delinking does not equal autarky (J O'Connor)

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Feb 18 11:32:53 PST 2001


Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >I think that, _morally speaking_, we in the belly of the beast _owe_
> >it to the rest of the world to build socialism here first of all &
> >help others make a transition to socialism.
>
> I dig absolutely, as someone once said, but how do you propose to go
> about this?

I think this question should never be asked, even privately inside one's own head, except when at least fragments of an answer to it have already begun to appear _in practice_. Tossed out in the abstract like this, in abstraction from ongoing practice, it tends to encourage every ism in the encyclopedia of revolutionary error.

Perhaps a really major lesson to be learned from WITBD is that he wrote it in 1902, not 1896. It would have been fatuous then, as a similar work -- i.e., an answer to your question -- would be fatuous now.

Carrol



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