[lbo-talk] Tan Malaka and Max Horkheimer, Theism and Atheism

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Sun Jul 8 08:29:55 PDT 2007


On 7/7/07, KJ <kjinkhoo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Have a look at Aboe Bakar Loebis, "Tan Malaka's Arrest: An Eye-Witness
> Account" in Indonesia, 53 (April 1992).

As it happens, this article is an open access article, available to non-subscribers of _Indonesia_: <http://cip.cornell.edu/Dienst/UI/1.0/Summarize/seap.indo/1106966645>.

Like the faction of the Tudeh leadership who were in exile during the Mossadegh years, losing control of the party to the hard-liners who could not bring themselves to building a better relation with the tragic Prime Minister (Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions_, Princeton University Press, 1982, p. 321-322), Tan Malaka was also rejected by his own party and found himself in exile in the crucial years when he could have conceivably made a difference had he been at home.

On 7/7/07, Geert Lovink <geert at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> Note that a study of a certain Harry Poeze is mentioned here. It came
> out earlier this year, here in the Netherlands. It is a three-volume
> study, in Dutch, which claims to have found the real circumstances
> under which Tan Malaka died.
>
> Poeze, Harry A. (2007). Verguisd en vergeten; Tan Malaka, de linkse
> beweging en de Indonesische Revolutie, 1945-1949. 'KITLV, 3 parts, 2200
> pages, ISBN 978-90-6718-258-4.

It may be an interesting book, but it is highly unlikely that it will become available to the English-speaking parts of the world any time soon. Rudolf Mrazek (cf. <http://www.umich-cseas.org/faculty/biographies/mrazek.htm>), who reviewed another book about Tan Malaka by the same author*, may review it, however.

* Rudolf Mrazek, "_Tan Malaka: Strijder voor Indonesie's Vrijheid, Levensloop van 1897 tot 1945_ by Harry A. Poeze" (Review), The Journal of Asian Studies 37.3 (May 1978), pp. 604-605.

On 7/8/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 8, 2007, at 12:09 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi quoted Max Horkheimer:
>
> > The meanings of the two concepts do
> > not remain unaffected by history
>
> Indeed. Because there's no way this could apply to the United States:
>
> > Nowadays atheism is in fact the attitude of those who follow
> > whatever power happens to be dominant...
>
> Come to think of it, this quote is pretty funny coming from someone
> who's constantly apologizing for a state in which religious power
> isn't merely dominant, but is the law itself.

In the sense that Max Horkheimer redefines the term "atheist" (one who follows "whatever power happens to be dominant"), you are an atheist (following the Cooler Elites), and so are Ali Khamenei, George W. Bush, and their respective followers, for the sentence only whose main clause you copy above ends with a crucial, adverbial clause: "Nowadays atheism is in fact the attitude of those who follow whatever power happens to be dominant, _no matter whether they pay lip-service to a religion_ or whether they can afford to disavow it openly" (emphasis added, Max Horkheimer, "Theism and Atheism," 1963, Critique of Instrumental Reason, Continuum, 1974, <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/horkheimer/1963/theism-atheism.htm>).

Similarly, "those who resist the prevailing wind" have little in common with the philosophical "theists" of yore for whom God was "a divine guarantor of the laws of nature," even if they resisted it in the name of religion in part or in whole. -- Yoshie



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