|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: joanna bujes
|| I'm sure that at the beginning of the soviet dissolution, there
|| were a lot
|| of people who thought that allegiance to the free market would get them
|| American-style capitalism goodies. Because, after all, as we all know,
|| capitalism is the capitalism of the U.S. and western europe; it
|| is not the
|| capitalism of Haiti, Chile, and Indonesia.
||
Almost Parenti's exact words in Blackshirts and Reds:
"The peoples of Eastern Europe believed they were going to keep all the social gains they had enjoyed under communism while adding on all the consumerism of the West.(...) Expecting to advance from Second World to First World status, they have been rammed into the Third World, ending up like capitalist Indonesia, Mexico, Zaire, and Turkey. They wanted it all and ended up with almost nothing."
IMO they did gain one thing through their ordeal: Poltical consciousness.
Hakki