The lessons of the fall of communism have still not been learnt
The events of 1989 are crucial to any understanding of the present world.
Germans celebrate 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall Photo: AFP
The air is filled with noisy outrage
about the moral emergency of the day. We are, according to the leaders
of every major political party, in the midst of a crisis of capitalism.
However bountiful the free market system may have been at its best, it
is now in such deep disrepute that any politician who wishes to remain
credible must join in the general vilification.
Even in this storm of condemnation,
everyone has to admit that there is actually no alternative to free
market economics or to the private banking system. So the competition is
strictly between adjectives: “responsible” or sometimes “socially
responsible” banking are great favourites, but now Ed Miliband has
produced something called a “national banking system”, which is
presumably not to be confused with a nationalised banking system. The
Miliband neologism is intended to suggest banking that takes the
concerns of the nation (or the population?) as its own. Whether he sees
this role as voluntary or enforced was unclear from his speech last
week.
But in spite of the official
agreement that there is no other way to organise the economic life of a
free society than the present one (with a few tweaks), there are an
awful lot of people implicitly behaving as if there were. Several
political armies seem to be running on the assumption that there is
still a viable contest between capitalism and Something Else.
If this were just the hard Left
within a few trade unions and a fringe collection of Socialist Workers’
Party headbangers, it would not much matter. But the truth is that a
good proportion of the population harbours a vague notion that there
exists a whole other way of doing things that is inherently more benign
and “fair” – in which nobody is hurt or disadvantaged – available for
the choosing, if only politicians had the will or the generosity to
embrace it.
Why do they believe this? Because
the lesson that should have been absorbed at the tumultuous end of the
last century never found its way into popular thinking – or even into
the canon of educated political debate.
Can I suggest that you try the
following experiment? Gather up a group of bright, reasonably
well-educated 18-year-olds and ask them what world event occurred in
1945. They will, almost certainly, be able to give you an informed
account of how the Second World War ended, and at least a generally
accurate picture of its aftermath. Now try asking them what historical
milestone came to pass in 1989. I am willing to bet that this question
will produce mute, blank looks.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the
collapse of communism which followed it are hugely important to any
proper understanding of the present world and of the contemporary
political economy. Why is it that they have failed to be addressed with
anything like their appropriate awesome significance, let alone found
their place in the sixth-form curriculum?
The failure of communism should have
been, after all, not just a turning point in geo-political power – the
ending of the Cold War and the break-up of the Warsaw Pact – but in
modern thinking about the state and its relationship to the economy,
about collectivism vs individualism, and about public vs private power.
Where was the discussion, the trenchant analysis, or the fundamental
debate about how and why the collectivist solutions failed, which should
have been so pervasive that it would have percolated down from the
educated classes to the bright 18-year-olds? Fascism is so thoroughly
(and, of course, rightly) repudiated that even the use of the word as a
casual slur is considered slanderous, while communism, which enslaved
more people for longer (and also committed mass murder), is regarded
with almost sentimental condescension.
Is this because it was originally
thought to be idealistic and well-intentioned? If so, then that in
itself is a reason for examining its failure very closely. We need to
know why a system that began with the desire to free people from their
chains ended by imprisoning them behind a wall. Certainly we have had
some great works of investigation into the Soviet gulags and the
practices of the East German Stasi, but judging by our present political
discourse, I think it is safe to say that the basic fallacies of the
state socialist system have not really permeated through to public
consciousness.
It would, if one were so inclined,
be fairly easy to assume that the grotesque activities of the Stasi, or
the Soviet labour camps, were aberrations or betrayals of the true
communist philosophy – and a great many people (even within the
mainstream Labour party) did believe precisely that for decades. When
the entire edifice simply dissolved with an almost bloodless whimper and
its masses were free to tell their stories of what life had actually
been like under the great alternative to capitalism, that was the end of
self-delusion – and it should have been the beginning of the serious
discussion.
But in our everyday politics, we
still seem to be unable to make up our minds about the moral superiority
of the free market. We are still ambivalent about the value of
competition, which remains a dirty word when applied, for example, to
health care. We continue to long for some utopian formula that will rule
out the possibility of inequalities of wealth, or even of social
advantages such as intelligence and personal confidence.
The idea that no system – not even a
totalitarian one – could ensure such a total eradication of
“unfairness” without eliminating the distinguishing traits of individual
human beings was one of the lessons learnt by the Soviet experiment.
The attempt to abolish unfairness based on class was replaced by
corruption and a new hierarchy based on party status.
If the European intellectual elite
had not been so compromised by its own broad acceptance of collectivist
beliefs, maybe we would have had a genuine, far-reaching re-appraisal of
the entire ideological framework. And that might have led to a more
honest political dialogue in which everybody might now be talking
sensibly about capitalism and how it needs to be managed. It is people –
not markets – that are moral or immoral.
Communism’s fatal error was in
thinking that morality resided in the mechanisms of an economic system
rather than in the people who operated them. There is no way of avoiding
the need for individual responsibility, which lies with citizens, not
governments – or with bankers as people, not with the “banking system”.
Some political leader (David Cameron?) needs to have the nerve to say
this or we shall be talking nonsense forever.