What remains of the socialist edifice of yesterday? Marxism, which, in its Leninist variant, reigned over the destinies of one third of the world’s population as recently as 25 years ago, has become but a shadow of its former self in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and of its command economy. Regimes such as those of China or Vietnam, where the communist party still holds sway, have come to follow a decidedly capitalist road in economic matters. Social democracy—the reform-minded, parliamentary alternative to Marxism-Leninism—has had its own spectres to confront. The third way trumpeted by Tony Blair and New Labour has been far more about coming to terms with the market economy and the constraints of global capitalism than about building a cooperative new Jerusalem in England or any other green and pleasant land. Here in Canada, the NDP languishes as an eternal third party, unable to provide any serious alternative to capitalism or to what its supporters...
Philip Resnick is a political scientist, long associated with the University of British Columbia. He has published widely on political topics, books such as Letters to a Québécois Friend (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1990), The Masks of Proteus: Canadian Reflections on the State (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1990), Twenty-First Century Democracy (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1997), The European Roots of Canadian Identity (Broadview Press, 2005) and The Labyrinth of North American Identities (University of Toronto Press, 2012). As a poet, he authored a number of collections in the 1970s and ’80s, primarily on Greek-rooted themes. His most recent collection of poems, Footsteps of the Past, was published in September 2015 by Ronsdale Press.
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