Capitalism keeps creating socialists, despite its best efforts. When people are dominated, they tend to resist: they build networks of mutual aid and find power in collective action. They begin to imagine a world organized along different lines, one where the wealth they make in common is held in common rather than hoarded by the few.

This is why you can’t kill socialism: because it’s not just a set of ideas about how to interpret and change the world but a tendency produced by the very system it seeks to replace. When Marx and Engels called communism a specter, they captured this undead quality. Socialism is the ghost in the machine, haunting capital wherever its circuits appear.

If socialism can’t be killed, however, it can be suppressed. And few countries had suppressed it more successfully than the US at the turn of the twenty-first century. American socialism, never as strong as its counterparts in other parts of the world, had become nearly invisible by the end of the 1990s. Its traditional sources of strength — the labor movement and the black liberation struggle, to name the two most important — had been eroded by economic restructuring and state repression. The collapse of Communist regimes abroad inspired a tone of capitalist triumphalism at home. US politics, finally safe from the long shadow of October 1917, became a contest between different flavors of neoliberalism — now hailed as the highest, and final, form of human civilization. US workers were in no shape to put up a fight: deindustrialization, mass incarceration, the attack on the welfare state, and the war on unions had left them disorganized and disempowered.