Dude’s an ultra
Bonus: https://nitter.net/uncle_authority/status/1721967810241335347#m
I guess the Deprogram guys are the Three Stooges now? But the joke doesn’t really work
It is a principle of dialectics that “contradictions are inherent in nature, the struggle between the old and the new is the process of development”. Mixing religion with Marxism is a fundamental contradiction (idealism vs materialism, as pointed out by RD) that many of us leftist struggle with due to our own unique material upbringings, but one that we will ultimately overcome and unfetter ourselves off the idealism that comes with religion.
RD take is the correct one here but this is not the way to address it, it is simply unempathetic to Hakim (we don’t know the source of his spirituality, might be related to his upbringing during war?). A private conversation + follow up post would’ve been the way to address this.
Of the 2 takes I’ve seen RD make on Twitter beefing with Hakim I’ve agreed with him both times but he’s really the embodiment of “incredibly insufferable ML that needs to learn how to ‘just vibe’ and not drone out class analysis” when people are just casually chatting/hanging out
we will ultimately overcome and unfetter ourselves off the idealism that comes with religion
And if that doesn’t happen? China, North Korea, and plenty of AES have religious movements even when atheism is the official stance. China especially can be a guide as many religions were illegal for decades, and people did not stop being religious.
I think China’s dialectical decisions about this reality makes sense, at least for their regulation of it in place of encouragement. For Christianity, they utilize the three-self motto: self-governance, self-support (i.e., financial independence from foreigners), and self-propagation (i.e., indigenous missionary work) to keep practices as indigenous as possible which seems helpful to me.
The material conditions that made religion bury deeply into the cultures of the world will slowly fade as the world progresses.
As marx pointed out religion is the opium of the masses, not as in a party drug but as in a drug that eases the pain and suffering off the oppressed.
Sure, and he’s right as far as religions – and especially state-run bourgeois religions – hampering and preventing revolution. But we have material evidence that (1) religion can and does give voice to and even assist revolutions (Marx and Engels both used religious imagery in their writings) and (2) post-revolution, the desire for spirituality and forms of religion persist even with upheaval and reorganization of material conditions from feudal to capitalist to socialist. Maybe it will die off completely in the future, but that hasn’t happened in any AES country to date and that’s really important to note.
I wonder what it would take for people on this website to realize that their parasocial daddies can be and often are incorrect. Roderic took a poor communicative tact, but it’s obvious to any Marxist that what Hakim wrote is, well, rather silly in its implications. Being charitable, Hakim’s view is likely skewed by personal favoritism and this error would be much less likely to come up if he was discussing other religions. Otherwise, one would be forced to conclude that he was catastrophically ignorant about the political functions of religion and the social basis for its creation, and completely oblivious to this ignorance.
Christman fucks up plenty too.
Christman fucks up plenty too.
But that’s because he’s our modern Harrier Du Bois. It comes with the territory
guy named Hakim from Iraq is Muslim, white people are shocked and appalled
Who is surprised? Roderic isn’t, as far as this tweet goes. It’s just the mixing of idealistic reasoning with Marxist reasoning to try to bring people to Marxism from Islam. It’s a method that communists call opportunism and claim, because of materialist philosophy, can only lead to incorrect interpretations and failure of socialist movements. Palestinians have material and religious reasons to resist, but the marxist analysis should focus on the material and how religion connects, not the other way
I also feel like it was said with a level of tongue in cheek facetiousness. Pointing to HAMAS’ use of religion as an ideological underpinning, and then saying “I’m recommend a book on the subject” and the book is the fucking Quran is… Very obviously a bit about Hakim’s tendency to recommend obscure theory books.
That wasn’t the question. The issue is that Hakim is performing reactionary tailism
I do think Hakim’s take is pretty bad here. It’s a very idealist belief that’s fundamentally not compatible with trying to understand the situation trough a materialist lense.
Implying he’s a reactionary opportunist is just such a massive overreaction though. You’re allowed to criticize other socialists without being insufferable about it.
There’s a case to be made that their religion has become very ingrained with their day to day lives to the point that it’s indistinct from any other type of social organization they have. In that case the faith, religious ideology, and texts are a little secondary to things like their family structures, social infrastructure, support networks, and locations where they can organize. So in that sense their religion has become very material, which is often what happens. Religious belief can often be made very manifest in the world, reified through things like very tight social groups. Islam in much of the world, including Palestine, is as much a political organization as it is the more spiritual side of things.
