Comment

Many in Europe are busy remembering the fall of communist regimes from Warsaw to Berlin to Budapest to Bucharest to Prague and Moscow in that memorable year of 1989, which also marked the bicentenary of the French Revolution and the fall of Bastille. The year 1789 marked a dramatic and violent overthrow of a dilapidated monarchy represented by that weakling Louis XVI and his flighty queen, Marie Antoinette. There was also plenty of violence — heads literally rolled thanks to the guillotine and all this was done in the name of reason and liberty. It ended with the anointing of the dictator-emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte.

But 1989 turned out to be interestingly different. The communist dictatorships became decrepit and when people pushed, the edifice came down crashing. The fall of the Berlin Wall parallels the fall of the Bastille. But this was a democratic revolution in the true sense of the term. Not a shot was fired. The dictators just fled. The exception was that of Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu and wife Elena who were executed in a peremptory fashion. But no other dictators replaced the communists. The democratic transition was slow and painful. But today, the east European countries which went through the dark four decades of authoritarian governments and closed economies stumbled and managed to survive in the market arena.

This would have been a perfect moment to sing once again the virtues of democracy and market economy. The party is spoiled by the fact that the markets have suffered a traumatic setback when the financial institutions in the US and Europe tumbled in a somewhat similar fashion like the communist dictatorships in 2008. One fall triggered the fall of others. And 2009 turned out to be a year of market gloom.

What are we to make of these two major events of the last 20 years? It is possible to argue that the fall of communism was a monumental landmark, something that happens once in a century or two, while the crash of markets was a mere episode in a regular cycle of boom and bust which recurs almost once every decade.

There is no need to rethink communism. It is a bad option and it is good that it crumbled the way it did. The capitalism story is not a happy one and there is need to finetune it and remove the inevitable glitches. That is not an easy thing to do either. What this means is that capitalists cannot really gloat over the fall of communism, at least at the moment.

The die-hard opponents of capitalism do nurse the hope that this is the time to refute the false claims of the market. But it is rather a false hope. It is not because their misgivings and distrust of the market are misplaced. It is more because they do not have a good enough economic alternative to offer. Communism and socialism have turned out to be ineffective and inefficient.

The search for a better alternative does not lie with the old-fashioned communists or with good old, heartless capitalists. The fact that these two systems are dead ends should not give rise to the illusion that a modified socialism is the panacea. The beleaguered British prime minister is not really practising any socialist voodoo to save the British banks. He is implementing commonsensical principles of prudence which predate capitalism and communism as we know them. US president Barack Obama, whose hysterical right-wing opponents dub him a socialist, is fumbling along the same Brown ways. For the man on the street, neither capitalism nor communism is comforting. The third way remains elusive. The glimmer of hope lies in the recognition that selfishness is self-destructive and that as societies we have to learn to be fair to each other. That is called morality. Genes can perhaps be selfish and thrive, not human beings. They need to care for each other, something that communists and capitalists hate with all their hearts and minds.