Marx and Lenin had a fairly limited understanding of religion. Of course it is the opiate of the people. Of course it is used to anesthetize and control the working class. But it's not just that.
Joanna
----- Original Message -----
>
> Don't be silly. There are Churches and there are churches. The quakers
> aren't so bad. Unitarians can be worked with. They've got assembly halls,
> disciplined members who see the point of the common good...lots of useful
> stuff.
I was speaking specifically about the Catholic Church, but even still, comments like this are alarming.
Just like the distinction between "big-C" and "small-c" communists, a distinction between "big-C" and "small-c" churches is only intended to obfuscate the real matter by means of equivocation.
It is the nature of the Right to be *opportunist*; if the new pope has said some things about an "unjust distribution of goods," this should merely be occasion for us to remind ourselves of Diderot's old quip, "And [with] the guts of the last priest let's strangle the neck of the last king!"
The pope isn't going to "help out the social movements" in Latin America. Let's get real!
Let this be a helpful reminder: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm
"Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as was the materialism of the eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists or the materialism of Feuerbach. This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels goes further than the Encyclopaedists and Feuerbach, for it applies the materialist philosophy to the domain of history, to the domain of the social sciences. We must combat religion—that is the ABC of allmaterialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way. The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion. Why does religion retain its hold on the backward sections of the town proletariat, on broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the mass of the peasantry? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the bourgeois progressist, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And so: “Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!” The Marxist says that this is not true, that it is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois uplifters. It does not explain the roots of religion profoundly enough; it explains them, not in a materialist but in an idealist way. In modern capitalist countries these roots are mainly social. The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in face of the blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment, a thousand times more severe than those inflicted by extra-ordinary events, such as wars, earthquakes, etc. “Fear made the gods.” Fear of the blind force of capital—blind because it cannot be foreseen by the masses of the people—a force which at every step in the life of the proletarian and small proprietor threatens to inflict, and does inflict “sudden”, “unexpected”, “accidental” ruin, destruction, pauperism, prostitution, death from starvation—such is the root of modern religion which the materialist must bear in mind first and foremost, if he does not want to remain an infant-school materialist. No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way.
Does this mean that educational books against religion are harmful or unnecessary? No, nothing of the kind. It means that Social-Democracy’s atheist propaganda must be subordinated to its basic task—the development of the class struggle of the exploited masses against the exploiters."
-dl
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 1:39 AM, Douglas La Rocca <douglarocca at gmail.com
> >wrote:
>
> What's up with this defense of the Church? Have people forgotten what it
> > means to be a Marxist?
>
>
> I think it's like belonging to a church, but without the part where there
> are other people?
>
> --
> "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen
> lytlað."
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>
-- Douglas La Rocca ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk