The Lessons of the Fall of Communism Have Still Not Been Learnt
5th February 2012
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.
When it becomes as odious to wear a hammer-and-sickle or a red star as it is to wear a swastika, then history will be straight. When people recoil from wearing Che Guevara’s face on a t-shirt as they would Rienhardt Heydrich’s, then history will be straight.