In Marxist theory, the final stage of socialism is true communism, when everyone shares of his or her resources equally, the state withers away, and true justice finally dawns upon the earth. We never have seen that stage and never will, because Marxism is rancid pseudo-religious hogwash that runs directly contrary to human nature. The real final stage of socialism is what we saw in the last ten years of the Soviet Union: an entrenched, all-encompassing, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracy nominally presided over by a succession of senescent, barely-there incompetents. With his disgraceful descent into open authoritarianism Thursday evening, Old Joe Biden and the Democrats signaled their intention to skip right to that final stage: they’ve already got the doddering figurehead and the ravenous bureaucracy firmly in place.
During the first stages of socialism in Russia right after the Bolshevik revolution, the new workers’ paradise appeared from the outside, where the gulags weren’t so easy to see, to be youthful, dynamic, and promising. The American journalist Lincoln Steffens visited Soviet Russia in 1919 and was enthusiastic, declaring: “I have seen the future, and it works.” Other American intellectuals visited the Soviet Union and were likewise enthused; the New York Times’ Walter Duranty was so enamored of the place that he willfully covered up evidence of Stalin’s Ukrainian famine so that Times readers wouldn’t get a negative view of the new Russia.
This sort of thing went on for years. Two decades later, with the U.S. on the brink of entering World War II, three young folk singers named Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Josh White, who called themselves the Almanac Singers, recorded Songs for John Doe, an album of peace songs.