OK, Carrol, so what are we to do in the meantime, while we are waiting for Godot? I mean, just now my political energies go into (a) a Jewish group called Not In My Name that workers for justice for Palestinians, including respecting their very petit bourgeois property rights to their houses and fields, and their liberal democratic rights to equality and freedom from deprivation of life and liberty without any process at all' and (b) working to build the Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, whose members do things like sue the police for brutality.
Neither of these activities require me to think, or even hope, that there must be some kind of way out of this, although it might be easier to stick with them if I thought that there was. Are you suggesting that it's not merely pointless but actually dangerous to give serious thought to whether there is a possible route to where you want to go, but that it is nonetheless sensible and even commendable to insist that whatever it is we do, we have to insist that we want to be "there," wherever it is--and you and I disagree, I will not, on where it is we want to be.
--jks
>
>
>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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