Has socialism a future?

Abstract

The starting point of this article is the currently fashionable ‘death of socialism’ thesis. The article is sceptical of the inflated claims of this thesis, and seeks to develop a critique of its underlying assumptions. After an initial attempt to situate the thesis in an historical context, it moves on to examine the principal components of the thesis, namely, changes in the working class, globalization, the collapse of communism, and postmodernism. It argues that whilst there is some explanatory value in these factors, they do not amount to a plausible demonstration of the end of socialism, and rest upon a suspect methodology. This leads on to a consideration of the future of socialism, in particular the possible fate of the word ‘socialism’, the relationship between socialism and alternative ideological traditions, and the role of the socialist tradition in the ideological configurations of the future.