I think most people here, like Chuck and Wojtek, agree with me on the importance of social networks and services and the idea that we can learn from religious organizations about them and work with likely ones toward common goals.
At the origins of the modern Left, mutual aid organizations were very common, probably the predominant form of proletarian organizations. Marxists, however, have tended to think that such mutual aid organizations are primitive workers' organizations inferior to trade unions and political parties specializing in protesting government and corporations and extracting higher wages and benefits from them (when they are not in a position to run the government themselves).
Of course, such protests must be still held, in defense of Social Security and things like that, but both the growth of the informal sector and the growth of service jobs in competitive (rather than monopolistic) industries in the formal sector -- both are worldwide phenomena -- means that the types of organizations dominant in the age when industrial workers in monopolistic sectors were well organized, on the political offensive, and set the standards that pulled the rest up can no longer be easily sustained -- many of the industrial unions in the USA are in their twilight years. Since capital has reorganized workplaces and social geography, we, too, need to change what we do and how we do it.
Then, there is a question of culture. While we are opposed to the war on drugs, we have to acknowledge the high personal and political costs of drug addiction to working-class people and think about how best to help them sober up or stay out of it. Working-class people who have sunk to the depth of drug addiction and cannot take care of themselves and their families are not in a position to fight any class struggle. This is another area where religious organizations have stepped in to provide services in a social vacuum left by secular leftists. Ditto for crimes.
On 3/25/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 25, 2007, at 11:20 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > How many secular leftists are actually involved in struggle for a
> > higher minimum wage and things like that and how many religious
> > organizations and religious members in secular organizations like
> > unions are involved in struggle for them? "Alliance" suggests a false
> > impression of being on an equal footing, as if there were many secular
> > leftists and secular organizations with no or few religious members,
> > which is not the case.
>
> Unions? Working Families Party? There are religious people in them,
> but they're institutionally secular. What are they, chopped liver?
They are institutionally secular, but secular leftists are a minority in them. Similarly, the US government is institutionally secular and still provides better services than unions or religions, and there are secular leftists who are US government employees, but the government doesn't belong to secular leftists. One of the questions is whether secular leftists can create an organization that we can call our own and that can rival religious ones in building communities and providing social services. In this day and age, organizations that do not do so -- whether trade unions or anything else -- have trouble surviving. We can't specialize in protesting the government and corporations and trying to extract higher wages, benefits, etc. from them for the reasons I mentioned above. -- Yoshie