All that is now possible, in the eyes of the ‘new realism’, is the more humane management of a capitalism which is in any case being thoroughly transformed. Nor is it only on the Right that the belief has grown in recent times that socialism, understood as a radical transformation of the social order, has had its day: apostles of ‘new times’ on the Left have come to harbour much the same belief.
#MALIST COMMUNIST FREE#
With this intoxicating prospect of the scarcely hoped-for dissipation of an ancient nightmare, there naturally goes the celebration of the market, the virtues of free enterprise, and greed unlimited. We know what this immense historic process is taken to mean by the enemies of socialism everywhere: not only the approaching demise of Communist regimes and their replacement by capitalist ones, but the elimination of any kind of socialist alternative to capitalism. At any rate, it seems clear that the form of regime which dominated the Soviet Union from the late twenties until a very few years ago, and all other Communist regimes from the post-war years onwards, is now unravelling in many of them, and is very likely sooner or later to unravel in them all.
The outcome of this crisis is still an open question, though the alternatives, broadly speaking, are not difficult to list: at best, a form of regime approximating to socialist democracy, which the reform movement initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union may manage to produce some form of capitalist democracy, with a substantial public sector or a reinforced authoritarianism with a spreading market economy-what Boris Kagarlitsky has aptly called ‘market Stalinism’-of which China is the most conspicuous example to date.
A vast ‘mutation’ is going on throughout the Communist world, and undoubtedly constitutes one of the great turning points in the history of the twentieth century. T he massacre in Tiananmen Square last June is unlikely to be the last violent expression of the deep and multiple crises-economic, social, political, ethnic, ideological, moral-which grip many Communist regimes, and which will in due course most probably grip them all.
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