During Brezhnev’s time I was in Moscow as a member of the Executive Committee of the Young Communists. To say I came back in horror would be an understatement. In any case, I returned with the firm conviction that if the left had to move forward, the USSR had to disappear as a political-mafia conspiracy. This was not meant to feel imperialistic or to ignore the enormous role the USSR played in defeating fascism and indirectly pressing European capitalism to develop welfare states. Quite simply: Soviet communism was dead and a global danger. so when started perestroika I felt politically and internally happy, and my admiration for Gorbachev’s courage and intelligence was overwhelming. Although he did not cease to appreciate the contradictions. The Soviet embassy sent envoys to meetings with the KP to “reassure” the comrades. An NGO brought a young Russian woman to the AU to talk about the moment: “Democracy has already come a long way. But very flawed. Jeans are already sold in many stores, but they are very expensive, not everyone can buy them.” In this phrase so naive, many of the later misfortunes were synthesized, and ultimately the way Western democracies had to surrender to uncontrolled capitalism, management of a historical fact.
I happily celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that day I saw myself as more European than ever before. When Gorbachev showed up for an interview on Channel 9 and invited me to meet him – he was a member of RTVV’s Executive Board – I approached him with a feeling I’ve rarely felt. Later I was part of the OSCE-EU Delegation to Moscow as a Member of Parliament. Watching Yeltsin’s presidential election and I think that meant the regression of the democratization course in Russia, with the stupid complicity of the West. Gorbachev got less than 3% of the vote, if I remember correctly. In our conversations with the ambassador and other Spanish and European diplomats, we asked about this already perceived fiasco in the campaign – Yeltsin won, then the PC and a far-right group. They told us openly that the Russian people did not trust Gorbachev for three reasons: A) We saw him end a totalitarian regime and many Russians agreed, but we also saw him end “his” Empire. , which gave them security and dignity. B) They thought that his educated wife, Raisa, who had a Western aesthetic, was in control of her. C) He didn’t drink. We do not take this fact lightly. When the communist candidate was asked about his political position, he replied that he drank much less than Yeltsin and much more than Gorbachev. This attempt to transform democratic centralism into alcoholic centrism resulted in the success of distillery radicalism. The stage was set for gangsters and ex-KGBs. Putin on the sly
For all that I let myself A personal and sincere tribute to Gorbachev’s death. And what could have been and what wasn’t. Or perhaps because of the heroism of someone who knows that in a state like the USSR, socialism cannot be achieved with transparency and philanthropy. They helped him dismantle: no one helped him build it.
While some—from the President of the United States to the Pope—were in a euphoria of victory, others became more enlightened because they found a logical consequence to what had happened in recent decades, apart from the vast immorality of the communist dictatorship. If anyone captured this clearly in one sentence – a title – it was Fukuyama, the Japanese-North American political scientist who achieved tremendous fame: History had ended. This is not the place to describe the theoretical debates it has spawned. And the truth is that he deserved a little more respect: he actually mingled—well—with Hegelian thinkers, but it is also true that liberalism has come to represent the spirit of the world forever, a conclusion that offers certainty. The intellectual excuse – then these still happened – so that the godfathers and engineers of borderless globalization would have a moral justification in economic neoliberalism. History does not end if Fukuyama is read, but they become variations on the same theme, and trying to encourage profound changes is as useless as perverted.
And what we’ve been through. The guilt of many evils, globalization but simply, the neoliberal paradigm is causing almost as much destruction as the cold war: an already unsustainable price in lives, in environmental destruction, in inequality that destroys the foundations of democracies. Breaking the paradigm required the backlog of many disasters and the intuition that there are others on the waiting list. Paradoxically, it was necessary, first of all, for post-perestroika Russia to revolt against a system that we thought was safe within the unpredictability of the invisible hand. They are not vigilant: the attackers are the worst, the remnant of what could not be. And the key is the power of alliance with other realities contaminated by neoliberalism – China – or with the domestic enemies of the far right, who are more than happy to see their local enemies as communists, the period and some distant communists as exemplary patriots.
Nothing better said: there is too much historical justice in Fukuyama, now he writes and says that neoliberalism has gone too far, a world stopped by its prejudices is impossible, and social democracy must return for a world order to be possible, what needs to be done with peace and globalization of the rich . I haven’t had time to bring Fukuyama back from the dead, and it wouldn’t be fair to dwell on criticism. The title of the book “Liberalism and its disenchanted and one critic has synthesized its meaning by saying that it is a defense of the liberal-democratic order without demonizing the state.
More poetically, cautiously, calmly, he went to a legendary door that he locked, opened it, bent down, and said, “Is anyone out there?” I imagine you asked. Because the bad thing is social democracy because what has been mythologized so many times is no longer possible and the digital economy makes certain returns impossible. Anyway, that’s all, Gorbachev is dead and Fukuyama wants us to push it. It’s a coincidence. But since there is nothing else to do, it moves and makes you think.