as was often the case, marx had it backwards. he analyzed the problem correctly - people focusing on an afterlife are going to endure large amounts of suffering to get there, and religions will continue to present this as a "virtue" in order to maintain the existing hierarchy of social inequality. this much is empirically obvious. however, you're never going to get the workers to revolt by having them abolish religion, you're just going to incite a xenophobic reaction and extreme cultural conservatism. we can see now that atheism is correlated with prosperity and can deduce that you're rather going to have to abolish poverty first, and then watch as people discard the mythology they don't need to numb the pain any further - even if they replace it with some other distraction.
it's difficult for the enlightenment thinker to accept that we can't all see through it so clearly. it drives me as nuts as the next egghead. but it is as it is...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvtJja2ihYQ
rr
And how are you going to abolish poverty? While I guess we will have to turn ot Marx for the answer; communism. Poverty is the lack of. In the case of Capitalism it is the lack of the ability to produce food and shelter if you do not own the means of production.
You are in a constant state of poverty until you rent out your labour. but because the capitalist owns the means of production the worker has to rent out their labour at a discount. Thus another form of poverty is created. Meaning religious is still needed.
Besides where you get the idea that when teh workers revolt there is incitement for a xenophobic reaction and extreme cultural conservatism. Those sound like fascist tendencies which have nothing to do with the rise of the working class.
you seem to be mixing propaganda into your conclusions.
jessica
actually, marx would argue that the way to abolish poverty is by putting society through a process of converting the primitive capitalism we call liberalism into an advanced capitalism, which he called socialism. communism then follows only as a corollary. now, i happen to disagree with marx that this is really possible - i don't think capitalism is going to collapse under it's contradictions or evolve into some kind of utopia. any kind of vanguard will always be co-opted. however, the absolutely key aspect in his teleological argument is that capitalism is required to produce the productive capacities to abolish poverty, and communism can only follow after these capacities are socialized. on the point of capitalism reducing poverty, he was absolutely correct.
i need to be honest that i'm not really following the rest of your argument. what i was getting at is that if you incorporate the anti-religious bent into your revolutionary politics too strongly then the workers will inevitably choose not to follow your programme because they will interpret it as an attack on their culture. they may be confused about the difference between culture and oppression, but holding the mirror up isn't going to get them to understand it so much as it's going to create a backlash, and push them back into the arms of management. fwiw, this has been well understood for many decades, and various internationals have ultimately chosen not to place the abolition of religion as central to their politics as a result of it.
i'm not a marxist, i'm an anarchist. i don't have much hope in the working class to free themselves from their own chains. and, as an artist, the idea of a state run by workers actually scares the fucking shit out of me.
i will say this though: one of the things marx was wrong about was the social inclination of the working classes. we can get gramscian about it if we want, or blame it on a lack of education, but it's also been well understood for many decades that wage workers tend to be very right-wing, overall, in terms of their social beliefs and cultural associations. the kind of enlightened liberalism that some people want to assign to the working class is in reality a function of the advanced levels of education that are only available to the more wealthy members of society.
if you look at history, every social revolution has either begun on the right or ends up co-opted by the right almost immediately. conservatism just offers a value system that is more in line with what people actually want.
i'm very guilty of standing on the left and calling everybody morons, but i realize it's not exactly a productive means of engagement.
rr
I ome from atown that ws built by Unionists, aka the working lass.. We had no problems understand what was happening and being left winged.
yeah, I don;t hink Mar said that about Soialism. I think you are thinking of Lenon or later Marists.
