Two Roads to Socialism—Two Blind Alleys?

Abstract

Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the world socialist movement has come to a turning point in its history. The decline and fall of the USSR is only the final stage in a process that began ten years ago. The events taking place in the socialist countries in the eighties—first the wave of strikes in Poland, then Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union, the student disturbances in Peking, and, toward the end of the decade, the fall of the Communist regimes in the countries of Eastern Europe, and now even the dismantling of the Communist system of power in the former Soviet Union following the failed putsch—have changed the world so much that one can even say that one era in the history of socialism, which began in 1917 with the first successful socialist revolution, has come to a close. A new era has begun.