At the end of the Cold War, the West adopted the Marxist approach to the collapsing USSR. Marxism, in its classical form, posits that economic factors are at the root of everything. Ideas and beliefs grow out of economic relations. Money is the base, and everything else is a superstructure. Whatever you think, want, believe and cherish is a result of your economic situation.
Now, I don’t believe any of this crap. People are more than their stomachs, and ideas always come first, overriding the economic, whether for good or for ill. But that’s the classical Marxist view.
The West adopted this view and decided that if you change the economic structure of the USSR from socialism to capitalism, this will lead its inhabitants to embrace the ideas that coexist most naturally with capitalism. Freedom, democracy, choice.
As we have had many chances to observe since then, this didn’t work. Because – newsflash! – the fundamental belief of classical Marxism is wrong, and every neo-Marxist in existence accepted this fact decades ago and created an alternative approach. The Western leadership of the 1990s, however, behaved like it was still 1848* and tried to apply Marx’s favorite remedy to cure the results of large-scale Marxist experimentation. The results were predictably sad.
Yet Western politicians still try to achieve the Marxist goal of changing human nature to achieve a society where human flaws will not exist she everybody will vegetate in a state of earthly perfection and bliss.
*The year of the publication of The Communist Manifesto.
Clarissa's Blog 
“The year of the publication of The Communist Manifesto.”
Also the year of the 1848 revolutions. I recently finished Christopher Clark’s new book about 1848, Revolutionary Spring. My third book on the subject. I’ve been fascinated by the 1848 revolutions because they are so messy and don’t fit into any clean narrative.
A bit in Clark’s book illustrates how complicated national identity can be. A Habsburg official was touring Galicia and investigating the attitudes of the Ukranian and Polish peasants there. When he addressed a group of Polish peasants as Polish, he was surprised to find that they denied they were Poles. When he asked “Well then who are the Poles?”, the peasants replied “The landlords and the town dwellers!”
(commenter formerly Known as AcademicLurker)
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Wow, this sounds like a book I urgently need to read. I always wanted to know more about that time period.
Thank you for the recommendation!!
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It’s worth checking out. Especially given your interest in the nation state and the emerging post-nation state order. 1848 was, for good or ill (I suppose both), such a critical moment in the development of nationalism.
One suggestion: depending on the state of your eyes, you might want to get the hardback edition. I read the paperback, and while I enjoyed the book, I found the print to be punishingly small.
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I’ve read a bit about 1948 and agree that it’s all very messy.
I’ve always wondered how Europe would have developed if the Americas had not been there as an emigration escape valve in the second half of the 19th century. Millions and millions of politically frustrated people left for the US, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, etc. after 1848. What if they had stayed? Could German unification have produced something less militaristic than the German Empire? Could Austria-Hungary have broken up (or loosened into a federation of some sort) in a peaceful fashion? Could Europe have avoided the massive death and destruction of two full scale World Wars?
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Very interesting pondering.
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Russia is a classic petrostate suffering from Dutch disease. Dictatorship is the most natural political system for this economic model.
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