Moral appeals, recruitment, etc.

Tahir Wood twood at uwc.ac.za
Thu Aug 15 00:33:31 PDT 2002


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



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