[lbo-talk] Was something about Atheism & Humanism

[c b]

Chuck Grimes
I just began listening to Jim Farmelant's posted radio link that
opened with a quote from CLR James. It was a wonderful quote from 1958
and ties in with what's below. To paraphase James, he begins with the
idea that Descartes had the revolutionary idea that rationalism, the
use of reason would liberate human society from the authoritarian
control of church and state domination. James notes Capitalism and its
near simultaneous birth within this period. He continues, that
rationalism was taken up by the elites of power, learned, and used to
enslave the masses of society rather than liberate them, but that was
resisted through a series of struggles that culminated in the French
Revolution, which as it turned out only deepened the control of
capital through the rationalization of the means of production and the
industrial revolution

^^^
CB: Ralph Dumain's piece seems interesting and worth discussing.

Comment : It is not surprising that the French Revolution deepened the
control of capital , because the French Revolution was a
bourgeois/capitalist revolution completing the overthrow of feudalism
(smiles).