Socialism And The Myth Of The Golden Past

Abstract

The belief has been widely and successfully fostered in recent years that socialism in the countries of advanced capitalism has gone into a steep and probably irreversible decline, and that the general embourgeoisement of capitalist societies has all but destroyed its appeal in those countries. There might still be some support, it is conceded, for a modern, reasonable, up-to-date, attenuated version of socialism; but anything more than this is doomed to hopeless failure and certain electoral disaster. Western social-democratic parties have mostly accepted some such view, and have found in it a further justification for their already well-developed propensity to define socialism as capitalism, only better. But there are also many socialists who reject that definition, yet who have come to accept the notion of socialist decline, of the past as militant and committed, and the present as unregenerate. The purpose of this essay is to question this reading of socialist history.