Almost three years ago, Sonia Gandhi was on track to become the prime minister of India. Then she dissed the Bombay Stock Exchange. The markets obligingly tanked, and “Red” Sonia was sidelined. The same thing happened in China this week (as I outlined Thursday on BuzzCharts).

The struggle isn’t over, of course; envy is one of the seven deadly sins and it never goes away entirely. However, this particular vice is today punished more rapidly than at any time in history.

It used to take decades for wealth to evaporate when a regime turned leftward. Now it takes seconds. And the ongoing problem is that the dictators can stand it. In the final analysis, all they need is enough money for bullets to stay in power.

Open societies, however, are a different matter altogether. The people who can choose where to invest and where to live form a powerful global community these days. A Japanese or Chinese housewife, voting with her savings account, can send a message which can, perhaps, topple a regime.

Back to China. On Tuesday the Chinese government was talking about interest-rate hikes and taxes on capital gains. In an instant, almost 10 percent of the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) Composite Index was gone. The following day, the government reversed course, and almost half the index’s value returned.

In the battle for what Pulitzer Prize winner Dan Yergin calls “the commanding heights,” Marx lost to the markets — yet again.