[lbo-talk] 15% of the Population, 2 Hours per Weekend (was Development of Political Underdevelopment)

Wojtek Sokolowski swsokolowski at yahoo.com
Sun Mar 25 08:40:30 PDT 2007


--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:


>
> No (though it would certainly help if leftists
> promised more than an
> HRC, an Obama, et al. and their wars -- if that's
> all you have for
> people, they don't need you). What it takes, in
> religions, unions, or
> any other orgs, is members' and others' willingness
> to provide a lot
> of services (like education and health care) to
> members and others in
> need and pony up a little money -- say $50 a month
> if you earn about
> the median wage -- to pay for operational expenses,
> missions at home
> and abroad, and so on.
>
> See the kind of money and manpower involved in the
> Episcopalian Church:

[WS:] I think I am with Yoshie on this, at least to certain extent. We can safely ignore the theological bullshit and public displayes of piousness (PDPs) associated with religion - but it is diffcult to ignore the material aspects of their operations - financial and human resources. having those resources on their disposal is what makes them count in this country.

However, I would not take those resources for granted, as Yoshie does, something that can be just "procured" by "organizing" - as the lefty mumbo jumbo often claims. How that control of human and material resources comes about itself requires an explanation.

My explanation is social networks. For historical reasons, organized religion is one of very few institutions in this country capable of sustaining and even creating social networks on a mass scale. The only two other institutions capable of doing it in this country on a mass scale are the miliary and the academia.

I countries where left/labor politics have been instituioalized - that network maintaining or crwating capablity exists to some extent. But this is not the case of this country. Therefore, to be successful th eleft must tap into the existing social proximity networks created by other institutions. That means basically two: the academia and organized religion, as military in all likelihood is not a very good conduit for left politics.

Thus far th eleft has been attached mainlyto the academia-based networks, but tha thas pnvious limitation. As people get older and move to the "real world," school-based social networks disintegrate, which limits the outreach of th eleft associated with thoes entworks to the academia itself.

Religion, otoh, doe not have that limitation. Therefore, it can form a good basis for left organizing. Of course, not every religion, but some of them are natural allies - like Unitarian Universalists or Quakers, for example. I do not know much about Black churches - they are a very diverse mix, some of them reactionary some of them progressive, but that again is a potentially promising area worth exploring. I would not even rule out more mainline religions, catholics, jews, protestants.

My ex (#2) used to work as a union organizer for a couple of years and told me that networking with progressive churches was the most effective way of organizing. In most cases having to endure the theological bullshit is not even an issue. For example, UU services are more like book discussion groups and the g- or j- words are not even mentioned.

Wojtek

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