Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Could God die again ?

[CeJ]

The piece that CB had posted was referring to the first century
Christians, several centuries before the First Council of Nicea--by
the fourth century we could say that the sectarian lines dividing
Christians from Jews and Samaritans (and 'pagans') were already well
in place. In the first century, you couldn't.

One line of interpreting Jesus Christ and his ministry sees it as
emerging from a very interesting branch of the Pharisees--the Essenes,
even though the early Christians are seen as being 'anti-Essenes', and
that might well have been how they differentiated themselves from the
communities that originally they belonged to. This sort of Judaism, by
the way, would be quickly misunderstood if we imposed modern and
post-modern ideas of Judaism onto it,. There is another modern/post-mo
anachronism that leads people to think post-temple Judaism stopped
developing even before the early Christian period and that
Christianity sprung full-blown as the modern religion we know it as
today from this Judaism (or as some religious Jews would have it,
Christianity sprung from something other than Judaism, in order to
deny this huge schism in early Talmudic Rabbinical Judaism). Judaism
and Christianity underwent enormous changes in competition with each
and then later, for example, with the rise of Islam.  Mostly the
'center of action' for all this interaction was not 'Palestine' but
'Babylonia'.

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?letter=E&artid=478

A branch of the Pharisees who conformed to the most rigid rules of
Levitical purity while aspiring to the highest degree of holiness.
They lived solely by the work of their hands and in a state of
communism, devoted their time to study and devotion and to the
practise of benevolence, and refrained as far as feasible from
conjugal intercourse and sensual pleasures, in order to be initiated
into the highest mysteries of heaven and cause the expected Messianic
time to come ('Ab. Zarah ix. 15; Luke ii. 25, 38; xxiii. 51). The
strangest reports were spread about this mysterious class of Jews.
Pliny (l.c.), speaking of the Essene community in the neighborhood of
the Dead Sea, calls it the marvel of the world, and characterizes it
as a race continuing its existence for thousands of centuries without
either wives and children, or money for support, and with only the
palm-trees for companions in its retreat from the storms of the world.
Philo, who calls the Essenes "the holy ones," after the Greek ὅσιοι,
says in one place (as quoted by Eusebius, "Præparatio Evangelica,"
viii. 11) that ten thousand of them had been initiated by Moses into
the mysteries of the sect, which, consisting of men of advanced years
having neither wives nor children, practised the virtues of love and
holiness and inhabited many cities and villages of Judea, living in
communism as tillers of the soil or as mechanics according to common
rules of simplicity and abstinence. In another passage ("Quod Omnis
Probus Liber," 12 et seq.) he speaks of only four thousand Essenes,
who lived as farmers and artisans apart from the cities and in a
perfect state of communism, and who condemned slavery, avoided
sacrifice, abstained from swearing, strove for holiness, and were
particularly scrupulous regarding the Sabbath, which day was devoted
to the reading and allegorical interpretation of the Law. Josephus
("Ant." xv. 10, § 4; xviii. 1, § 5; "B. J." ii. 8, §§ 2-13) describes
them partly as a philosophical school like the Pythagoreans, and
mystifies the reader by representing them as a kind of monastic order
with semi-pagan rites. Accordingly, the strangest theories have been
advanced by non-Jewish writers, men like Zeller, Hilgenfeld, and
Schürer, who found in Essenism a mixture of Jewish and pagan ideas and
customs, taking it for granted that a class of Jews of this kind could
have existed for centuries without leaving a trace in rabbinical
literature, and, besides, ignoring the fact that Josephus describes
the Pharisees and Sadducees also as philosophical schools after Greek
models.

Their Communism.(comp. B. M. ii. 11).

"No one possesses a house absolutely his own, one which does not at
the same time belong to all; for in addition to living together in
companies ["ḥaburot"] their houses are open also to their adherents
coming from other quarters [comp. Aboti. 5]. They have one storehouse
for all, and the same diet; their garments belong to all in common,
and their meals are taken in common. . . . Whatever they receive for
their wages after having worked the whole day they do not keep as
their own, but bring into the common treasury for the use of all; nor
do they neglect the sick who are unable to contribute their share, as
they have in their treasury ample means to offer relief to those in
need. [One of the two Ḥasidean and rabbinical terms for renouncing all
claim to one's property in order to deliver it over to common use is
"hefker" (declaring a thing ownerless; comp. Sanh. 49a); Joab, as the
type of an

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Could God die again ?

[CeJ]

Was I referring specifically to Nestorians? No, that is why I used the
broader term 'non-trinitarian', which would include Christians who did
not think Christ a god, and if 'divine', no more divine than the rest
of humanity.
The Nestorians appear to have 'softened up' C. Asia to Islamic
conversions later on.

CJ

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Could God die again ?

[CeJ]

When I look at the archives, my Weitling post looks cut off. Something
must have happened with the text pasted into the gmail.

At any rate, more interesting is his own work in pdf online.

www.duke.edu/web/secmod/primarytexts/Weitling-SinnersGospel.pdf

Do it as a separate download (right click, save as...), or your
browser is likely to 'hang'.

Also interesting is what Engels wrote in 1843:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/10/23.htm

The New Moral World No. 21, November 18, 1843

Germany had her Social Reformers as early as the Reformation. Soon
after Luther had begun to proclaim church reform and to agitate the
people against spiritual authority, the peasantry of Southern and
Middle Germany rose in a general insurrection against their temporal
lords. Luther always stated his object to be, to return to original
Christianity in doctrine and practice; the peasantry took exactly the
same standing, and demanded, therefore, not only the ecclesiastical,
but also the social practice of primitive Christianity. They conceived
a state of villainy and servitude, such as they lived under, to be
inconsistent with the doctrines of the Bible; they were oppressed by a
set of haughty barons and earls, robbed and treated like their cattle
every day, they had no law to protect them, and if they had, they
found nobody to enforce it. Such a state contrasted very much with the
communities of early Christians and the doctrines of Christ, as laid
down in the Bible. Therefore they arose and began a war against their
lords, which could only be a war of extermination. Thomas Munzer, a
preacher, whom they placed at their head, issued a proclamation, [162]
full, of course, of the religious and superstitious nonsense of the
age, but containing also among others, principles like these: That
according to the Bible, no Christian is entitled to hold any property
whatever exclusively for himself; that community of property is the
only proper state for a society of Christians; that it is not allowed
to any good Christian to have any authority or command over other
Christians, nor to hold any office of government or hereditary power,
but on the contrary, that, as all men are equal before God, so they
ought to be on earth also. These doctrines were nothing but
conclusions drawn from the Bible and from Luther’s own writings; but
the Reformer was not prepared to go as far as the people did;
notwithstanding the courage he displayed against the spiritual
authorities, he had not freed himself from the political and social
prejudices of his age; he believed as firmly in the right divine of
princes and landlords to trample upon the people, as he did in the
Bible. Besides this, he wanted the protection of the aristocracy and
the Protestant princes, and thus he wrote a tract against the rioters
disclaiming not only every connection with them, but also exhorting
the aristocracy to put them down with the utmost severity, as rebels
against the laws of God. “Kill them like dogs!” he exclaimed. The
whole tract is written with such an animosity, nay, fury and
fanaticism against the people, that it will ever form a blot upon
Luther’s character; it shows that, if he began his career as a man of
the people, he was now entirely in the service of their oppressors.
The insurrection, after a most bloody civil war, was suppressed, and
the peasants reduced to their former servitude.

If we except some solitary instances, of which no notice was taken by
the public, there has been no party of Social Reformers in Germany,
since the peasants’ war, up to a very recent date. The public mind
during the last fifty years was too much occupied with questions of
either a merely political or merely metaphysical nature ? questions,
which had to be answered, before the social question could be
discussed with the necessary calmness and knowledge. Men, who would
have been decidedly opposed to a system of community, if such had been
proposed to them, were nevertheless paving the way for its
introduction.

It was among the working class of Germany that Social Reform has been
of late made again a topic of discussion. Germany having comparatively
little manufacturing industry, the mass of the working classes is made
up by handicraftsmen, who previous to their establishing themselves as
little masters, travel for some years over Germany, Switzerland, and
very often over France also. A great number of German workmen is thus
continually going to and from Paris, and must of course there become
acquainted with the political and social movements of the French
working classes. One of these men, William Weitling, a native of
Magdeburg in Prussia, and a simple journeyman-tailor, resolved to
establish communities in his own country.

This man, who is to be considered as the founder of German Communism,
after a few years’ stay in Paris, went to Switzerland, and, whilst he
was working in some tailor’s shop in Geneva, preached his new gospel
to his fellow-workmen. He formed Communi

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cox tries to think out making movement

[waistline2]

In a message dated 1/6/2010 2:08:21 P.M.  Pacific Standard Time, 
cb31...@gmail.com writes:

>> But, as we know  from earlier surges of the left in the U.S. and
elsewhere, the effectiveness  of such organizing is dependent on
conditions that are unpredictable and that  cannot be artificially
brought into existence. The political question, then,  within an
interim period such as our own since 1975 is what kind of work  and
thought in the present does the hypothesis of such a period in  the
future demand.<<

Carrol  


Comment
 
Cox is old enough and experienced enough to generally land on his feet and  
on the right side of theoretical and political questions . . . all the 
time. His  unraveling of the "right" and "left" involved in overthrowing Jim 
Crow is  astute. That is to say. I like his mind set on basically all the 
issues most of  the time. I would be honored to be in the same organization as 
him, not  withstanding norm individual differences in interpretation of 
history. 
 
WL. 

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Cox tries to think out making movement

[c b]

[lbo-talk] Bill Gross fulminates
Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Jan 6 09:16:27 PST 2010

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Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> [Bill Gross is the world's biggest bondholder. He's not a standard-
> issue Wall Street hack, but he's far from an oddball...]
>
>  >
>
> Investment Outlook
> Bill Gross | January 2010
>
> Let’s Get Fisical
>
> A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal
> poll reported that over 65% of Americans trust their government to do
> the right thing “only some of the time” and a stunning 19% said
> “never.”




Let's play with that figure.

Let's assume that 15% are from a reactionary perspective.

That leaves 4% of the population oppose state olicy from a leftists
perspective. Also lets assume that about 2/3 of the u.s. population
consists of mentally and physically active persons (excluding nursing
home residents, for example, but including prison populations). So we
have a potential for left organizing of 8 million people.

How many people, (in the period from Rosa Parks to the defeat of ERA)
participated actively in the movements of the '60s? Note I say
movementS, plural. And I include among those active partiicpants
everyone from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to some stray 15-year
old who went to one Anti-Wardemonstration in 1971. (All these have
both a right and an obligation to refer to "Waht WE accomplished in
the '60s: For the central achievement of that decade was the temporary
creation of a WE of tha inclusiveness, so that that 16-year old has a
right and an obligation to say "We smashed Jim Crow in the Southh,"
eventhough he had not been born when Rosa Parks said No. The creation
of such an inclusive "WE" is one of the measures of a serious mass
movementfor social change.

