The flimsiness of Soviet ethics might not have been so damaging, since Communism was essentially a materialist system, had the purely material achievements been more substantial. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of the tribe.
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
The economic defense of capitalism has an impressive pedigree. Arising in competition with this stream of thought, it is only natural that many of the influential arguments for socialism have been economic as well. But the economic defense of socialism is only half of the story. And whenever the empirical success of socialist economics falls into doubt, it is on the second tradition that socialist thought relies. With this in mind, I shall here take up a two-pronged argument.