Myopia of Western Marxism: Trying to reinvent socialism without its history

A perverse piece by John Quiggin in The Guardian the other day, called ‘Socialism with a Spine‘. I cannot quite figure out if Quiggin is hitching his economics to Marxism at a convenient moment or whether some deeper affinity lurks somewhere. And I leave aside his strange effort to call European social democracy of the 1950s and 1960s ‘socialism’. Instead, what is striking is that he completely ignores a century of actual and complex efforts to construct socialism around the world – apart fro...