So how many people were involved in that movement (that coalescnce of
those movementS)? I can't imagine it was much over a million. And
probably less than 100,000 were in the various activities that created
the sparks that caused a prairie fire. The total population was
smaller then, but my guess is (experts in demographics can correct me
here) that counting activists and the more enthusiastic of the
passviie supporters on the sidelines, from one too two percent of the
population constituted the Movment which changed u.s. socie5ty more
profounly than anything since the Civil War.

Someone said of slogans I had introduced that they would turn off 98%
of the population. I'm not that optimistic -- I would guess between 99
and 99.5$ would be turned off. But that .05$ would represent a larger
number than those who _triggered_ the events of the '60s!

Obviously all these numbers are sort of wild guesses, but I think they
accurately gesture towards the order of magnitude involved. There
would seem to be (say) at least three or four million people in the
U.S. today that have sufficient passive agreement or potential
agreement with seriously radical left politics that if they could be
mobilized (as bodies and intellects) in a more or less compatible
collection of movments for this or that -- enough to generate a
Movement that would shake the nation to its roots, gatherrng both
increasing numbers of passive supporters AND increasing numbers of
hysterical opponents (whose hysteria would make intelligent governing
more difficult) as to ccreate a social context frighteningly and
joyfully open to the future.

All that, incidentally, is what I have meant over the years in
isisting that left agitation appeal primarily to those who already in
some way or other agree with us. The mobilizing of that potential
constituency is a necessary preconditon of reaching any larger
population.

But, as we know from ealier surges of the left in the U.S. and
elsewhere, the effectiveness of such organizing is dependent on
conditons that are unpredictable and that cannot be artificially
brought into existence. The political question, then, within an
interim period such as our own since 1975 is what kind of work and
thought in the present does the hypothesis of such a period in the
future demand.

Carrol

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[Marxism-Thaxis] The Climate Justice Movement Breaks Through

[c b]

The Climate Justice Movement Breaks Through (1)
12/11/09 •
MARK ENGLER
In early September 2006, Johann Hari, a columnist for the British
newspaper The Independent

http://theactivist.org/blog/the-climate-justice-movement-breaks-through

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[Marxism-Thaxis] The Relevance of Lenin Today

[c b]

The Relevance of Lenin Today
Posted by Jason Schulman on 1/04/10 • Categorized as Exogenous Views, Theory


http://theactivist.org/blog/the-relevance-of-lenin-today



SAMUEL FARBER

The left has been experiencing a situation somewhat similar to the
World War I years. At that time, the abject failure of social
democracy to oppose the imperialist war produced a major crisis on the
left. This crisis was eventually “resolved” by the October Revolution
and the development of a new revolutionary politics in the form of the
young Soviet state and the Communist International. Meanwhile, social
democracy reconstituted itself as more openly and frankly reformist,
and reduced the revolutionary phraseology particularly common in the
May Day strikes at the turn of the century.

We now live in a period of a collapsed Communism that, with the
partial exception of Poland, was not overthrown by a mass movement
from below. Instead, Communism fell as a result of the disintegration
produced by the systemic contradictions of this new form of class
society different from both capitalism and genuine socialism (i.e.,
the democratic rule of the polity and the economy by the working class
and its allies). Social democracy continues to live on as the
increasingly ineffective regulator and rationalizer of capitalism
without even the pretense of a serious class-based reformism. It is
hardly surprising that the left is disoriented and in disarray since
there are no signs of the emergence of a new socialist paradigm to
take the place of these two bankrupt political schools. Such a new
paradigm cannot be hothoused as an understandably desperate Leon
Trotsky attempted to do in 1938 with the creation of a Fourth
International lacking mass support. The experiences of the current
struggles for racial and gender equality and national
self-determination will undoutedly become part of the new paradigm. So
will the lessons learned from working-class struggles, now beginning
to emerge from the long slump that began, in the United States, with
concessionary unionism at the end of the 1970s and Reagan’s
suppression of PATCO in 1980.

The dramatic new realities of the coming century will require a
revolutionary synthesis that will have to start from scratch. It no
longer suffices, if it ever did, to counterpose any of a number of
narrow perspectives, be they Anarchism, Trotskyism or Luxemburgism, to
the heretofore hegemonic social democracy and Communism. Nevertheless,
starting from scratch does not mean that the new will not carry within
it elements of the old, aside from the fact that it is often desirable
to borrow explicitly from some of the previously established
perspectives.

What are likely to be the useful elements of Lenin’s politics for a
democratic revolutionary socialism of the 21st century? I believe that
Lenin’s most important contribution to Marxism and revolutionary
politics was his ability to take the pulse of the historical moment
and define the political situation in conjunctural terms. What I have
in mind here was Lenin’s ability to “go for the jugular,” that is, to
disentangle an often complex situation and seize the main element or
trend within that situation. Closely related to this was his ability
to understand the changes in working-class and popular consciousness
and the direction in which it was headed at a particular moment. Lenin
was a consummate politician (in the non-corrupt sense of the term)
within a Marxist tradition that has often attracted people who care
about many things other than politics. Marxism offers a philosophy of
history, a body of economic theory and a class-based sociology. But
while necessary to Marxism, these are not sufficient as a guide to
action. For this one also requires the development of politics as an
art or skill. Otherwise Marxism becomes an abstract and schematic body
of knowledge quite unsuited to political action. Thus, for example,
the decision to participate in elections to the Tsarist-controlled
Duma could not and should not have been made, according to Lenin, on a
once for all basis without regard for the particular set of
circumstances prevailing in each election.

Along the same lines, the decision to actually move to overthrow the
Provisional Government in the Fall of 1917 was necessarily affected by
almost daily conjunctural changes. Lenin was correct in insisting that
once the political decision was made to organize an insurrection,
tactical considerations of a military type moved to the foreground and
could not be downgraded as secondary matters. While Lenin’s emphasis
on the working class as the principal agent of social transformation
more than matched that of any other majorfigure in the classical
Marxist tradition, he did not interpret this commitment in a narrow
“workerist” fashion. It was Lenin who emphasized that a true social
democrat had to be a “Tribune of the People” to whom no social
conflict fell outside the sphere of socialist politics. That the
working class m

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marxism, Marxists and US Civil War

[waistline2]

This is really excellent material across the board Thanks. One reactionary  
author puts forth Robert E. Lee and his family freeing of slaves as proof 
of the  intentions of the Confederacy, when most familiar with our history 
know that  Jefferson Davis was the man and President of the Confederacy. Ole 
man Jeff Davis  was amongst the largest slaveholder in the South, if not the 
largest period. The  South had a better chance of resolving history in their 
favor by freeing the  slaves in 1776, but ole man George Washington was the 
largest slave holder of  that period. 
 
The Obama administration is facing a historical alignment that is the  
South/North political axis under fundamentally different conditions of capital  
development. The only slaves left to be freed in America are the wage slaves 
and  in this sense Obama is not Lincoln. In the sense of the historic form 
of  American political reaction he has the appearance of  Lincoln. .  
America is not passing through a period of antagonism between different forms 
of  
capital/labor. 


WL. 
 

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[Marxism-Thaxis] German or “True” Socialism

[c b]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch03.htm

C. German or “True” Socialism
The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that
originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was
the expressions of the struggle against this power, was introduced
into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just
begun its contest with feudal absolutism.

German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits (men of
letters), eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting, that
when these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social
conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German
social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate
practical significance and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to
the German philosophers of the Eighteenth Century, the demands of the
first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of
“Practical Reason” in general, and the utterance of the will of the
revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified, in their eyes, the laws of
pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true human Will
generally.

The work of the German literati consisted solely in bringing the new
French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience,
or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own
philosophic point of view.

This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language
is appropriated, namely, by translation.

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints
over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient
heathendom had been written. The German literati reversed this process
with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical
nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French
criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote “Alienation
of Humanity”, and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois state
they wrote “Dethronement of the Category of the General”, and so
forth.

The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the
French historical criticisms, they dubbed “Philosophy of Action”,
“True Socialism”, “German Science of Socialism”, “Philosophical
Foundation of Socialism”, and so on.

The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely
emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to
express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of
having overcome “French one-sidedness” and of representing, not true
requirements, but the requirements of Truth; not the interests of the
proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who
belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty
realm of philosophical fantasy.

This German socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and
solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such a mountebank
fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.

The fight of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie,
against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the
liberal movement, became more earnest.

By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered to “True”
Socialism of confronting the political movement with the Socialist
demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism,
against representative government, against bourgeois competition,
bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois
liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had
nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement.
German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French
criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of
modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions
of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very
things those attainment was the object of the pending struggle in
Germany.

To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons,
professors, country squires, and officials, it served as a welcome
scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.

It was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills of flogging and bullets,
with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German
working-class risings.

While this “True” Socialism thus served the government as a weapon for
fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly
represented a reactionary interest, the interest of German
Philistines. In Germany, the petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the
sixteenth century, and since then constantly cropping up again under
the various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of
things.

To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in
Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie
threatens it with certain destruction — on the one hand, from the
concentration of capital; on the o

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] COMMUNISTS’ EFFECT ON AMERICA

[c b]

Ralph Dumain  wrote:
> Amazing. Is this one and the same ideological complex to be found in
> the current red-baiting of Obama? It seems so.

^
CB: Yes and no.  Obama isn't doing anything "communist".  Lincoln
executed the main US Communist platform plank for his day: abolish
slavery.  He did have the support of the commies and reds of his day.
And, then before Marx and Engels and communists became quite as
notorious as today, it wouldn't have been so scandalous or radical to
champion labor over capital as Lincoln does in the famous quote.

