I agree that the approach is a bit muddy. But let me make one claim more explicitly, and maybe that will help. I m going to argue that ther can be leftists who operate at different levels of society. In my analysis, the church should be understood as a society in and of itself, with its own structures of oppression/repression, it's own status quo etc... Because that's the case, people within those societies need to challenge those inequitable structures. And it just so happens that material production is not going on within that society, so people have no reason to challenge that within this context. The production and reproduction of ideology is another story, and that they are challenging. This is not to say that the same people will not engage in a critique of capitaism when engaged in other struggles. I'm just speaking in terms of emancipatory struggles within the context of the church. If you don't want to coun them aas part of the larger US left, I think you have to count them at least as the left faction(s) within the churches.
I think our differnce might lie in the fact that I'm seeing the church as a world in and of itself, so these struggles, related as they are to core clurch ideologies, are have "world-emancipatory" potential.
Yours, Frances
On Tue, 9 Jun 1998, Michael
Eisenscher wrote:
>
> Your approach is problematic. Any "progressive" or "liberal" could be
> militantly for a woman's right to choose (including many Catholics), or for
> the rights of lesbians/gays/bisexuals/transsexuals, and any number of other
> single issues (or multiple ones) without questioning the relationship of
> those forms of oppression to the capitalist system. On the other hand, it
> is possible to be part of those struggles and see them as integral to the
> larger fight to transform society in fundamental ways (cooperative
> communities, utopian schemes, socialist forms, etc.). So identifying a
> grouping within the faith community as "left" merely on the basis of those
> issues without identifying their world view regarding the system and the
> connection of those issue struggles to changing it offers a pretty muddy
> definition of "left."
>
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