A key historical moment thirty years ago today
Thirty years ago today, the Soviet Union collapsed.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#History
The first self-conscious socialist movements developed in the 1820s and 1830s. Groups such as the Fourierists, Owenites and Saint-Simonians provided a series of analyses and interpretations of society. Especially the Owenites overlapped with other working-class movements such as the Chartists in the United Kingdom.
If we date the movement from the 1820s, then we can say that over a span of 200 years there has not been a single enduringly successful full implementation of socialism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states
Not a single enduringly successful full implementation of the idea.
Activists keep turning back to Marx on the basis that he was so seminal in regard to the critique of the capitalist system. The latter surely is hyper-exploitative, oppressive, anti-social, anti-ecological. Ruinous. But neither Marx nor Fourier, Owens, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, Kautsky, Bernstein, Bebel, Bellamy, the Webbs, Morris, Lenin, Luxemburg, De Leon, Trotsky, Gramsci, Stalin, Debs, Thomas, Mao, Jaurès, Draper, Meidner, Harrington, Corbyn, Žižek, Sanders, or Wolff . . . had a viable conception of social transformation.
We need to be talking about different, alternative post-capitalist visions:
