EDITORIAL
Friday, November 9 will mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For our editorialist Nicolas Beytout, this historic event marks more the victory of one economic model over another, than that of democracy over the dictatorship. But if capitalism swept away the collectivist ideology in the early 1990s, three decades later, it is now widely questioned.
"This is one of the most important events in the history of the world, the moment when communism collapsed in Europe, and where its decline has accelerated elsewhere in the world. China, which officially claims to be communist but has adopted many of the codes of the market economy, and then there are some pieces of museums like Cuba and North Korea, which is a deadly ideology, in the name of which millions of people were killed, so it collapsed that day, defeated by capitalism, because it is the economy, it is the market that has defeated communism.
The victory of capitalism ...
These countries collapsed from the inside. They were ruined, unable to follow the progress of the rest of humanity. Progress, growth, innovation, industrial power, and then at the individual level the comfort of life, well-being, leisure, in short consumption: all this created a gap between the two blocks that was not more tenable. It is the market economy that killed the collectivist economy.
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This victory of one system over the other is always so clear. But she is no longer undisputed. We see it almost clinically through what is happening in Germany at the electoral level. The extremes are back, and especially in the former East Germany. They thrive on the feeling of downgrading of part of the population, and also on the theme of 'it was better before'. To see reborn the extreme right in a country that gave birth to Nazism is very disturbing. In fact, this far-right populist siphonates the voices that went to the radical left and a movement from the Communist Party. The gap between the two Germany has not been completely filled. And the frustration with the system is great.
... and his crisis
And this frustration is found elsewhere than in Germany, in a different form: it is the whole protest movement of capitalism. It can take different forms, for example the challenge of growth, or hyper-consumption, the challenge of inequalities. What is certain is that capitalism, a great winner 30 years ago, did not know how to think about its evolution. He was not able to see himself other than as a dominant system, winner by knockout. Well, the awareness is being made, but this 30th anniversary of the victory of the market economy is also a little defeat, as a symbol of a capitalism that has failed, until today , to reinvent itself. "