Dialectical Communitarian Anarchism as Negation of Domination: Review of "The Impossible Community"

[struggle4progress]

11. Do you know the saying, "Philosophers solve the world -- but the problem is changing it"?

There has never been a shortage of persons willing to lay out their theories about how we can obtain some golden age -- but the fact is that the social world does not easily conform to theories: it is the product of endless struggles, born out of the realities of physics and of human finitude and mortality, out of material conflicts of interests and the human tendency to mask our own hypocrisy with fictions that reflect our sincere but unattainable moral ideas, out of brazen coercion and out of continual attempts at reconciliation and compromise ...

Our problems cannot be addressed by theory. We must face a paradox:

Disaster looms if we do not bring a golden age into being, yet rational experience teaches us there is no chance we will ever actually create a golden age. If we believe the golden age is possible, we will certainly become bitterly disillusioned by reality and will sink into cynical apathy. If we do not believe a golden age is possible, we will never take the only steps that might actually save us from ourselves. We must be fools, believing in impossibilities, in order to act appropriately -- and yet we cannot act appropriately without adopting a hard-eyed realism about the world

There is no exit from this paradox, which cannot be resolved by sentimental theories and cannot be side-stepped by mere realism. The only solution available is concrete action: we must keep an eye on the compass and an eye on the sea as we sail towards an unknown destination, prepared for a thousand contingencies, ready at any instant for the possibility of shipwreck

Philosophers solve the world -- but the problem is changing it