It’s been 82 years since the death of Eugene Debs, and while socialism has finally arrived in the United States  in the costume of a giant Wall Street bailout  you wouldn’t know it from a visit to the office of the Socialist Party USA.

Tucked in a musty wooden cubby in a building one block north of Houston Street, the party’s national office is a voluble and strident little place, a lecture hall of sorts, where the lectures  some might call them propaganda  have been thumbtacked to the walls.

“Feed the Poor!” they say. Or “Eat the Rich!” Or “Don’t Trust Corporate Media!” Like an older cousin from your childhood, the room itself is forever giving advice.

Much of that advice these days concerns the bailout, which the party has opposed in a series of elaborate communiqués that advocate a federal tax on millionaires and the eventual abolition of all financial markets. It’s a far cry from the government’s plan to introduce a whiff of Soviet-style command into the capitalist economy  a juxtaposition that the Socialists find absurd.