There's a whole "literature" of neo-Confederates demonstrating that
Lincoln was a Marxist/Communist. Oh please don't throw him into that
briar patch, masters.  These modern reactionaries think that painting
Lincoln red as a communist, in the modern period will discredit
Lincoln and the North in the Civil War. What it does is _give_ kudos
to Marx, Engels ,Wedemeyer and Communists for being so militantly and
radically anti-slavery compared to most in their day. Communists were
as militantly anti-slavery as other abolitionists; and of course they
were active supporters of the labor and trade union movements of their
day. Wedemeyer was a professional soldier in Germany; and Germany had
a leading military "culture".  So, many of the '48ers' like Wedemeyer
brought a high level of military science skills to the aid of the
North in the war; there were a lot of German generals and other
officers in the Union Army at the start. And many of the 48'ers had
experience with fighting from the 1848 revolutionary war in Germany






>
> At 11:31 AM 1/6/2010, c b wrote:
> >Ironically, it is the neo-Confederate rightwingers who are , I guess,
> >trying to bring back slavery in the South, who chronicle the enormous
> >contributions of German Communists to the military cause of the North
> >in the Civil War
> >
> >CB
> >
> >COMMUNISTS' EFFECT ON AMERICA
> >
> >
> >http://www.southernheritage411.com/truehistory.php?th=122
>
>
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[Marxism-Thaxis] Marxism, Marxists and US Civil War

[c b]

Here's the link that asserts that Lincoln owned a German language newspaper

CB

[Marxism-Thaxis] Marx on Lincoln; Lincoln owned German language newspaper
Charles Brown charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us
Thu May 8 08:43:35 MDT 2008


[Marxism-Thaxis] Marx on Lincoln; Lincoln owned German language
newspaper   Charles Brown
[Marxism-Thaxis] Marx on Lincoln; Lincoln owned German language
newspaper   Charles Brown
[Marxism-Thaxis] Marx on Lincoln; Lincoln owned German language
newspaper   Ralph Dumain




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Before becoming President, Lincoln owned a German language newspaper.
The large number of German immigrants who had been on the rvolutionary
side with Marx and Engels in 1848 were an important block of
abolitionists, and supporters of Lincoln's election.  The Marxist
organizer  Wedenmeyer  was a professional soldier , and main
correspondent with M and E in this period. He lived in Illinois. We
can speculate as to whether Lincoln was aware of _The Communist
Manifesto_ , or even Marx and Engels articles on the Civil War. They
may have written him letters.



"1859 Abraham Lincoln acquires the "Illinois Staatsanzeiger" paper and
struggles through German grammar "
http://www.cloudnet.com/~edrbsass/GermAmChron.htm




Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1862

Comments on the North American Events

clip

Lincoln’s proclamation( emancipation proclamation) is even more important than
 the Maryland campaign. Lincoln is a sui generis figure
 in the annals of history. he has no initiative, no idealistic
 impetus, cothurnus, no historical trappings. He gives his
most important actions always the most commonplace form.
Other people claim to be “fighting for an idea”, when it is for
 them a matter of square feet of land. Lincoln, even when
he is motivated by, an idea, talks about “square feet”. He
sings the bravura aria of his part hesitatively, reluctantly
and unwillingly, as though apologising for being compelled
by circumstances “to act the lion”. The most redoubtable
 decrees - which will always remain remarkable historical
documents-flung by him at the enemy all look like, and are
intended to look like, routine summonses sent by a lawyer
to the lawyer of the opposing party, legal chicaneries,
involved, hidebound actiones juris. His latest proclamation,
 which is drafted in the same style, the manifesto abolishing
slavery, is the most important document in American history
 since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the
tearing tip of the old American Constitution.

Nothing is simpler than to show that Lincoln’s principa
l political actions contain much that is aesthetically.
repulsive, logically inadequate, farcical in form and
 politically, contradictory, as is done by, the English
Pindars of slavery, The Times, The Saturday Review
and tutti quanti. But Lincoln’s place in the history of the
United States and of mankind will, nevertheless,
be next to that of Washington! Nowadays, when
 the insignificant struts about melodramatically on this
 side of the Atlantic, is it of no significance at all that the
significant is clothed in everyday dress in the new world?

Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution.
 This plebeian, who worked his way tip from stone-breaker
to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without
a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional
importance-an average person of good will, was placed
at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal
suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new
 world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this
 demonstration that, given its political and social
organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish
feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!

Hegel once observed that comedy is in act superior
to tragedy and humourous reasoning superior to
grandiloquent reasoning.[Lectures on Aesthetics]
Although Lincoln does riot possess the grandiloquence of
 historical action, as an average man of the people he
 has its humour. When (foes he issue the proclamation
declaring that from January 1, 1863, slavery in the.
Confederacy shall be abolished At the very moment when
 the Confederacy as an independent state decided on
 “peace negotiations- at its Richmond Congress. At the
very, moment when the slave-owners of the border
states believed that the invasion of Kentucky by the
 armies of the South had made “the peculiar institution”
 just as safe as was their domination over their compatriot,
 President Abraham Lincoln in Washington.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1862/10/12.htm

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: COMMUNISTS’ EFFECT ON A MERICA

[Ralph Dumain]

Amazing. Is this one and the same ideological complex to be found in 
the current red-baiting of Obama? It seems so.

At 11:31 AM 1/6/2010, c b wrote:
>Ironically, it is the neo-Confederate rightwingers who are , I guess,
>trying to bring back slavery in the South, who chronicle the enormous
>contributions of German Communists to the military cause of the North
>in the Civil War
>
>CB
>
>COMMUNISTS' EFFECT ON AMERICA
>
>
>http://www.southernheritage411.com/truehistory.php?th=122


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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Could God die again ?

[Ralph Dumain]

Wilson is another reactionary ignoramus, certainly not a "new" 
atheist, any more than his pal Dawkins is new.

At 01:43 PM 1/6/2010, c b wrote:
>Another biologist on religion. Wilson is a main sociobiologist.
>
>CB
>
>http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2005-November/019411.html
>
>
>Wilson: science and religion are incompatible
>Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
>Thu Nov 17 13:52:26 MST 2005
>
>Previous message: [Marxism-Thaxis] OBSERVORMAN: the 'contemplative
>attitude' & student rebellion
>Next message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Wilson: science and religion are incompatible
>Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>[Marxism] Wilson: science and religion are incompatible
>
>acpollack2 at juno.com acpollack2 at juno.com
>ience%20and%20religion%20are%20incompatible&In-Reply-To=>
>Mon Nov 14 11:38:34 MST 2005
>
>
>Check out
>http://www.harvardmagazine.com/lib/05nd/pdf/1105-29.pdf
>(found at aldaily.com), which is E.O. Wilson's intro to the new combined
>edition of Darwin's books.
>In it he quotes Darwin attacking Christianity as a "damnable doctrine"
>and wonders why anyone would want to believe in it. This in the course
>of Wilson arguing AGAINST recent and increasing attempts to claim
>science and religion can and should be reconciled.
>
>He also takes a swipe at "Marxism-Leninism" for its alleged theory
>of humanity as a blank slate. His arguments, while themselves one-
>sided, are worth engaging with. A more nuanced version of what
>he calls "scientific humanism," i.e. the notion that people are
>products of both nature and nurture, is of course fully compatible
>with a mature Marxist analysis.
>
>___


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[Marxism-Thaxis] Could God die again ?

[c b]

Another biologist on religion. Wilson is a main sociobiologist.

CB

http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2005-November/019411.html


Wilson: science and religion are incompatible
Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Thu Nov 17 13:52:26 MST 2005

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[Marxism] Wilson: science and religion are incompatible

acpollack2 at juno.com acpollack2 at juno.com

Mon Nov 14 11:38:34 MST 2005


Check out
http://www.harvardmagazine.com/lib/05nd/pdf/1105-29.pdf
(found at aldaily.com), which is E.O. Wilson's intro to the new combined
edition of Darwin's books.
In it he quotes Darwin attacking Christianity as a "damnable doctrine"
and wonders why anyone would want to believe in it. This in the course
of Wilson arguing AGAINST recent and increasing attempts to claim
science and religion can and should be reconciled.

He also takes a swipe at "Marxism-Leninism" for its alleged theory
of humanity as a blank slate. His arguments, while themselves one-
sided, are worth engaging with. A more nuanced version of what
he calls "scientific humanism," i.e. the notion that people are
products of both nature and nurture, is of course fully compatible
with a mature Marxist analysis.

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] ] Could God die again ? : Dennett

[farmela...@juno.com]

My take on the New Atheists
(including Dennett) here:
http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant/Papers/129476/The-New-Atheism--and-New-Humanism-

Jim F.

-- Original Message --
From: c b 
To: Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and the 
thinkers he inspired 
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] ] Could God die again ? : Dennett
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 12:31:33 -0500

Dennett's Breaking the Spell

http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2006-February/019846.html

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Wed Feb 1 07:58:48 MST 2006





Criminal Lawyer
Criminal Lawyers - Click here.
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[Marxism-Thaxis] Could God die again ? : Dennett

[c b]

[Marxism-Thaxis] Religion and science: a reply to a right-wing attack
on philosopher Daniel Dennett
Ralph Dumain rdumain at igc.org

http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2006-March/020131.html

Wed Mar 22 08:15:33 MST 2006




I read Wieseltier’s weaselly review, and while I understand the reaction
against him, there are a few things here that trouble me.

A picture is painted of an intellectual climate so rabidly repressive and
pro-religion, or intimidated by religion, that Dennett is innovative,
courageous and iconoclastic even to bring up religion as a topic for
scientific study, i.e. by the fundamentalists' nemesis, evolutionary
biology.  Is this true? Is Dennett doing something so bold, so innovative,
so cutting-edge, so threatening, that it stakes out a hazardous new
territory in the manner of Galileo and Darwin?  It may be that my
perception and experience are skewed, and that what seems to be relatively
straightforward and banal is horribly shocking.  Nobody ever thought to
examine religion scientifically before?  Could this be true?  Or has the
ideological climate deteriorated so badly that a Dennett is one of the few
holding down the fort for a scientific view of the world?  Why is this a
"radical venture"?  Tell me.

It is difficult to tell from any of these reviews what the scientific
content of Dennett's claims actually are.  I missed his talk in DC.  Two
friends attended it, both of whom hold comparable views.  One thought he
was terrific, the other thought he was insipid.  The former is reading the
book likes it, the latter hasn't looked at it.  The one who is reading it
has not yet told me of its substantive scientific content.  So what am I to
make of this?

The charge of scientism means little unless one knows what scientism is and
the object of study allegedly being violated thereby.  One could also say
the same of reductionism.  It is, unfortunately, rather difficult to say
whether Dennett is guilty or innocent of either from these reviews.  I am
inherently suspicious of sociobiology as an avenue to explanation of social
and ideological phenomena, though undoubtedly evolutionary biology must be
a component of our understanding along with social theory.  It's too bad we
don't have a social climate that promotes a more sophisticated public
discourse.

At 09:21 AM 3/22/2006 -0500, Jim Farmelant wrote:

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Could God die again ? : Dennett

[c b]

Religion and science: a reply to a right-wing attack on philosopher
Daniel Dennett

http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2006-March/020130.html

Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Wed Mar 22 07:21:18 MST 2006

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/denn-m21.shtml

The 19 February 2006 issue of the New York Times Book Review carries a
tendentious attack on Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural
Phenomenon, the latest work by American philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Dennett is best known as a philosopher of evolutionary biology and for
his earlier books, Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous
Idea—works that make significant contributions to the defense of
Darwinism and philosophical materialism. In his earlier books, Dennett
showed himself to be a skilled and thoughtful popularizer of the most
important philosophical ramifications of the modern conception of
evolution, and a shrewd exposer of many of the superficial attempts to
discredit it or sow confusion about it. He is also acutely sensitive to
the politically reactionary role played by those who are now attempting
to reintroduce creationism under the guise of “intelligent design.”
Dennett is himself an ardent atheist. In the intellectual climate that
prevails in academia, these positions require a laudable degree of
courage.

