ABSTRACT
Communism has died. Some say, of senility. Some say, of shameful afflictions. All agree that it will stay dead for a long, long time.
The official opinion (whatever that means) of the affluent West greeted the news, arguably the least expected news of the century, with self-congratulating glee. The theme of the celebration is well known: ‘our form of life’ has once and for all proved both its viability and its superiority over any other real or imaginable form, our mixture of individual freedom and consumer market has emerged as the necessary and sufficient, truly universal principle of social organization, there will be no more traumatic turns of history, indeed no history to speak of. For ‘our way of life’ the world has become a safe place. The century remarkable for fighting its choices on the battlefield is over, ten years before the appointed time. From now on, there will be just more of the good things that are.
