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. --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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