ABSTRACT
This chapter believes that the doubts which Noam Chomsky voiced about the kind of rationality and science exemplified by America's war policies in Vietnam have a direct bearing on the problems which, it suggests, are central to the crisis of socialism. The general question 'what went wrong?' can, for socialist present purposes, be subdivided into two specific areas of enquiry. First there is the effort to get to the roots of what went wrong with the Soviet Union after Russia had experienced what was generally believed, by both its friends and enemies, to be the world's first socialist or proletarian revolution. Second, there is the failure of non-revolutionary socialism, or social democracy, to fulfil the hopes of pioneers and its latter-day socialist supporters, and its corresponding adjustment to far more modest aims. The Fabians, like social democrats generally, rejected the Marxist dialectic of progress through class conflict, too, the identification of the working class as the key agency of socialism.