Breaking the Spell proposes a radical venture: to make a scientific study
of religion. Dennett rejects the idea of the late Stephen Jay Gould that
religion and science occupy two separate “magesteria” that ought to and
can co-exist peacefully as long as neither intrudes on the other’s
dominion. Dennett refuses to abide by the injunction that scientists
should refrain from looking too closely at religion.

Dennett’s proposal to study religion does not mean only subjecting
religion’s claims to logical scrutiny. It is not for him only a matter of
counterposing religion to science. Instead, he seeks to use the methods
of science to inquire into the natural reasons for the continued
prevalence of religion. Why is it, he asks, that religion has not only
survived, but expanded in influence even after its claims about the world
have been shown to be false?

Dennett’s book does not attempt the exhaustive investigation that it
proposes, but it does provide an introduction to a significant body of
existing literature on the subject and proposes a number of potential
avenues of development and inquiry. Dennett is undeniably correct to
claim that a taboo exists that creates real barriers to the study he
proposes. To look at religion under the scrutinizing microscope of
science is regarded, within the prevailing intellectual climate, as
entirely unacceptable.

Dennett is also right to insist that such a study is all the more
necessary in light of the immense political influence still wielded by
religion in modern life. For this reason, he expects hostility not only
from the official representatives of the major religious denominations,
but especially from those academics and intellectuals eager to defend
religion for essentially political reasons.

A particularly banal and duplicitous example of such a “defense” of
religion was provided in Leon Wieseltier’s assessment of the book, which
appeared in the February, 19 issue of the New York Times Book Review.
Wieseltier is the literary editor of the New Republic, a journal in which
the right-wing trajectory of the Democratic Party intersects with that of
the Republican neo-conservative right. Wieseltier embodies the magazine’s
orientation. He is crass defender of American imperialism and a member of
the Project for a New American Century, which argued for an invasion of
Iraq from the time of the group’s inception in the mid-1990s. Prior to
this review, Wieseltier’s most recent polemical exercise was a
denunciation of Steven Spielberg’s film Munich for being “anti-Israel.”

The first question that ought to be asked about Wieseltier’s review is
why he was asked to submit it in the first place. One presumes that the
Times Book Review could have easily called upon an expert in philosophy,
biology, anthropology or comparative religion, to suggest only the most
obvious disciplines. Instead it decided to commission a right-wing
ideologue to perform a hatchet job on Dennett’s book. Given Wieseltier’s
religious and political commitments, his selection is highly significant
because of what it says about the agenda of the New York Times Book
Review editors. They chose him in order to give a platform to a defender
of religion to attack science.

Wieseltier knows enough to realize that religion cannot be defended by
attempting to refute what science has to say about it. There is 

[Marxism-Thaxis] ] Could God die again ? : Dennett

[c b]

Dennett's Breaking the Spell

http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2006-February/019846.html

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Wed Feb 1 07:58:48 MST 2006

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Ralph Dumain
I suspect this is bullshit, but what do you think?

Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
by Daniel C. Dennett
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067003472X/qid=1138785320/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs
_b_2_1/002-9455841-5053647?s=books&v=glance&n=283155




>From Publishers Weekly
In his characteristically provocative fashion, Dennett, author of Darwin's
Dangerous Idea and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts
University, calls for a scientific, rational examination of religion that
will lead us to understand what purpose religion serves in our culture.

^^^
CB: Well, today religion is not biologically or evolutionarily functioning
,as "ancestor worship" would have been highly adaptive in relation to the
environment of the first humans. Rather today religion is as Feuerbach and
Marx analyzed it, and then of course it is big in the class struggle,
dividing the working class in countries and internationally. The current
U.S. war on Islam is , obviously front and center in capitalist strategy for
continuing to dominate the world.

So, now I see a way in which the Dawkins and Dennetts' vulgar biological
determinism diverts from anti-capitalist struggle.

^



Much like E.O. Wilson (In Search of Nature), Robert Wright (The Moral
Animal), and Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene), Dennett explores religion
as a cultural phenomenon governed by the processes of evolution and natural
selection. Religion survives because it has some kind of beneficial role in
human life, yet Dennett argues that it has also played a maleficent role. He
elegantly pleads for religions to engage in empirical self-examination to
protect future generations from the ignorance so often fostered by religion
hiding behind doctrinal smoke screens. Because Dennett offers a tentative
proposal for exploring religion as a natural phenomenon, his book is
sometimes plagued by generalizations that leave us wanting more ("Only when
we can frame a comprehensive view of the many aspects of religion can we
formulate defensible policies for how to respond to religions in the
future"). Although much of the ground he covers has already been well trod,
he clearly throws down a gauntlet to religion. (Feb. 6)
Copyright C Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All
rights reserved.

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[Marxism-Thaxis] Could God die again ? : Dennett

[c b]

Another post from Ralph on Dennett.

CB

Dennett's Breaking the Spell
Ralph Dumain rdumain at igc.org
Wed Feb 1 02:33:18 MST 2006

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I suspect this is bullshit, but what do you think?

Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
by Daniel C. Dennett
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067003472X/qid=1138785320/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-9455841-5053647?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

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[Marxism-Thaxis] ] Could God die again ? : Dennett

[c b]

Daniel_Dennett wikipedia note:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2006-February/019940.html

"Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942) is a prominent American
philosopher. Dennett's research centers on philosophy of mind and philosophy
of science, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and
cognitive science."

Dennett is the author of several major books on evolution and consciousness.
He is a leading proponent of the theory known by some as Neural Darwinism
(see also greedy reductionism).
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2006-February/019941.html

http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2006-February/019942.html

Dennett is also well known for his argument
against qualia, which claims that the concept is so confused that it cannot
be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore
does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism. This argument was
presented most comprehensively in his book Consciousness Explained.


The term Neural Darwinism is used in two different ways. In one usage it is
the theory that consciousness can be explained by Darwinian selection and
evolution of neural states. In the other it describes a process in
neurodevelopment where synapses which are being most used are kept while
least used connections are destroyed or 'pruned' to form neural pathways.


Greedy reductionism is a term coined by Daniel Dennett, in the book Darwin's
Dangerous Idea, to distinguish between acceptable and erroneous forms of
reductionism. Whereas reductionism means explaining a thing in terms of what
it reduces to, greedy reductionism comes when the thing we are trying to
understand is explained away instead of explained, so that we fail to gain
any additional understanding of the original target



Dennett's views on evolution are identified as being strongly adaptionist,
in line with the views of zoologist Richard Dawkins. In Darwin's Dangerous
Idea, Dennett showed himself even more willing than Dawkins to defend
adaptionism in print, devoting an entire chapter to a criticism of the views
of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. This has led to some backlash from
Gould and his supporters, who allege that Dennett overstated his claims and
misrepresented Gould's. [1]

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[Marxism-Thaxis] ] Could God die again ? : Dennett

[c b]

andie had read some of Dennett's philosophy writing, natch (smile).

CB


Dennett on religion & eovlution
Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Mon Feb 13 19:27:27 MST 2006




andie:
Also I don't know of any evidence that peoples who
exhibited "religious" behaviors, if that's what those
are, outreproduced peoples who didn't, but that mayt
just be my anthropological ignorance.  No doubt people
with common beliefs and values what could form a
basis of cooperation and mutual trust did better on
average, but there's no reason that beliefs and values
had to be religious in any interesting sense.


CB: From use of the comparative method, it seems likely that all the first
religions were what are now termed "animistic". Spirit is in everything type
of stuff.


^^
Finally, Dennett. In his younger days he  wrote some
very interesting papers in philosophy of mind, e.g.,
in Brainstorms. Last time I read him was his book
Consciousness Explained in the mid 90s -- I thought it
was just awful. Dreadful, Really appalling.  He is
also an intolerably cutesy-wootsy writer, a stylistic
defect of the old MIT crowd. So I'd be surprised if
this book had much to offer.


CB: Yea, _Darwin's Dangeous Idea_ is cutesy-wootsy, alright.


Dennett on religion & eovlution
andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Mon Feb 13 14:04:25 MST 2006

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I don't think that there is anything wrong with
biological explanations of social behavior if they're
sensible done with proper methodological standards.
One thing that has to be remembered in this context is
that a "biological" explanation --a  proper one -- is
ipso facto an environmental explanation (including the
cultureal environment -- biological propensities are
just propensities of our biology to manifest
themselves in certain ways in a given range of
environments.  The classical Darwinan example of the
black winged moths that flourishedw ith the rise of
the dark, Satantic mills is a case in point.

This goes for behavior too, though I believe the
evidence for any tight connection between almost any
behavior and any genrtic (in particular) contribution
is any envirinment is pretty speculative. The most
impressive sociobiological explanations I have seen
concern sexual behavior, and that is what you'd
expect, given the close link between sexuality and
reproduction -- the heart of natural selection.

The idea that religion has much of a genetic basis
eems shakier.  One might speculate that cultures with
religions were more likelu to produce more children
who reached reproductive age than cultures with out,
but it's not obvious how this works in the way that,
for example, the idea that a propensity to have males
stay with their mates and offspring would have that
effect.  Besides, it is my undedstanding that
anthropologically we don't get evidence of anything we
might think of as religion, such as burials with
tokens like food or arrows, etc. that might be
interpreted as being useful in an afterlife, until
about 40,000 years ago. Now human evolution hasn't
stopped in that period, but from a biological point of
view we've "evolved" (no suggestion of progress) much
faster culturally than biologically in these 40
millenia.

Also I don't know of any evidence that peoples who
exhibited "religious" behaviors, if that's what those
are, outreproduced peoples who didn't, but that mayt
just be my anthropological ignorance.  No doubt people
with common beliefs and values what could form a
basis of cooperation and mutual trust did better on
average, but there's no reason that beliefs and values
had to be religious in any interesting sense.

I note that "religion" is a slippery term and
certainly does not designate a unitary phenomenon, so
biological explanations would have to either encompass
these differences or be explanations of different
things.  And I'm not only talking about the fifferenve
between, say, Christianity and Confuncianism, but even
the difference between Christianity as a theology, the
teachings of the Fathers and the Philosophers and the
decrees of the the Pope (or whoever) and the ordinary
folks' often very different practicers of the sort
documented, e.g., by Carlo Ginzberg.

