godless red

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to go about defining socialism. One is more rationalist, exegetical — it begins with Marx’s description of capitalism and negates whatever it takes to be its core components. The other way is more empirical, historical — it takes Really Existing Socialist states at their word and seeks to identify what is distinctly progressive about them. Many partisans of the former approach smugly dismiss the latter, and vice versa. The problem for the former camp is that they can never beat the charge of perfectionism, of lacking realism and so being locked into world-weary pessimism and misanthropy, since fallen humanity keeps failing to push the communism button. The problem for the latter camp is that we can never beat the charge of apologetics — we specialize in support to such an extent that it’s hard for us to stay critical or advance the state of the art. Both errors can be avoided only if we can somehow bring both methods to bear simultaneously. To that end, I’d like to show how a more thoroughgoing rationalism, one that takes more seriously the necessity of beating capitalism, converges on the same results as Really Existing Socialist practice.