Abstract

And Why We Will All Miss It So Much

The article focuses on socialism in Russia. The strength of socialism as an ideology lay in its claim to dissolve inequality through a simple change in social format. On the chartered antitotalitarian left-a persistent impulse has been to show that the socialist project, deformed and betrayed though it was in the Russian model and its clones, is still somehow salvageable. This sentiment, doggedly appended to declarations of relief that the cold war is over, yields two main contentions. The first is that greater and timelier infusions of democracy might have saved Russian socialism. The second, a cloudier thing, is that because the continuing structural imperfections of capitalism are so alarming, a socialist option just has to be viable.