Laurence Coderre (New York University)

Given the manifest gap in the twentieth century between socialism as an idealized, egalitarian political project and the failures of self-described communist party-states to bring about that which was promised, many scholars have seized on the notion of the “actually existing” to disentangle the two. First coined by the East German thinker Rudolf Bahro, the disambiguation of “actually existing socialism” from the promise of socialism per se was meant to reinvigorate a sense of revolutionary “possibility,” in Raymond Williams’s words. And yet, rather than offer a springboard for thinking socialism anew, the “actually existing” paradigm has too often been relegated to a descriptor of centralized bureaucratic regimes in a way that misleadingly suggests that the goal and tenets of socialism per se can—and perhaps should—be taken out of the historiographical equation altogether.

As the speaker argues in this talk....(read more at event page)