ABSTRACT
Socialism involves community empowerment within the individual’s quest for liberty. Theories of socialism attempt to balance the needs of the community against those of the individual. John Dewey, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty were, like so many intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, highly sympathetic toward socialism. For Foucault, real politics needs to be a negotiated reality that takes place, permanently, in the ever-changing, and on all fronts. Self-reflection without the equal expansion of our moral imaginations offers no protection for liberty. At the level of inter-community relationships, which become global in its outreach, social and political relationships among the localized communities are united by a shared political, social, and communicative vision. A serious attempt to formulate a socialist theory of communication along the lines of intra- and inter-community relations may do much to help insure the success of anarchist federations once they have an opportunity to be established.
