[lbo-talk] Time to Get Religion

B. docile_body at yahoo.com
Sun Dec 3 12:35:40 PST 2006


Angelus Novis wrote:

"You and Noam Chomsky can spend the next 10,000 years shouting facts at people until you're blue in the face. Until you develop an inkling of the pull that reified social relationships exercise upon human consciousness, your contribution to effecting any social change will tend towards null."

Shouting facts as opposed to -- lies? Or what?

"The pull that reified social relationships exercise upon human consciousness" -- so that's what anyone who's effected social change has done, eh, from suffragettes, to the old IWW, to the Civil Rights movement? School us, then! I'd like to know, too.

Also, the idea that "anarchism" lacks critique of ideology is false. I don't know where to even begin to address that one. You could start with Kropotkin's take on Social Darwinistic ideology (_Mutual Aid_), Bakunin's spot-on critiqute of statist intellectuals as our modern era's sacerdotal caste, replacing former eras' priesthoods -- to Bookchin's critique of various ecological or environmentalist paradigms, to Rudolf Rocker's _Nationalism and Culture_ ,which took on eugenics and race theory in the 1930s before many (but not all) Marxists had investigated racism thoroughly, to David Graeber, to any number of other people. Praxedis Guerrero, the Mexican anarchist, also took on patriarchy and racism in the 1910s -- like Emma Goldman, who also took on patriarchy and other forms of unjust oppression, including the "red bureaucracy" Bakunin had warned of.

In short: Just because you haven't read it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

-B.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list