- THE FALL OF SOVIET UNION

Mikhail Gorbachev took the power of the Soviet Union in 1985 and he promoted two important decisions – to finish to Cold War and also to modernize the Soviet Union. The first one was called ‘Glasnost’ that consisted of transparency in political decisions and in giving more freedom to the society. The second and the most important measure was the ‘Perestroika’ which consisted of economic reforms that allowed private investment and property, and opened the country’s economy.

Together with Gorbachev’s actions in the USSR, a Polish politician and union leader, Lech Walesa and his Solidarity Movement, supported remotely by Pope John Paul II, was also protesting against totalitarianism in Poland, one of the poorest and most repressed countries in the Eastern Block. The world supported these three actors but never could have imagined what was about to happen in such a short period of time: On November 9th, 1989, the Berlin Wall, which divided East and West Berlin and was the symbol of the division between communism and capitalism, was torn down. As a matter of fact, at that time it was impossible to stop the avalanche of people fleeing from the east to the west, therefore the Soviet economy was not sustainable anymore and collapsed. In 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union and freed the satellite countries.

At present, in the first decade of the 21th Century, the world is in despair with the most difficult economic crisis that capitalism has undergone and that has demolished the neo-liberal thoughts of the 90’s which assured that capitalism was the only way to live. We are now undergoing, enduring, and observing that the free-market system and neo-liberalism not only is not a solution to poverty, inequality, and disease in the world, but that it has caused tremendous economics gaps, not only between North and South, as researchers wrote before, but among societies in the same countries, cities, and towns. The differences between classes, regions and countries are huge now.

Although history shows us that communism, as put in practice before, has failed, it is urgent to reinvent a new left and give a radical and deep democratic significance to Socialism in order to bring about a real alternative to capitalism. Our societies are devastated by social injustice, global warming, and the actions of those who are opposed to change. The Establishment is creating a society of ambition in which people who has more want more and, thus, accumulation around the world takes place in front of 250 million persons living below poverty levels in the world. We are not only talking about workers as in the past; the new concept has to evolve to citizens who have the right to live in happiness and dignity. The New Left Socialism has been reborn around the planet from the ashes of its own mistakes and its goal is to build democratic societies with liberty, education, health and justice for all.