In 1991, as the Soviet monolith crashed down like a badly baked soufflé, a certain breed of Western academic began to hyperventilate about the “end of history.” This argument, most famously peddled with much romanticised gusto by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, suggested that liberal democracy had finally won and every other “ism” was headed for the museum of dead ideas. 

But Fukuyama completely ignored the sheer stubbornness of a dead idea. Failed ideologies do not simply pack up and leave. Instead, they enter what the Australian economist John Quiggin calls a “zombie state.” Most become a set of hollow rituals and rhetoric, cut off from reality. 

To visualise this phenomenon, one might look at a modern day Labour Day rally. In these, speakers often rely on ‘zombie rhetoric’, reciting slogans from the early and mid-20th century that no longer align with current reality. For example, this disconnect is evident in the way the once-subversive poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Habib Jalib has been stripped of its sting and reduced to a mere aesthetic. Picture a Faiz couplet used as a caption for an Instagram post featuring a latte, or a Jalib quote slapped on to a tote bag. This was bound to happen.

This is ‘zombie socialism.’ A middle-class favourite. It is no longer about the proletariat or the actual redistribution of wealth, but has become a convenient ‘anti-imperialist’ or ‘anti-colonial’ cloak, used to hide the fact that those draped in it have run out of original ideas. They scurry around digital echo chambers as if attending a fancy dress party, wearing the masks of Marx, Mao, Che or Lenin. Social media serves as their primary playground, where they flaunt a zombie ideology for ‘likes’.

Failed ideologies often enter a “zombie state”, becoming a set of hollow rituals and rhetoric, cut off from reality. But........

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