You may have missed it, but Europe is currently collapsing because socialism has bankrupt most European nations. Once Germans stop paying for everyone else's free stuff, the EU is done. The free market is what people do when no-one holds a gun to their head to force them to do something else. Socialism is what people do when politicians hold guns to the workers' heads and force them to hand over everything they own.
Edward, I think you missed the whole point of my opening post. Social democracy is not socialism. Social democracy and liberalism are attempts at fixing capitalism, which inevitably fail because you can't fix capitalism, an inherently broken system. I'm talking about real socialism, not the welfare state, which indeed suffers from the fact that you can't just take from one to give to another.
Actually it wasn't socialism at all, it was a deregulated banking system. In the UK it was Thatcher's radical privatization schemes.
I think the age of empire is coming to a close. The USSR was only one example, but it's a global phenomenon. The kind of organizations that will replace them will be smaller, more locally oriented, and could very well be communist or socialist in nature, but there will be no more continent sized empires with central governments. Industrialization is a one-time phenomenon only made possible by cheap energy. The USSR could not NOT succeed, given that it's huge area contained vast areas of farmland, oil wells, and many other natural resources. The same way capitalism will end due to the limits of growth, your revolutions will likewise be limited due to the end of industrial production, and thus the concerns of the worker, and the class divide. Labor will be mostly concerned with producing food, and our way of life will regress to that of a pre-industrial society.
You have to address the issue of ownership of the means of production. As long as workers democratically own the means of production, I'm all for it. If private individuals do, then you are back to square one in the exploitation and class divide department.
