In 1981, two lone assassins, crazy as only the United States can make them, went in search of celebrity targets in New York and Washington. One of them scored a tragic hit. John Lennon was shot dead outside his Manhattan apartment. Ronald Reagan survived. The day Lennon died, his song Imagine, which spoke of peace and social justice and expressed the ideals and hopes of an entire generation, was played on radio stations and in shopping malls throughout the Western world. In Moscow, four years before Mikhail Gorbachev became the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, young people assembled on the Lenin Hills and sang Back in the USSR.
After the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s, the political establishment in every Western capital was determined to roll back the political and social advances of the preceding decades. Reagan in the White House and Margaret Thatcher, freshly arrived in No 10 Downing Street, pioneered the widespread shift to the right that would stamp the decade. Forty years after the rise of a carefully-constructed Keynesian model, which had governed class-relations in north America and western Europe, it was decided that the time had come to demolish the old edifice. It had served its purpose.
Gradually, a new Anglo-American consensus emerged. This was neo-liberalism, a vision of global capitalist supremacy, determined to let nothing obstruct the flow of profits. This new turn was symbolised by Reagan and Thatcher, neither of whom was taken seriously upon first coming to power. I recall a 1984 conversation with the American novelist and political commentator Gore Vidal on the subject of Reagan. I asked whether he remembered Reagan the B-movie actor. Vidal grinned and acknowledged that he had underestimated an old acquaintance:
"I have known Reagan slightly for 100 years. If he came into a room, people would gallop like gazelles to avoid him. He is the most boring man that ever drew breath, but a superb actor. All this stuff about B-movies is bullshit. He was one of the top 10 movie stars in the United States. If I had known he was going to be president, I would have stayed still and listened to him, ingratiated myself in order later to destroy him."
The new economic regime promoted by Reagan and Thatcher had a tough political agenda. This was defined by the dismantling of welfare rights, the disabling of trade unions via legislation and repression (the miners in Britain, the air-traffic controllers in the US), the deployment of military force abroad and the redistribution of income away from the poorest to the most prosperous layers in society. Some 20.2 million households, earning under $10,000 lost an average of $400 each in benefit cuts, while 1.4 million wealthy families, earning an average of $80,000-plus, received an average of $8,400 in tax cuts.
In the UK, too, individual greed was encouraged by the lowering of taxes and the sale of council houses and other state assets. "There is no such thing as society," proclaimed Margaret Thatcher as she encouraged people to get-rich-quick today and forget tomorrow. Financial deregulation stimulated the formation of a class of nouveau entrepreneurs, who thought little of safety regulations or trade-union rights for their employees. As the 1980s continued to regress, it became clear that shame had disappeared from the political lexicon.
During Reagan's first term in office, low-income families lost 23 billion dollars in revenue and Federal benefits, while high-income families gained more than 35 billion dollars. It was this that explained the massive endorsement of Reagan in the prosperous suburbs and the sun-belt.
Thatcher followed suit, catering to the cupidity and narcissism of the individual, thus consciously creating a social environment in which the needs of the underprivileged could be safely ignored. A hallucinatory euphoria, aided by a sycophantic news establishment, helped to cement the new consensus. In the TV networks in the US or the BBC in Britain, those who resisted being "one of us" were unceremoniously removed. The domestic counter-revolution was tied in to an aggressive foreign policy stance. Reagan and Thatcher unleashed a new Cold War and a new armaments drive. Their aim was to oblige the Soviet Union to follow suit and thus cripple its own economy. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, as history began to quicken its pace in the USSR and eastern Europe.
However, contrary to accepted mythology, it was not the Reagan doctrine of crippling leftist regimes in Angola, Nicaragua or Afghanistan that unhinged the old Soviet Union. The Russians were worried by the new US offensive and retaliated in kind as they were especially worried by the possibility of an invasion of Cuba, but scholars who have been studying Soviet archives of the period have stated that the Russians did not panic at all. Of course, the men in Moscow were alarmed by all the talk of nuclear war that was emanating from Washington, but compared to Reagan's brinkmanship, the Soviet responsive was ultra-moderate. Reagan's war-mongering was the basis of the new antinuclear movement that arose.
On June 12th, 1982, 750,000 people gathered in New York's Central Park to demonstrate against nuclear weapons and agitate against the arms race. It was this citizens' action from below that encouraged the reformers in Russia. In 1981 only one in three Americans questioned favoured the abolition of nuclear weapons. By the end of 1983 it was four out of five. And 36 nuclear freeze referendums were passed in November 1982. Only three went in the other direction. "Zero option", meaning no nuclear weapons at all, was the slogan inscribed on the banners of the peace movement. While a servile UK under Thatcher and Heseltine waged a relentless campaign against the Peace Movement and its allies and defended nuclear weapons to the hilt, the idea of a "zero option" would soon be taken up in both Washington and Moscow.
