Political faiths diverge from religion to the extent that they cease to demand that The Truth occupy the whole of of one's life. All political adherences reduce life *at times* to either/or: You are for us or against us. For the bourgeois electoral party that time is merely the few seconds in the voting booth at various intervals. For communism (not held as a religion) the periods of either/or would come (do come) less frequently, but they are protracted: the period leading up to and including armed struggle of one sort or another. I think in an earlier post I quoted from the Chicago Tribune a bit about the young woman in Seattle chanting from the roof of a VW, her chant climaxing in "Hook your elbows and hold that line" or something like that. At the point the police charge one does not want the person next to one to suddenly develop an ironic distance. Neither the Democratic nor the Republican, the Conservative nor the (New or Old) Labour, ever made such demands on their members. The *model* for responding to such demands that the whole of western culture offers is that of the Christian martyr & the God who demands such show of loyalty, a loyalty expressed in every moment of one's life and every bit of one's being. Christian literature is greatly concerned with how one can exhibit such loyalty and still somehow remain a human and not a monster such as St. Catherine of Siena or St. Joan.
Prior to the success of the October Revolution the periods that did and did not demand such totality of commitment from communists were demarcated fairly clearly. Communists such as Eleanor Marx could give of their time and energy to the estlabishment of the Chaucer Society without feeling or being viewed as failing to keep up the faith.
The situation changed radically when, with the October Revolution, the Spectre achieved body in a great nation. During the Cold War (1917-1991) communists (like communism) were under seige and developed (often) a seige mentality. (The recent debate over the case of the Rosenbergs gave some of the flavor of this long seige.) During that period there arose slogans such as "A Communist is a dead man on leave" (often not an exaggeration). The whole of a communists life came to resemble those few seconds in the voting booth for the adherent of a bourgeois electoral party: every moment was a moment of "You are for me or against me." Every moment was (or came to seem to be) a religious moment, in which one's whole being depended on the endless reaffirmation of the saving truth.
Ultra-leftism (an overestimation of the power of capital and an underestimation of the power of the working class) leads (as in a passage recently quoted by John Mage) to seeing friends as enemies. This too is a religious feature. Jared Israel, in a post on marxism, observed of Bosnia, "The Bosnian "government" is pro-Islamist. Not pro-Muslim. Pro Islamist. It forced out secular Muslims. . . ." This is the characteristic perspective of religion, with the relative secularism of a few Christian nations for one or two centuries being the exception. When communists see only enemies, when they see every moment as a decisive moment, they too begin to believe that [only] The truth will set you free, to demand of themselves and each other that the truth be clung to at every moment.
Most sciences (both hard and soft), including marxism, most of the time resemble the bourgeois electoral party more than they resemble the state. (I presume physicists would not be very tolerant of someone who held to the predominance of the element of water as an explanation for the softness of wool.) But it seems that psychoanalysis (and particularly but not only Lacanian psychoanalysis) resembles religion or communism under seige: it demands the affirmation of loyalty in abstraction from any practice in which that loyalty can be demonstratyed, that is it demands the worship of this or that trinity.
There have, in fact, been relatively few schisms in marxism -- the proliferation of sects has been *mostly* on the margin, and those sects are to be lumped in with the vegetarians, spiritualists, etc. which Engels complained populated the margins of the workers' moement. They will continue to do so, but the very existence of such periodicals as MR, such maillists as pen-l, lbo, marxism and l-i (both of the latter much less monlithic than some lbo-ers assume) are signs of the fundamental grounding of marxist unity in practice rather than in doctrine. The view of communism as a religion is in great part the creature of bourgeois anti-communism, which treats *any* strong belief which is also oppositional as "dogmatic" or religious.
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Doug:
> >>Schisms and anathemas in psychoanalysis -- which existed before Lacan --
> >>come from the fact that it is "a confession." It is instructive that those
> >>who left and denounced Marxism thought of it as the "God That Failed."
> >>Those of us who remain Marxist don't think of Marx as "God."
> >
> >So where do all the schisms in Marxism come from? And is there no
> >trace of the scriptural in the way Marxists who aspire to orthodoxy
> >look for backing in the sacred texts? And nothing of canon-formation
> >in the process of certifying Marxian texts after Marx? And nothing of
> >heresy-searching in the way some people (and here I'm speaking from
> >personal experience) are judged on whether they're loyal or not?
>
> I'm really going over the limit, but since you ask....
>
> I think that many Marxists have treated Marxism as if it were a kind of
> theodicy, and that explains, to me, why so many ex-Marxists have predicated
> their new ideologies upon a denunciation of Marxism (the God That Failed
> syndrome, as I mentioned above).
>
> Within the Marxist tradition, ultra-left communists seem most given to
> anathemas, in that their political identity is predicated upon multiple
> negations -- not the CP (equated with Stalinism), not Trotskyism, etc.
> Compare the tone of the Monthly Review with, say, that of Radical Chains
> ("RADICAL CHAINS IS A MAGAZINE TRYING TO GO BEYOND ALL LEFT IDEOLOGIES,
> AUTONOMISM, LENINISM ETC. TO DEVELOP A MARXISM FOR THE 21ST CENTURY...").
> I find the latter more turgid than the former.
>
> Yoshie