Egypt and beyond

There is a predictable, inevitable, and not wholly inaccurate mention of the fall of the Berlin
wall in today's Guardian...in discussing Egypt...

Unfortunately, the end of what was called "communism" is not widely understood. Perhaps I can express my own point of view most quickly if I recall the words of one former dissident in Czechoslovakia who said that what they'd gotten in the end was not at all what they had wanted when the 'Velvet" revolution started... They had wanted something more like a Swedish social democracy and had gotten something too much like the United States...

There is, as well, a genuine question, rarely asked, about the real costs of the transition to the current form of organization in "Eastern" Europe...whether it might have been carried out differently, what was the extent of bad influence from the U.S.A. and its allies.....
So that, e.g., among western capitalists, unemployment is just the price to pay for business
as usual--a penalty meted out to workers not capitalists....and I did once read in a Czech newspaper about estimates by a sociologist, estimates of the number of people who had died younger under capitalism than they would have under the old regime, dying younger because they had become unemployed and started drinking.....As I re-read these words, they seem altogether too premature-- the course of events in Egypt and other countries is very much unfinished. But I think I've made my point about the easy comparison to the events of 1989.