> I have long ceased, _as a marxist_, to be bothered by this label;
> that's
> what the opponents of any world view do -- they throw labels at it.
> It's
> a nice sport.
(1) I am not an "opponent" of Marxism. I respect KM quite highly as a thinker, as I hope I have made clear. I simply do not take all of his thought as a single indivisible unit, to be agreed with or disagreed with as a whole. As someone with a lot of philosophical training, I learned never to do that, with Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Hegel, or anyone else. You have to dissect their writings, determine their logically independent claims, and evaluate them one by one. As Kelley, I think it was, noted the other day, philosophical argument is not "killing" anyone, it's just evaluating arguments to see whether they are sound or not.
When I do that with Marx, I find, among other things, that what he says about the world to come after capitalism is overthrown is not logically connected with what he says about capitalism (though he certainly thought that it was "dialectically" connected, whatever that means). So what he says about one could be very insightful, and what he says about the other quite wrong (or at least not supported by a sound argument, and therefore possibly wrong).
Of course, as a Marxist, you probably do take everything he wrote as a single unit, so anyone who criticizes one part of it automatically becomes an "opponent of Marxism."
> But as a student of language and literature, I object, and object
> strongly, to this silly use of "religion" simply as a pejorative label,
> because it empties the word "religion" of all content.
(2) As a Marxist, you probably think of "religion" as a pejorative label. I don't think it's either pejorative or approving -- it's just a description of one function of the human mind. The mind does a lot of things, such as scientific investigation, artistic creation, religious and mythical activities (belief, devotion, etc.), ethical reasoning and judgment, and just plain old wool-gathering, among many others. None of these is ipso facto "good" or "bad" as far as I'm concerned.
> It is a pretty sloppy word at best, given the number of different
> specific religions
> claiming the title. When you then simply use it as a (not-so-clever)
> epithet, you take some more life out of it
(3) I wasn't using it as an epithet, though the brevity of my remarks might suggest so. What I mean by talking about the "religious" aspects of Marxism (without getting into a long essay about it) is that, when it tries to predict the future, in particular how capitalism will develop (becoming more and more crisis-ridden, etc.) and what its eventual fate will be (to be abolished by revolution, followed by the succeeding epochs of socialism and communism), it is talking about something that it cannot possibly discuss scientifically, because there is no scientific way to make such predictions about "future history." (A big claim, I realize, but I think it can be argued for. Think Hegel: "The owl of Minerva only flies at twilight.")
What Marx and Marxists do in making statements about future events of this kind is analogous enough to many religions (especially the Abrahamic ones), in my view at least, to justify using the term "religion" (again, not in a "pejorative" way, but just as a description of the logical and psychological functions of these statements). Their function, it seems to me, is basically to give people who are suffering under the present social conditions a vision of the future which will inspire them to keep struggling and give them some hope that, even if not in their lifetime, their struggle will contribute to an eventual triumph of good over evil. (Marxists generally sneer at words like "good" and "evil," and Marx of course portrayed capitalism as having good and bad aspects, but he certainly presented the future communist society as a *better* one than capitalist society -- otherwise, why struggle for it?)
In addition, these statements about the future communist society not only describe it as better than capitalist society, but they strongly imply that some sort of logic of history will powerfully support the struggle. This aspect of Marxist writings looks to me, as well as to a lot of other students of Marxism, very similar to (for example) the Christian idea that God is leading history toward the Second Coming. You may see this as an offensive comment, but -- I'm sorry -- the similarity we see between Marxism and Christianity on this point is just to close to ignore. And the psychological operations of the two visions of the future seem to be basically the same to us.
Thus, these statements ultimately function in such a way as to motivate action against the system, which is what Marxists want. Without this part of the Marxist system, the people Marxists are addressing might be resigned to their lot in life and give up the struggle, so rather than being angry when "outsiders" such as I point to this part of the system, Marxists should be proud of it, it seems to me.
> If you disagree with marxism, or with certain aspects of it, the
> english
> language is large and flexible enough to find a way of expressing your
> point without this spoiling of a useful word. Your rhetorical skills
> can't be so impoverished that you need to use this stale chestnut.
(4) I admit that I am no rhetorician at all, so I suppose my rhetorical skills are lousy, but I am trying to be a philosopher, so that's irrelevant.
Of course, there are any number of other terms besides "religion" that I could use, and if I were composing an extended, highly polished philosophical treatise on the topic, I would come up with some, but these are only e-mail list postings, for Pete's sake.
> Several billion people on this earth self-label as adherents of this or
> that religion. Why steal the word from them.
(5) I think that's the nub of this whole issue. Marxists don't self-label themselves as religious people. But from outside (and I don't consider myself a Marxist -- at most, perhaps, a sort of Bernsteinian socialist, though as I say I admire a lot of Marx's thought very highly), what Marxism says about the future sure looks awfully analogous, at least, to Abrahamic religions. Maybe I could come up with another term which would be more accurate and descriptive. I'll work on it.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt