The threat of the Soviet bloc forced western democracies to acknowledge the rights of workers and poor peopleAs the big day dawned last weekend, Berliners held a huge street party, with more than 100,000 revellers gathering in the cold to ooh and aah over an epic display of fireworks. Elsewhere, celebrants of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Wall followed their own time-honoured traditions. TV producers ran that grainy archive of burly Germans smashing sledgehammers into brickwork, while posh newspapers rolled out their grandest pen-suckers to pronounce on The Future of the Continent. Thus, a historic event that changed the world is stripped of some of its most troubling questions and tidied away into a neat little period piece, a Now That´s What I Call Perestroika! compilation album.Let us try to change that today, for I come not to bury communism but to praise it - or rather, one aspect of it that gets next to no recognition. On its own terms, `really existing socialism` was a miserable failure: brutally repressive to its own peoples and ultimately unable to compete with capitalist economies. Yet it achieved something else that its own politburos and planners never intended - an achievement that represents one of our era´s greatest paradoxes. Communism didn´t topple capitalism, but kept it honest - and so saved it from itself. Related: Berlin marks 30 years since fall of the wall in reflective mood Related: In 1989, capitalism won. Today its greatest ideological challenge is the planet | Larry Elliott Continue reading...
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