Re: On Bhaskar's turn to God was Re: my column

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gary MacLennan wrote:

>
> But Jim has raised a wider question, what should the attitude of the "hard
> bitten rationalists" be to the resurgence of the spiritual, which is so
> evident in the new anti-capitalist movement.

I don't see that. I see what I have always seen -- that anti-capitalist
movements involve huge numbers of people who are not only not
marxists but adherents of one or another religious tradition (as well
as, in practice, millions of people who don't happen to have any
opinion at all, one way or the other, on religion). Most of the people
who are still left locally from earlier struggles are Christian. I work
with them very well.

Now you use the word spiritual, and I with deliberation ignore that
term to begin with and substitute "religion." They are not necessarily
connected. In one very important passage in *Capital* (speaking of
the value of labor power) Marx uses the words "social" and "moral"
interchangeably. I would simply add "spiritual" to that list when used
by materialists. "Spiritual," if we use it at all in a positive sense,
identifies recognition of or response to historically generated social
relations among humans. It would belong to such a word cluster as
"morale," "high-spirited," "comradeship," "solidarity." To give it any
kind of "extra-human" force is to leave materialism and thereby
marxism behind. NOTA BENE: Marxists are not the only socialists.
The Minister of Health in the government of the CPC after the
Revolution was a Christian. She and Chou took great pleasure in
mutual disagreements on religion but it never affected her loyalsty
to the revolution. But if Marxists are not the only socialists they are
*still* as the Manifesto declared (reference the Communists) the
only ones that see the *whole* -- and if they allow the incursion of
the "spiritual" in its usual (religous or metaphysical) senses they will
lose that since of the whole.

> I like to point out here
> Lou's example of the first American Marxist (name?) who doubled as a
> medium.  Many of the early socialists and Marxists were interested in such
> matters.

Yes, and individually they were committed comrades in the struggle against
capitalism and for socialism -- but they contributed little if anything to the
growth and development of marxism as a tradition. I agree completely with
John Bellamy Foster on this: materialism (materialism as that view which goes
back to Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius) is the soul of marxism, and
when marxism turns "spiritual" it loses its soul.

>  It was I suspect the less than benign influence of Lenin with his
> obsessive attacks on religion that turned the Marxist movement away from a
> sympathetic look at those of us who seek transcendence on other than
> material levels.

He was correct to do so. There *are* no non-material levels. The social
(the material grounds of the spiritual) is not another level, separate from
or superior to the material, it is merely one of the forms or modes of
existence of the material. Lenin may or may not have been correct in
making materialism a criterion for member ship in the RSDLP, but he
was certainly correct denying the compossibility of marxism and
any sort of spiritualism. At least in the U.S., and perhaps in most
nations, we do not know at this time what organizational form a
revolutionary socialist movement may take, and in some cases, perhaps
in most, that will be a form which includes non-marxists as well as
marxists. In that case it will include idealists as well as materialists.
But any organization that is defined, specifically, as marxist can only
include materialists (atheists).

>
> I argue here that what we need is a very broad movement if we are to wind
> back capitalism.  Within that context tolerance and acceptance is an
> absolute necessity.

I agree completely. But this has nothing to do with one's judgment of the truth

or validity as theory of any spiritualism, including Bhaskar's.

> Now if it helps Marxist can take refuge in the distinction between
> objective and subjective idealism.

I take no refuge whatever in that distinction. Idealism is idealism. Objective
idealism, in fact, *can* be more vicious than one of the varieties of
subjective individualism. The latter are apt to have little or nothing to do
with the individuals concrete behavior or social beliefs. The former
(objective idealism) is the natural home of all authoritarianisms, including
fascism. That need not be the case, but the first great opponent of
democracy, Plato, explicitly grounded his anti-democratic ethics and
metaphysics in a denial of materialism and an affirmation of objective
idealism. Objective idealism denotes an absolute truth, and the
conflicting opinions of the mob must not be allowed to interfere with
that Truth. The Truth of objective idealism and the Inquisition are
very nearly siamese twins. Stalin was an objective idealist, for those
to whom that label makes a difference.

>  Bhaskar is now an objective idealist in
> that he asserts the primacy of spirit over matter.  He is not a subjective
> idealist like the post modernists in that he does not claim that the
> material world has no independent existence apart from humanity's cognitive
> activity.

So he will be prepared to impose that higher truth, that primary spirit, on
the unbelieving mob. I really distrust such spiritualism deeply.

>
> Bhaskar's objective idealism puts him in the company of the Vedic scholars,
> Plato and Hegel.

All vicious authoritarians.

>  We should note here Lenin's remark about idealist.  think
> of it like this Jim.  Objective idealists may be a bit crazy but they are
> still family.

No. (Again, we are not speaking of political coalitions, which will
necessarily include a wild variety of personal beliefs.)

> It all depends whether they think the kingdom of god can be realised here
> on Earth.

The kingdom of god, on earth or in heaven, is a fraud and a danger to
humanity.

>  If they support that then we have an alliance.

But this goes without saying, and is utterly irrelevant to the present
discussion.

> If they want pie
> in the sky when we die then we have nothing in common with them.

Nor if they want pie in the sky now.

And may I remind you of a point made earlier in this same discussion
on another list. Probably the vast majority of humanity has always
gotten along very well without "spiritual" values. The Homeric poems
are strictly materialist for example. The gods differed from humans
only in being immortal. They were quite material. Zeus could see
very far, but he was not omnipresent. He could hurl mountains, but
he was not omnipotent.

It was either Plato or Aristotle that hoped the writings of Democritus
would be destroyed. That wish was nearly achieved, those thoughts
surviving mostly in a poem (De Rerum Naturam) which survived into
the modern world in only a single copy. I suspect the founders of
various other ruling-class metaphysical traditions (another synonym
spirituality) were more advanced than the Roman or medieval
european guardians of the faith and wiped out more successfully
their equivalents of Democritus.

As Lenin noted (and not only as a sort of Aesopian language to
avoid the censor) idealism implicitly nurtures clericalism. The
spiritual truth cannot survive without an all powerful priesthood
to impose it on the masses.

Carrol

> warm regards
>
> Gary