ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on the triumphalist argument about the economic superiority of socialism, which was first formulated two hundred years earlier by Winstanley, returned in a new form adapted to capitalist globalisation. The socialist state would be ‘the securest trading company in the world’. Bebel believed that a ‘socialist state’ closing itself off from the other states, with the capacity to defend itself effectively was ‘unthinkable’. The crucial point in this internationalist formula is that communism was predicated not only on the cooperation of workers movements but on the combined efforts of the most advanced countries. Logically, this ruled out socialism in one country. According to Vollmar the complexity of the process of socialist transition ruled out its simultaneous occurrence in all major countries. Socialism might come about near simultaneously in two or three countries, for instance in France and Germany, but ‘The victory of socialism in at first only one country is in any case the probable scenario’.
