[The] assertion that “everything is possible in human affairs” is either meaningless or false.

— E. H. Carr

What Happened to the Socialist Revolution?

Anyone who has pretensions to being a revolutionary socialist nowadays, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, is surely obliged to answer one simple, if salient, question: what on earth has happened to the socialist revolution? For those of us who believe that the socialist transformation of society must through necessity pass through the gate of the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order the fact is that moves to do just that have, since the mid point of the last century, been almost entirely absent from our planet; and absolutely absent from that part of our planet where the locus of capitalist power is lies—the advanced metropolis of western Europe, north America and Australasia. While the first half of the last century, as we shall see, was indeed a period rich in revolutionary experience in just this part of the world capitalist system, since the restabilisation of social and political order following the Second World War the metropolitan capitalist citadel has remained pristine in its resistance to revolutionary challenge.

(A version of this article was published as Ed George, “Through What Stage Are We Passing?”, Socialism and Democracy, 19:2 (2005).)

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