Fwd: [Religion and revolution]

[Abu Nasr <abu-nasr@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Dear Abu Nasr:

Writing from a non-subbed address. Could you please fwd to marxism list?

Abu Nasr makes an important point when he explains that the progressiveness or
the reactionary character of an ideology, or of a religious belief, is nothing
that should be explained in an idealist way. Ideas are filled with social
contents, people build their revolutionary or reactionary points of view
resorting to the legacy of the generations dead, but the _social contents_ of
those ideologies is not predefined by that legacy. Some conceptual structures
may be more amenable to convey revolutionary ideas than others, but only in a
very general way.

Think of Protestantism in its heyday, the 1500s. It would be a very
contestable idea that French Hughenots, who were tied to local privileges,
were the revolutionary force in France. In France, it was the Royal Person,
tied to Catholicism, who carried the revolutionary principle of struggle
against feudalism for a whole historic period. And French Protestants were not
precisely revolutionary on the concrete arena of political struggle and civil
warfare.

Even the so much praised (most times not without reason) attempt to blend
Marxism and Christianism by Latin American Third World Priests has some
reactionary sides, in this context. It may serve, as it has in my own country,
to justify a denial to embrace Marxism in the struggle for power. I am not
doing "Marxist act of grievances". Marxists must show our own worth in actual
struggle, certainly. But behind this reluctancy to overtly embrace Marxism
lies the decission not to accept full leadership by the workers in our
revolution by dilluting them into the vast mass of the "popular masses".
These ideas thus play an antihegemonic role, and when it comes to concrete
programs do not advance too much. Thus, they put in danger the whole effort.



Lic. Néstor M. Gorojovsky
Dirección de Estadísticas del Sector Primario
Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos
Argentina

Tel.: (0541) 349-9728




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