The theory of socialism and the socialist movement in Marx’s time arose in the context of nineteenth century capitalism. Since that time capitalism has evolved, through a series of stages, of which the latest is the global neo-liberal order whose construction began some twenty five years ago. The theory and practice of socialism have also evolved since Marx wrote, as the first attempts to build socialist systems rose and then ebbed over the past century (Marx, 13).
Throughout the 1990s theoretical analysis and the left's debate over strategy and tactics have been conditioned by two basic elements: in first place, the political and ideological impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the other European socialist states which keeps the need for an overall balance sheet of the historical experience of socialism on the agenda and secondly, the subsequent universal avalanche of myths about the "regenerative capacity" of the capitalist system, the "indisputable power" of imperialism and the consummation of a "civilization change" (technological, economic, social and political) that makes any revolutionary transformation of society impossible.
One of the foundation stones of the "capitalism" thesis is that, by virtue of the so-called scientific and technical revolution, the capitalist mode of production found the formula for resolving, or at least for always postponing, the outbreak of its antagonistic contradictions amongst them crises of overproduction from which it emerges that the revolutionary transformation of society would not only prove impossible, but even unnecessary (Kotz, 50). Another piece of fashionable ideology is that science and technology have acquired a life and rationality or irrationality of their own, namely that scientific and technological development have become humanity's motor force, such that its dictates admit of no appeal, by neither the exploiters nor the exploited. It thus generates social changes that invalidate the entire....
