ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the broad intersections between a socialist and a communicative perspective in social philosophy. Communication scholars have particular expertise on how rhetoric and ideology intersect. Communication is a practical method of exchange, verbal or nonverbal, of emotive data. In other words, communication involves the exchange of symbols between humans that affects participants in an interaction. The importance of seeing socialism in communicative terms further rests on the fact that non-socialists take the word “socialism” very seriously, and they do so by embodying it with a negative aura. The violence associated with socialist politics is always the violence of the capitalist state that rises to contain and subvert libertarian impulses. The dialectical nature of the relationship between social identity, organized resistance, and communication is indicative of the symbolic structures of meaning that underlie all human interaction.
