[lbo-talk] Cuba's painful transition from sugar economy

Carl Remick carlremick at hotmail.com
Fri Aug 26 07:47:07 PDT 2005



>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>
>Carl Remick wrote:
>
>>Actually, I agree with you completely, but I'm afraid there is no way this
>>can happen. The LBO List General Counsel has pointed out that no one
>>knows how to run a socialist society anymore and that it's insulting to
>>the intelligence of the working class even to propose a socialist society.
>> So that's that!
>
>You write as if you know how to run a socialist society, but no one will
>listen to you or the revelation has been forbidden. Au contraire, we're all
>ears. So do tell.

The point is not so much that I know how to run a socialist society but that we *all* do if we listen to our inner selves. Before we adopt any specific new social rules, what we need is a new mindset, one that I believe is latent in most people.

I keep banging the drum for Ralph Waldo Emerson not because I'm some New England antiquarian but because I think that his thought still holds validity as a way to fulfill the promise of democracy and escape the prison of capitalism. I don't think that RWE's counsel of self-reliance was an endorsement of free enterprise and consumerist individuality; I think it was a call to the citizenry to practice real introspection, dismiss social conventions from their minds and ponder what truly are the wellsprings of human motivation. IMO, the deepest aspirations of humankind are not expressed by the all-too-otherworldly wisdom of, say, Christianity or the all-too-worldly wisdom of Adam Smith but by a spirit of pragmatic selflessness, a will to socialism, that is stifled US society as it is now exists.

Carl



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