Date: 06 Jul 96 01:32:08 EDT
From: neil <74742.1651-AT-compuserve.com>
Subject: ISO/US & SWP-UK= Cliffite muddle on ideology


DEar friends,

In the Socialist  Worker/US  dtd. May 24th , paper of  trotskyist  Int'l.
Socialist Org./US,
their is on Pg 7 , a muddled explanation of Ideology from Duncan Hallas .

In "How our rulers keep their Grip". Hallas I think , while making a some good
points
of how the exploiters bamboozle workers to keep  us stupified and in the dark ,
also makes some key blunders.

First of all Hallas underestimates the role of religious mystifications
todayamongst the workers and the petit bourgeois.  He seems to have a economist
notion
that religion became passe as a weapon of reaction when the bourgeois
revolutions prevailed over feudalism .
This is a serious error, true for a time the bourgeois fought it out with the
reaction with fuedalism/mainly catholicism  in capitals  "ascendant period" up
to about 1900.
But the bourgeois, in theor present period of decadence  have made peace with
the  catholic church and the other  churches/religions,
be they Christian, Judaic, Mohammedin, Shintoist, etc & they have been reunited
with the rulers and policies of the various  capitalist rulers of the nation
states. The religions
themselves have a huge material stake in the continuance of capitaist
exploitation and wage slavery and alterations of their doctrines and practices
prove this. Also billions in ecclesiatical investments in capitalist
enterprises.

Also Hallas/ISO have a wooden view of ideological struggle . They seems to
thinthat ALL ideology constitutes "false consciousness" . I don't think thiis
consistent with 
dialectics . In fact ideological struggle is part of the class struggle in
societal superstructure connected to the economic basis of class contradiction.

Marx/Engels never stated that ALL ideology  was false consciousness as the 
Cliffites assert . He pointed out that the dominant idelogies of ever class
society were ever the concepts of the ruling classes.
But this did not leave the workers helpless, they could combat this not only by
their industrial unification/combination in the class struggles agaisnt wage
slavery,
but by their own self- controlled political/ideological groups and parties that
would 
imbue the workers with the antidote of proletarian ideology - ideas that are 
consistent with workers collective class interests and prepare better to wage
war on bourgeois ideology which corrupts and stunts workers class conscoiusness.

This is a front of the class war we cannot neglect any longer . but with the ISO
views dominant , the rulers have secured the weak points in proletarian line of
battleand if marxists  cant help fill the breach, the bosses and their media
will continue 
to  blow right through these parts of the class war fronts with devastating 
consequences!

Neil



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