>
> More than that. It produces Al Qaeda and the Taliban. These are not
> primitive elements from some previous social order. They are wholly
> contemporary products of, well, 'finanzcapital'. Let's face it Osama bin
> Laden is more a product of financial speculation than he is of Islam,
> and the Taliban more a product of the Pentagon than of Afghanistan.
>
> Hate to say it, but those chickens did come home to roost.
I think an adequate explanation of Al Qaeda and the Taliban would include the role of "finance capital" (which, like Islam, or indeed Al Qaeda and the Taliban themselves, isn't one homogeneous thing) in creating conditions in which the mentality at issue develops and functions, but it isn't the only important explanatory factor, is it?
The Kleinian psychoanalysis underpinning Robert Young's analysis of fundamentalism and terrorism, for instance, points to relations in infancy and childhood as playing a crucial role in the development of this mentality. Moreover, these relations require for their full description an account of the mentality of e.g. parenting adults. This mentality is itself the result of current and past social relations including family relations. Kleinian psychoanalysis treats these relations ("object relations") in a way that makes them very close to "internal relations" in the sense of Hegel, Marx and Whitehead (a point made use of in Jessica Benjamin's _Bonds of Love_).
If this is a realistic psychology, a full explanation of the Taliban would require examination of the social relations including the economic and family relations within which its members developed and live. This is what I understand Marx to have meant by a "materialist" analysis.
Ted