Before getting to the nuts and bolts questions of practical organizing, which can in any case be only discussed productively in the context of actual organizing, the prevailing attitude on the secular left has to change: the equation of religion with superstition (the view, btw, is contrary to Marx's) has to be dropped; futile attempts to figure out what "religion as such" is must be abandoned; the silly idealist notion that you can understand the religious by reading the Bible, the Qur'an, the Torah, etc. has to be pushed back into the dustbin of history. In short, we need a historical materialist approach to the religious.
> the electorate
> Republicans
> Democrats
> the 2004 election
> an election when the religious right was thumped
I'm not saying what I'm saying to lure the religious away from the Republicans and get more votes for the Democrats. In general, we need a longer-term approach to this question, as well as others, than attention spans dictated by swings between electoral cycles, the swings that are inevitable since Americans who bother to vote have only two ways to vote in most cases.
> By the way, interesting Gallup poll of the Muslim world at <http://
> www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3637>. The "radicals"
> are better-educated, richer, and more optimistic about the future
> than the "moderates."
That is so whether you look at Muslims, believers of other religions, Marxists, other socialists, secular liberals, and so on, probably in most nations in the world. Radicals, especially radical leaders, tend to come from the better educated. That's one of the reasons why workerism is off the mark.
To repeat, the dialectic of capital-wage labor is indeed what makes capitalism what it is, and it is therefore the primary contradiction at the level of theory, but that theory does not imply that people can or must organize themselves in practice along the line of the primary contradiction which is an abstraction. In reality, all social movements under capitalism -- including successful revolutionary ones -- have been cross-class movements, with more or less eclectic sources of influence (from religion to feminism), and they always will be and should be. Theoretical tools developed in the Marxist tradition can merely help us understand and participate in social movements better than without them. In short, the tools are not meant for purifying cross-class movements into a movement of, by, and for "the proletariat" in the abstract. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>