   End of Utopias  Bookmark and Share Friday, Nov 13, 2009
Slavoj Žižek has a good essay in the LRB about the anniversary
of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He looks at the idea that the
end of the socialism brought in its wake a realistic mind-set
grounded in the “truth” that markets and capitalism are the only
basis for a social order that works. He basically argues that
after the Wall fell, the same sort of people maintained
political control. Neoliberalism has its power elite, just as
Warsaw Pact countries had their Politburos. What’s striking
about the velvet revolutions, Žižek argues, is that after the
fall of the Wall, these elites turned out to be the same people:
He sums up the ideological usefulness of this misrecognition:
free marketeers can argue that their revolution was betrayed and
demand more radical reforms.   Markets don’t exist by virtue of
natural law; impersonal exchange is hardly inscribed into human
genetic code. Violence, or its implied threat, establishes the
terms of exchange, or wor