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> Which is why the "left" (apologies to Carrol), confronting the enormous
> weight of the dead hand of the past on the living, was early on forced to
> adapt to religion and nationalism in lieu of direct challenges to these
> obstacles to science, reason, and internationalism - reworking religious
> and patriotic themes and imagery to serve popular rather than reactionary
> causes. Even the most resolutely internationalist and anticlerical
> movements
> like the IWW, for instance, presented Jesus as a proletarian militant and
> injected revolutionary lyrics into traditional Christian hymns to
> facilitate
> its organizing.
I do think you misunderstand me on a few things. I have nothing against "using" Christian hymns, etc. As an atheist I have nothing against Christian left-radicals. In fact I think the Berrigans or further back, Dorothy Day, or Myles Horton, have contributed and other religious inspired radicals have contributed more to working class independence and grass-roots radicalism than the CPUSA. I also think that their is something deeply radical and almost anarchist in the "verifiable " sayings of Jesus. I look at anti-statist Christianity as part of my tradition, in the same way as I look at Tiberius Gracchus, the sans coulottes, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglas, Tolstoy, Marx, Rosa Luxembourg, Debs, A. J. Muste, Bishop Romero, and Fred Hampton as all part of the tradition we should learn from. So the Anabaptist radicals and the enlightenment atheists all need to be integrated into a living tradition.
> The CPUSA famously (or infamously, depending on your POV)
> described "Communism as 20th century Americanism" and organized the
> "Lincoln" and "Washington" brigades to fight in Spain. Other parties and
> movements across the left-wing political spectrum in all countries employed
> the same devices, often under pressure from their own members with residual
> loyalties to church and nation. What Jerry and other exasperated radicals
> see as duplicity by leftists afraid to show their true colours are more
> often seen by others active in mass political parties and left-liberal and
> church-based groups as necessary tactical and rhetorical compromises
> provoked by the "bedrock stuff" embedded in the culture.
I have been a part of many church based groups. I have never told lies about what the U.S. does in the world. But their is a difference between participating in a base-community or running support for a sanctuary movement or helping Catholic radicals make connections with the union movement, all of which I have done, and participating in the debased politics of ignorance to violence and oppression which is a bourgeois party.
Marvin, I am not asking you to agree with me, but you can at least try to see how I see the difference.
Jerry
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