Book Review: Socialism is Dead, Long Live Socialism by Todor Bombov

  

 

Socialism is Dead, Long Live Socialism by Todor Bombov  

This is the kind of book that makes me pause before I start, because it is asking for work, not vibes. Bombov splits the project into two parts: a political argument about what a socialist state would actually require, and an economic argument that tries to build a critique of political economy in direct conversation with Marx’s Capital.

The broad claim is blunt: the twentieth century systems that called themselves socialism were not socialism at all, and the confusion around words has done real damage.

I liked that the first half refuses to romanticize power. One of the most concrete moments is his insistence, via Marx and the Paris Commune, on stripping officials of special monetary privileges and paying state servants at the level of workmen’s wages.

I felt that clarity in my body, because so many “justice” conversations float above the material and never come back down.

I enjoyed the second half less and more at the same time. Less, because there is real math and formal structure in the chapter titles alone, and it can be heavy going.

More, because the ambition is rare: he argues about wages, credit, and inflation in a way that tries to be falsifiable, not just inspirational.

As someone who works with people who carry fear in their nervous systems, I kept thinking about how political arrangements become daily psychology: who gets stability, who gets punished for needing help, who is told to be grateful for scraps. This book does not hand you comfort. It hands you a framework and dares you to argue back.

Readers are right that it is not light reading, but it felt important to sit with it anyway.