ABSTRACT
Though best known for his contribution to the West German ‘Green’ movement in the 1980s, Bahro’s first and perhaps most substantial statement as a political theorist was his critical analysis of ‘actually existing socialism’, written in East Germany during the 1970s. Bahro was born in 1935 in Silesia. He became a committed Marxist and party member in the German Democratic Republic, carrying out a series of trade union, cultural and organizational jobs. Though always independent and reform-minded, his decisive break with the political elite of Eastern Europe came with the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Unlike many East European dissidents, Bahro analysed the formation and structure of what he preferred to call ‘proto-socialist’ states from a resolutely Marxist standpoint. But, again, Bahro rejected the common tendency among leftwing critics of these societies to see their development as some kind of deviation from or ‘betrayal’ of classical Marxist principles. They should, rather, be seen as a quite distinct type of historical form, with their own specific structures, dynamics and antagonisms. They are not a post-capitalist stage, en route to communism, but, rather, represent an alternative, non-capitalist route to industrialism.
