When the "Free Market" Returned to the East

 The vipers, the bloodsuckers, the middlemen - that's what needs to be rehabilitated in the Soviet Union. That's what makes our kind of country click!

------ Bruce Gelb, former head of the United States Information Agency

With the fall of Communism, private capital resumed control of its former service area in the East, looting state enterprises and delivering a harsher life to the majority of people, many of whom naively assumed that a generous social safety net would be retained in the post communist era. Political scientist Michael Parenti offers an admirable summary of the disaster that ensued:

"Once the capitalist restorationists in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union took state power, they worked hard to make sure that the new order of corporate plunder, individual greed, low wages, mindless pop culture, and limited electoral democracy would take hold. They set about dismantling public ownership of production and the entire network of social programs that once served the public. They integrated the erstwhile communist countries into the global capitalist system by expropriating their land, labor, natural resources, and markets, swiftly transforming them into impoverished Third World nations. All this was hailed in the U.S. corporate press as a great advance for humanity.

 "The former communist nations are being recolonized by Western capital. Most of their foreign trade is now controlled by multinational corporations. Like Third World countries, they are increasingly deprived of each other's markets. The once heavy and mutually beneficial commerce between them has been reduced to a trickle, as their economies get tied into the investment and extractive needs of global capitalism. Instead of mutual development, they are now experiencing the maldevelopment imposed by global monopoly capital.  . . .

"With the advent of private investment in the East, production did not grow as promised but dropped drastically. Hundreds of the more attractive and solvent state enterprises have been privatized, often given away at token prices to foreign investors, while other state firms are decapitalized or driven into bankruptcy.  . . . 

"The net money flow has been East to West, in what amounts to a colonization of the East."

"In the emerging free market paradise of Russia and Eastern Europe, price deregulation produced not competitive prices but prices set by private monopolies, adding to the galloping inflation. Beggars, pimps, dope pushers and other hustlers ply their trades as never before."

_____Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds - Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, Chapters 6 and 7