[lbo-talk] RE: Xmas message

[joanna bujes]

"But all is not entirely lost. As it happens the very system which we 
wish to replace, capitalism, is also the enemy of religion. 
Capitalism repeatedly finds itself needing to quickly uproot existing 
values and traditions and replace them with new one, to suit the new 
material conditions it creates. So the very system of preserving old 
values intact from generation to generation, the religious culture, 
is an obstacle to capitalism."

This is not true. If Organized Religion (OR)is a practice whose aim is to privilege its interpretation of reality and to offer an illusory, eternally deferred spiritual cohesion, there's nothing about it that challenges Capitalism -- and in fact it never has challenged capitalism historically. Rather what OR does is to provide a plane upon which this cohesion exists -- while you spend the rest of your life being a slave/master, a wage slave, what have you. Xtianity did not oppose slavery, nor does it today oppose exploitation. 

While capitalism dissoves all familial and social bonds, OR remains to tie up the loose ends, by offering that "opium" Marx mentions. The resurgence of fundamentalist strains in reaction to the destructive effects of capitalism/modernization is proof enough. 

Joanna