Re: [Marxism] If Thomas Paine had written Common Sense in 1770...

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Joaquin Bustelo wrote:
>
> Bleary eyed correction: Were Common Sense to have been written in 1770, it
> would have been written by someone else,

This is correct historical materialism*, but it doesn't really honor the
metaphorical force of the speculation. And it is useful to recognize
that some sorts of action are/can be perfectly correct in themselves but
are useless except under appropriate conditions. A good deal of the
belly-aching on this list about this or that action by Morales, Chavez,
etc. flows from ignoring that reality.

Carrol

*When my younger daughter was around 10 she began pestering me on
whether I would have voted for Abraham Lincoln had I been alive then. I
was able to get across even to a 10-year old that if Carrol Cox had been
alive in 1860 he wouldn't have been Carrol Cox.

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