One way it occurs to me that that "religion" might
have a biological basis is Freudian -- I don't mean
old Oedipus but the Oceanic feeling Freud discusses as
a feature of both religious ecstasy and infancy -- the
latter is probably largely biological, a feature of
the undeverdeveloped central nervous system, and if it
is a valuable, pleasurable, etc, experience, one can
see why one might wish to recapture it in adulthood.
Though again the tie to

[Marxism-Thaxis] Could God die again ? : Dennett

[c b]

Ralph Dumain  :

-clip-

I'm not so familiar with Dennett, but the last presentation I
remember he did in DC was so godawful, I'm inclined to dismiss him,
too. Philosophy in the USA is pretty damn narrow as well.

^^^
CB: Here's your post on Dennett ( and replies) from back when he spoke
in D.C. in 2006

http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2006-February/019922.html




Dennett on religion & eovlution
Ralph Dumain rdumain at igc.org
Mon Feb 13 10:47:28 MST 2006

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Daniel Dennett is coming to town to do a book spiel on Valentine's Day, I
suppose for the losers with nothing better to do.  His new book is:

"Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067003472X/qid=1139811589/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-9455841-5053647?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

See the review in the Feb. 9 THE ECONOMIST:
"Let's cool down and look at this rationally"
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5491909

I'm not familiar with Dennett's work, but I cannot believe that he or any
of these other hawkers of
Darwinian explanations of cultural beliefs and behavior have a leg to stand
on.  What do you think?

Dennett
Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Mon Feb 13 13:50:04 MST 2006

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I guess I would say the religion as ancestor "worship" was very adaptive in
Darwinian terms, because it was an element originating culture, and for
humans, culture is a LaMarckian-like adaptive mechanism, i.e. it allows for
the inheritance of acquired characteristics, unlike genetic inheritance.

CB

^^

Let's cool down and look at this rationally


Feb 9th 2006
>From The Economist print edition


A modest suggestion, in intemperate times, for a more temperate approach to
religion


  

TOWARDS the end of his elegant, sharp-minded essay on the need to study
religion in a dispassionate way (in other words, just as anything else
should be studied), Daniel Dennett teasingly asks his readers whether they
have heard of a people called the Yahuuz. Among these exotic folk, he
informs us, people who reach the age of 80 are expected to commit suicide,
and their remains are then gobbled up by the whole tribe. What we would
regard as child pornography, they call good clean fun; they also perform, in
hilarious public rituals, the things that civilised folk do in a lavatory.
If readers are disgusted, Mr Dennett goes on to suggest, they may finally
have glimpsed what many Muslims feel about western countries where people
drink alcohol, wear skimpy clothes and ignore traditional ideas about the
family.

Had he been writing today, in a month when Muslims and Christians are
engulfed in passionate conflict over the ridiculing of the Prophet Muhammad
in a European cartoon, Mr Dennett, a philosophy professor at Tufts
University, might have used a different metaphor or parable to convey the
difficulties of discussing religion across high cultural barriers. Just as a
set of rules and rituals can seem self-evidently horrific to some people and
perfectly natural to others, the symbols of religion-holy persons, holy
artefacts or holy buildings-can evince reactions ranging from awe to
repulsion to indifference among people who in other contexts would find
little to disagree over.



But, memorable as it is, the tale of the Yahuuz goes against the grain of Mr
Dennett's main argument, which is that religious belief-especially in the
United States-is often sheltered from the cut and thrust of intellectual
argument and scientific scrutiny, and it should not be.

As the writer argues, there is now a huge range of intellectual tools which
ought to be used to understand the phenomenon of religion better: from
psychology to neuroscience (studying the parts of the brain where religious
experience seems to occur) to genetics to social and cultural history. As a
passionate neo-Darwinian, Mr Dennett is particularly interested by the
"usefulness" of religion in evolutionary terms. And as a rigorous
philosopher, he sets about deconstructing, in a few devastating strokes,
some of the beliefs that people have held about the "personal" nature of
reality.

In a world where many of the forces that determine human life seem
unpredictable, frightening and capricious, it is natural-as Mr Dennett
reminds us-to attribute personal qualities to those forces. But in everyday
life, human

[Marxism-Thaxis] Marxism, Marxists and US Civil War

[c b]

Here are some of the posts from on thread on this from LBO-Talk

CB

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2006/2006-February/004245.html

Wedemeyer and cannons
Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Tue Feb 28 11:02:21 PST 2006

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This may be the sentence that suggests that Engels is offering
Wedemeyer cannons. It's ambiguous.
CB


"You may have any number of Prussian howitzers, as they have all been
withdrawn now and replaced by rifled 6-pounders and 4-pounders (which
fire 13-pound and 9-pound heavy shells). " Engels to Weydemeyer


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/letters/65_03_10.htm





Engels To Joseph Weydemeyer In St Louis




Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 121; First published: abridged in Die Neue
Zeit, 1906-1907, and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1934.


-clip-

Incidentally, I am most grateful to you for your explanations about
military organisation in America, it was only as a result of them that
I obtained a clear picture of many aspects of the war there. I have
been familiar with the canons Napoléon for many a long year, the
English had already replaced them (light, smooth-bore 12-pounders with
a charge weighing 1/4 of the ball) when Louis Bonaparte re-invented
them. You may have any number of Prussian howitzers, as they have all
been withdrawn now and replaced by rifled 6-pounders and 4-pounders
(which fire 13-pound and 9-pound heavy shells). I am not surprised
that the elevation of your howitzers is only 5°, it was no higher with
the old long howitzers the French had (until 1856), and, if I am not
mistaken, the English ones were only a little more. In general, the
high-angle fire from howitzers has been used for a long time only by
the Germans; its great unreliability in range-finding in particular
had brought it into disrepute






Joseph Weydemeyer; Engels supplied the North cannon through Weydemeyer
Michael Hoover hooverm at scc-fl.edu
Tue Feb 28 09:56:48 PST 2006

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>>> cbrown at michiganlegal.org 02/28/06 11:47 AM >>>

Michael Hoover: not sure how much any of this really matters,

CB: Might not matter too much. I tend to use Engels and Marx's
vigorous support of war to end slavery to demonstrate that Marxism is
fundamentally anti-racist.

CB: Some of the credible evidence was sent to the list already. Marx
wrote a letter to Lincoln. I copied it here. Lincoln was the
Commander-in-Chief. That's _credible_, nay substantial credible
evidence - enough evidence that I'd even say the burden of proof sort
of shifts to you to disprove. Then there's Wedemeyer, a likely
conduit. I'll dig up his biography. Then there is the article on the
strategy of cutting the South in half instead of surrounding it. That
article itself is some evidence of communication with the Union
command. It was not likely just Marx and Engels just wrote that as
academic , detached commentary. It was printed in an American
newspaper. Surely, they and Wedemeyer made efforts to get it to the
Union command. Evidently there was debate between strategies within
the Union command. That article might help persuade the
decisionmakers. Since the Union ended up doing what was in the
article...

That's a lot of credible evidence you have to overcome.

CB: That these articles are in a U.S. newspaper is further evidence
that Union command probably got them. It is not likely that Lincoln
and cabinet had as sophisticated
economic-geographic-political-analysis of the situation as what Engels
and Marx wrote. Hard to believe that White House didn't read those
newspaper articles. 

well, both of seem to question significance of all this, so maybe we
should agree to disagree about specifics...

you call the international's congratulations to lincoln a letter that
marx wrote to lincoln, i've already indicated that i view said
correspondence differently and why (message certainly had fraternal
intent, but that in and of itself calls no attention to marx)...

nothing i've posted has suggested that i think m&e wrote detached
academic commentary, they thought both 

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] COMMUNISTS� EFFECT ON AMERICA

[farmela...@juno.com]

They seem to exaggerate
Carl Schurz's relationship.
He certainly knew Marx and
had worked with him in 1848,
but he doesn't seem to have
liked him very much.  Anyway,
as Schurz rose up in  GOP politics,
his views became more conservative.

Many of the other people listed
in that article were close associates
or supporters of Marx and remained
so after they came to the US.

Jim F.

-- Original Message --
From: c b 
To: Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and the 
thinkers he inspired 
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] COMMUNISTS’ EFFECT ON AMERICA
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 11:31:32 -0500

Ironically, it is the neo-Confederate rightwingers who are , I guess,
trying to bring back slavery in the South, who chronicle the enormous
contributions of German Communists to the military cause of the North
in the Civil War

CB

COMMUNISTS’ EFFECT ON AMERICA


http://www.southernheritage411.com/truehistory.php?th=122



Their influence from then to now—How did it all begin? Did they leave
their footprints on our nation?

Why did Lincoln and his Republicans insist on attacking the sovereign
nation, the Confederate States of America? Why did Lincoln and his
Republicans refuse to compromise with the South?

Perhaps the following may set you on the pathway to truth and aid you
in answering both questions.

All that follows comes to us through the courtesy of Walter D. Kennedy
and Al Benson, from their explosive, iconoclastic history text
entitled RED REPUBLICANS AND LINCOLN’S MARXISTS: MARXISM IN THE CIVIL
WAR (obtainable online at http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/ ). If
you think what you o read here is something“you ain’t seen nothin’
yet!” Do read the book. My impression of the contents in just one of
its chapters follows.

IMPORTANT REPUBLICAN POLICY- INSTIGATORS, ‘”FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES,”
--APPOINTED THERE BY ABE LINCOLN --

1. Brigadier General Joseph WEYDEMEYER of Lincoln’s army was a close
friend of Karl MARX and Fredrick Engels in the London Communist
League. Marx wrote Weydemeyer’s letter of introduction to Charles A.
DANA—an editor of New York Times Tribune. Weydemeyer was an escapist
from the Socialist/Communist Revolution. He fled to the U.S. and
became very active in the just-beginning Republican Party. He
supported Freeman in the Republican Party’s first election and Lincoln
in its second. He was described in a Communist publication as a
“PIONEER AMERICAN MARXIST.’ He wrote for and edited several radical
socialist journals in the U.S. (p. 200)

2. Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. DANA ---close friend of Marx,
published with Joseph Weydemyer a number of Communist Journals and,
also “The Communist Manifesto,” commissioned by Karl Marx. As a member
of the Communist/Socialist Fourier Society in America, Dana was well
acquainted with Marx and Marx’s colleague in Communism, Fredrick
Engels. Dana, also, was a friend of all Marxists in Lincoln’s
Republican Party, offering assistance to them almost upon their
arrival on the American continent. This happened often after receiving
introductory letters from Karl MARX, himself. (p. 196).

“Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, no other American did
more to promote the cause of communism in the United States than did
Dana.” (p. 141). It was due to Dana’s close friendship and work with
the New York Tribune editor, Horace Greeley, another dedicated
socialist, that Greeley employed Marx as a correspondent/contributor
to the U.S. newspaper. Dana became the first high-level communist in
an American administration---which was the FIRST REPUBLICAN
ADMINISTRATION in the United States of America.

