How the Abandonment of Democracy and Internationalism Has Decimated the Socialist Movement

Abstract This paper looks not at workers’ struggles, which had their ups and downs over the last two hundred years, but specifically at the revolutionary socialist movement, which aims to eliminate capitalism. While there have been contributions to the vision of a classless, stateless society by utopian socialists and anarchists, the paper concentrates on Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and their legacy. It identifies three bifurcation points in this particular revolutionary socialist tradition where a substantial part of the movement abandoned democracy, internationalism, or both, and argues that this has had a disastrous effect on the movement and needs to be reversed.