While the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), under its new chairman Erich Honecker, focused on consumption and economic growth in the 1970s, some Marxist intellectuals in the GDR recognized the urgency of the ecological question. They took the warnings of the Club of Rome seriously and pleaded for a different communist way of life, one that would abandon the ever-prosperous industrial economic model. To this end, they independently formulated eco-socialist utopias. Wolfgang Harich was the first in 1975 with Communism without Growth?, followed by Rudolf Bahro with The Alternative from 1977, and Robert Havemann with his book Tomorrow, published in 1980. In this article, the three utopian texts and their authors are presented, analyzed and compared. Amberger shows that the oppositional thinking of Harich, Bahro, and Haveman does not only belong in the history books but can also be an inspiration for today’s debates on climate change and environmental destruction.
The Welsh literary and cultural theorist Raymond Williams was, together with Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart, a founding figure of British Cultural Studies. He is known, among other things, for the unorthodox interpretation of Marxism he called “cultural materialism”. We present here a Czech translation of Williams’s reflections on Die Alternative (published in English as The Alternative in Eastern Europe) by Rudolf Bahro. Williams’s text first appeared in the New Left Review under the title “Beyond Actually Existing Socialism” (NLR I, no. 120, March/April 1980). Translated by Magdaléna Michlová and Jaroslav Michl, introduced by Jaroslav Michl.