Date: Tue, 7 Oct 1997 10:57:02 -0800 From: bhandari-AT-yuma.Princeton.EDU (Rakesh Bhandari) Subject: M-I: Re: Zizek on PKs >precisely *not* directly the ideas of those who rule. How did Christianity >become the ruling ideology? By incorporating a series of crucial motifs and >aspiration of the oppressed - truth is on the side of the suffering and >humiliated, power corrupts, and so on - and rearticulating them in such a >way that they became compatible with the existing relations of domination. But the Promise Keepers and the Nation of Islam make no appeal to precisely those features of religion. They embody directly the ideas of those who rule--the cravenness and irresponsibility of the working class and the caste-like oppression of women by a community of men. Moreover, since only relatively priviliged workers, if not petty bourgeois men, will be able to meet the standards of keeping the promises to provide for the family as a whole or to keep domesticated servile women, these new communities ultimately will only serve to give the relatively priviliged any kind of moral authority. What seems remarkable to me is the absence of the motifs and the aspirations of the oppressed in these new organizations. If they still resonate with the oppressed, this then speaks to the problem of how the ideas of the ruling class do in fact become the ruling ideas, not the subversive power of the oppressed's visions of utopia which have putatively been coopted in the new patriarchal, punitive religion sweeping across the country. Indeed to suggest that such utopic impulses are somehow implicit in these organizations suggest such a degraded idea of human community that it makes one fear that all is lost since the utopia of human community can no longer even be imagined. I suggest coming to grips with this--the real depths of our crisis--instead of thinking the soothing thought that utopia has somehow surfaced in the spectacles of bourgeois society. Rakesh --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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