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In some ways, I have gone full circle. When you see a system change once, you start believing that it can change again. Fighting cynicism and political apathy turns into what some might call a moral duty; to me it is more of a debt that I feel I owe to all the people of the past who sacrificed ever…

MY STORIES ABOUT SOCIALISM in Albania and references to all the other Socialist countries against which our socialism had measured itself were, at best, tolerated as the embarrassing remarks of a foreigner still learning to integrate. The Soviet Union, China, the German Democratic Republic, Yugosla…

EACH YEAR, I BEGIN my Marx courses at the London School of Economics by telling my students that many people think of socialism as a theory of material relations, class struggle, or economic justice but that, in reality, something more fundamental animates it. Socialism, I tell them, is above all a…

When confronted with the same decisions about structural reforms, his colleagues became cynical. “Oh, well,” they would say. “We survived the Turks. We survived the Fascists and the Nazis. We survived the Soviets and the Chinese. We’ll survive the World Bank.” He was terrified of forgetting what th…

When those working in the port heard that they were about to lose their jobs, they began to visit our house in the early hours of the morning, waiting patiently outside until my father left. At first, there were only four or five, but as news of the structural reforms spread, the crowds grew bigger…