an emblem of a free society, and vice versa, while Marx excoriates the unbridled activities of capitalism as something that makes some persons freer than others. How an economist views a society determines as well how the economy of that society will be viewed.
This distinction is useful because traditional comparisons of communism and capitalism have involved comparisons of entire ways of life that were presumed to have been "natural" to the societies affected by one economic system or the other. The whole of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for example, was predicated on Marxist economic analysis and philosophy, which in turn was predicated on criticism and analysis of economic capitalism. Indeed, the USSR has been at pains over most of the twentieth century to preserve an anticapitalist economic system that Marx found so reprehensible. Yet 1989 saw a liberalization of Soviet-style economies and the repudiation of communism altogether in Eastern Europe. As The Washington Post put it in early 1990, referring to events in Eastern Europe,
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