[lbo-talk] Marxism and Religion

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Sun Mar 4 14:26:44 PST 2007


On 3/3/07, Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> I was wondering whether you have you got a link
> or two to share, showing where Marx is proclaiming his *faith in an imminent*
> advent of the transition to socialism?

E.g., most famously in the Communist Manifesto, "The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to _an immediately following proletarian revolution_" (emphasis added, <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch04.htm>).

Marx and Engels lived the last time when a continental revolutionary wave swept through Europe. Since then, with a few exceptions (e.g., the Spanish Civil War, France of 1968), the Europeans have ceased to be revolutionary.

Not only that, Europe doesn't exist.

<http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?lg=en&reference=1968> "Interview with Samir Amin 'There Is No Europe: You Have Just the European Side of the US Project" Giuliano Battiston Translated by Gianluca Bifolchi and revised by Mary Rizzo

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

_In the face of the dominance of the US, Europe still looks incapable of articulating a truly alternative political project. How should it be behaving?_

As it stands, despite the many Europeans who wish it, I just do not think that Europe is capable of becoming an alternative element to US hegemony. It should leave the NATO, break the military alliance with the US, and get rid of its neo-liberalist views. Currently, however, the European political and social forces are anything but interested in this project, so much so that -- like the old Italian PSI -- they have rather strengthened their Atlantic alliance and aligned the NATO with liberal-socialism. I can't see any different Europe on the horizon, nowadays. From this point of view Europe doesn't exist: the European project is just the European side of the American project. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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