>The Church has been one of the
>bigger promoters of Jubilee 2000- the call for total abolition of third
>world debt-- and many other global ideas quite outside the New World Order
>economic thinking.
I said new NIEO, not new NWO--I was trying to give some concrete programmatic meaning to the murky passage which you downoaded. At any rate, it seems that he is merely representing the interests of the third world statist bourgeoisie under whose regimes the Catholic Church grows. And what are these many other global ideas? Amnesty for Stroessner?
>I would fully agree that the Pope downplays class struggle-- although he
>rather pointedly upholds the rights of workers to engage in such struggle
>when capitalists fail their Christian responsibility (which in my view
>leaves a rather large loophole for class struggle most of the time).
How the hell do we--a jew and a jain--determine a failure in Christian responsibility? If Pierre Bigo's views (or views like that) have the greatest influence within the Catholic Church (see seeming Ernst Bloch disciple Hinkelammert's discussion), the invocation of the right of use is seriously constrained by what the conscience of property owners themselves will allow. So your view counts for naught compared to that of property owners and the Pope. If this Christian responsibility has been defined down to meeting the demands of one's conscience, then capitalists are left to determine to their own failure. At any rate, I have no idea how we are to go about determining when Christian responsibility has been abdicated and the idea of premising the carrying out of class struggle on the abdication of that responsibility (and who will determine? the pope?property owners?) seems like a death warrant. People cannot be accepted within a labor movement that will invoke such authority.
>On a broad organizing front, I would generally rather engage with an open
>heart those who profess to share similar goals and try to convince them of
>the need for different tactics, than to just denounce them as irrevocably an
>enemy or opponent because they have different tactical and strategic
>evaluations.
Nothing like that was done. I only pointed out that the pope's reflections were dim, meaningless, murky and wrong. I can understand how people would be influenced by Dussel's or Hinkelammert's reading of the bible.
yours, rakesh