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.
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