“We are all socialists now,” proclaims Newsweek. We are creating “socialist republics” in the United States, says Mike Huckabee, adding, on reflection, that “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.” We are witnessing the Obama-era phenomenon of “European socialism transplanted to Washington,” says Newt Gingrich. Well! Even as we all turn red, what follows is a report on the state of actual existing socialism.

First, as we survey the political landscape, what’s striking is the absence of advocates of socialism, at least as the term was understood by those who carried that banner during the capitalist crisis of the 1930s. Then, socialists and communists both spoke of nationalising all major industries and abolishing private markets and the wage system. Today, it’s impossible to find a left-leaning party anywhere that has such demands or entertains such fantasies. (Not even Hugo Chavez — more an authoritarian populist than any kind of socialist — says such things.)

Within the confines of socialist history, this means that the perspective of Eduard Bernstein — the German socialist who argued that the immediate struggle to humanise capitalism through the instruments of democratic government was everything, and that the goal of supplanting capitalism altogether was meaningless — has definitively prevailed. Within the confines of American history, this means that when New York’s garment unions left the Socialist Party to endorse Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, they were charting the paradigmatic course for American socialists: into the Democratic Party to support not the abolition of capitalism but its regulation and democratisation.

... contd.