File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1997/marxism-general.9709, message 16


Date: Wed, 03 Sep 1997 21:36:35 +0100
From: Chris Burford <cburford-AT-gn.apc.org>
Subject: M-G: The sigh of the oppressed creature


Sorry not to have come back earlier - had to dry the keyboard out.

So apologies to Bedgood who agrees with Malecki about the "tear dripping
garbage". I had no intention of making firm Bolshevik lips quiver with an
unfamiliar emotion. 

I do think it suggests that Dave and his group are at a rather early and
schematic stage of forming a new international if he can support such an
abstractly revolutionary line as Robert's attempt to declaim "Off with
their heads" two centuries after the French Revolution as marxism. 

Perhaps Dave's comrades in Britain will take the opportunity of the tens of
thousands queuing to pay their respects, to try some similarly
revolutionary propaganda or agitation. But if they listen first rather than
get their heads kicked in, they would discover there is an
*anti*-monarchist thread to the popular reactions. People will take their
stand whether Diana was the consort of Charles or not. They know they are
driving this process now and overt criticism of "the palace" is beginning
to surface. This phenomenon is occuring soon after the first opinion poll
ever to show support for the monarchy dipping below 50% in Britain. The
picture is not unconnected. 


No I won't cross post this to MI. While obviously coming from a very
different angle to Hugh I welcomed his flurry of postings, not least as a
counter-attraction to Rolf Martens' own anguished divorce post-mortems on
marxism-general. 


But I want to stretch this theme theoretically. There is enough written in
the culture of globalisation about international icons. Hugh referred to
the Elvis cult. My intuition, is that what is happening in Britain and
across the world is in many respects a fumbled groping at something
religious. There is ritual of a very simple nature. People wait, stand, and
leave some flowers. They know the messages they write are futile and trite
but they still do it with determination and dignity. They are making up a
communal ceremony as they go along. 

A superficial awareness of Marxism quotes that religion is the opium of the
people. But Marx, while being an atheist of course, wrote about the
contradictory nature of religion in profound ways. It is also the heart of
the heartless world. And Diana when she was Lady Vulnerable rather than
Lady Bountiful seems to have triggered that in people. 

It is also the sigh of the oppressed creature. 

What is happening this week and will happen at the weekend, will get
incorporated by the existing system as fast as it can (and Blair evidently
has a very shrewd idea of how to harness it for his populist purposes), but
it is still worth an effort to try to analyse, as well as to laugh at the
anguish of the establishment.

What should be done? Well a left wing organisation should not put itself
off side with the people (which is not necessarily to merge with the surge
either). I understand L'Humanite on the morning after the death criticised
the system of private ownership of the media through the effect on the
paparazzi.


The passage I have been referring to is the fourth paragraph of Marx's
"Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" 1843/4

"Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real
suffering and a protests against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of
the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of
soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."


>From "On the Jewish Question" 1843

"Religion is precisely that: the devious acknowledgement of man, through an
intermediary."



And this passage I found particularly interesting in the light of how Diana
has acted as intermediary and secularised a religious experience for people:


"Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the
province of public law to that of private law. It is no longer the spirit
of the state where man behaves - although in a limited way, in a particular
form and a particular sphere - as a species being, in community with other
men. It has become the spirit of civil society, the sphere of egoism and of
the bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community
but the essence of difference. It has become the expression of the
separation of man from his community, from himself and from other men,
which is what it was originally. It is now only the abstract confession of
an individual oddity, of a private whim, a caprice. The continual
splintering of religion in North America, for example already gives it the
external form of a purely individual affair. It has been relegated to the
level of a private interest and exiled from the real community. But it is
important to understand where the limit of political emancipation lies. The
splitting of man into his public and his private self and the displacement
of religion from the state to civil society is not one step in the process
of political emancipation, but its completion. Hence political emancipation
neither abolishes nor tries to abolish man's real religiosity."


So ironically, it seems to me that through this intermediary, Diana, who is
openly described by a leading British editor Andrew McNeil as a world wide
"commodity" (that is, a psychological commodity) the latent religiosity of
our species reasserts itself in strange and unpredictable ways. 

What will be bad is the opium like-nature of the experience. 

What is good is and will be, the simple expression of community. When
people stand in silence for Diana they know at some level that the sense of
community they are expressing embraces someone who came from a broken
marriage, and whose marriage has broken up, who has had a nervous
breakdown, screamed and felt desperately like killing herself, who touches
someone with HIV infection whether they are gay or not, who cuddled a black
child missing a leg because she believes that the governments of the world,
*including the US government NB* should not delay any longer the banning of
landmines. And whose sense of participation in community embraces muslims
too. Embraces in all senses of the word and they do not hold that against
her. This last point is one by no means yet won and the events around her
death are if nothing else a valuable step forward in the acceptance of
people of muslim culture without discrimination (and that is still true
even if it takes a playboy to do it.)

At its best this religiosity will express a sense of human community.


I do not see why marxists need totally to merge with it, not to feel
horrified or embarrassed by it.


Chris Burford

London.



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