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The futures of the Euro and the eurozone remain uncertain. Spain and Portugal have gained minimal stability only for Italy to wobble and Cypus enter a tailspin. No one knows how far the European crisis will spread: perhaps to old member Belgium or new member Slovenia, perhaps to the EU itself, enda…

[...] But we should recognize that the Soviet Union was not equivalent to socialism and thereby somehow directly analogous to capitalism. It was something more particular and of a different order.

This is so whether we treat capitalism as a set of practices that can be undertaken by capitalists …

Immanuel Wallerstein had been long (and very controversially) comparing communist states to factories seized by a labor union during a strike.' If the workers try to operate the factory themselves, they inevitably have to follow the rules of capitalist markets. The workers might get a better distri…

Nobody in 1917 considered the revolution in Russia unexpected. The Russian nobility had long been haunted by the specter of serf peasants revolting to avenge their near-slave condition. A modern proletarian revolution had been awaited ever since the European upheavals of 1848. This fear/hope was fe…

There is a further obstacle to revolutionary change. The communist and fascist revolutionary alternatives to capitalism were disasters, and they are the only ones to have emerged so far. There are no other alternatives around and almost no one wants to repeat either of those. Socialism, whether rev…