The process received an electrifying jump-start when the decaying Communist Party of the Soviet Union elected the closet-reformer Gorbachev as its first secretary. His aims were ambitious. On the domestic front he wished to democratise the Soviet Union. Two Russian words, glasnost and perestroika entered the political lexicon. He wanted neither capitalism nor a Stalinist-style command economy. He spoke of the new Soviet Union as a social-democracy. On the international level he had been greatly affected by the mass presence of a Europe-wide peace movement against nuclear weapons and missiles. Whether or not he actually read E.P. Thompson's classic Protest and Survive is not known, but the pamphlet was translated into Russian and circulated widely in the country and at every level. Gorbachev's famous Zero Option was a plea for total disarmament and for a new nuclear-free Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.
AT THE Reykjavik summit in Iceland in 1986 there was an incredibly symbolic meeting between the Kremlin reformer and the former Hollywood actor. This was the winter of Chernobyl and, to the amazement of their respective allies in Europe, Gorbachev and Reagan came close to agreeing to a deal that could have led to complete nuclear disarmament. The defence establishment in Washington and London, led by publicists such as Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Brent Scowcroft and Thatcher, worked overtime to reverse what they saw as a dangerous accommodation to the enemy. It was difficult to accuse Reagan of being soft on the "commies" but a campaign was mounted to nullify Reykjavik and the hopes that it had aroused. Gorbachev, alone, carried on. The peace movement had its most prominent supporter in the Kremlin.
In 100 Poems Without a Country, the great German-language poet, Erich Fried had written: Imagine Socialism/ freed of everything/ that upsets you/ Ask yourself/ Who then would be really upset/ He and no other is/ and remains/ your real enemy.
Gorbachev's enemies were many. Inside his own country he was mistrusted by an intelligentsia which had suffered too many disappointments in the past and was by now completely hooked on the economics of Milton Friedman and the politics of Margaret Thatcher. Within the Communist Party, the old bureaucracy was prepared for cosmetic adaptations, but resistant to any fundamental change in the way the Soviet Union was governed.
Gorbachev's first response was to embark on a populist campaign in favour of his reforms. He threw new ideas directly at the people and was pleased by the response. He gathered support from below to strengthen his leverage at the top, but - and this was a fatal error - he obstinately refused to draw a dividing line inside the Party. He wanted to carry the entire Party with him, defining the opposition in psychological rather than political terms. A crucial section of the Soviet elite remained unconvinced. Gorbachev tried to keep everyone on board with the inevitable result: he succeeding in isolating himself. Boris Yeltsin, in those days a heady reformer and the scourge of corruption, broke with his leader and moved in a radical direction.
In desperation, Gorbachev turned to the West. The Germans and the French were keen to help, but unilateral initiatives by their leaders made Washington extremely nervous. The shock-therapy Ayatollahs behind Reagan and Thatcher, typified by Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard, were free-market fundamentalists. They did not want Gorbachev's "third way" in the new Russia. For them it was too social-democratic. They wanted a naked and brutal capitalism that steamrolled the benefits of the old system. The result of this shortsightedness is responsible for the gangster-capitalism that prevails in Russia today.
Gorbachev had one trump card left in his hand. He could have told the Germans that he would never give up East Germany unless he was assured of a neutral, nuclear-free new Germany and the neutralisation of the Balkans. In other words he could have used Soviet military muscle to push through a new-style Europe. Here he failed. He was so besotted by appearing reasonable to the West and trying to impress Washington that he lost all sight of reality. He imagined Western leaders to be as straightforward as he was and they, unsurprisingly, let him down.
In the winter of 1989 the Berlin Wall came down and the West Germans effected a speedy anschluss. Within months, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved and the Soviet Union itself disintegrated, not with a bang, but a whimper.
For a short while the West was triumphant. Capital had scored a sensational victory without a shot being fired. Those who equate the former regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union with the German Nazis and the Italian fascists should ponder this fact. It took a world war and the death of millions to defeat fascism. The decaying Stalinism, east of the Elbe, crumbled easily. Perhaps this is one reason NATO decided to wage a war in Yugoslavia in the late 1990s: to show it had muscle which could crush the remnants of the past. All the early evidence that is beginning to seep out of Kosovo from members of war crimes tribunals looking for concrete evidence of atrocities indicates that the number of Kosovan victims did not even reach 1,000, let alone the genocide and the holocaust imagery that was used by the press and television networks to justify an unnecessary war. NATO wanted to show Western triumph as one of weapons. In reality it was reason and hope that initially triumphed, only to be cruelly disappointed by the dismal reality that followed. Thus, the legacies of the 1980s were mixed. Greed co-existed with hope, before vanquishing it from the world. Whereas today, in the words of the late American poet, Thomas McGrath:
Now, in another autumn, in our new dispensation/ Of an ancient, man-chilling dark, the frost drops over/ My garden's starry wreck- age,/ Over my hope./ Over the generous dead of my years./ Now, in the chill streets I hear the hunting and the long thunder of money.
Tariq Ali is a writer and film-maker. The paperback edition of his latest novel, The Book of Saladin, is published by Verso on November 20th
