The end of Marx began with the slow seeping of Marxist credibility, the core identity Marx the decline of Marx into half-baked over-inflated influence to limp ideological posturing rendered full time academic fossil; Marxism ossified because Marxism became a la mode for academics! When marxism went viral in Western academic institutions it was to hide Communism's full-blown crisis and structural breakdown rather than its fashionability in the West. There was nothing left in the tank and even ideologues were registering empty - Berlin's Wall had to come down , and it happened in my lifetime! What a celebration! Double the joy when Mandela's release later that year proved that South Africa's white community and those who backed it no longer considered Communism capable of being a threat. Marx had seriously underestimated his intellectual dependency on the urban poor turning into urban warriors overnight! His dialectic had overshot and his historical 'Science' had crumbled into dust! His follower (Lenin) never anticipated that Russia would revolt against the Tsar and aristocracy with Communism only to replace Communism with Populist Capitalism when the time was right! The vanguard of the proletariat would lead Russian Capitalism to a velvet victory,branded by its idiosyncratic background. The masses wanted their own Capitalism to free markets and self-determine their own lives that had been so dominated by previous forms of 'state' ownership including 'collectivization' of the USSR and Tsarist privilege, and it was a populist brand that made Russia the broad brush of Capitalism retaining executive powers for a 'minority'. Russia was more keen than most to use Sovietism to leap-frog the aristocracy and the middle-classes to get their hands on markets opening-up for new trade other than the the ex-Soviet unofficial black market of free-marketeers /mafia.!
The End was inevitable but the Tschovskyian swan song it was not.
How to end it... The moment to judge when the time was right to say goodbye to bread queues, shortages, lack of incentives ,paranoia and fear and embrace a free world was fraught with danger; too premature and you would be shot, too late and the Russian military would stage a coup! It was a precarious tight-rope walk that could have been planned many decades earlier than in 89; perhaps it was the policy of last resort, to live and fight for another day? How maddening to Marxist's to misread economic Western Depressions and economic collapses as layers (be them quite complex) of 'Capitalism in crisis' and stick there heads above the parapit on a false quest to prove 'Marxist understanding of history' to boot! Oh dear, what fools we made of them! Every time! 'It's must have been like taking candy from a baby!' You've been framed! Economically and intellectually blindsiding the USSR must have been a blast! But how and why? Because these economic crises in the West were part of the dark arts of self economic harm to inflict heavy damage behind the Iron Curtain without a shot being fired, as well as being the norm for Capitalism to relaunch and evolve, rebirthing or resetting the Capitalist economies of the West! Of course the East would have suspected economic underhand tactics, but the chance to rub intellectual salt into the wounds into their hero and big-daddy was the most effective 'counter-revolutionary act of bougeios narcisstic nihilistic zionist barbarism (remember we didn't fire a single shot here) of heretical underhand...' That's right sucker!! Your 'genius' Marx failed his political GCSE's! And I thought it was you who claimed we worship false Gods!??
So what protected the West from Soviet infiltration and ideological pollution of the West?
The fact remains too cliched, but letting off steam when we are young (youth culture and student politics) will nearly always mean that we'll turn into pillars of society without turning into pillars of salt because we have worked things through and have emerged the other side. In short non-judgementalism and the freedom to exercize it! But that's for my next blog