On 8/19/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie wrote:
>Like Shi'ism, Marxism, too, is "a religion of protest. It can only
>speak truth to power and destabilize it. It can never be 'in power.'
>As soon as it is 'in power' it contradicts itself" (Dabashi, p. 91).
>The career of Marxism as the official philosophy of socialist states
>has been, if anything, sadder than that of Shi'ism as the official
>philosophy of a theocratic state. Communism, when it becomes the
>opium for the people administered by a state, tends to narcotize and
>depoliticize them more than any religion can.
It seems that Yoshie is racing 90 miles an hour down the road away from
Marxism. I wonder whether she will end up in the postmodernist camp or
simply convert to Islam the way in which Kent State professor Julio Pino
did. Pino was on Marxmail for about a year preaching the superiority of
Islam to Marxism until he followed his own ineluctable logic and became an
intellectual jihadist. What a waste of humanity.
What I am doing is twofold: to suggest a way that can get Muslims
interested in historical materialism as an intellectual and political
tool; and to recommend that historical materialists first make efforts
to understand Muslims on their own terms, with all the complexity and
contradiction of their social reality and ideology, just as
anthropologists do.
I understand that you are not interested in either, but in that case
you might simply ignore what I am saying.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
