wipe with newspaper for a week, and then we’ll talk.

This is a joke, and please feel free to delete. But on a more serious note, this is a false distinction. You really can’t have your economic tyranny without political one.

I know we’ve had our disagreements, Chris—and feel free to delete this comment—but I just couldn’t help piping up in passionate agreement with this statement.

I could now follow up with all sorts of clever or snarky or earnest addenda to this comment, turning it into a criticism of one or another of your previously-expressed opinions with which I disagree. But this assertion is simply too true, and too important, for me to bother with such bickering. So I’ll just say, “thank you”, for standing up and making it. Would that more people were willing to do so, more often.

The GDR was a completely artificial political unit from the start and the only reasons the state came into being were the Cold War and the Soviet Union’s wish to impose a Communist economy and political system on the Eastern European states. Before 1961 the citizens of GDR were, effectively, voting with their feet – that is: leaving the place in droves – for political and economic reasons.

Even if the repression in other states of the Soviet Bloc was every bit as hard as in the GDR, the regime lacked any internal support outside of a small core of Communists and some anti-Capitalist idealists (sorry, if I sound like a hard-core neo-con here. I’m not but etc, etc…). The latter suffered a nasty surprise in 1989 when the majority of the population couldn’t wait to join the FRG - partly for political reasons, partly for economic. And no, I don’t think many East Germans in 1989 had a correct idea about how modern capitalism works.

Anyway, the question about political and civil freedom as an intrinsic value has been led ad nauseam here but I would side with CB in this issue.

PS: Here is the DVD on German Amazon

To answer your final question: no I don’t believe that such an economic system could coexist with political liberty.

“Personally, if I were faced with a choice between worse economic prospects and a condition where the state might be blackmailing my loved ones into reporting on my every move, I’d opt to be poorer but freer.”

This is a sentiment with which in our present conditions most of your readers will probably agree. But I hope you understand that most people who were alctually faced with the choice chose the “relatively wealthier and less free” alternative. This included the actor you are describing: I would guess few janitors’ wives reported on them for the Stasi (and yes, some, but few, writers and musicians chose to be janitors). This also included the people who gave the actor’s wife orders – or do you think they were doing it out of faith in the communist ideals? (In this sense I agree with your thesis about relative importance of intranational poverty, though perhaps not quite in the same sense as you mean it: people who did the opressing in the comunist countries did it, mostly, for the intranationally relative prosperity, which was laughable by western standards of the time). Another thing to keep in mind is that for most people it was less about themselves and more about their children…

And do I understand you correctly: when discussing these choices, do you mean that a freer political system could have realistically coexisted with the communist economic system?

http://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/13/relativities-local-and-global/

The question of East Germany seems rather complicated in this respect, though, since, obviously there’s a difficulty about what counts as the relevant country.