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20 YEARS AFTER THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL: BEYOND THE FREE MARKET
Eric Hobsbawm
NOVEMBER 2009 (IPS) - The short twentieth century was an era of religious war between secular ideologies. For historical rather than logical reasons it was dominated by the opposition between two and only two mutually exclusive types of economy, ‘Socialism’, which was identified with centrally planned economies of the Soviet type and ‘Capitalism’ which covered all the rest, writes Eric Hobsbawm, British historian and author.
This apparently fundamental opposition between a system that sought to eliminate profit--seeking private enterprise (i.e. the market) and one that sought to eliminate all public or other restrictions on the market, was never realistic. All modern economies must combine the public and the private in varying ways and to varying degrees and in fact all do so. The two attempts to live up to the full binary logic of these definitions of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ have both failed. The state-planned command economies of the Soviet type did not survive the 1980s. Anglo-American ‘market fundamentalism’, then at its apogee, crashed in 2008
(*) Eric Hobsbawm, British historian and author.
(END/2009)
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