3. Brigadier General Louis BLENKER, Lincoln’s army—radical
socialist/Communist from Germany—was remarkably successful in
encouraging German immigrants to join Lincoln’s army and the
Republican party. He promised Lincoln that he could get “. . .
thousands of Germans ready to fight for the preservation of the
Union.”(p. xiv). He was a leader in the Revolution in Germany and
fought in several battles there. When the Revolution failed, he went
to Switzerland where, along with other Marxists, he was ordered to
leave the country. His life in the U.S. was markedly grander than it
had been previously—on a much higher social level. As a General, he
offered a refuge to all Marxists. If unable to obtain a commission for
them, he made a place for them as “aide-de-camp.” Great food, great
drinks, great entertainment and servants were available for one and
all obtained, largely by looting defenseless civilians. This practice
was so flagrant, civilians who were looted, were considered
“Blenkered.” Later, Blenker, under accusations of graft, resigned his
commission. (p. 118)

4. Major General August WILLICH—often called “The Reddest of the Red
‘48ers” was a member of the London Communist League with Karl MARX and
Fredrick ENGLES. (p. xiv) Before seeking refuge in the U.S. Willich
was a personal acquaintance of Ka

[Marxism-Thaxis] REPUBLICAN PARTY, RED FROM THE START

[c b]

A few years ago in a thread and argument on the extent of the
influence of Marx and Engels on Lincoln, I found on the web that
Lincoln had owned a German language newspaper in Illinois. Perhaps his
famous quote following was rooted in his reading German Communists

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the
fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first
existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the
higher consideration." Lincoln's First Annual Message to Congress,
December 3, 1861.


A lot of '48'ers, German revolutionists, including Wedeymeyer were in
Illinois, and were an important component of the coalition that won
for the Republican Party when it first started, Again , below, it is a
rightwinger in the article below who digs up all the evidence of how
Red the Republican Party of Lincoln was. These stupid reactionaries
think they are besmirching Lincoln's reputation by tying him to
Communists.

CB


REPUBLICAN PARTY, RED FROM THE START


http://www.newswithviews.com/Stang/alan30.htm

by Alan Stang
February 1, 2008
NewsWithViews.com

Many patriots these days lament that the Republican Party has “lost
its way” and “gone wrong.” It has “diverged” from the fiscally
responsible, small government philosophy of Republican heroes like
Robert Taft whom Eisenhower’s handlers finagled out of the nomination
for President in 1952. We are told that is why today’s Republican
Establishment hates Dr. Ron Paul with such a passion; that they hate
him because, like Taft, he is the quintessential Republican. Patriots
who say that are mistaken, of course. The reason the Republican
Establishment hates Dr. Paul is precisely that he is not a
traditional, mainstream Republican, that his platform of freedom is an
aberration. The Republican Party didn’t “go wrong,” didn’t “go left.”

It has been wrong from the beginning, from the day it was founded.
>From the beginning, the Republican Party has worked without deviation
for bigger, more imperial government, for higher taxes, for more wars,
for more totalitarianism. From the beginning, the Republican Party has
been Red.

Why? In 1848, Communists rose in revolution across Europe, united by a
document prepared for the purpose, entitled Manifesto of the Communist
Party. Its author was a degenerate parasite named Karl Marx, whom a
small gang of wealthy Communists – the League of Just Men – hired for
the purpose. The Manifesto told its adherents and its victims what the
Communists would do.

But the Revolution of 1848 failed. The perpetrators escaped, just
ahead of the police. And they went, of course, to the united States.
In 1856, the Republican Party ran its first candidate for President.
By that time, these Communists from Europe had thoroughly infiltrated
this country, especially the North. Many became high ranking officers
in the Union Army and top government officials.

Down through the decades, Americans have wondered about Yankee
brutality in that war. Lee invaded the North, but that sublime
Christian hero forbade any forays against civilians. Military genius
Stonewall Jackson stood like a stone wall and routed the Yankees at
Manassas, but when Barbara Frietchie insisted on flying the Yankee
flag in Frederick, Maryland, rather than the Stars and Bars, that
sublime Christian hero commanded, according to John Greenleaf
Whittier, “‘Who touches a hair of yon gray head/Dies like a dog! March
on!’ he said.”

But the Yankees, invading the South, were monsters, killing, raping
and destroying civilian property. In one Georgia town, some 400 women
were penned in the town square in the July heat for almost a week
without access to female facilities. It got worse when the Yankee
slime got into the liquor. Some two thousand Southern women and
children were shipped north to labor as slaves. Didn’t you learn that
in school?

Sherman’s scorched earth March to the Sea was a horror the later Nazis
could not equal. Why? Because the Yankees hated Negro slavery so much?
There can be no doubt that the already strong Communist influence in
the North, combined with that of the maniacal abolitionists, was at
least one of the main reasons. Slavery was a tardy excuse, an
afterthought they introduced to gain propaganda traction.

In retrospect, it appears that because nothing like this had ever
happened here, Lee and Jackson did not fully comprehend what they were
fighting. Had this really been a “Civil” War, rather than a secession,
they would and could easily have seized Washington after Manassas and
hanged our first Communist President and the other war criminals.
Instead they went home, in the mistaken belief that the defeated
Yankees would leave them alone. Lee did come to understand – too late.
He said after the war that had he known at the beginning what he had
since found out, he would have fought to the last man.

What was the South fighting? Alexander Hamilton was the nation’s first
big government politician. Hamilton wanted a str

[Marxism-Thaxis] COMMUNISTS’ EFFECT ON AMERICA

[c b]

Ironically, it is the neo-Confederate rightwingers who are , I guess,
trying to bring back slavery in the South, who chronicle the enormous
contributions of German Communists to the military cause of the North
in the Civil War

CB

COMMUNISTS’ EFFECT ON AMERICA


http://www.southernheritage411.com/truehistory.php?th=122



Their influence from then to now—How did it all begin? Did they leave
their footprints on our nation?

Why did Lincoln and his Republicans insist on attacking the sovereign
nation, the Confederate States of America? Why did Lincoln and his
Republicans refuse to compromise with the South?

Perhaps the following may set you on the pathway to truth and aid you
in answering both questions.

All that follows comes to us through the courtesy of Walter D. Kennedy
and Al Benson, from their explosive, iconoclastic history text
entitled RED REPUBLICANS AND LINCOLN’S MARXISTS: MARXISM IN THE CIVIL
WAR (obtainable online at http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/ ). If
you think what you o read here is something“you ain’t seen nothin’
yet!” Do read the book. My impression of the contents in just one of
its chapters follows.

IMPORTANT REPUBLICAN POLICY- INSTIGATORS, ‘”FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES,”
--APPOINTED THERE BY ABE LINCOLN --

1. Brigadier General Joseph WEYDEMEYER of Lincoln’s army was a close
friend of Karl MARX and Fredrick Engels in the London Communist
League. Marx wrote Weydemeyer’s letter of introduction to Charles A.
DANA—an editor of New York Times Tribune. Weydemeyer was an escapist
from the Socialist/Communist Revolution. He fled to the U.S. and
became very active in the just-beginning Republican Party. He
supported Freeman in the Republican Party’s first election and Lincoln
in its second. He was described in a Communist publication as a
“PIONEER AMERICAN MARXIST.’ He wrote for and edited several radical
socialist journals in the U.S. (p. 200)

2. Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. DANA ---close friend of Marx,
published with Joseph Weydemyer a number of Communist Journals and,
also “The Communist Manifesto,” commissioned by Karl Marx. As a member
of the Communist/Socialist Fourier Society in America, Dana was well
acquainted with Marx and Marx’s colleague in Communism, Fredrick
Engels. Dana, also, was a friend of all Marxists in Lincoln’s
Republican Party, offering assistance to them almost upon their
arrival on the American continent. This happened often after receiving
introductory letters from Karl MARX, himself. (p. 196).

“Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, no other American did
more to promote the cause of communism in the United States than did
Dana.” (p. 141). It was due to Dana’s close friendship and work with
the New York Tribune editor, Horace Greeley, another dedicated
socialist, that Greeley employed Marx as a correspondent/contributor
to the U.S. newspaper. Dana became the first high-level communist in
an American administration---which was the FIRST REPUBLICAN
ADMINISTRATION in the United States of America.

3. Brigadier General Louis BLENKER, Lincoln’s army—radical
socialist/Communist from Germany—was remarkably successful in
encouraging German immigrants to join Lincoln’s army and the
Republican party. He promised Lincoln that he could get “. . .
thousands of Germans ready to fight for the preservation of the
Union.”(p. xiv). He was a leader in the Revolution in Germany and
fought in several battles there. When the Revolution failed, he went
to Switzerland where, along with other Marxists, he was ordered to
leave the country. His life in the U.S. was markedly grander than it
had been previously—on a much higher social level. As a General, he
offered a refuge to all Marxists. If unable to obtain a commission for
them, he made a place for them as “aide-de-camp.” Great food, great
drinks, great entertainment and servants were available for one and
all obtained, largely by looting defenseless civilians. This practice
was so flagrant, civilians who were looted, were considered
“Blenkered.” Later, Blenker, under accusations of graft, resigned his
commission. (p. 118)

4. Major General August WILLICH—often called “The Reddest of the Red
‘48ers” was a member of the London Communist League with Karl MARX and
Fredrick ENGLES. (p. xiv) Before seeking refuge in the U.S. Willich
was a personal acquaintance of Karl MARX. In fact, Marx referred to
Willich as “A communist with a heart.” Willich was a Captain in the
Prussian army when he met Karl Marx and became a Socialist/Communist.
The Prussian Army court martialed Willich and kicked him out of the
army. He, then, participated in the Socialist Revolution in Germany.
He fled the nation when the revolt was crushed, and eventually wound
up in the U.S. and became an editor of a newspaper in Cincinnati
written in the German language. He raised volunteers from the Germans
in his area and became their Captain. Eventually he became a general
and was, actually, a competent commander. He never ceased
indoctrinating his troops wi

[Marxism-Thaxis] August Willich in the Civil War: Heart of a Communist/Mind of a Prussian

[c b]

August Willich in the Civil War: Heart of a Communist/Mind of a Prussian
by Mike Quigley

http://www.civilwarinteractive.com/ArticlesWillich.htm


He was also referred to as "The Reddest of the Red" and at a meeting
at a Cincinnati German Workers Union Hall in the uproar on the
execution of John Brown, August Willich exclaimed to his listeners, "
Whet your sabers and nerve your arms for the day of retribution when
Slavery and Democracy will be crushed in a common grave." August
Willich considered himself a militant proletarian communist but
expressed his reservations about the doctrine of relentless class
struggle. Thus his personal duels with Karl Marx led him to be called
a "Communist with a Heart".