Oupy Wall Street started on the right????
jessica
no, that was marx, alright. it's been argued that lenin tried to skip this process, and that was the ultimate failing point, but it's a subtle argument that i'm not going to get into. the real problem was the leninists were really badly co-opted by foreign capital. he was at once trying to convert russia from a feudal society to a capitalist society and from a capitalist society to a socialist society. i don't see a reason, in theory, why this ought to be impossible - even if lenin was explicit that they had to get to capitalism first. i do agree that russia wasn't the best place to try and build socialism, though, because it never went through a capitalist phase.
the best introduction to this is engels' socialism: utopian and scientific. it skips a lot of the theory (which really ought to be regarded mostly as nonsense, anyways) and just gets to the point in the proposed development of society from feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism.
there were socialists that rejected this kind of teleological view of social evolution and argued for communism immediately, which is what you seem to want to assign to marx. they were called anarchists and developed through their own process, before disintegrating almost entirely between 1910 and 1950. i think history has proven the anarchists right, but marxists continue to reject them as not accepting various contrived marxist philosophical doctrines.
the occupy movement i was involved with was not very left-wing when you scratched the surface a little and talked to the participants. it attracted a lot of right-wing conspiracy theorists and right of centre libertarians (not to mention the odd nazi), but even if you throw these out as outliers the core of what was left really wasn't much further left on the spectrum than a fairly mild social democrat. the most significant thing that came out of it was the occupy sandy clean-up, which was no doubt beneficial to the people in the area, but was really operating on christian principles - and was, in fact, headquartered out of a church. it really ended up in the tradition of american liberalism, which tends to cluster around the center and lean a little right.
as for the topic, you'd be more likely to find occupy participants arguing for religious tolerance than the abolition of religion. that's a centre-right liberal/libertarian position.
something that's sort of been glossed over by history is that the anti-war movement in the 60s ultimately crested in electing nixon. there's a long history of this. part of the problem is that historians tend to have a leftward slant in their analysis, which blinds them to what is right in front of them. again: it's no depth of insight on my behalf to realize that the working class leans right. you can come up with gramscian excuses, you can take malatesta's line that unions are capitalist institutions that uphold the status quo rather than revolutionary institutions or you can swing pseudo-fascist like foucault does and more or less say "fuck 'em to their own misery, they're hopeless.". but you have to address it at some point. the evidence is just staggering.
even when we've seen some real organizing done and some real gains won, it's practically always been in the context of upholding the status quo - and much of the concessions have been produced with arguments that the demands are actually mutually beneficial. most of what was won was won in the context of fordism, rather than the context of revolutionary politics. union management and union rank and file have been more than eager to play along if they can just get a bit of spending income, which just keeps the system spinning at the expense of those outside the factories.
again: no insight on my behalf. this is well understood by people making decisions on both sides of the class war.
czg
I can not accept the argument that Lennin or Stalin are exceptions to the rule, Marxism generates totalitarianism by its process, after reviewing the man and his history I will even argue that he knew this and was the intent to marxisms design to usurp power from one group of alpha monkies to another group of previously beta monkies. Nothing beneviolet
jessica
i agree with you. marxism is an authoritarian, statist system. it's not possible to reach communism using marxist theory.
what marx outlined was an extremely exploitative form of capitalism. you're right that he was aware of it. and most of the socialists alive at the time were aware of it, too.
that's why they kicked marx out of the socialist movement.
and why the bolsheviks conquered russia with millions of dollars given to them from american banks.
it wasn't an accident. it wasn't a failure...
czg
You have my attention what do you suggest? Zietgiest is deception as well, from what I have learned. People are moral agents annd accountable to thier actions. When I was a victim and a part of my local zietgiest chapter I was poor and angry all the time. Then I took responsability for my actions and stoped doing things that made me suck as a person, now the community I live in and feed with my unique talents and gifts that only I and you can provide this world, now I am wealthy soon to reach 15 million a year in income, that can not be taken away unitl I die, not even communism can take my wealth as it is a part of my body where I go people thrive. Please join me in the light of truth and love.
I was a homeless person 12 years ago, so there are no excuses you need no money to start just a belief in your self and love for others.
jessica
lol. i'm in favour of socially mechanizing production and abolishing currency. that's what communism actually means.