Joanna, maybe your comments gets never near the point here. Surely Marx that the _capacity_ to be alienated, to experience the market world as heartless, soulless, and oppressive, is a sine qua non of changing it. This capacity finds expression, in bourgeois society, in various ways, first, as an experience of diminishment, deprivation, oppression, and alienation, a world, literally, of hurt. Second, as a response to that hurt, of a kind of self-medication, in religious dreams of a better world beyond this one. But it also can be expressed in resistance, struggle, and collective attempts to bring about change. Clearly Marx thinks that is the way to go.
The importance of having that capacity as part of human nature is central to the Marx's emancipatory projects. As you say, Joanna, if we were pure "Smithian" rational economic agents or poor, nasty, and short "Hobbesean" brutes (of course neither Summitry nor Hobbes held the views of human nature usually associated with them, but that is another story), we would be very unlikely to want change because we would not experience the market world as oppressive. The fact that we seek solace in religion, therefore, although it may reduce our chances of changing the conditions we find oppressive, shows that we do find them oppressive, and therefore might, under the right conditions, seek to change those conditions. But it is not religion but need for it, or what the need for it implies, that is the positive thing on this account.
As to MLK and progressive religiosity, I do not think Marx ever acknowledges that religion itself can be a vehicle for social change in a progressive way, although maybe he says something nice about the piety that motivated abolitionism, I'm not sure. Certainly the idea is wholly antithetical to the Young Hegelian project, which did not seek to harness religion to the service of progress but to reveal its -- we would say now, and Marx would after 1845 -- ideological role in supporting the status quo.
Possibly that may have been a failure on Marx's part and the Young Hegelian project. Be that as it may, the real issue that we have been circling around, I think, is the way the existence of religion shows that human nature involves the capacity to suffer from alienation and to cope with or overcome that suffering.
--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> Well, yeah, there's a difference between Vicadin and
> Heroin, in today's
> parlance.
>
> There's a difference between the working class
> completely accepting
> their subjugation and pain, and their fantasizing a
> world that would be
> worthwhile to live in.
>
> One could turn the idealism of religion into a
> demand for heaven on
> earth, into a dream (in MLK's parlance) that could
> be realized. It would
> be much harder complete cynicism or a dog-eat-dog
> vision into that.
>
> Joanna
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> >So Marx would consider a soporific to be maybe
> >"somewhat" positive? Really, Joanna. Obviously he's
> >not operating on reefer madness assumptions, but
> he's
> >saying that we can understand why people would turn
> to
> >religion, and that this turn has a bad
> conservatizing
> >effect. The anesthetic effects deadens the pain
> while
> >leaving the cause to fester and suppurate.
> >
> >--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >>andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>>Your point?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>His point is that it was considered a soporific,
> an
> >>anodyne.
> >>
> >>Not entirely positive, but not the evil it has
> been
> >>made into since.
> >>
> >>Joanna
> >>
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> >
> >
> >
> >
>
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