Greetings Economists, On Mar 1, 2007, at 5:03 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
Engels, as a matter of fact, argued that early Christianity and many medieval Christian revolts were precursors to modern working-class mass movements, and he found many material and spiritual parallels between Christianity and socialism,
Doyle; I would summarize this point as how the major religions theorize the mass mind. The book religions theorize how to unite via text and auditorium like venues the mass of the audience before the authoritative speaker. This basic knowledge production workshop hybridizes face to face contact with the authority of text based one to many processes. The weakness of all major religions is the lack of language like content in their religions. Where language like entails clarity about emotional connection via interactive content in a given media used to unite people. The word democracy emphasizes the interactivity of nation states but fails to give clarity about the scale and power of interactivity in nation states, instead relying upon traditional religious means to unite a large mass audience into one entity. So that Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism all fall into the same processes of creating a mass mind as does the religions of the book. The Socialist project meets similar barriers to creating a mass movement as do the religions, but the democratic theory in Socialism impels a development not so much freedom of expression but of large scale language like connections between the millions. Therefore the development of computed communications shifts the basis of connection away from the base of traditional religions which is that of one to many authority to a very large scale equality that comes from language like sharing of information. The value of shared information is in the networked properties of any given piece of knowledge. The model would be how big languages like English capture a wealth of knowledge that small languages can't encompass however powerful their base of development theory might have been. The network properties of information can't be captured by one to many forms of knowledge. Yoshie writes in the thread Marxism, Religion, and Capitalism (was Felix Morrow on religion) Marxists are fond of saying that religion is compatible with capitalism, and so it is, in some hands, but the same can be very well said about Marxism. As a matter of fact, it is probably easier to reconcile Marxism with capitalism than to reconcile religion with it. Religion, after all, was originally a pre-modern, pre-capitalist phenomenon, so, in order to adopt any variety of it to capitalist life, you have to twist it very seriously, almost beyond recognition. Whereas Marxism arose after capitalism, in response to it, and one of its tenets widely held by adherents to Marxism is that transition to socialism first of all demands a great deal of capitalist development, and for many Marxists no amount of capitalist development seems enough foundation for that perpetually postponed transition. :-> I think some of what is said here is valuable, but the basic Marxist view of society as equality of workers clashes with religions means of producing a united community. Functionally all religions rely upon a single source of 'wisdom'. So that for example Wittgenstein's theory of family resemblance can't function as a means of generating information. It is not clear to Islam how to distinguish family resemblance in the schism between Sunni and Shi'i for example. Google suggests that finding family resemblance fast is important, and working together on the spread of boundaries of the family of knowledge could be automated. I'm directly saying Socialism has a culture in development based upon the equality of the working class that is not possible in the religions and therefore is a specific and powerful culture in it's own right. It is therefore quite necessary for socialist to challenge and reject religion claims about equality. For example the veil, or for example the pulpit. thanks, Doyle
