[PEN-L:11460] Re: Re: Re: Blackburn versus Brenner

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mathew Forstater wrote:

> What you can surmise is what would have been in those countries which
> produced their own textiles for many centuries before British outlawing of
> domestic production in those countries,

Mat, what we don't have to surmise is that your politics and mine are
awfully close, as are mine and Lou's. After I sent the post you quote
I suddenly remembered a conversation I had with Lou when I was
in NYC for the 1998 Socialist Scholars Conference. I had made
a hypothetical proposal of some sort. I don't remember the subject,
but I remember Lou's reply: That he would never consent to discuss
a merely hypothetical proposition. But a proposition about what
would have been in 1700 under some other set of conditions than
those which in fact held is every bit as hypothetical as some
hypothetical proposition re 2010.

I think that the educated guesses made by you, Lou, Jim B, etc. are
pretty good guesses. But that is all they are, and I want to base my
anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics on something firmer than
educated guesses about a past empirical state of affairs or hypotheses
however educated about what would have been if....

In fact hypothetical propositions re 2010 can be both more useful
and more certain than those about 1700. Some fine critiques have
been submitted to the marxism list of the erroneous position of the
Australian DSP. Every one of those critiques takes the form of
a comparison of the state of affairs following (now and in the future)
the DSP's error on East Timor and the state of affairs that would
have existed had it followed a principled anti-imperialist line.

The DSP has essentially committed itself to the ideology of "The
White Man's Burden." That is the eurocentrism that I want to
fight.

Carrol