[lbo-talk] Religion & Political Practice

[Carrol Cox]

LBO-talk is certainly a 'safe' context in which to sneer at or otherwise
attack religion, and I've done so myself -- and probably will again in
the future. But it is also a context in which sneers at religion
represent a particularly pointless indulgence in phatic language -- or
even juvenile self-expressive language. I don't object to phatic
language as such -- in fact I still suspect that language _originated_
for the most part with such usage. (AHD: Of, relating to, or being
speech used to share feelings or to establish a mood of sociability
rather than to communicate information or ideas.) But such sneers tend
to focus not on the religious conceptions but on the people who hold
them. This is to rip both people and ideas from any concrete context of
social relations and material conditions.

As I have often argued, at any given time and place, under given
conditions, left political outreach can impact on  only particular
fragments of the population. (The CIA 40 years ago having studied this
universal pattern in left agitation and growth, labelled it the "Inkblot
Strategy" and tried to implement it as a counter-insurgency strategy in
Vietnam.) But because the focus of outreach at any given time is
circumscribed does _not_ mean that one should sneer at the population
not, presently, reachable. As I have mentioned a couple of times
recently, Marx's Third Thesis is an excellent guide here. We have to
assume out goals and principles are correct to avoid the  paralyzing
indecision of Burridan's Ass,  but that is no excuse for sneers at the
_people_ who do not now accept those ideas.

The North Vietnamese undoubtedly knew quite well that (at least up to
near the end) most americans had no objection to calling Vietnamese
gooks and destroying their cities from the air. And so on. Yet the
Vietnamese never failed in their public pronouncements to separate the
american people from the u.s. government.

If/when there is again an upswelling of the u.s. left as in the '30s or
the '60s, large numbers now in the various
evangelical/fundamentalist/etc sects will become responsive to left
agitation. I'm not particularly fond of the base/structure metaphor, but
if we regard the individual as an ensemble of social relations, then we
really cannot on the one hand take right-wing  xtianity as a set of
abstract, free-floating ideas, & right-wing xtians as abstract,
free-floating individuals who out of pure stupidity or pure malice
choose those ideas. Base/structure analysis at least avoids the
vulgarity on parade in the "You do realize" thread.

Carrol