The British Broadcasting Corporation recently held a poll in various countries of the world in which they asked the respondents’ opinions on capitalism and the fall of the Soviet Union, among other things.(1) Unsurprisingly, the opinions on the current world system were strongly divided in the world, and mostly between the rich and the poor nations. Nevertheless there were some interesting results. Only 11% of all people polled indicated the current capitalist system worked well, with many people desiring reform or regulation, and 23% indicating it was “fatally flawed”. We may take the latter position as an anti-capitalist one, meaning principled opposition to capitalism lives among a quarter of the sample polled, a better result than might be expected. Opposition to capitalism altogether was still intense in France, by far the most anti-capitalist of the Western nations: in this country 43% of the population indicated to oppose capitalism altogether, compared to 35% in Brazil and 38% in Mexico.
Opinions on the collapse and disappearance of the USSR were strongly divided by bloc. Continue reading “Great divisions of global opinion on capitalism, USSR”