StickWithANose

In a stunning turn toward journalistic integrity, the New York Times actually gave space to noted political theorist Slavoj Zizek who offers us a thoughtful reflection on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the political trajectories that emerged from the end of the Soviet empire. The entire essay is well worth your time, but I’d like to focus in on one particular point that Zizek discusses.

A further twist is added by those countries in which Communists allowed the explosion of capitalism, while retaining political power: they seem to be more capitalist than the Western liberal capitalists themselves. In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won over Communism, but the price paid for this victory is that Communists are now beating capitalism in its own terrain.

This is why today’s China is so unsettling: capitalism has always seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the explosion of capitalism in the People’s Republic, many analysts still assume that political democracy will inevitably assert itself.

But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself to be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal capitalism? What if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of economic development, but its impediment?

If this is the case, then perhaps the disappointment at capitalism in the post-Communist countries should not be dismissed as a simple sign of the “immature” expectations of the people who didn’t possess a realistic image of capitalism.

When people protested Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the large majority of them did not ask for capitalism. They wanted the freedom to live their lives outside state control, to come together and talk as they pleased; they wanted a life of simplicity and sincerity, liberated from the primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy.

It is all too common for political thinkers and pols in general to link capitalism and democracy as two sides of the same coin, but it is a connection that has always been way more tenuous than we’ve been willing to concede. In fact, market economies and the democratic state have always been in tension with one another, and there is no reason to assume that this will not continue to be the case.

So, as we’re inundated with solemn essays about the triumph of capitalism and democracy over communism wrapped in tiddy narratives of the good triumphing over evil, it is wise to remember that these narratives did very little in explaining the political dynamics of the Cold War while it was still going on, and they are almost totally useless in understanding its aftermath.