Perspective

What's the point of this 25-years-ago retrospective, other than historical curiosity?  Two things:

1. Regimes, no matter how powerful, fall if they don't change with the times (impermanence), and
2. People, even under the most repressive of conditions, can bring about non-violent change.

In an interview that ran 25 years ago today in The Boston Globe, Jan Bisztyga, then the official spokesman for Poland's Communist Party, said that as technology had accelerated, even then, at an unprecedented pace, the world simply passed communism by.

Communism's great weaknesses, he maintained, were its inability to perform economically, its inability to reform when changes were obviously needed, and its inability to "change old-fashioned views of society."  The world had become too pluralistic for the kind of black-and-white thinking that had kept the Eastern bloc in a straitjacket.  

In other words, the weaknesses that caused the fall of communism were the same shortcomings political conservatives in the United States suffer today.  Today's capitalist conservatives look at the events of 1989 as a condemnation of socialism, and Bisztyga freely admitted, "There is no future to the kind of bureaucratic socialism I am representing now." But the conservative assessment captures only 50% of what was wrong.  Bisztyga said that he was still optimistic about the future of socialism, "just not this kind of socialism."  The failure of bureaucratic socialism was not in the socialism, but in the inherent inertia of a bureaucracy that could not adapt to the changing times.

In contrast, Bisztyga noted, the West stood up to the tremendous speed of technological change with high flexibility and dynamism.  "You put all your energies into this, and you won."

But there is a price to pay, Bisztyga warned, and the bill will eventually come due in the West.  The United States had badly neglected education, concentrating on an elite instead of on a broad base of educated people that an advanced country needs.  If the United States were to maintain its position as a great country, Bisztyga said, it would have to take money away from right-wing causes, such as armaments, and give some back to education and the environment, just as the Eastern bloc had to dismantle central planning and install individual initiative and free markets.  Thus, the two sides might eventually meet somewhere toward the middle.

Instead, the U.S. has chosen to double down on military expenditures, abandoning even the pretense of equal educational opportunities for all, and has continued to neglect its infrastructure and the environment. As income inequality continues to grow rampant, this kind of inflexible thinking may bring this nation to the same crossroads that the Polish Communist Party found itself in 1989, and people in the West may have to rise up and bring about the same kind of non-violent change that rocked eastern Europe 25 years ago.