Re: Islam and Muslims (was Doug and Islam)
On Mar 16, 2007, at 1:56 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
Yes, just as Marxism has been a religion of left, right, center, and the apolitical.
Hmmm, pretty odd coming from the editor of MRZine, but that aside…
I suppose you could embrace some sort of liberal critique of
“totalitarianism” and the left-meets-right-at-the-extremes version of
the political spectrum, but in any sensible political taxonomy,
Marxism is a doctrine of the left. It’s egalitarian and radically
democratic; the right is anti-egalitarian and often authoritarian.
Marxism is opposed to mushy compromise (which is centrist). And it
is, almost by definition, the opposite of apolitical; in fact, it
annoys a lot of apolitical types because it insists on politicizing
almost everything, like art and the mundanities of daily life.
I suppose you could also argue that some Marxists apply the doctrine
in a catechistic way, which would make it a kind of religion - but
coming from you, as an apologist for religion, that wouldn’t be too
credible as a critique. Ditto with Soviet-style state socialism; it
became a rationale for domination, not liberation. But you could turn
Marxism as a tool of analysis against that version of the doctrine:
by virtue of their privileged access to power, the Soviet
nomenklatura became a ruling class, with no democratic means in the
political sphere to dislodge them. And, sometime in the 1970s or
early 1980s, they decided it was time to go capitalist, and become a
serious ruling class.
Doug