Civilization,Culture, Technology,and the Market

The largest, the cruelest empire in the history of mankind is rapidly disintegrating. But we must not be deluded. The ruins of great empires do not yet mean the emergence of a new, happier, and wiser society. The empire has not yet disintegrated entirely. But even when it does, this will not mean that the people inhabiting one-sixth of the earth's surface will live better, that life will become happy, and that our countrymen will be freer, richer, healthier, better educated, and more humane. Even the cessation of the activity of the CPSU does not mean that the destructive force of lawlessness, militarism, the suppression of human dignity, stagnation, conservatism, the terrible discomfort of everyday life, unprecedented exploitation, general incompetence, parasitism, and technological backwardness is a museum relic forever consigned to the past.