delinking does not equal autarky (J O'Connor)

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Feb 18 12:55:56 PST 2001


Carrol Cox wrote:


>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.

Ok, I see. The task is absolutely essential, but we have no idea how to go about it, until certain unspecified conditions change in unspecified ways as the result of unspecified causes.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Doug



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