Suchergebnisse

Postcommunist reforms in Russia & Eastern Europe have utterly failed because capitalism has been "built with the tools of communism." The postcommunist states have retained the fundamental views of moral relativism & internationalism, maintaining the underlying ideologies of communism. A capitalist class has not been created, true freedom has not been secured, workers have been given few rights, & a monopolistic production structure has been preserved. The decline of the state has had disastrous effects on the market, while reforms have reversed economic growth in the region. Though evolutionists predicted these consequences, few expected the effects to prove so catastrophic. K. Larsen

A review essay on a book by George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (New York: Public Affairs, 1998). Poznanski describes Soros's model as an intelligent challenge to the general optimism about the future of capitalism & also as a framework for the study of the fall of communism. Soros describes a crisis in capitalism caused by a shift in the balance between the market economy & state power. As the state ceases to regulate the market, the market becomes highly speculative & widens the gap between the rich & the poor. The resulting excessive speculation damages economies, while income disparity encourages political upheaval. The state is also dismantling the welfare system, & thus making the gap wider. This pattern is apparent at both the national & global levels. Regional financial crises are deteriorating economies & transferring wealth abroad. Postcommunist readers find Soros's work unacceptable because it puts their new hope in capitalism in a negative light & also implies that communism collapsed from moral decay. L. A. Hoffman

A wide range of questionable or at least ambivalent human tendencies has suddenly been liberated as it were from the straight jacket and given free rein at last. Thus, we are witnesses to a bizarre state of affairs, society has freed itself, true, but in some ways it behaves worse than when it was in chains. Václav Havel