Post-1989 regimes are reactionary, not anti-communist liberations

Evidence

As Blake once put it: ‘Unacted desire breeds pestilence’. Regimes which had so severely circumscribed the possibilities of acting on socialism’s emancipatory desires were then faced with – were at length overthrown by – the ‘pestilence’ of commodity fetishism, as it enveloped the disgruntled populations to such a degree that they succumbed to the most extreme ideas of the American and West European Right. So it is that the movements that came to power in 1989 and constitute the majority inside Russia as well – aided, surely, by imperialism, but with the momentum of mass mobilizations – have turned out to be not only reactive but reactionary, in the strict sense. On some key issues – distribution of wealth, public responsibility for basic human needs, collective ownership of the major means of production, struggle against imperialism, struggle against religious forms of alienation, the desirability of multi-ethnic and multinational polities, solidarity with non-European countries – these are regimes of distinctly Right reaction. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 46

Categorization

• XREF: Sharply contradicts the mainstream reading of 1989 as ‘the end of history’; echoes debates in the reader’s knowledge of post-Soviet oligarchic outcomes.