Why we are Still Socialists and Marxists After All This

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1990s, Marxist socialists in the United States are on the defensive. The turmoil in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the massacre in China have been widely accepted as demonstrating a final failure of socialism. In the United States, the very long period of economic expansion, ignoring our repeated predictions of recession, seems to undermine Marxist analyses of the self-contradictory nature of capitalism; the expansion is all the more significant because it has come along with conservative policies, the rejuvenation of the market, and all that. It is easy for one to react, as much of the public has, to these recent developments with the conclusion that socialism and Marxism are dead and that capitalism will be increasingly triumphant.