On 3/9/07, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie:
> Marx and Marxists have often thought that religion is basically either
> a ruling-class ideology to facilitate exploitation or a sigh of the
> oppressed substituting heaven for an earthly kingdom or both. There
> are both aspects in religion, and those aspects may disappear if
> exploitation and oppression can be done away with (which doesn't seem
> possible any time soon), but in all likelihood religion predates the
> rise of class society and will probably outlive it, how to face death
> -- one's own or others' -- being one of the questions that religion
> may be better equipped to address than science.
that's what I said.
Yes, but that's only the beginning. Beyond that, religion is a social
and political question, and the recognition that it is not merely an
ideology should help us approach it in a way that we have approached
other important political questions, for instance, what used to be
called the National Question.
> 1. Leftists used to be more interested in crisis theory that posits
> immanent limits to capital, but today they seem increasingly
> interested in crisis theory that posits external limits ("peak oil"
> being one of the popular ones) to it. Maybe that's a sign of
> exhaustion of crisis theory.
the original Marxian crisis theory was only about the prediction that,
due to its internal contradictions, capitalism will create some of its
own problems (in addition to those coming from outside capitalism)
which would in turn create opportunities for progressive social change
(the building of the working-class movement, etc.)
In the days of Marx and Engels, that line of thinking made sense to
them. From the beginning of industrial revolution till the ascendancy
of Keynesian state intervention, economy in even the most advanced
capitalist countries was subject to frequent crises. Socialists
probably could reasonably imagine riding a wave of economic crisis to
transition to socialism (though none actually did so -- no formerly
and still actually existing socialism emerged from a plain and simple
economic crisis). After Keynes and the rise of the interventionist
welfare state, it's more difficult to believe that in the West: crises
are fewer, crises are better managed, crises give more opportunities
to capital than labor, and so on. So, if today's socialists in the
West still contemplate transition to socialism (though I think few
actually do, whether or not they admit their own social
democratization), we have to think about ways of getting there without
going through anything like the Great Depression.
In the South, quite severe economic crises are not uncommon. One
recent one did break the old ruling class choke hold on power and
created an opening for a new approach to socialism (or perhaps just
social democracy, in some people's opinions): Venezuela. Other
nations in the South that went through similar economic crises either
did not create as good openings or didn't have revolutionaries on the
ground to take advantage of openings that did emerge or both.
(Zimbabwe may be right now going into a similar crisis, too.) So,
what might be useful to people in the South may be not so much general
economic theory about how a crisis may happen as political thoughts on
what to do in the meantime of business as usual, so there will be
people who know what to do if and when a crisis arises.
"Peak oil" theory [POT] seems a return to Ricardian theory --
nature-based diminishing returns being the key idea -- which can be
interpreted in Marxian terms or in a lot of other ways, including
Malthusianism. But whereas Marx's original theory had capitalism's
success breeding failure (poverty in the midst of plenty), the POT
suggests the general impoverishment of society. Instead of the image
implied by Marx of a victorious self-organized working class
conquering a rich world, the POT suggests that if the working class
ever wins, it will conquer squalor.
That's in part because of environmental consciousness, not the POT per
se: an objective difficulty of reconciling the idea of conquering a
rich world and the kind of systemic change that may be required by a
rational response to climate change. If climate change goes unabated,
there is a real possibility that our descendants (whether or not they
are socialists) will be inheriting squalor in many parts of the world.
Further, people like to have _short_ conversations on topics that are
_easy_ to discuss. For example, I tried to have a serious discussion
of the Roemer & Skillman attacks on and alternatives to the Marxian
theory of exploitation, but people didn't like the length of my posts
and Gil said that no serious discussions were possible on e-mail
discussion lists like pen-l.
Gil may be right about that. But even if you look at journals where
long serious discussions are allowed and encouraged, crisis theory, it
seems to me, is pretty divorced from practice, having become part of
Marxian economics.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
