Me:
> I think Marx's formula was good here: he didn't hate religion as much > as capitalism, which encouraged people to embrace religion.
Yoshie:
I thought that Marx's formula was that, although religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the development of capitalism tends to secularize life.
I referring to his transition from the brand of atheism of the Young Hegelians (who saw religion as the enemy) to seeing the popular embracing of religion as having material (i.e., worldly) basis. The latter part -- about secularization -- may have been part of his view, but (as you say) it turns out to be wrong or, more likely, incomplete, at least in the US.
I believe he was too simplistic about the correlation between capitalist development and secularization. "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." It looks to me that endless development of capitalism has more effectively eroded or destroyed secular institutions on the Left, from state socialism to trade unions, than religious ones, and profane illusions make people more passive than sacred ones.
He was right that capitalism created proletarianization, urbanization, the concentration of workers into factories and the like, and constant attacks on popular standards of living -- which created the basis for trade unions and the like. Crises and the marketization of life encouraged a popular reaction which often involved the embracing of socialist, social-democratic, or populist ideas and joining mass parties of the left. The combination of severe poverty, economic crises, and peasant revolutions helped create state bureaucratic socialisms, especially in the aftermath of imperialist world wars. But changes in material conditions do not have a simple or automatic effect on ideologies. It's true that capitalism involves a process in which "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." But that doesn't mean that the holy goes away completely. Capitalism profanes the holy, yes, but that doesn't mean that a new holy could not be created. Or the old holy could be reformed. As I've said before, as long as people have that obnoxious tendency to die, there will be a material basis for religion, for embracing the holy. (BTW, I'm not convinced that Marx believed that the material basis for religion would be abolished under capitalism.) Of course, since the beginning, capitalists have tried to use the holy for their own purposes (e.g., stabilizing capitalism). This may profane the holy (objectively speaking) but it allows the holy to persist. And people can mix religion with a sober facing of the real conditions of life (i.e., leftism or socialism). Facing the "real conditions of life, and ... relations with his kind" doesn't seem to involve the total destruction of religion. Religious parties such as Christian Democracy have merged their faith with somewhat socialist-sounding programs, allowing the preservation of their faith. A lot of early US labor unions were based partly on religion, allying with burial insurance societies and the like. The US Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs and after involved a hell of a lot of religion, including the "social gospel" (from which my late mom learned a lot). If I remember correctly, both Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington were religious. The US Communist Party embraced a secular religion, the view that the late USSR was an Eden on Earth, with (the alleged existence of!) any bad things being merely due to mistakes and/or due to the inevitable difficulties of transition to socialism, requiring even more dedication to Marxism-as-religion. Further, material conditions change, partly due to the normal workings of capitalism. Currently, we're in an era when the material bases for the old socialist and communist movements, for labor unions, etc., in the rich countries of the capitalist core are going away (or, rather, have largely gone away). Those conditions have shifted to places like China. At the time of their creation, leftist critics of social democracy told workers that social-democratic parties and labor unions would win only temporary victories. They were right. If given a chance, capitalism will blow away efforts to tame it. Part of the problem is that labor has a hard time making the needed shift. Nowadays in the US, there are lots of opportunities for unionization among immigrant workers (hey, it's a throw-back to the early 1900s!) But the existing labor union bureaucracies have a hard time making the transition. The destruction of bureaucratic state socialism doesn't seem as automatic as that of labor unions. It partly occurred due to the internal contradictions of bureaucratic socialism. For example, Cuba, which has a more organic linkage between the people and the leadership, has been much more successful at avoiding destruction. (North Korea, on the other hand, always seems to be on the brink of collapse, but survives through luck and authoritarianism.) that's enough for today. Talk to you tomorrow. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
