“TO secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

For generations this formulation has served as a compelling description of the socialist goal inscribed on Labour Party membership cards, the banners of trade unions and in the minds of millions of working people.

For some it signified a steady progress through Parliament to achieve the public ownership of the main industries and services and a peaceful accommodation with a gentled capitalist class.

To others was a goal that might only be reached through a revolutionary struggle that entailed the comprehensive abolition of private ownership and the emergence of the working class as the ruling class.

These ideas coexisted in proletarian political parties in each country where workers formed a distinct class.

Revolutionary and reformist socialists argued and debated for several decades until the theoretical questions were seemingly settled by the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The precise formulation adopted by the Labour Party itself was the product of this new moment.

Sufficiently ambitious as to convince an insurgent working class newly impressed that the Russian workers had pioneered the process, sufficiently imprecise as to allow for a wide range of interpretations of what the achievement of these goals might entail in societies presumed to be less autocratic and polarised than tsarist Russia.

A century of struggle, of victories and defeats, and a markedly less proletarian Labour Party conference endorsed Tony Blair’s limp rephrasing of the Labour Party’s goals: “a dynamic economy, serving the public interest, in which the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition are joined with the forces of partnership and co-operation to produce the wealth the nation needs and the opportunity for all to work and prosper, with a thriving public sector and high-quality services, where those undertakings essential to the common good are either owned by the public or accountable to them.”

People willing to argue that the actually existing capitalist system displays much dynamism; that privatisation much serves the public interest; that the market and competition are reliable drivers of work and prosperity for all; that this system provides high-quality services or that they are accountable are rare even in the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Outside the PLP there are even fewer who think the term socialism can be attached to any system that conforms to this formula.

There does exist a discussion about what socialism might mean in the 21st century. In part it is given shape by the ebb and flow of popular movements in Latin America which have seen imperialism and local reaction challenged in many countries.

A fierce counterattack by the US and the emergence of a new stage in the class and national struggles — in which the very polarisation that exists in many of these countries gives little room for ideological and practical compromises — leaves little room for class compromise.

Another work-in-progress is China’s volcanic advance in which a strategic public sector is harnessed to massive private capital flows — which in a few decades has transformed the lives of millions. What this means for socialist theory is as yet unclear and remains hotly disputed.

In those European states where four decades of actually existing socialism created an alternative model of society, three decades of crony capitalism has convinced a persistent proportion of the persistently poor that the former is preferable.

It is striking that in many central and eastern European states the arriviste capitalist elites coexist in harmony with both their Nato and EU sponsors and the remnants of and successors to the domestic fascist and nazi collaborationist forces that, for two generations, Soviet power and socialist regimes held in check.

In our part of Europe — where since the end of the second world war — and excluding Spain, Portugal and Greece where Nato sustained fascist governments — socialism conceived as the administration of society based on the organised power of, and in the the interests of, the working class — has almost vanished from the political lexicon.

At best it has been expressed as an advanced programme of social reform based on checks on the freedom of capital coupled with a more progressive tax system and the extension of public ownership from energy, utilities and transport to parts of industry.

The British variant of this, the 1970s Alternative Economic Strategy, was a bold attempt to frame an electorally credible alternative and an intellectually coherent challenge to the direction European capitalism was taking.

The product of a fruitful co-operation between economists and other specialists on the Labour left and in the Communist Party had a champion in Tony Benn.

It enjoyed a brief moment only to vanish when Labour premier James Callaghan and chancellor Denis Healey bent over for the IMF.

Benn described it with crushing realism as “a moment of defeat and we have to recognise it.”

A French variant, the Common Programme of the French Socialist and Communist Parties, resulted in the election of a left-wing majority and in Francois Mitterrand, a president committed, formally at least, to radical change.

When the markets rebelled and French bosses went on investment strike, both president and policy succumbed to the power of the capitalist markets.

Labour’s present-day renaissance as a party of profound change is grounded in the election of a leader whose appeal is based on personal integrity and a lifetime of consistent opposition to the policies of austerity, privatisation and imperial war rather than a worked-out programme for government.

The hundreds of thousands, young and old, who joined or rejoined Labour and the millions of voters who returned to Labour have done so because there now seems an electorally credible alternative to actually existing capitalist policies.

Labour’s programme, presented in markedly non-ideological terms as the rational answers to real-life problems experienced by millions, is not dressed up in the traditional language of socialism or presented as the resolution of old controversies.

It is nevertheless a challenge radical enough to mobilise what, for the purposes of this discussion, we can call the class enemy, to a frenzy of measures designed to derail it.

It has reignited the anxieties of our ruling class that the socialist project has, once again, a wide appeal.

We are in a different place from more than four decades ago when Labour’s notional leadership — the party’s national executive committee — adopted a programme based around the nationalisation of the main 25 manufacturing firms.

That self-regulating independent entity — the Parliamentary Labour Party — would have nothing of it. Which illustrates that perhaps we are not in such a different place.

British capitalism has changed in the intervening years and taking command of the economy nowadays must entail a more comprehensive set of measures than nationalising enterprises and industries that, in many cases, no longer exist.

Getting to grips with the big business bosses and the bankers nowadays is impossible without quite extensive measures to limit the export of capital, direct it to the productive economy, tax wealth, invest in housing and infrastructure and the social wage as well as extending public ownership beyond the recovery of rail, road transport, energy and utilities.

That none of this is possible without taking the Bank of England under Treasury control and even less is possible while Britain is locked in the single market and the EU’s customs union presents serious socialists with problems, both practical and theoretical.

The theory that working-class power in Britain could emerge from a synthesis of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary challenges, and that an aroused and organised labour movement would provide the necessary social weight to negate long-established capitalist state power, needs — if it is to appear intellectually credible — to take account of the way capitalist power reacts when faced with an existential challenge.

It also needs to take account of the increasingly evident truth that we cannot reasonably expect capitalism to take the necessary measures to prevent the earth slipping into an irreversible degradation of the environment that can only end in the extinction of life.

The first real-life experiment to create socialism in real time, rather than the imagination, occurred because of the immense suffering and deep dislocation that accompanied the great inter-imperialist conflict of 1914-17.

The second great extension of socialist relations of production occurred as a consequence of the transformation of the second world war into a global anti-fascist struggle and the profound shift in the balance of domestic and continental class power that followed the nazi defeat.

China became a people’s republic after similar and related convulsions.

Later Third World countries gained formal statehood and independence as the fruit of a changed balance of global power that saw the national liberation movements incorporated into a de facto alliance that made the progressive movement in the advanced capitalist countries an uncertain reserve force and the socialist countries a more reliable ally.

In writing that “someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world,” the North American cultural critic Frederic Jameson has achieved a rather redundant task of turning Slavoj Zizek on his head.

But in doing so he illustrated the truth that no rational person would desire war on the scale that has so far served as the handmaiden of socialist revolutionary change.

Indeed, it might be argued that many of the real-life problems that have faced the working class and its vanguards in constructing socialism arose precisely because of the burdensome heritage that accompanied their efforts.

But we are faced with a set of imperatives that unless they can be met will render superfluous the alternatives that Rosa Luxemburg posed when, in the aftermath of the Great War she asked: “Socialism or barbarism?”

Unless we are confident that capitalism can, of itself, throw up the social, political and economic forces that can tame its appetite for profit at the expense of people and planet then we need a strategy for revolutionary change in modern times that does.

Revolutionary theory and practice is grounding in the truth that the working class is the only class that has no interest in exploiting another.

The working class is also the only class that has no material interest in despoiling the planet.

The alternatives really are socialism or extinction.