mel

This is a major rewrite and reformulation of my previous blog post "The Ethics of Revolution", it should be clearer now.

Introduction

All revolutionary leftists, leftists who seek to overthrow capitalism, (whether they are aware of it or not) do so on the basis of a normative claim. Namely that a socialist society would be superior to a capitalist one. To make any normative claim, one must at some point, make an ethical appeal in order to articulate the reason...

Sometimes I hate this place.

I've recently had a discussion with a group people who believed, in summary, that Communism was an ideology which had absolutely no use for any ethical terminology, and that any grounds upon which you may try to justify it was nothing more than "petty moralism". They instead proposed that people should just do whatever is "useful" or "helpful", and that whether or not one should want Communism simply, ultimately, came down to a personal preference which they held for...

While we would all love to wake up in the morning and be living in a new world in which our favorite conception of a post-revolutionary society is already a reality, we know that sadly, for some time we'll be stuck in a world run by capitalists. While we do everything we can to bring that world about someday, it is very unlikely that tomorrow, next week, next year, or the next decade we will wake up and find ourselves very much closer to that world. We're dealing with a poorly educated, complacent,...