[lbo-talk] Marxism and Religion

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Tue Feb 27 07:38:40 PST 2007


On 2/27/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Yeah, some people who do good things politically are religious. And
> some people who do bad things are too. Archbishop Romero wasn't shot
> for his religion; he was was shot because he was a challenge to the
> power structure. Most likely his shooting was ordered by at least
> some people who were good churchgoers. During the Central American
> wars of the 1980s, and the South American wars of the 1970s, elites
> were organized through things like Tradition Family Property that had
> deep ties to the Catholic hierarchy. So can we isolate any
> independent influence of religion from this? Or do people use
> religion as an expression of their predetermined politics, where the
> independent variables are temperament and interest?

The same can be said about Marxism, anarchism, and so on. People whose politics are called Marxist include some leftists who are on this list but also Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path), and so on in the South and the Red Brigades (Italy), the Red Army Faction (Germany), the Japanese Red Army, etc. in the North. The Third Indochina War was fought in 1979 between two countries under the communist parties: China and Viet Nam.

The conclusion that one comes to based on these facts is that the religion of Oscar Romero and and that of the Salvadoran Right are not the same, though they loosely belong to the same long-standing, extremely diverse and contradictory ideological tradition, just as Hugo Chavez's Marxism and Pol Pot's Marxism are not the same, though they loosely belong to the same longstanding, extremely diverse and contradictory ideological tradition.


> Unlike Yoshie, I've actually gone through a couple of religious
> phases in my life (always Catholic). They were the product of
> alienation, repression, and unhappiness.

I'm afraid some people adopt anarchism, Marxism, what have you for the same reason. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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