Genosse Kotze
6th June 2007, 03:10
I brought up this point initially in the Film and Lit. section, but it got a kind of a limp-dicked response, so here I am. I read Statism and Anarchy recently and it was nothing like I expected it to be--it was totally lame.
However, it wasn't a whole loss. He did manage to come up with something I found very insightful (albeit too brief). In his condemnation of religion he said: "For the people the church is a kind of celestial tavern...in church and tavern alike they forget, at least momentarily, their hunger, their oppression, and their humiliation, and they try to dull the memory of their daily afflictions, in the one with mindless faith and in the other with wine. One form of intoxication is as good as the other"(pg. 207). Now, this argument is really nothing new; we've all heard the saying "religion is the opium of the masses" but the term "celestial tavern" is, I thought, a pretty clever, and better way to put it. But that’s not what I found most perceptive.
He basically says that religion is the whipping boy of bourgeois or seriously limited revolutionaries. “They must shock the bourgeois world but not anger it, and they must attract the revolutionary youth but avoid the revolutionary abyss. There is only one way [to do this]: to direct all of their pseudo-revolutionary fury against the Lord God…since we ourselves are convinced atheists we are obliged to give full expression to our lack of belief—I will go further and say our hostile attitude toward religion….[however] we should not place the religious question in the forefront of our propaganda among the people. It is our profound conviction that to do so is synonymous with betrayal of the people’s cause. It is our direct obligation to place before the people the principal question on the resolution on which their liberation depends. But that question is…the economic and social question, economic in the sense of social revolution and political in the sense of destruction of the state. To occupy them with the religious question is to distract them from their real cause and thus to betray it” (pg. 208-9). Bingo! Although he really failed to convince me in the book that destruction of the state is the supreme task at hand, he is absolutely correct to point out that just as religion is used to defuse any revolutionary potential brewing within people by supplanting it with tales of burning bushes and silly parables, to focus primarily on religion’s destructiveness diverts people away from pursuing the true bane of our existence in the same way religion does. Bakunin goes on to say that as people’s material conditions change, so too will their attitudes towards religion. “Thought follows from life and in order to alter the former one must first of all change the latter. Give the people a broad human existence, and they’ll amaze you with the profound rationality of their ideas” (pg. 207).
However, it wasn't a whole loss. He did manage to come up with something I found very insightful (albeit too brief). In his condemnation of religion he said: "For the people the church is a kind of celestial tavern...in church and tavern alike they forget, at least momentarily, their hunger, their oppression, and their humiliation, and they try to dull the memory of their daily afflictions, in the one with mindless faith and in the other with wine. One form of intoxication is as good as the other"(pg. 207). Now, this argument is really nothing new; we've all heard the saying "religion is the opium of the masses" but the term "celestial tavern" is, I thought, a pretty clever, and better way to put it. But that’s not what I found most perceptive.
He basically says that religion is the whipping boy of bourgeois or seriously limited revolutionaries. “They must shock the bourgeois world but not anger it, and they must attract the revolutionary youth but avoid the revolutionary abyss. There is only one way [to do this]: to direct all of their pseudo-revolutionary fury against the Lord God…since we ourselves are convinced atheists we are obliged to give full expression to our lack of belief—I will go further and say our hostile attitude toward religion….[however] we should not place the religious question in the forefront of our propaganda among the people. It is our profound conviction that to do so is synonymous with betrayal of the people’s cause. It is our direct obligation to place before the people the principal question on the resolution on which their liberation depends. But that question is…the economic and social question, economic in the sense of social revolution and political in the sense of destruction of the state. To occupy them with the religious question is to distract them from their real cause and thus to betray it” (pg. 208-9). Bingo! Although he really failed to convince me in the book that destruction of the state is the supreme task at hand, he is absolutely correct to point out that just as religion is used to defuse any revolutionary potential brewing within people by supplanting it with tales of burning bushes and silly parables, to focus primarily on religion’s destructiveness diverts people away from pursuing the true bane of our existence in the same way religion does. Bakunin goes on to say that as people’s material conditions change, so too will their attitudes towards religion. “Thought follows from life and in order to alter the former one must first of all change the latter. Give the people a broad human existence, and they’ll amaze you with the profound rationality of their ideas” (pg. 207).