““It is especially humbling that the simplest Trotskyist, council communist or anarcho-syndicalist militant saw much more clearly than famous and brilliant theorists that, however deserved the terminal defeat of the Soviet bloc and of Soviet-style state capitalism had been, however understandable and salutary the sudden East European infatuation with freedom and rights, however promising the fall of the market Stalinist parties, it was at the same time a historical disaster, heralding the demise of working-class power, of adversary culture, the end of two centuries of beneficent fear for the ruling classes. What was a philosophical construction and idealization in Marx’s Capital—capitalism as a total system, with capital as the only Subject—became a palpable, quotidian reality.””
