- World
- Books & the Arts
- November 10, 2014
No, the Demolition of the Berlin Wall Was Not the End of Socialism
No, the Demolition of the Berlin Wall Was Not the End of Socialism
“Socialism is inseparable from democracy,” The Nation wrote in its 1989 editorial.
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The deconstruction, if you will, of the Berlin Wall twenty-five years ago this week perversely led to the erection of a similarly oppressive barrier, now to critical thinking rather than to the free movement of persons and goods, which has long been begging for deconstruction in turn: the trope, I mean—and it is no more than a trope—that the end of the Berlin Wall, a creature barely more than a quarter-century old, caused or vaguely heralded the end of socialism, a tradition of political thought and action stretching back roughly two centuries with antecedents at least a millennium or two older than that. This Nation editorial from late 1989, especially its concluding paragraph, is a bracing reminder of who exactly benefits from the proliferation of the idea that history ended the year before the editor of Back Issues was born.
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