The Jesus Factor

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

I watched this Frontline PBS documentary last night and urge everybody 
to look at the show's website, which has a lot of useful information:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jesus/

Although most of us had some inkling about Bush's connections to the 
Christian right, this show really lays it all out on the table. These 
are some really scuzzy types, who raise greed and sanctimoniousness to 
unheard of levels.

It occurred to me while watching this show that there is a phenomenon at 
work here that has never been fully explored by Marxism. While Trotsky 
wrote many useful and insightful analyses of fascism, there has not been 
nearly as much attention devoted to the particular character of late 
capitalist devolution which takes a different form. You get a toxic 
mixture of Judeo-Christianity and rightwing politics that continues to 
embrace parliamentary forms with repression around the edges. In 
semicolonial contexts, the repression is escalated--particularly with 
respect to rebellious indigenous populations. I am thinking of the Bush 
presidency in the first instance and apartheid South Africa and Israel 
in the second.

Of course, just like in the 1930s the only way to fight this rightwing 
movement is through resolute and radical direct action, not dithering at 
the ballot box.

>>Renaudel, Frossard and their similars seriously imagine that an 
alliance with the Radicals is an alliance with the “middle classes” and 
consequently a barrier against Fascism. These men see nothing but 
parliamentary shadows. They ignore the real evolution of the masses and 
chase after the “Radical Party” [the French "lesser evil"] which has 
outlived itself and which in the meantime turns its back on them. They 
think that in an era of great social crisis an alliance of classes set 
in motion can be replaced by a bloc with a parliamentary clique that is 
compromised and doomed to extinction. A real alliance of the proletariat 
and the middle classes is not a question of parliamentary statistics but 
of revolutionary dynamics.

This alliance must be created and forged in the struggle. The whole 
meaning of the present political situation resides in the fact that the 
despairing petty bourgeoisie is beginning to break from the yoke of 
parliamentary discipline and from the tutelage of the conservative 
“radical” clique which has always fooled the people, and which has now 
definitely betrayed it. To join in this situation with the Radicals 
means to condemn oneself to the scorn of the masses, and to push the 
petty bourgeoisie into the embrace of Fascism as the sole saviour.

The working-class party must occupy itself not with a hopeless effort to 
save the party of the bankrupts. It must, on the contrary, with all its 
strength, accelerate the process of liberation of the masses from 
Radical influence. The more zeal and the more boldness it applies to 
this task, the more surely and rapidly will it prepare a real alliance 
of the working class with the petty bourgeoisie. It is necessary to 
place oneself at their head and not at their tail. History is working 
quickly. Woe to him who lags behind!

full: 
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1936/witherfrance/#whither


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