Why America’s poisonous politics makes ‘Market Leninism’ an attractive alternative
By John Avlon
1:09PM GMT 29 Mar 2014
“Market Leninism” has become the biggest challenge to our society, writes John Avlon. And the problem with this alternative to Western governance is that it promises prosperity at the expense of individual freedom – while dismissing democracy as ineffective
So much for the end of history. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall gave rise to the idea that liberal capitalist democracy would carry the human race inexorably toward broad sunlit uplands, we are confronted with the ugly fact that culture outlasts politics.
The ideology of communism may have ended up on the ash heap of history like Nazism before it, but now “Market Leninism” is taking its place as a challenge to liberty in the 21st Century.
The fault lines reflect Cold War regions.
Russia and China and some of their old satellite states have traded Marx and Lenin for Market Leninism.
The militaristic one-party state endures – but the nomenklatura now attracts global capital, swilling champagne in jet set nightclubs instead of behind dacha walls.
