Did the fall of the Berlin Wall make us Less Free?

The Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek makes a habit of pointing out that Hollywood can be depended upon to pour out apocalyptic movies in which the western civilisation/the human race/the world, is brought to an end by natural disaster/medical catastrophe/alien invasion/terrorist or rouge state fanatics, yet there are never any films about the overthrow of the capitalist order. The point, of course, is that in modern capitalism it is easier to envisage the ending of the world than even a modest modification of our economic arrangements.

Why is this? The only reasonable answer seems to be that there is no modification. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc Marxist state planning was shown to be appallingly corrupt, woefully inefficient, environmentally disastrous and rotten in about every imaginable way. Have we then reached the end of history as Fukuyama crowed at the time?

The Hegelian dialectic holds that when a social condition emerges it forms the thesis of how society should be. A response to this emerges, which becomes the antithesis. Because people are unlikely to jump from one position to another a consensus emerges which is acceptable to both sides. This then becomes the new thesis, against which a new antithesis will emerge. The current thesis is liberal capitalism, the critique, the antithesis, was Marxism. But there was no consensus. The nearest we came was social democracy, but this is just capitalism-lite. Instead the antithesis collapsed and left capitalism standing as it was before hand. The dialectic had faltered.

So do we now live in an age without an antithesis? In a way we do. There is no readily available coherent alternative to liberal capitalism. The left wing alternatives will either take us back to Soviet style tyranny or will condemn millions to dying of starvation, or both.

But this is not to say that there is not opposition to capitalism. Capitalism is far smarter than that. We know that capitalism is unfair and that we exist in a world in which our desires are conditioned by the nature of capitalism. Where capitalism is brilliant is that it seizes people’s opposition to it, wraps it in a bow and presents it back to them as freedom. ‘Look how great liberal capitalism is! It allows you to think it’s shit’. In Soviet Russia any opposition to the regime was suppressed. Liberal capitalism disarms its critiques by letting them be critical. The harsher you are on the system, the more easily the capitalism absorbs and accommodates you. Liberal capitalism is an ideology par excellence.

If I am free to challenge the system yet my challenge doesn’t matter am I really free? Well not really. How am I free to oppose something if the thing that I want to oppose grows stronger from my opposition to it? How do I weaken something which is not merely immune to by attacks, but hardens because of them? No matter what my views of the system it accommodates me; entraps me.

Yet this accommodation can only exist in a system when the opposition is already emasculated. When there is no alternative which may actually challenge the existing social edifice it may withstand such attacks on the basis that it occupies a social space which is, at that moment unassailable. The collapse of communism is just such an emasculation. At the height of the Cold War things were very different.

It is now widely known that from the 1950’s onwards MI5 kept files on many leading figures in the Labour Party on the grounds that they may be affiliated with the Soviet Union. It is possible that they bugged Harold Wilson. They didn’t necessarily believe that these politicians were working for the KGB, merely that their views were wrong.

In the Cold War, opposition to capitalism was not always something that strengthened the system. The alternative to the capitalist edifice meant that capitalism was not unassailable; it could be replaced by socialism. Attacks on the status quo could, in sufficient measure, lead to its overthrow. There was a way for the people to rid themselves of one ideological system and replace it with another. Such things had happened in Cuba and South East Asia; they had almost happened in Europe in 1968. The prospect of an alternative makes dissent dangerous.

I very much doubt that the security services currently keep tabs on Labour Party leaders. The freedom to dream of socialism has been stripped away. There is no positive proscriptions left in those who want an alternative system; their opposition is of the negative sort, complaining without offering solutions.

The fall of the Berlin wall marked the removal of the alternative to capitalism which constrained it and held it in check. Before capitalism had to meet the needs of the people or they could swap it for socialism. With that gone capitalism has been able to become more aggressive and encompass more areas of life than it ever would have done whilst the Wall stood. The threat of protest lost its bite. Such impotence and irrelevance surely makes us less free.

It could be that the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago marked the freedom of the East but also marked the stripping away of an important freedom from those in the West.