When communism ended (and I always intentionally use the word collapse, not defence), it seemed that the principles and institution of this system had been discredited to such an extent that they cannot return in imaginable future. And that one cannot possibly dare to defend them in public without blushing.
One could not have supposed that the state may once again be more trustworthy than the market, that one could think it is possible to distribute more than is produced, that a person is entitled to a certain life standard and not that they have to do something for it, that any lofty-sounding doctrine is more important than human freedom, that wisdom of the elected is more than what the “common” people know.
Who was naïve
We were not that naïve. Many of us have have been pointing out in the past twenty years that the partial abandonment of these ideas took place only in the post-communist part of the world (and in some third-world countries), that even there the primary impulse is being quickly depleted and that nothing like that is happening in the “first” world.
However, from the point of view of political correctness, it was taken for our hypersensitivity, misunderstanding and especially lack of appreciation of the “amazing” development in the western Europe and America, maybe even for a certain jealousy of this world on our side. Some exceptionally blinded individuals even considered our opinion to be in the shadow of attitudes that had been overcome long time ago – nationalism, Pan-Slavism, belief in “extreme” doctrines (such as traditional liberalism for example).
In any case, our opinions were considered to be a product of our half-a-century-lasting absence in the good company of the developed democratic world and it was hoped that we might learn from it.
Paris did not understand
We have seen and still see some problematic reversion in the European Union, namely, on the political and economic levels. When some of us have started pointing it out aloud, we were considered to have not only different opinions, but also to be foolish, slightly stupid and naïve.
My experience with the recent visit to Paris has been enlightening in this sense. My opinions were not disputed, they were only considered to be so out there that they were not comprehended. And yet I was only stating the obvious.
Cartel of power
Attentive observers in other places of the world see it differently. For example, the Australian professor Wolfgang Kasper is writing about democracy, subsidiarity, and centralisation, and he gives an example of “de-democratisation of governance in the European Union”. He calls it a “defensive cartel of power that is dragging the society down”.
One group of his examples involves “the final phase of the Roman empire controlled from its centre; the closed, centrally governed Ming dynasty in China 400-500 years ago; the centralized Ottoman empire some100-200 years ago; and the EU that has been still more and more concentrated in Brussels since the 1970s”. The increasing regulation of the European economy is visible and enormous.
A new element in this ideological chaos is the current economic crisis that is being attributed to the market, although it is evident that it has been a consequence of gross errors of the economic policy of the United States and of other developed countries. It is also a symptom of the periodicity of the economic development.
Marx’s ghost
However, my motivation for writing this article was something else. In its issue dedicated to President Obama’s inauguration, the American magazine Time was discussing the politics of the new administration. And most probably not by accident the magazine’s six pages were dedicated to the article
Rethinking Marx with the basic thesis “As we work out how to save capitalism, it’s worth studying the system’s greatest critic”.
The author Peter Gumbel says that we should “leave aside the prophetic, prescriptive parts of Marx’s writings” and instead deal with his “trenchant diagnosis of the underlying problems of a market economy”. Also worth quoting is the fact that according to the author the Communist Manifest is “almost uncannily prescient about the costs and benefits of globalisation”. The author is therefore asking whether we did not make a mistake at the end of the 20th century when we rejected Marx’s economic theories too quickly.
I am quoting this text so extensively because these are not the words of a marginal author published in a marginal magazine and with bad timing. In the past decades, the weekly Time magazine has been among top American printed media. We must not leave such things unnoticed.
The author is the President of the Czech Republic.
