ABSTRACT
This effort rests on two premises. First, if capitalism-the private appropriation of means of production for the purpose of accumulation by a minority upper and ruling class, via purchase of labor power from a dispossessed majority-is historically delimited and immanently contradictory, then its transcendence eventuates in a qualitatively distinct and superior form of social and economic organization, to which the term "socialism" is applied. The fundamental argument for socialism, then-as distinct from realizable, or "feasible," programscannot rest on pragmatic compromises, as in some version of market socialism or Mikhail Gorbachev's "regulated market economy"; socialism's qualitative distinction and superiority must be established at a high level of abstraction, consistent with the general critique of capitalism.
