On 2/25/07, Angelus Novus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The Felix Morrow piece which was posted is of very little use for that. It is not a critique of religion, merely a denunciation if it. Just as anarchists do not critique the state, they merely denounce it.
A lot of people who come to socialism or communism from bourgeois backgrounds, like Marx himself, come to it first through their personal confrontation with dominant culture -- in many cases religion, as was partly the case with Marx himself, which Richard Price in his introduction to the Felix Morrow essay emphasizes: "The 'Marxism' of the young Karl Marx evolved in large part out of the criticism of religion" (<http://www.workersaction.org.uk/23Articles/23Morrow&Religion.htm>) -- and only later develop their criticism of the material social structures that they think give birth to it. Based on their personal experience, they often mistakenly believe that, for workers, peasants, and others below their stations in life to convert to socialism or communism, they, too, must first develop criticism of religion, just as they did. But that is not so. Their personal experiences cannot be generalized. Poor people come to socialism or communism in their own ways, usually not through criticism of religion, and they may choose to be active in both their church and party which is also like a church, while maintaining capacity to criticize both. After all, the essence of both, at their best, is fellowship, so there is no reason why it is impossible to combine them, though in practice it is often difficult to do so. _The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South_ (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1979) is worth reading, to study how a man born into a sharecropper family, for instance, might approach Marxism and religion. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
