Jon Johanning writes:
> Leftist fundamentalists and evangelicals like Jim Wallis may have a
> point that the U.S. left will have to bite the bullet and learn to
> speak to these folks in religious language, as he does, if it ever
> wants to reach them....
Of course, leftist sectarians usually speak a religious language, unfortunately not the mainstream one.
Is Wallis saying that we have to appeal to those with Confederate flags on their pick-ups (a la Howard the Dean)? how about those with naked women on their mud-flaps?
> I belong to the school of thought that holds that "class
> consciousness"
> is not a particularly useful concept. Usually, it seems to me, "class
> consciousness" means "what *our* political party or grouplet
> thinks the
> working class *should* think." I.e., it's something the "true
> consciousness" folks are trying to force on other people, for whose
> intelligence they really don't have much respect. Instead, I
> think that
> cultural phenomena like working class fundamentalist religion *is* a
> type of class consciousness which doesn't need to be rooted out of
> workers' minds; rather, they need to be taught to see the
> anti-capitalist implications of that very consciousness,
> which is what
> people like Wallis are trying to do. ...
Wilhelm Reich's "What is Class Consciousness?" is useful. (It's in SEX-POL, i.e., before he went nuts.)
What Jon is saying is that "class consciousness" _as applied by "our political party"__ is not a particularly useful concept. Marx's original concept -- involving the consciousness of the common interests of the working class -- is useful, especially when used in contrast to actually-existing class consciousness (which Reich focuses on). jim d