In this pre-millennial hour December 1999 the editors of The Nation chose to run two stories an appraisal of the socialist century past and a harbinger of the socialist century to come that provide the answer to my question. The main focus of Singer's article is The Black Book of Communism , a French treatise that attempts to sum up the human horror of the project to make a better world. According to the book's authors, during the twentieth century between 85 and 100 million human beings were slaughtered in peacetime by Marxists in the effort to realize their impossible dream. That is the minimal lesson one might expect to learn from the unbroken record of the socialist utopias of the century just past. But it is exactly the lesson The Nation fervently rejects.
Socialism is dead.
Long live socialism. For Singer and The Nation , the unrelieved horror and failure of socialist experiments over the course of a century are not a lesson in sobriety for those who promoted and supported them, nor a reason to reconsider the faith. It is just a tragedy of errors that need not discourage them and need never be repeated. In other words, had there been sufficient Communists in America and Europe to make revolutions there as well, the utopia that socialists had dreamed of would have been realized in fact. With Communists triumphant everywhere, the Marxist fantasy would have come true.