August Willich had an unlikely background as a communist. His last
real name was von Willich. His father was an officer in the Prussian
army. He was born in Braunsberg, Prussia in 1810. Young August as part
of the elite Junker class entered the prestigious military academy of
Potsdam at the age of 12 and by 15 was an ensign in the Prussian army.
By 21, he was captain in the artillery with a promising career in what
many military historians consider the finest army in the 19th century.
While in the Prussian army, however, Willich took the lead of a group
of officers interested in reading and discussing forbidden books. His
republican political ideas caught the eyes of his superior officers,
and he faced court martial. He thus resigned his commission and took
up the trade of a carpenter (to demonstrate his commitment to the
proletariat). In the revolution of 1848/49, he led a scratch force
composed of armed workers from the Baden provisional republican
government called "Willich's Free Corps" which temporarily checked the
advance of the elite Prussian army. They flew a "Red" flag of the
workers revolution, the first time in history. Still defeat was
inevitable and like Hecker and Schurz, he sought exile first in
Switzerland and eventually to America. He settled in Cincinnati with
its large German population (often referred to as "the City over the
Rhine") and became editor of the Republikaner, a German-language
newspaper. Undaunted by the middle-class respectability of the German
community, he used his newspaper editorials to promote socialism,
denounce Catholicism, and criticize all organized religions. In its
general political stance, however, the Republikaner backed Republican
candidates and policies in Ohio, first Fremont and then Lincoln.

With the firing on Fort Sumter, over a thousand German volunteers
joined in 24 hours. August Willich may have said it best when he
replied, "We will show them what patriotic German can do.". The
regiment would be later designated the 9th Ohio or nicknamed "Die
Nuner". Due to political considerations August Willich was not made
the colonel of the regiment but rather a prominent lawyer in
Cincinnati named Robert L. McCook was given the commission. While
McCook was made colonel he had the intelligence to make August Willich
the de facto colonel , while he spent most of his time mastering
administrative duties and studying "Hardee's Tactics". McCook later
exclaimed he was , "just the clerk for a thousand Dutchman". Though
August Willich may have been a "Communist with a Heart"; he had the
mind of a Prussian officer and trained them in Prussian tactics of
three rank advancing fire lines. His unique concern for his men earned
the nickname "Papa". Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana had great
admiration for Willich. He offered him colonel's commission of a
German unit being formed in Indiana or designated the 32nd Indiana in
August 1861. "Papa" Willich accepted the commission and the regiment
was quickly formed and likewise trained in Prussian infantry fire and
maneuver tactics combined with Prussian bugle calls. When Kentucky's
neutrality came to an end, the 32nd Indiana was given the assignment
of building a pontoon bridge across the Green River so that troops
could stand guard on the other side to ward off any Confederate attack
while the railroad bridge was being repaired. On December 17, 1861 a
Confederate force of 1,300 attacked this detachment of less than 500
men. The battle was known as Rowlett's Station. The combined force of
Confederate infantry, cavalry, and artillery which included Terry's
Texas Rangers, bored down on this out manned detachment of German
infantry. During the hour long engagement in which they had to form a
square to repel a cavalry attack, the Confederates were driven back
and the colonel of Terry's Texas Rangers was killed. For a week,
northern newspapers wrote glowing accounts of the battle, and August
Willich and the 32nd Indiana for a moment became national heroes.

During the winter of 61/62, Willich had brick ovens built and his men
had freshly baked bread every day. This kept up the morale of the 32nd
Indiana. It would be more than a year before other Union commanders
would discover this morale building value of daily fresh bread. August
W

Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Christian Story of Jesus's Birth Is a Myth Born o f Politics

[farmela...@juno.com]

I think you are referring to
Nestorian Christianity.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestorianism)

It was declared heretical by both
the Western and Eastern churches,
but it enjoyed official support
in Syria and Persia, and its missionaries
were active throughout the Middle East
and even the Far East (i.e. India, China).
That's probably the type of Christianity
that was familiar to Mohammed and many
of the Nestorian communities in the
Middle East were probably absorbed
into Islam later on.

The issue of the nature or the natures
of Jesus was a highly politicized issue
as exemplified by the convening of the
Council of Nicea by the Emperor Constantine,
who at the time, was not even officially
a baptized Christian. But by then, Constantine
had thrown his political lot in with the
Christians and he realized that if that
religion was to become the official religion
of the Empire, its basic doctrines had
to be sorted out.  A basic issue like the
issue of the nature of Christ was one that
was seen as being fraught with all sorts
of political implications which both spiritual
and temporal authorities had to wade through
very carefully.

Jim F.

-- Original Message --
From: CeJ 
To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Christian Story of Jesus's Birth Is a Myth Born 
of Politics
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 15:09:50 +0900


One tension that was always there was the nature of Jesus Christ. For
some, he was God's gift,
a prophet, a messiah, a teacher (rabbi), but not a god nor God. For
all the success Christianity then enjoyed, one large dichotomy was
between 'trinitarians' and 'non-trinitarians', although this doesn't
seem to have been a clear dichotomy in the religion's first century,
but later. At any rate, those who could not accept JC as a god, or
were born into those traditions, participated in a type of
Christianity that co-existed and often largely assimilated to Islam.
Jews and Samaritans who could not accept him as a messiah might well
have ended up in Palestinian and Mesopotamian forms of Rabbinical
Talmudic Judaism. (However, Rabbinical Judaism has periodically been
open to other messiahs as well).

If you look at how Islam portrays Jesus Christ (and Mary) in their
texts and oral traditions you might get a stronger sense of how he was
variously perceived in the now remote late classical, early middle
ages.
You will also note how various forms of 'Abrahamic' religions that the
post-mo minds think of as 'ancient' or 'classical' were really the
product of the early middle ages (i.e., trinitarian Christianity,
rabbinical Judaism, Karaite Judaism, Islam).  Which might bring us to
all sorts of interesting political questions.


CJ

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Christian Story of Jesus's Birth Is a Myth Born o f Politics

[c b]

On 1/6/10, farmela...@juno.com  wrote:
>
> To me one of the most interesting
> aspects of the history of Christianity,
> was how a religion that for many years
> was regarded by the Roman establishment
> as a politically subversive cult was
> eventually embraced by that establishment
> and became the official religion of the
> Empire.
>
> As the article noted, the early Christians
> gave to Jesus many titles which were also born
> by the Roman emperors.  The Roman Senate
> had given Octavius, among his many titles,
> the title of Price of Peace, presumably,
> because he reestablished peace and order
> in the Empire after the outbreak of civil
> war that had followed his uncle's assassination.
> Most of the other titles, like Savior of the
> World, were likewise titles of the emperors.
> So to the Roman establishment, it seemed
> clear that the Christian sect was attempting
> to elevate their crucified leader above
> the emperors.  Obviously, a sign of
> subversion in the eyes of the establishment.
>
> Jim F.

^
CB: Octavius-Augustus, like Jesus, also named himself (a) God.

"Divi Augustus"  is in the title   "Res Gestae Divi Augustus" ( Things
Accomplished by the Divine Augustus).

Our month of August is also named after Caesar Augustus.  July is
named after Julius Caesar.

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Christian Story of Jesus's Birth Is a Myth Born o f Politics

[farmela...@juno.com]

To me one of the most interesting
aspects of the history of Christianity,
was how a religion that for many years
was regarded by the Roman establishment
as a politically subversive cult was
eventually embraced by that establishment
and became the official religion of the
Empire.

As the article noted, the early Christians 
gave to Jesus many titles which were also born
by the Roman emperors.  The Roman Senate
had given Octavius, among his many titles,
the title of Price of Peace, presumably,
because he reestablished peace and order
in the Empire after the outbreak of civil
war that had followed his uncle's assassination.
Most of the other titles, like Savior of the
World, were likewise titles of the emperors.
So to the Roman establishment, it seemed
clear that the Christian sect was attempting
to elevate their crucified leader above
the emperors.  Obviously, a sign of
subversion in the eyes of the establishment.

Jim F.

-- Original Message --
From: CeJ 
To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Christian Story of Jesus's Birth Is a Myth Born 
of Politics
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 15:09:50 +0900

Christian Story of Jesus's Birth Is a Myth Born of Politics

http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2010-January/024987.html

>


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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Popularity of Atlas Shrugged: r ( theory, practice)

[c b]

On 1/6/10, CeJ
>
> Oops. I forgot to discuss Rand. I think perhaps at least one
> LBO-Talker noticed what I already had--she isn't a half-bad novelist.
> I'd rather read her than any number of novelists of the 20th century
> (although I'm coming around to, for example, reading CP Snow again).

CB: There's some Christian -Socialist/ writer-reader (smile)

> And she warrants some discussion for her contribution to some
> philosophical issues,

CB: What specifically ?

 if only because she was such a good
> 'popularizer' of an idea of philosophy, while at the same time being
> so hostile to the usual way in that dillettantes use--religion.
>
> CJ
>
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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Could God die again ?

[c b]

Yeah, and "Willich was a "true" communist or something, as M & E
categorize the "Socialist and Communist Lit"

CB

On 1/6/10, Ralph Dumain  wrote:
> It was Weitling or another major exile that was involved in the
> American abolitionist movement and organized a German-speaking
> regiment in the Union army. I need to check my book on the Ohio
> Hegelians. . . .  Oh, the individual in question is August Willich.
>
> At 08:48 AM 1/6/2010, c b wrote:
> > From there he got
> >the chance in 1849[11] to emigrate to the United States (as one of the
> >Forty-Eighters).
> >
> >
> >^
> >CB: I wonder if he fought in the US Civil War.
> >
> >I don't see Weitling mentioned in this section from "Chapter III.
> >Socialist and Communist Literature the critique of other communist
> >tendencies below from the Communist Manifesto.
> 
>
>
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[Marxism-Thaxis] The New New Anti-Communism

[c b]

The New New Anti-Communism

by John Feffer

Foreign Policy in Focus - January 5, 2010 Vol. 5, No. 1

http://www.fpif.org/articles/the_new_new_anti-communism

Hillary Clinton is a commie symp.

That's a familiar line from the rabid right, which
hasn't yet gotten the news that the Cold War is over.
Google the secretary of state's name and "communist,"
and you'll get over a million links, some of them to
neo-Nazi websites. Folks say the craziest things on the
Internet. I just didn't expect The Washington Post to
make the same argument.

In a recent editorial, the Post lambasted Clinton's
speech on human rights in which she quite sensibly
added "oppression of want" to the traditional concerns
with the oppression of tyranny and torture. "Ms.
Clinton's lumping of economic and social 'rights' with
political and personal freedom was a standard doctrine
of the Soviet Bloc, which used to argue at every East-
West conference that human rights in Czechoslovakia
were superior to those in the United States, because
one provided government health care that the other
lacked," the Post opined.

