There is an alternative to the logic of no alternative: on politics 30 years after the fall of the Wall

Those who say that Marxism was refuted by the Soviet Union are like those who say that Christianity was refuted by the Inquisition. 

Those who think that a position is true if its negation is false are destined to become cynics. And they are wrong. This has been clear since Kant's argument in the Antinomies. 

(The argument is roughly as follows: Suppose that the universe must either be finite or infinite. Then consider the hypothesis that it is finite. Prove that this leads to a contradiction and the hypothesis is reduced to absurdity. Now suppose that by the logical principle of the excluded middle that since the universe is not finite, it must be in infinite. Now follow the same steps to show that the universe cannot be infinite. Therefore it must be finite. Therefore it must be finite and not infinite, and it must be infinite and not finite.)

There are binary alternatives that are constructed this way. The Republicans and the Democrats are supposed to be mutually exclusive and exhaustive alternatives: There is no third party. Or, "there is no alternative" (Margaret Thatcher). When she said this, the Soviet Union still existed. The Cold War was structured discursively so that they were our alternative and we theirs. If you are not on our side, you are on their side. If you think our system is unjust and you protest it, we will jail you for being a Communist, or for being against socialism and for capitalist exploitation. 

Refuse all such scams and bogus thinking! If what could be were a department of what is, no change would be possible. If "the" other system can be proven to be bad, that doesn't make "ours" good. 

To everyone who speaks of the sole good of the lesser evil, I pose this question: Suppose the existence of a society that is "not as bad" as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia and that fact is its main recommendation. 

Hypothesis: Cynics are people who effectively want to die, or at least believe that no one can live and be happy.. But they want first to persuade you to despair. Lacking greater courage of their convictions to draw the conclusion therefrom, these people just want to sleep. They want you to think that there is nothing to live for, but also that there is no alternative to this nothing. There is a boredom that is neither life nor death. That is what they are selling. They can't help it, they don't know any better. The model of such a non-life is the self-motivated machine or the complex of informational machines and workers operating them who are (to take another page from Kant) its cogs.