Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [160]
True enough. But our point – certainly mine – was and is that if critique is no longer enough, it is more essential than ever. We criticized New Labour not because it had accepted the realities of living in a capitalist society, but for accepting too much of the ideological assumptions of the prevailing free market economic theology. Not least the assumption which destroys the foundations of all political movements for improving the condition of the people, and with them therefore the justification of Labour governments, namely that the efficient conduct of a society’s affairs can only be by the search for personal advantage, i.e. by behaving like businessmen. Indeed, the critique of neo-liberalism was all the more necessary, since it not only appealed to businessmen and to governments who wanted to remove their traditional suspicion of Labour, and needed a justification for appealing to middle-class ‘swing voters’, but because neo-liberalism claimed the authority of a ‘science’ increasingly identified with the interests of global capitalism, namely economics, as consecrated for almost a quarter of a century by its highest authority, the Nobel Prize for Economics. Not until the very end of the century, when it was finally awarded to Amartya Sen, and then to a vocal critic of ‘the Washington consensus’, Joseph Stiglitz, was it given again to economists known to be outside the prevailing orthodoxy; and not until (so it is understood) the electors for the Nobel prizes in the natural sciences had expressed dissatisfaction at the consistent ideological bias of what was intended to be a scientific distinction. Perhaps the bursting of the great speculative bubbles of the fin-de-siècle, 1997–2001 have finally broken the spell of market fundamentalism. The end of the hegemony of global neo-liberalism has been predicted and indeed announced long enough – I have done so myself more than once. It has already done more than enough harm.
III
In the meantime Soviet socialism was dying.
Unlike the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet Empire, the end of the USSR took place in comparative slow motion, between the time Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and its formal death in late 1991. It had its moments of headline drama – Yeltsin on the tank in Moscow resisting the attempted coup of August 1991 – but its basic action took place in the darkness of the Soviet corridors of power, such as the unpublicized but fundamental decision in 1989 to abandon the last of the Five-Year Plans (1986–92) in mid-course. As it happens, I was working on the Soviet economy at the UN university’s World Institute of Development and Economic Research (WIDER) and watched the process in the agreeable and acutely Russia-watching city of Helsinki, a few hours by land, a few minutes by air from the Soviets, where I spent some summers during those final years. If it did nothing else, it gave me an insight into the disastrous blindness of the western economists who passed through there, moving comfortably between airport, transnational hotel chain and limo, preparing to put the Russian economy to rights by the untrammelled operations of the free market, as certain of the possession of eternal truth as any Islamic theologian.
By the 1980s the idea that the socialism of the USSR or its followers was what those of us inspired by the October Revolution had in mind was dead. A case could still be made for it as the necessary counterweight to the other superpower, and with greater moral conviction as the supporter of the liberation of oppressed peoples, notably in South Africa.