Posted by John, December 21st, 2009 - under Mary MacKillop, Religion.

Tags: Alienation, Commodity fetishism, Fetishism

The world is going to hell in a global warming handcart. Maybe Mary MacKillop can save us.

After all, someone who can cure inoperable cancer 60 years after she has died shouldn’t find getting the major capitalist powers to agree on ways to address climate change too hard.

So come on Mary, get Obama and Wen Jiabao to agree on real, binding and transparent targets to reduce greenhouse gases by 50 percent by 2020. And while you are at how about a Pauline conversion for Tony Abbott, Ian Plimer and their hangers on in the media?

There is a more serious point in all of this. Many people believe this saintly and godly mysticism. Many many more, it must be said, than believe or understand socialism. Why?

The struggle of humanity to understand the material reality around us has been one of our grand projects.

Of course that understanding is warped through the divisions of class society, but capitalism now provides us with the material base to transcend class and need and build a truly human society, a heaven if you like on earth.

The rise of capitalism and the enlightenment accompanying it saw the old religious mysticisms retreat in the face of knowledge.

But mysticism regrouped and became an integral part of the ideology of a capitalism establishing and stabilising its rule in Europe and the United States at various times in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

The material base for this regrouping was not just the needs of capital. Religion, Janus like, in fact appeals to both contending classes.

But for workers the very nature of their position in capitalism – the alienation from their own products and the creation of an external world of commodities – mirrors itself in the religious fetishism of god in heaven while humans are trapped on earth in the unrelenting production of goods and services for profit.

God is the fetishism of the human spirit expressing itself under capitalism in wage slavery.

To appeal to a society divided along class lines god becomes both boss and worker. Capitalism witnessed the social democratisation of god. He is now the Gough Whitlam of paradise.

The profound alienation we as workers experience opens up our lives to non-material explanations of the world. Marx put it much better when he wrote:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

In other words, like opium, it gives pain relief. And like opium it doesn’t address the causes of pain but rather masks them.

We on the left can’t ignore the more than 60 percent of workers who believe in god or a spiritual being. It is these workers who in remaking the world will remake themselves.

That means understanding the attraction of a long dead woman [or replace Mary MacKillop with another piece of mysticism here] to many workers in society.

It means, as Lenin wrote, that we are concerned with creating the paradise of the here and now, as many workers will be at some stage too.

When the oppressed arise, we must be on their side, even if they do believe in Mary MacKillop.

It is their power as workers that is the driving force of change and one we socialists want to relate to. We can only do that by understanding religion and the religious, not dismissing them.

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