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Re: ISO/US & SWP-UK= Cliffite muddle on ideology
DEar friends,
In the Socialist Worker/US dtd. May 24th , paper of trotskyist Int'l. Socialist
Org./US,
their is on Pg 7 , a muddled explanation of Ideology from Duncan Hallas .
In "How our rulers keep their Grip". Hallas I think , while making a some good points
of how the exploiters bamboozle workers to keep us stupified and in the dark ,
also makes some key blunders.
First of all Hallas underestimates the role of religious mystifications todayamongst
the workers and the petit bourgeois. He seems to have a economist notion
that religion became passe as a weapon of reaction when the bourgeois
revolutions prevailed over feudalism .
This is a serious error, true for a time the bourgeois fought it out with the reaction
with fuedalism/mainly catholicism in capitals "ascendant period" up to about 1900.
But the bourgeois, in their present period of decadence have made peace with the
catholic church and the other churches/religions,
be they Christian, Judaic, Mohammedin, Shintoist, etc, have been reunited with the
rulers and policies of the various capitalist rulers of the nation states. The
religions
themselves have a huge material stake in the continuance of capitaist exploitation
and wage slavery and alterations of their doctrines and practices prove this.
Also Hallas/ISO have a wooden view of ideological struggle . They seems to thinthat
ALL ideology constitutes "false consciousness" . I don't think this consistent with
dialectics . In fact ideological struggle is part of the class struggle in societal
superstructure connected to the economic basis of class contradiction.
Marx/Engels never stated that ALL ideology was false consciousness as the
Cliffites assert . They pointed out that the dominant idelogies of ever class society
were ever the concepts of the ruling classes.
But this did not leave the workers helpless, they could combat this not only by
their industrial unification/combination in the class struggles agaisnt wage slavery,
but by their own self- controlled political/ideological groups and parties that would
imbue the workers with the antidote of proletarian ideology - ideas that are
consistent with workers collective class interests and prepare better to wage war
on bourgeois ideology which corrupts and stunts workers class conscoiusness.
This is a front of the class war we cannot neglect any longer . but with the ISO views
dominant , the rulers have secured the weak points in proletarian line of battleand if
marxists cant help fill the breach, the bosses and their media will continue
to blow right through these parts of the class war fronts with devastating
consequences!
Neil
