Letting them eat cake

Martin Kettle trumpets the success of neo-liberal economics, remarking that "the prospect that hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indian people will enjoy double or treble the prosperity that their parents knew is the single most wonderful possibility in the modern world."

Maybe so, but as for neo-lib Nirvana I can't but help remember the crowds of pensioners at Moscow Central Station in the early Nineties selling off their final belongings before presumably crawling off to die somewhere, nor the girls lining the airport road eight years later dealing in that ultimate unit of capital - their bodies.

"Freedom" is also a word much-bandied but little in evidence as we would understand it in much of the "liberalised" former communist bloc these days.

Chastened by Perestroika and Tianamen, the comrades in Beijing appear to have concluded the USSR collapsed not because of a yearning for "freedom" per se but because their people lusted for the wealth of the West.

Pressure for "democracy", therefore, was not so much about representation, as wanting a say over who got what slice of the cake. Their solution? Instead of providing that say, let them eat cake.

Judging by some of his recent statements, former-comrade Putin also appears to have adopted the same line of thinking (adopts a Russian accent): stuff their mouths with dollars....

So what! I hear you say, but if capitalist dicatorships in China and Russia are among the so-called successes of the post-Cold War settlement, have we really got so much to feel smug about?