ABSTRACT
Commonsense contains few, if any, proofs that socialism is ‘inevitable’ or, indeed, feasible. Commonsense, as Ernst Bloch pointed out, is founded on the assumption that the form of life people experience will last indefinitely, that ‘men will always be men’. Now the feasibility of the socialist project hinges precisely on the hope that men may, given the right conditions, cease to be as we know them and as we seem always to have known them. To this hope, however, the sobering popular wisdom of endlessly duplicated individual and collective ‘practical lessons’ is opposed.
