<div>On 12/1/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <<a href="mailto:critical.montages@gmail.com">critical.montages@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> The Marxist tradition once had a world view, a world view (more specifically a philosophy of history) of inevitable dialectical progress, from pre-capitalism, to capitalism, to socialism, the world view that the Marxist tradition borrowed in part from Christianity and in part from liberalism.  It no longer does, though it remains useful as it supplies a theoretical framework and analytical tools.  Since the world view of inevitable dialectical progress was manifestly out of this world, the Marxist tradition, as a theory, may be said to have improved as a result of the loss of that world view. The problem: a school of thought can be built around a theoretical framework and analytical tools, but a social movement cannot be.  A social movement, especially one with an ambition to present a superior alternative to capitalist modernity, needs a world view, a world view that inspires people to have faith in the work they must do in the face of adversity.  Have Marxists in particular and socialists and leftists in general invented a new world view?  No. T -- Yoshie</blockquote><div> Yoshie, What are you doing now?  God-building?  I had to search back through my memory and then with a little help through my Leninist texts to come up with this -- but minus the positivism -- it sounds like you are recreating "proletarian philosophy".  So perhaps you should also look for precedents in the philosophy of Lunacharsky, Gorky, and Bogdanov? I'm not necessarily criticizing, but pointing out that over and over again we have actually rehearsed this debate in one form or another. Perhaps a form of "god-building" is what is needed and a "proletarian philosophy" or socialist world-view has to be constructed in such a way to provide us with a "God-substitute" and through it positing a teleological goal to history? If this is what you mean that I am pretty much against it; because all and all I still imagine there will be no religion, heaven or hell, only human consciousness, earth, sky and all of life.  At least one of my goals -- socially and politically -- is that humans can live without the false-hood of teleology Or is it that you think that the God doesn't need to be built because the other religions have shown us the way all we should/need to do is secularize their teleology?  Because only with a secularized teleology can we motivate people? provide them with hope?  It was all this kind of stuff that as a boy submerged in Catholicism, that I turned to Darwin, Marx, and the physical sciences to get away from.  Maybe, I am misunderstanding you. Jerry Monaco </div> </div>