Is Socialism Still an Alternative?

Abstract

[What I’ve written above] sounds to me like a call, to return to [seeking] for a socialist alternative to the commanding global hegemony of capitalism.” So I conclude a central section of my new book Revolutionary Traveller: Freeze-Frames from a Life.2 Yet the need to follow such a course is more easily asserted than proven—not least, on one hand, in light of the notorious failures of various attempted “socialisms” throughout the last century, and, on the other, the apparent vitality, despite its current “crisis,” of global capitalism’s stranglehold on the poorest of the world’s poor. What can we say in defense of a socialist project, especially for the global South? I will begin, in the first section, by interrogating two recent attempts to refuse (or ignore) a socialist possibility, and then, in a second section, look more closely at some of the claims that might continue to be made, with a straight face, on socialism’s behalf, especially with reference to Africa, the region of my own most intensive focus.“