Capitalism is not an ideology, or a philosophy or a set of beliefs. It is a mode of production, an abstract model of how human beings have been organised to produce tradable commodities - as Marx and Weber explained. However, it can exist in a determinate historical context only if it is structured, regulated, organised, shaped, justified, legitimised, and hence restrained by the interplay of different ideology. To be in favour of capitalism has little meaning, unless one is prepared to favour whatever political organisation of society is required in any given situation to ensure the reproduction of the conditions of capitalist accumulation

Marx, of course, never seriously examined how a society could overcome capitalism and establish socialism. He had defined socialism in the most generic terms of distributive justice - ‘to each according to the work performed’ - to be followed by ‘to each according to needs’. He never developed a theory of socialism, or considered how socialism should be planned, or what forms of communal property should exist within in. He never produced a grand theory explaining how the conditions of capitalist production are themselves produced and reproduced. These conditions are the non-market means whereby market relations are maintained: ideology, culture, politics, the state, the family. There is nothing of any importance in Marx on nationalisation, the public sector, or economic planning. Marx was a theorist of capitalism, who sought to discover how the system worked. He was not a theorist of socialism and was contemptuous of those who wrote utopian blueprints. He was convinced that capitalism would not last for ever, but he never explained how it would be abolished or how it would end. Marx had no doubt that capitalism was the most dynamic system ever to appear on the surface of the earth. It was an unsettled, innovating and expansive system, which would revolutionise the world and draw it together in a tightly knit mesh: the world market. He accurately predicted that the centralisation of capital would develop ‘on an ever-extending scale’, entangling ‘all people in the net of the world-market’, giving capitalism ‘an international character’. As for the political shell which would contain this worldwide formation, Marx and his followers remained silent.

Neither such principled hostility to Soviet communism nor such open exultation at its downfall could be voiced by socialists and social democrats. However arbitrary the exercise of power, gruesome the repression, inefficient the economy and stultifying the bureaucracy, there was no denying that the USSR had achieved at least one of the conditions defining a socialist society: the absence of capitalism. The collapse of the system had not only removed the ‘deformations’ of socialism, but even this one defining feature. Nor could social democrats rejoice at the collapse of the centrally planned economy, because it did not usher in a social-democratic alternative. On the contrary, the ‘market’ turned out to be more uncritically worshipped in what was once ‘the Motherland of Socialism’ than it had ever been in the West.

Reality was not so simple. Liberals, Christian democrats and conservatives lived the collapse of communism with the exhilarating satisfaction of those who had unexpectedly turned out to be on the right side of History. They had denounced communism not as the wrong application of a just principle - socialism - but as the inevitable consequence of a deleterious ideology carried to its logical conclusion. Without the market, they claimed, there could be no freedom. No conscious mechanism for the allocation of resources could provide greater happiness than the innumerable decisions of millions of individual consumers.