Moral appeals, recruitment, etc.

[Tahir Wood]

Eric Williams' exact conclusions concerning the nature of social 
change -- in this case the end of slavery and mercantilism -- are 
debatable, but, surely, moral appeals -- e.g. moral appeals to 
abolish slavery -- become most effective at the moment when objective 
conditions -- e.g., development of wage labor and industrial 
revolution -- favor (or even demand) them.  The recognition of the 
primacy of changes in material conditions (= relations and forces of 
production) over changes in morals and manners is not fatalism but 
historical materialism.
Yoshie

Yes, but this tells us less than we might think. If the wise old owl she really does only fly at dusk, then this historical materialism is precisely that, historical. That doesn't mean that in the present the "changes in material conditions" can be grasped in their totality. To put it simply, at any given moment we really 'don't know what we're doing'. As an old Maoist friend of mine used to say, "hindsight is an exact science". Even if you're a political genius (I say political) like Lenin undoubtedly was, and it's April 1917 say, you cannot know what you're doing. And I think that Lenin himself knew that.
Tahir