Date: 27 Aug 96 02:37:06 EDT
From: neil <74742.1651-AT-compuserve.com>
Subject: religion & marxism


dear siddharth,

please take time to re-read  my critique (and those of  a couple others)  of the
CLASS
nature and interests of religion in the class struggle in current postings.
Nowhere did I  say or infer that  ALL religious  people were  'devils in
 sheeps clothing" or enemies of the people. Such views would be absurd given the
numbers of workers still influenced in motion of  class society by religious
mysticism.

Your touching  concern for the lack of funds/profits ( derived from exploiting
third world and even  indirectly  1st and 2nd world workers- Gulf -Oil shiekdoms
, Brunei, etc.))  of the national bourgeois in less deveolped  nations  shows
you see no problem with the world  capitalist crime set-up. You only squeal as a
broker for the junior mafioso at  what you think is an unjust divvying up of the
stolen loot -- the surplus value.

Have you yourself been on a decades long religious  seance detatched from
reality? Virtually the whole world today is under capitalist social relations
and the arteries of 
capitalist industrail and financial operations have advanced the national
bourgeois
ruling classes to junior partners of the G-7 big imperialist/capitalist  states.

Your view of exploitation is a liberal-moralistic one, not very marxist either.
If an ordinary  western worker  in industry makes $2,200 a month , on the 
average this is ralated to the  western  costs of living, labor market , demand,
worker
organization and the  profits of the owners of means of production/exchange.
If  his/her  industries surplus value rate produced averages out $7,000/mo ,
this worker is still quite 
exploited, would you not say? 

However, even if you can parade some national bourgeois who cries in his beer
that he/she only made $600 surplus value  a month, this Siddharth, this is
probably
based on avg. that he/she sweated 4or 5 workers in a little shop and paid them
maybe $65 each  a month. The 'poorer' national bourgeois is still an exploiter,
and the western worker, though getting to purchase  more commodites, is 
still exploited in a marxist sense.

The class struggle issue here at home in the imperialist  metropolis as the
world  capitalist drive down the wages/benefitso f the workers as a class, the
western worker  needs to break from racialist chauvinism toward
the nationally oppressed workers  and unite with & raise the workers standards
in the lesser developed country, and indoing so, help save him/herself! Might
not the current capitalist offensive lay the MATERIAL basis for movement in that
direction? Or have you taken to MIMs idiocies?

Er, ah, Siddharth , i guess your attack on the militant  dialectical
materialists on the list  had something
to do with your  own apparent agnosticism  (Re: your "Poor Karl Marx, if he is
looking down........").
Cute, but not very scientific thinking  on your part.


Neil



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