The Way To The Alternative
From 1967 to 1977 Bahro worked in various companies in the rubber and plastics industry in work organization. This confrontation with the actual conditions in the factories soon brought him to the conclusion that the East German economy was in a serious crisis and that the main reason for this lay in that the workers had virtually no say in the workplace. This view he formulated in December 1967 in a letter to the Council of State Walter Ulbricht, and he proposed to transfer the responsibility in the workplace in terms of grassroots democracy to the workers. A few weeks later there were changes in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which ushered in the Prague Spring. Bahro took a lively interest, and supported its development. In May 1968 he was summoned to an interview with a member of the Central Committee, who made it clear that his solidarity with the "counter-revolution" is no longer tolerated. Bahro developed his ideas systematically and published. This decision was reinforced and modified, as on 21 August 1968, the Prague Spring was ended by invading troops. This was, as Bahro later said, "the blackest day" of his life and the reason for the final break with the SED. For tactical reasons, he decided, however, not to make this break in public, so as not to jeopardize his book project.
After a preliminary study of literature, Bahro began in 1972 with the part-time work on his dissertation on the development conditions of the high school and technical college job openings in state-owned enterprises of the GDR, which was to bring part of his project in the academic discourse. In parallel, he secretly wrote a thematically broader manuscript from which later became the book The Alternative. In 1973 he filed for divorce Gundula Bahro. Both spouses said later this was as a precautionary measure, in particular to protect the children against the expected government reprisals. Gundula Bahro went further and in 1974 made contact with the state security, to inform them about the secret book project by then her ex-husband, and finally to hand over a copy of the manuscript. From that time Rudolf Bahro was without his knowledge placed under intensive observation and spying.
In 1975 he submitted his dissertation at the Technical University of Merseburg. He was initially evaluated by three reviewers, all very positive. But then the Stasi stepped in, which organized another review opinion thwarting the promotion. The work on the alternative manuscript, however, was observed only on and not hindered. Bahro was, however, convinced that his original intention to spread this actually written book for GDR citizens in larger numbers in the GDR, not to realize it. In December 1976 he learned that one of the specimens that he had distributed for review to friends and acquaintances who had come in a roundabout way into the hands of the Stasi. This prompted him to finish the job quickly to a conclusion. Through middlemen now a contract with the European publishing house in Cologne had been reached. In the musicologist Harry Goldschmidt Bahro was an unsuspecting helpers who smuggled the finished manuscript to West Berlin. It also managed to send several copies of the manuscript by mail to selected individuals in the GDR.
Later, in West Germany, Bahro said that a theoretical basis for The Alternative was Karl August Wittfogel's "Oriental Despotism" and other earlier, Marxist works. He could not refer to Wittfogel, because of Wittfogel's later anti-communist views. Wittfogel also, through his geographical/ecological determinism, influenced Bahro's later ecological writings as well.
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