A Walk over the Post Socialist Rubble What’s the Big Idea

WHERE the dream palaces of socialist ideology used to stand, with their halls of mirrors, banqueting rooms, and workers’ dormitories, there are now great big sad-looking holes. They are partly filled with the twisted beams, rubble, and debris of the old edifices, left by the wrecker’s ball. This pitiful clutter will almost certainly prove quite hard to break down any finer. The remaining void, from the interstices of the debris upward, is now being filled up.

The filler is a gooey, viscous conglomerate of disparate elements. One day it may harden into a homogeneous-looking cement and earn a name of its own. Early attempts to hasten this process, and to give the filler intellectual respectability—by calling it, variously, the Third Way, the post-socialist, postmodern, or post-industrial model, the caring, communitarian order, or the forum over the market—seem premature. For the time being no synthesis has taken place. The bits and pieces are still clearly distinguishable and sometimes even mutually contradictory. This makes them fascinating, though not necessarily enjoyable, to watch.

WHERE the dream palaces of socialist ideology used to stand, with their halls of mirrors, banqueting rooms, and workers’ dormitories, there are now great big sad-looking holes. They are partly filled with the twisted beams, rubble, and debris of the old edifices, left by the wrecker’s ball. This pitiful clutter will almost certainly prove quite hard to break down any finer. The remaining void, from the interstices of the debris upward, is now being filled up.

The filler is a gooey, viscous conglomerate of disparate elements. One day it may harden into a homogeneous-looking cement and earn a name of its own. Early attempts to hasten this process, and to give the filler intellectual respectability—by calling it, variously, the Third Way, the post-socialist, postmodern, or post-industrial model, the caring, communitarian order, or the forum over the market—seem premature. For the time being no synthesis has taken place. The bits and pieces are still clearly distinguishable and sometimes even mutually contradictory. This makes them fascinating, though not necessarily enjoyable, to watch.