From: Gegenstandpunkt, Winter 1992 [translated from German]

Context: Fall of the Soviet Bloc

Immediately after the failed coup by Soviet leaders against the dissolution of the state, in time for the ban and disintegration of the CPSU, the high-class German press came out with obituaries of communism. The demise of the system alternative did not appear as an object in need of explanation, but as evidence and explanation: Communism not only went under, but was thereby refuted and therefore deserved to go under. Now the success of power establishes historical truth, failure is refutation and proof of injustice. Liberal commentators, who always found Ronald Reagan's phrase about the "evil empire" terribly primitive, drop the last excuses for the "big social experiment" and fully agree with the wisdom of the "cowboy in the president's office": Socialism was nothing from the start as a crime committed by criminal minorities. The facts, the definitions of values and laws against which the Bolsheviks had violated, become an unbridled acknowledgement of all the disgusting qualities of our superior system, for which Marx recommended its abolition.

Yesterday's system comparators of course already knew then what they had to make of business and government on the other side of the Iron Curtain: there they had a different – material, non-formal – understanding of human rights than our main Western one; the one-party state with its social organizations was never a parliamentary democracy in our sense; Although the planned economy was able to concentrate scarce resources on major national projects, it did not react spontaneously to external changes like our market does. Comparative insights of this kind proved sufficiently clearly - for anyone who took the Western view - that the other system was not like ours, that it could not be used. Social studies teachers and Eastern Bloc experts have always said it. Now they hail the end of the Soviet Union as proof: They got it right - and got it right from history itself. "Didn't we tell you so?" - their articles sound triumphant. As if they ever, and even always, said that! They found the other system undemocratic, illiberal, their wealth a poor egalitarian mass supply, but it always worked too well for them with all its abnormalities: The East was too stable and effective for them in involving the population, it still produced too much wealth, particularly in the form of armaments, and was too attractive to a few labor parties in the West and whole blocs of states in the 3rd world. The condemnation of the other system always knew a side of respect for the hostile world power that stood with armies of millions on the Elbe. That this socialism was "actually existing" impressed its Western critics as much as it did the proud inventors of this peculiar system name. That it's finally become unreal in the last year is welcomed by them as proof of all the comparative disparagemental judgments they've made about it, although the two aren't at all the same thing. Because history agrees with their value judgments, they agree with history, abandon their comparative, democratic-moral values and propagate the pure law of power: what asserts itself is good, what goes under must go under and should therefore also do so. Anti-communist journalists become reversed but outspoken supporters of the “Historical Materialism” and propagate the “historical automatism” they had always accused their communist opponents of.

Not the best times for the left, but fascinating texts came from it.