When we first decided to do an issue of the DGS devoted to the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, we agreed from the outset that the best approach would be to invite a range of writers and activists from different perspectives and traditions to put forward their views and thoughts.

DGS readers can draw their own conclusion, we said.

When it comes to understanding history the DGS offers no party line, and neither do we have a one size fits all discourse which can capture the experiences of the societies and peoples who lived under Communism between 1917 and 1989.

We do not proclaim to have a monopoly on either wisdom or truth and in fact tend to slightly wary of those who do.

Instead, what we offer in our special issue is a range of views which attempt to analyse and interpret the Communist experience.

There are very few magazines, certainly on the left anyway, which offer such depth, broadness and scope in one single issue. We have articles from a range of Marxist writers, and articles from left social democratic and libertarian perspectives.

Although the differences between many of the writers contributing to this issue will be clear, it’s not our intention to set up polemics or rehash the debates of the past. We hope readers will engage with this special issue in a discursive and open mode. After all, all of our contributions have a thread in common – that the Soviet experiment had flaws which led to its demise, and that if we are to build a credible model of socialism capable of transforming the lives of the mass of humanity in the 21^st century we must learn lessons from the mistakes – and yes, the achievements – of the 20^th.

Perhaps this means looking again with fresh eyes.

In the immediate aftermath of Communism’s collapse, political and philosophical discourse tended to take on an apocalyptic tone.

We have reached the end of history, Fukuyama proclaimed. Others talked about the end of philosophy itself. ‘The end of man’, became fashionable in certain ‘post-modern’ narratives.

For some on the left it seemed like the end of hope, because socialism had perhaps best expressed humanity’s struggle for liberation. For others, it was a renewal of hope, because the Soviet Bloc had become a monstrous distortion of the socialist ideal.

Socialism was the dream of building a fully democratic, co-operative and classless society where freedom and equality could be realised.

Surely this was Marx’s dream?

Was the demise of the Soviet Bloc really the end of history, or only the end of a certain concept of history?

Was Communism’s demise really the end of Marx, or only the end of a certain conception of Marx?

The ghost of Marx lives on, wrote the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the early 1990s responding to Fukuyama’s end of history claim.

Derrida emphasised that there was more than one ghost and more than one spirit of Marx.

These spectres are to be found, alive and well, in this issue of the DGS.

Well over one hundred years ago the great Oscar Wilde wrote that the ‘the truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility’.

How true. Enjoy.