I can just visualize Hillary Clinton and her
speechwriters over at State sifting through arcane
historical texts for inspiration. They pull a book from
the shelf. It's old and hasn't been touched in quite a
few years. Is it Marx's Capital? Lenin's State and
Revolution? No, it's the collected speeches of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt. In his famous "four freedoms" speech
from 1941, FDR identified "freedom from want" as
"economic understandings which will secure to every
nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -
everywhere in the world." Sounds a lot like "oppression
of want" to me.

Or maybe Clinton and her team simply perused United
Nations documents for inspiration. The concept of human
security, which has been a staple of international
politics for the last two decades, draws together
threats to the political, economic, and military
security of individuals and communities. The UN's 1994
Human Development Report defined human security as
"safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease
and repression" as well as "protection from sudden and
hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life -
whether in homes, in jobs or in communities."

The Human Security Network, meanwhile, brings together
a number of countries that never belonged to the Soviet
Bloc - Canada, Austria, Mali, Costa Rica - to explore
comprehensive approaches to human trafficking, AIDS,
climate change, and the like.Or maybe the Clintonistas
read our own Just Security report, which applied the
human security approach to U.S. foreign policy. Hmm,
FDR plus the UN plus Foreign Policy In Focus: That is a
suspicious lineage.

The Post complained that the Obama administration,
"working with friendly but unfree countries, [would]
choose the easy route of focusing on development, while
downplaying democracy." It cited Clinton's speech in
Morocco on engagement with Islamic countries.

Strange, I don't remember the Post complaining about
the Bush administration - or any of its predecessors -
prioritizing economic relations with such undemocratic
countries as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Washington has
always downplayed democracy in order to secure access
to oil and cement military ties with such countries.
Now it may (or may not) downplay democracy in order to
improve the lives of ordinary people. Obviously that's
a more unpardonable sin.

We've seen the hard right dust off the language of red-
baiting during the debates over health care, the
economic stimulus, and the proposed jobs bill. Those
views have leaked into the mainstream. Meanwhile, the
terrorist-as-the-new-communist argument has lost its
zing. After all, we are fighting overseas contingency
operations, not a war on terror any longer. So, brace
yourself for the new new anti-communism, which
identifies communist sympathizers like Hillary Clinton
as the real threat to America. Talk about boring old
re-runs.

The Cold War is over. Long live the Cold War...

[John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in
Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.

He is the author of several books and numerous
articles. He has been a Writing Fellow at Provisions
Library in Washington, DC and a PanTech fellow in
Korean Studies at Stanford University. He is a former
associate editor of World Policy Journal. He has worked
as an international affairs representative in Eastern
Europe and East Asia for the American Friends Service
Committee. He has also worked for the AFSC on such
issues as the global economy, gun control, women and
workplace, and domestic politics. He has served as a
consultant for Foreign Policy in Focus, the Institute
for Policy Studies, and the Friends Committee on
National Legislation, among other organizations.

He has studied in England and Russia, lived in Poland
and Japan, and traveled widely throughout Europe and
Asia.]

_

__

[Marxism-Thaxis] You Remind Me of Herbert Hoover

[c b]

Barack Obama, You Remind Me of Herbert Hoover

But it doesn't have to be this way.

John B. Judis

The New Republic - January 5, 2010

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/barack-obama-you-remind-me-herbert-hoover

Barack Obama has been compared to almost every American
President of the last hundred years--favorably to
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Ronald
Reagan; and unfavorably to Jimmy Carter and George H.W.
Bush. I want to put another name in the hat: Herbert
Hoover.

It might seem ludicrous, or unfair, to compare Obama to
one of the most vilified presidents of the last
century, but that's because Hoover's reputation is
largely, or at least somewhat, undeserved--the product
of Democratic attacks and Hoover's own strident
responses to these attacks.

To his contemporaries, Hoover had been the American
most suited to be president. He had performed
brilliantly as head of the American Relief
Administration after World War I. In 1920, The New
Republic and Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged him to run
for president as a Democrat. Hoover chose not to run.
Instead, he became perhaps the greatest of all commerce
secretaries. He was responsible, among other things,
for persuading industry to reduce overall costs by
standardizing industrial parts and tools. Because of
Hoover's innovations, an auto mechanic could repair any
American car.

Hoover was also not a conservative Republican like
Calvin Coolidge, but a progressive who believed that
capital and labor could work together with the
encouragement of a beneficent government. In 1928,
Hoover won the presidency in a landslide, and might
have enjoyed success if the Great Depression had not
intervened. Still, Hoover responded to the greatest
economic crisis in the nation's history. He funded what
was then the largest peacetime public works
expenditure. He signed a labor bill, the Norris-
LaGuardia Act, that was the precursor of the Wagner
Act. And he established the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation to lend money to ailing banks. "The Hoover
administration," biographer Joan Hoff Wilson wrote [1],
"became the first in American history to use the power
of the federal government to intervene directly in the
economy in time of peace."

Unlike other Republican conservatives, Hoover didn't
regard unemployment as a passing irregularity that time
and patience would remove. In 1921, in the wake of an
earlier sharp downturn, Hoover had convened a
President's Conference on Unemployment, which
recommended public works as a response to unemployment.
When he became president, he renamed it the President's
Committee on Recent Economic Changes. Its path breaking
report, published at the end of his presidency,
recognized the new problem of "technological
unemployment." Unlike his predecessor, Hoover also
tried to do something about the international monetary
system that was breaking down under the weight of
unpaid loans and reparations from World War I.

But Hoover failed, finally, because he shared the same
assumptions about deficit spending and government
intervention as most other politicians and economists
of his day. He was willing for government to do more to
combat the business cycle, but he feared that enlarging
the state would lead to Soviet-style socialism, and he
thought that in the end the economy would right itself
the way it had before. Hoover had the potential to be a
very good president, but he was overwhelmed by the
unprecedented challenges that he faced.

Obama, of course, is not making the same mistakes as
Hoover or facing exactly the same situation. But
Hoover's example shows that a person who is highly
qualified to be president and who boasts significant
accomplishments in office can still fail because of the
enormity of the challenges he faces. Obama could enjoy
great success in getting legislation through Congress,
including national health care insurance; he could take
larger steps than any of his predecessors, including
Franklin Roosevelt, to pull the United States out of a
slump; but he could still fail and bring his party down
with him.

I'll describe Obama's formidable challenges in foreign
policy in a subsequent column. I want to concentrate
here on the domestic and international economy. There
are two features of the current downturn that make it
different and more dangerous than previous post-World
War II recessions. First, it combines a financial
crash--and its effects on housing--with the
deterioration of that part of private industry that
produces tradable goods and services, from cars and
machine tools to software and pharmaceuticals. Call
this part of industry the productive core of the
economy.

Most economic commentators have focused on the
"financial crisis" and ignored or downplayed the crisis
in the productive core. In the broadest terms, this
crisis goes back to the 1970s when the U.S. began to
lose market share--and in some cases entire industries
like consumer electronics--to European and Asian
competitors. It abated somewhat i

[Marxism-Thaxis] Barack Obama Worked For The CIA - John Pilger

[c b]

Doug Henwood 


On Jan 1, 2010, at 10:35 AM, Jim Farmelant wrote:

> That would be an interesting issue to look into.
> How does the US ruling class go about recruiting
> political talent? How were people like
> Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and
> Barack Obma able to rise to the
> top so fast?  What agencies are
> responsible for scouting out,
> recruiting and grooming talented
> young people in the interests of
> the ruling class?

Party leadership - political establishment plus major contributors -
would be a start. Supplemented by the inner pundit class (e.g.,
William Kristol's "discovery" of Sarah Palin).

Doug

^

CB: Y'all think that the ruling class recruits but doesn't fire as in
the removal of JFK ?  There's a thin line between conspiracy theory
and sophisticated ruling class analysis (smile)

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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Could God die again ?

[Ralph Dumain]

It was Weitling or another major exile that was involved in the 
American abolitionist movement and organized a German-speaking 
regiment in the Union army. I need to check my book on the Ohio 
Hegelians. . . .  Oh, the individual in question is August Willich.

At 08:48 AM 1/6/2010, c b wrote:
> From there he got
>the chance in 1849[11] to emigrate to the United States (as one of the
>Forty-Eighters).
>
>
>^
>CB: I wonder if he fought in the US Civil War.
>
>I don't see Weitling mentioned in this section from "Chapter III.
>Socialist and Communist Literature the critique of other communist
>tendencies below from the Communist Manifesto.
 


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Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Could God die again ?

[c b]

>From there he got
the chance in 1849[11] to emigrate to the United States (as one of the
Forty-Eighters).


^
CB: I wonder if he fought in the US Civil War.

I don't see Weitling mentioned in this section from "Chapter III.
Socialist and Communist Literature the critique of other communist
tendencies below from the Communist Manifesto.


"In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly
for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering
class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class
does the proletariat exist for them."



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch03.htm

3. Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism
We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern
revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat,
such as the writings of Babeuf and others.

The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends,
made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being
overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of
the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions
for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and
could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The
revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the
proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated
universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.

The Socialist and Communist systems, properly so called, those of
Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, and others, spring into existence in the
early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between
proletariat and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois and
Proletarians).

The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as
well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form
of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them
the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any
independent political movement.

Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the
development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does
not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation
of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science,
after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.

Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action;
historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones; and
the gradual, spontaneous class organisation of the proletariat to an
organisation of society especially contrived by these inventors.
Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and
the practical carrying out of their social plans.

In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly
for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering
class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class
does the proletariat exist for them.

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own
surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves
far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the
condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured.
Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the
distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how
can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it
the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?

Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary
action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily
doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for
the new social Gospel.

Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the
proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a
fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first
instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of
society.

But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical
element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence, they
are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the
working class. The practical measures proposed in them — such as the
abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family,
of the carrying on of industries for the account of private
individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social
harmony, the conversion of the function of the state into a more
superintendence of production — all these proposals point solely to
the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only
just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised in
their earliest indistinct and undefined forms only. These proposals,
therefore, are of a purely Utopian character.

The significance of Crit

[Marxism-Thaxis] Barack Obama Worked For The CIA - John Pilger

[c b]

As for what ghost told me about PEN-L, all I had to do was look at the
web archive and the , ummm, almost total lack of discussion outside of
the usual shameless self-promoters. Looks like Prof. Milquetoast got
his wish.

As for that ghost, it must have been the same one who made you
buttered popcorn and watched the Obama campaign with you.

CJ

^
CB: More moribund than Marxism-Thaxis ? (smile)

I am a ghost , myself.  I watched the Obama campaign campaigning
door-to-door with a hot chick on the Eastside. Now the O campaign, she
was not moribund.

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