Weinstein review of his latest book "The Long Detour - The History and Future of the American Left". In short, fall of the iron curtain doesn't mean end of history but offers opportunity for a reinstatement of the revolutionary dynamic.

"Today, the Soviet threat (and its identity with socialism) now appears to have been grossly exaggerated. Indeed, the Cold War itself can be seen as an historical hiatus—a ritually choreographed standoff that afforded the American ruling class with both protection from dissent and an organizing principle for its retrograde foreign and domestic policies, while it provided the Soviet Union with a rationale for the Communist Party’s unquestioned rule at home and in Eastern Europe. In short, this time of fear and conformity was a godsend for the rulers on both sides of the Iron Curtain."

Seems to go down a similar path as Chomsky in Soviet Union vs. Socialism (has been linked here a number of times - a very important piece indeed):

"When the world's two great propaganda systems agree on some doctrine, it requires some intellectual effort to escape its shackles. One such doctrine is that the society created by Lenin and Trotsky and molded further by Stalin and his successors has some relation to socialism in some meaningful or historically accurate sense of this concept. In fact, if there is a relation, it is the relation of contradiction.

It is clear enough why both major propaganda systems insist upon this fantasy. Since its origins, the Soviet State has attempted to harness the energies of its own population and oppressed people elsewhere in the service of the men who took advantage of the popular ferment in Russia in 1917 to seize State power. One major ideological weapon employed to this end has been the claim that the State managers are leading their own society and the world towards the socialist ideal; an impossibility, as any socialist -- surely any serious Marxist -- should have understood at once (many did), and a lie of mammoth proportions as history has revealed since the earliest days of the Bolshevik regime. The taskmasters have attempted to gain legitimacy and support by exploiting the aura of socialist ideals and the respect that is rightly accorded them, to conceal their own ritual practice as they destroyed every vestige of socialism.

As for the world's second major propaganda system, association of socialism with the Soviet Union and its clients serves as a powerful ideological weapon to enforce conformity and obedience to the State capitalist institutions, to ensure that the necessity to rent oneself to the owners and managers of these institutions will be regarded as virtually a natural law, the only alternative to the 'socialist' dungeon."

Also check out the reader's comments at the end of Weinstein article. Telling.