[lbo-talk] Islam and socialism

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 10/26/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 26, 2007, at 11:48 AM, Jeffrey Fisher wrote, quoting YF:
>
> >> What is on the political agenda in many nations (from Latin
> >> America to
> >> the Middle East), and what should get on the political agenda in many
> >> others, today is not socialism but democracy and republicanism.  If
> >> socialism grows anywhere, perhaps in Venezuela, it will do so
> >> organically out of people's practice of democracy and republicanism,
> >> which will differ from one country to another.  There is no other
> >> way.
> >
> > there you have it.
>
> Yeah. It's much better to hammer "secular leftists" for their failure
> to embrace religion in general and political Islam specifically than
> it is to talk to Muslims about socialism.

You don't get the point: socialism -- expropriate all the
expropriators -- is not on the  practical agenda, among secular or
religious peoples, including among self-identified secular leftists,
such as those who are found here.

That essentially annihilates the erstwhile difference between secular
and religious leftists regarding political economy and puts religious
leftists sometimes to the Left of secular ones in this respect.

As a matter of fact, terms such as Left and Right are increasingly
meaningless.  Neither Putin nor Hu is a leftist, and yet how they
think and what they do, representing Russia and China, matter more
than all the world's leftists combined.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>