[lbo-talk] Not in Search of the "Salt of the Earth" (Re: Time to Get Religion)

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Sat Dec 2 08:52:10 PST 2006


On 12/2/06, Jim Straub <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> wrote:
> re-engaging with the thought of most ordinary people in this country

One thing that I'd like to emphasize, as I think out loud, is that I'm not in search of the "salt of the earth." (Workerism, common in the Marxist tradition, goes against the best in the Marxist tradition.) I'm saying that we must engage the religious, not because they are more ordinary than the irreligious (though the former are certainly far more numerous than the latter in the USA and West Asia), but because they are, in many respects that matter politically, superior to the irreligious in practice at least in the USA and West Asia: the religious, whether they are on the Left, Center, or Right, are more patient, more socially skilled, and therefore better organizers than the irreligious; and religious leftists, more often than not, are more politically intelligent than secular leftists. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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