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

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Sun Mar 25 10:21:54 PDT 2007


On 3/25/07, Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> Andy F wrote:
>
> > Consider Bitch's observation that a lot of the megachurches provide a
> > lot of the day-to-day social services that unions, coops and gummit
> > use to provide. Right now it looks like eternal salvation and daycare
> > vs. a higher minimum wage and ...?
>
> I think lots of people go to church on a regular basis for the social
> aspect of religion. You would think that the number of people who do
> church because they want to achieve "eternal life" after deathis
> diwndling among churchgoers. Although the growth of the Southern
> Baptists suggests otherwise.
>
> But just look at what churches do. They spend large amounts of money on
> social services.
>
> I think this suggests that leftist could attract people if they spent
> more time "building community" and counter-institutions. After all, we
> have more concrete things to offer than religions which are selling
> heaven and hell.
On 3/25/07, Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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.
<snip>
> 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.
<snip>
> 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.

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



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