Disputed Victory: The Neoliberal inheritors of Communism's totalitarian mantle claim the Fall of the Berlin Wall as an unqualified victory for free-market capitalism. The true victory, according to Professor M.P. Leffler, belonged to the managed, social-market capitalism of Western Europe. The tragedy of the past 25 years lies in the extent to which that victory has been squandered.
IT WAS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ago last Sunday that the Berlin
Wall fell. On 9 November 1989, Gunter Schabowski, over-tired, under-briefed and
unaccustomed to dealing with genuine journalists, informed his countrymen
(erroneously, as it turned out) that all restrictions on persons leaving the
German Democratic Republic (GDR) had been lifted.
What had, until then, been a rather lack-lustre press
conference instantly came alive. Confused, embarrassed and desperate to escape
the rising chorus of questions, Schabowski indicated that, as far as he knew,
the new regulations would come into force “right away”. East Berliners,
watching all this unfold, live, on state television, did not wait for further
corroboration. Tens-of-thousands flocked to the Wall’s checkpoints where,
lacking orders, the border-guards simply waved them through. The Cold War was
over.
In the quarter-century since Schabowski’s historic
misinformation brought the Cold War to an end, the fiction agreed upon by the victors
of that long ideological struggle is that the fall of the Wall marked the
global triumph of free-market capitalism.
Not true, says Melvyn P. Leffler, the Edward Stettinius
Professor of American History at the University of Virginia:
“With what we now know about the history of the Wall coming
down – the contingency of the event and the agency of ordinary people – we
should draw different lessons, ones that are not about the universal appeal of
freedom or the munificence of free markets or the efficacy of strength, power,
and containment.”
Professor Leffler rightly celebrates the role of
citizen-based activism in the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. He points to the
many thousands of brave individuals who insisted that the East-West commitment
to human and civil rights enshrined in the Helsinki Agreement of 1975 be upheld
by the regimes of actually existing socialism.
“These NGOs worked tirelessly to shame transgressors. They
nurtured transnational contacts, and their mutual support sustained dissidents
throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. As much as anything, this led
to the downfall of the repressive communist regimes.”
Not that repression constituted the dominant motif of the
“Velvet Revolutions” that swept across Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the GDR in
1989. The example of Leipzig is striking in this respect. When, their patience
exhausted, the Stalinist hardliners still in charge of the GDR ordered local
Interior Ministry troops to forcibly suppress the “Monday Demonstrations”
gripping Saxony’s largest city, their commanding officer point-blank refused to
let his men leave their barracks. He would not, he said, order Germans to fire
upon Germans.
Transpose this situation to the United States, and ask
yourself how likely it is that the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department,
or the Commanding Officer of the Ohio National Guard, would refuse an order to
fire upon their fellow Americans? No US agents of state repression have ever
refused such orders in the past.
It was not free-market capitalism, red in tooth and claw,
that the peoples of Eastern Europe embraced in 1989, but the tamed capitalism
of European social-democracy. As Professor Leffler observes:
“When we think about the collapse of communism, we should
emphasise and celebrate the attractiveness of a social market economy – not
free enterprise. Indeed, it was the principles of the social market, regulated
competition and a commitment to social equality and a safety net, that were
incorporated into the law establishing the economic and monetary union of West
and East Germany. In the ideological competition between free enterprise and
communism, the social market won the Cold War.”
Twenty-five years on, we should, perhaps, ponder the
near-universal failure of social-democratic parties to grasp the significance
of their ideological victory. Rather than celebrate the triumph of moderation
over extremism – of all kinds – they chose instead, to embrace the cold
inhumanity of the new, neoliberal, iteration of totalitarianism.
Neoliberalism’s cheerleaders gleefully point to the excesses
of the Stasi (the East German secret police) as proof of communism’s moral
delinquency. But, twenty-five years after the Stasi’s unlamented demise, is
such neoliberal triumphalism justified? In the light of Edward Snowden’s
alarming revelations concerning the electronic reach of the NSA (and its ‘Five
Eyes’ partners) are the peoples of the English-speaking democracies any freer
from state-sanctioned “total surveillance” than the peoples of the vanished Soviet
Bloc? In an age of ‘extraordinary rendition’, ‘black-sites’, ‘waterboarding’
and drone strikes; exactly who are the moral delinquents?
Certainly, we must celebrate the triumph of human freedom that
the fall of the Wall so powerfully symbolised. But, as we do so, let us not
fall into the error of believing that everything which followed the collapse of
actually existing socialism in any way represents the uncomplicated vindication
of the human spirit. Stalinism was not the answer, but there remains a powerful
truth in the succinct message some unknown graffitist daubed upon the grim
concrete canvass of the Berlin Wall:
STALINISM IS NOT SOCIALISM. CAPITALISM IS NOT
FREEDOM.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 11 November 2014.
