[lbo-talk] Marxism and Religion

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 3/1/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > Don't get yer panties in a bunch. I didn't mean to
> > dispute that he thinks that Protestantism is the
> > appropriate religious ideology for capitalism, or
> > market society, the topic of the section, and that
> > market society is a higher, better, superior social
> > form than prior forms,
>
> Two observations on this:
>
> a. Marx saw capitalism as opening the possibility of socialism; whether
> he _also_ thought that in and of itself it was higher, better, superior
> social form than prior forms is debatable.
>
> b. But if he did think that, he was wrong. (It is not even wholly
> obvious that capitalism was a precondition for socialism, but that is
> another debate.) In any case the progressive features of capitalism have
> long been exhausted, socialism being now further away, more doubtful of
> achievement, than it was 50 years ago. [Note that by "progressive" I
> mean that which points towards a qualitatively superior future
> possibility, independently of the present goodness or badness of the
> event in the present.) For two centuries now we have been in the midst
> of a worldwide massacre, a massacre which shows signs of rapidly
> expanding, far from diminishing.

Ulrich Beck said, "Zombie categories embody nineteenth-century
horizons of experience, horizons of the first modernity. And because
these inappropriate horizons, distilled into a priori and analytic
categories, still mold our perceptions, they are blinding us to the
real experience and ambiguities of the second modernity" (Ulrich Beck
and Johannes Willms, Conversations with Ulrich Beck, Trans. Michael
Pollak, London: Polity Press, 2004, p.19).  The faith in the
"civilizing influences of capital" (Marx, _Grundrisse_,
<http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/f501-550.htm>)
is one of those Zombie categories.  The faith in the "civilizing
influence of capital" _minus_ the faith in an imminent advent of
transition to socialism which Marx, et al. had is doubly living dead.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
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