Gar Alperovitz, president of the National Center for Economic Alternatives in Washington DC has observed: ‘Perhaps the most important lesson of recent developments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is that fundamental problems in any society – despite misleading appearances of superficial calm – are very difficult to “paper-over” forever.’

There is little doubt that the social experiment inaugurated in the Russian Revolution in 1918, and imposed on other eastern bloc countries in the wake of World War II, has failed. The gloating response of western imperialist opinion concerning the ‘failure of socialism’ is, at the same time, misleading. The cracks within predominantly capitalist societies seem to grow wider, reaching almost daily ever deeper into the social fabric of the West. For some this is owing to government interference with market forces. For others it is because government has not guided the economy firmly enough. Whatever the cause, the enormous gap in income and wealth between the rich and poor in many western countries ought to be enough to persuade those who rejoice in the failure of Eastern European socialism of the flaws within the western economy.

In the United States, Britain and elsewhere accumulated private wealth has been used to subvert the democratic process in a variety of different ways. Economic privatisation has frequently denied the poor access to adequate social services. The private funding of special interest candidates has skewed the electoral process, while the promotion of acquisitive material values has often been successfully used to distract public opinion away from crucial social and economic issues.