A pandemic. An economic crash. And a second socialist run for the White House smashing up against the rocks of the Democratic Party. We just finished two decades of the twenty-first century, and the end of the End of History has come crashing to a halt — at least twice already.

As Antonio Gramsci put it, the old is dying and yet the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, morbid symptoms appear. Most of our readers haven’t even hit forty, and already they’ve seen two economic disasters, followed by two major socialist runs for the American presidency that won big with those under forty-five but lost older voters. And with the spread of right-wing populism, we have plenty of morbid symptoms to contend with.

But the light breaking through the dark is bright. Even after four years of media smears and Democratic establishment attacks, Bernie Sanders gained millions of votes and broke new ground in the western half of the United States. And now, with the COVID-19 pandemic, the public’s ideas about what is possible and what is owed to workers are changing by the day. Now, more than ever, it’s the time for socialists to start building institutions that can not just fight election cycle by election cycle, but also look beyond those contests and start planning for a future that is slowly coming into view.