Real politics and revolutionary change: The political theories and strategies of Impossibilist Social Democracy, Council Communism, and Communist Anarchism.

This thesis investigates the compatibility of revolutionary socialism with an understanding of politics as being the management of conflict in a world of persistent moral disagreement. The conclusion is that a compatibility can be found once socialist revolution is viewed as the culmination of a process of the development of an ethos of non-domination, rather than a coup d'état or minority political conquest. Such an ethos requires the members of a political community to view each other as equal citizens partaking in a process of collective self-governance and need not rest on a shared singular set of moral values or conception of the good life. The three socialist currents examined (Impossibilist Social Democracy, Council Communism, and Communist Anarchism) present three different theories and strategies for achieving a socialist revolution through such means. All three currents place an importance on political and economic education, horizontal organisation, and engagement in collective action, though they differ in terms of emphasis and form. These differences in emphasis and understanding lead to differing conceptions of the role of the state and the use of representative democracy during the course of socialist revolution, and how it is to be transformed, abolished or rendered obsolete. I assess each in terms of the degree to which they are cognisant of the perennial problem of having to navigate moral and ethical conflict while not collapsing into a new form of collective domination.