File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9710, message 112


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




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