Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

by Lea Ypi

Why had socialism come to an end? Only a few months before, in our moral education class, teacher Nora had explained that socialism was not perfect; it was not like communism would be when it arrived. Socialism was a dictatorship, she said, the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was different, and certainly better, than the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that ruled in Western imperialist states. In socialism, the state was controlled by the workers, rather than by capital, and the law served the workers’ interests, not the interests of those who wanted to increase their profits. But she made it clear that socialism had problems too. Class struggle was not over. We had many external enemies, like the Soviet Union, which had long ago given up on the ideal of communism and turned into a repressive imperialist state that sent tanks to crush smaller countries. We also had many internal enemies. The people who had once been rich and had lost all their privileges and property kept plotting to undermine the rule of the workers and deserved to be punished.