>> But really, this is extraordinarily abstract - as abstract as any M-L
>> sect gassing on about the proletariat. Which religious people?
>
> Before getting to the nuts and bolts questions of practical
> organizing,
But you'd been coming on as the professor of praxis, so it's funny to evade it now.
> 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.
You write as if you're the first person ever to think these thoughts. The actual left I've been around is highly tolerant of religious people; there'd be no antiwar movement or global justice movement without them.
>> 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.
I'm not either. But 1) I was using R vs D as a general index of political proclivities, suggesting that the R base is hopeless while those who vote D are potentially receptive to a lefter message, and 2) if you're so hot to engage people where they are, rather than where you'd want them to be, then you can't dismiss the R/D thing so blithely.
> 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.
Really? I hadn't heard that before.
> 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.
Really? I hadn't heard that before either. Or this:
> In short, the tools are not meant for purifying
> cross-class movements into a movement of, by, and for "the
> proletariat" in the abstract.
While organized labor in the US is dominated by some fairly conventional political thinking, esp at the top, there are plenty of seriously radical people scattered throughout unions who know this very well, and try to do what they can. Unions in the US would be in even worse shape than they are if it weren't for reds and pinks, from the CP's influence in the 1930s through all the Berkeley Trots who created TDU and Labor Notes, to the SEIU of today. But you know all this, right?
Doug