Two quotes from yesterday's Guardian -

'The capitalist/socialist debate has in general ceased to dominate modern politics. From Beijing to Brussels, the free market has won the battle of economic ideas.' Oliver Letwin, Conservative Party spokesman on big ideas(?).

'A new book, Second Chance by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the cold war hawk who served as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, includes a startling phrase. No leftist, Brzezinski detects what he calls a "global political awakening", a stirring across much of the developing world, among those who are "conscious of social injustice to an unprecedented degree and resentful of its deprivations and lack of personal dignity". Thanks to television and the internet, the global have-nots can now see all that the haves are enjoying at their expense. The hard-headed Brzezinski sniffs revolution in the air.' Jonathan Freedland

Letwin talks of a battle won, Brzezinski writes of a war to come. Letwin views the transformation from state capitalism to liberal capitalism as a defeat for socialism. He doesn't quite proclaim that the class war is over.
The "end of history" soundbite has been laid to rest alongside the "no such thing as society" madness. Greed may still be good for the City thimbleriggers but they don't shout it from the rooftops anymore. The Conrad Black trial in the US has revealed that not even among a population bombarded day and night with capitalist propaganda is it possible to find twelve people who accept that the rich have a God-given right to take, and take, and take.
Are the American dreamers rousing from their slumber?

In the same edition is a right of reply piece by one Michael Carter, World Bank country director for Russia, 1997-2001. He objects to Naomi Klein's article on the World Bank. On Russia he writes, "With hindsight there was much the bank could have done better in the extraordinarily complex challenge it faced in Russia...". With foresight too. Carter was lucky to be appointed to the Russian job as a rise in oil prices kick-started an upturn in the Russian economy. Previously the World bank had been overseeing the impoverishment and immiseration of large sections of the population.

"Russia's economy sank into deep depression by the mid-1990s, was hit further by the financial crash of 1998, and then began to recover in 1999–2000. Russia's economic decline was far more severe than the Great Depression, which nearly paralyzed world capitalism following 1929. It is about half as severe as the catastrophic drop borne out of the consequence of the First World War, the fall of Tsarism, and the Russian Civil War.
"Following the economic reforms of the early 1990s, Russia suffered from a sharp increase in the rates of poverty and inequality.[7] Estimates by the World Bank based on both macroeconomic data and surveys of household incomes and expenditures indicate that whereas 1.5% of the population was living in poverty (defined as income below the equivalent of $25 per month) in the late Soviet era, by mid-1993 between 39% and 49% of the population was living in poverty. Per capita incomes fell by another 15% by 1998, according to government figures.
Public health indicators show a dramatic corresponding decline. In 1999, total population fell by about three-quarters of a million people. Meanwhile life expectancy dropped for men from sixty-four years in 1990 to fifty-seven years by 1994, while women's dropped from seventy-four to about seventy-one. Both health factors and sharp increase in deaths of mostly young people from unnatural causes (such as murders, suicides and accidents caused by increased disregard for safety) have significantly contributed to this trend. As of 2004, life expectancy is higher than at the nadir of the crisis in 1994, yet it still remains below the 1990 level.
Alcohol-related deaths skyrocketed 60% in the 1990s. Deaths from infectious and parasitic diseases shot up 100%, mainly because medicines were no longer affordable to the poor. There are now roughly one and half times as many deaths as births per year in Russia.
"While the supply shortages of consumer goods characteristic of the 1980s went away (see Consumer goods in the Soviet Union), this was not only related to the opening of Russia's market to imports in the early 1990s but also to the impoverishment of the Russian people in the 1990s. Russians on fixed incomes (the vast majority of the workforce) saw their purchasing power drastically reduced, so while the stores might have been well stocked in the Yeltsin era, workers could now afford to buy little, if anything.
"By 2004 the average income has risen to more than $100 per month, emblematic of the mild recovery in recent years thanks to a large extent to high oil prices. But the growing income is not being evenly distributed. The social inequality has risen sharply during the 1990s with the Gini coefficient, for example, reaching 40%. Russia's income disparities are now nearly as large as in Argentina and Brazil, which have long been among the world leaders in inequality, and the regional disparities in the level of poverty are still growing sharper." (Wikipedia, "History of Post-Soviet Russia")