THE PAST AND THE FUTURE OF THE SOCIALIST PROJECT 5 not anathema for the socialist movement; on the contrary the charge of the socialist movement against the bourgeois order is that it represents a betrayal of its own slogans. Secondly, following from the first point, the concept of a socialist revolution is not one of a determined minority capturing power but of a broad-based upsurge. This is because it is directed against the usurpation of power by a minority, namely the bourgeoisie, and represents simultaneously a deepening of democracy. From this it follows that it is necessarily a protracted affair, a thought expressed by Marx with graphic imagery in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. It also follows that such a broad-based upsurge must develop -democratic institutions of its own, which give expression to the deepening of democracy represented by the revolution. Thirdly, implicit in this view of the socialist project is the confidence that it would always have a moral stature unmatched by its opponents. To say this is not to hark back to the position of the Utopian Socialists; it is implicit in Marx's writings as well as in Lenin's. Marx's materialist foundation for the socialist project which maintained that the transcending of capitalism would indeed be on the agenda because the antagonistic contradictions' characterising the system make its historical demise inevitable, actually underscored the moral necessity of the socialist project. Lenin's pointing to the imperialist wars as the inevitable outcome of the moribund system and his call to "turn the imperialist war into a civil war" was indubitably informed by a sense of the moral superiority of the socialist project. His imagery, using words like "rotten", "decaying" and "moribund" to de3cribe the capitalism he saw was not accidental. History has a trick of eluding even the best attempts to comprehend its totality, and in the course of this lecture I shall give three instances of this. The first relates to the fact that even as the theoretical basis of the socialist project was being developed through an analysis- of capitalism located in a materialist interpretation of history, capitalism was already displaying characteristics going beyond the analysis. This of course did not invalidate the analysis; but it did leave a gap. And the gap related to imperialism, a term which I employ to denote the entire saga of capitalist domination of the third world. Marx was acutely aware of the colonial connection and wrote tomes on it; but this did not find a place in the main corpus of his theoretical work. Almost until the war the socialist project took little cognisance of imperialism. The problem lay not just in the inevitable incompleteness that was introduced into the totality of its praxis as a consequence. It lay, even more immediately, in the limitations that were placed on its analysis of capitalism itself. The period from 1850 to 1914 was a long boom in which, because labour reserves were getting used up in the metropolis,