Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 21:59:21 -0500 (EST)
From: Alex Trotter <uburoi-AT-panix.com>
Subject: medieval footware: a marxist analysis



"The same thing can happen to socialism as happened to the church, i.e., 
it can be resurrected every time that everyone thinks that it is very 
close to death."

--Georges Sorel, *Reflections on Violence* (1907)


In light of the discussion of Lenin's MAEC, it strikes me as quite 
interesting that in the same year (1908) that Bolshevik Lenin and 
Menshevik Plekhanov were laying down the law against Bogdanov and the 
Machist and syndicalist currents in the RSDLP, Pius X launched a papal
encyclical condemning the modernist heresy in the Church Catholic.

Has anyone else noticed this parallel (i.e., "revisionism" = "heresy")?
Plekhanov himself certainly did:

"Until now, there were no attempts to 'supplement' Marx by a Thomas 
Aquinas. But there is nothing impossible about the fact that, despite the 
recent papal encyclical against the modernists, the Catholic world at one 
time pulled from its midst a thinker capable of this theoretical heroic 
act."

--*Basic Questions of Marxism*

And some of you may also be aware of Kautsky's identification of 
the German Social Democracy (the marxist orthodoxy before Lenin's) with the 
early Christian Church.


Now I'll step back and let all you Trotzkyites and Jesuits discuss.



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