Although I’d criticize Hakim for characterizing all Palestinians as Muslim, or saying that Islam is the primary thing that’s motivating them. Rather, it’s more the case that political Islam is the most organized game in town due to historical factors of the region. If it weren’t Islam, then people who want liberation would have something else, like how many Irish Republicans are Catholics. It is true though that 98% of Palestinians are Muslim, but that 2% who aren’t will probably also want liberation.
I think your comment is exactly showing something that we as communists should be aware of: calling someone an opportunist or a reactionary is not some heavenly stamp which forever makes that person incorrect or evil or some shit. Calling someone opportunist only needs to mean “currently in the process we call opportunism” and nothing more. We decide whether that’s true and expect the comrade to change or not depending on that result. If they don’t change after being opportunist then they are still performing that opportunism.
Roderic doesn’t think Hakim is evil or something, that’s more idealist than believing in religion generally, just that the claims to religious power are opportunistic and through that Hakim is performing opportunism. We can disagree, but the idea that we can’t call someone something because it’s mean, even when that thing is a concrete description of a process, is bullshit that we take from some western Christian beliefs of unwashable guilt (without Jesus or whatever).
Also to be clear, I disagree with Roderic only because I think that Hakim is doing the “their religion becomes material to their lives” thing and it seems probably true based on the form of resistance Palestinians are doing. The fact that he is also religious makes it complexer (and possible that he should not try to connect it to Marxism) but I’m not bothered by it until we’re already far enough in socialism that religion’s material presence isn’t necessary anymore.
That’s a really good point.
Maybe I read the tweet as being more aggressive towards Hakim than it was, because reading the word opportunism I just immediately assumed it’s accusing him of not being a real communist or whatever, instead of just criticizing what he’s doing right now.
Thanks for pointing it out, I’ll try to be more mindful of that.
Also to add, distinguishing s person from their actions is also something we should avoid. He is criticizing Hakim AS the Hakim who is doing this. Not just Hakim as a person or Hakim’s actions. But redoing through self-crit changes the incorrect person too and makes this not some “heavenly stamp” as I called it. We just can’t be scared of being critiqued for our actions as ourselves, because our actions can’t be removed from “ourselves”
I’d claim Hakim has the correct take here, and Day’s is a vulgar materialist view that ignores the interplay of faith and material conditions.
That might be a credible take if, for instance, Hakim’s post so much as mentioned material conditions, or Roderic’s post was about the engine of history rather than Hakim’s post.
Your assessment is totally disconnected both from the content of Hakim’s post and from the content of Day’s tweet.
I mean no, it’s not. The main anti-colonial group left in Gaza, which is massively popular, is an organization whose primary driving force is Islam. Religion is an incredibly important cultural force that is a key driving factor for Gazans and other Palestinian people in this fight. That is a materialist analysis of the situation lol because that is what the Palestinians themselves are saying. Just look at the wording used by the people there: the dead aren’t the dead but ‘martyrs’, and this isn’t just a conflict but a ‘jihad’ (righteous fight).
Hakim is very correctly noting the obvious here in that a vast majority of the Palestinians are Muslim and that their faith is a primary driver of this conflict for them. Painting in broad strokes isn’t denying that there aren’t any secular Palestinians, but talking about how Palestinians are fighting back and resisting in aggregate / at a zoomed out level.
Saying that the primary driving force behind Hamas is Islam is literally the exact opposite of material analysis.
Colonized people will resist their occupiers regardless of beliefs. The point isn’t that religion isn’t important to the people of Palestine, or that they can’t or shouldn’t find purpose or comfort in it. We should still not pretend that it’s the specific ideas they believe in that compels them to resist their occupiers.
Except it is the specific idea that compels them to resist their occupiers. Because they say it is. Saying otherwise is doing literally exactly the same thing that white Americans did that caused indigenous native Americans to have to change their practices, which they did not see as religious, to fit into the western white European understandings of the word ‘religion’ in order to receive government funding. Even if a Marxist or materialist analysis of the situation says in general that oppressed peoples ‘usually’ or ‘always’ react a specific way because of a specific force, you’re missing the point that that is a scientific theory. It is an abstraction. That does not mean it is reality or the only way of viewing a situation.
Your understanding of the situation and how it fits in with your worldview is different than the point of view of the Palestinians actually experiencing the situation. Again, I want to point you to the broad literature of the study of religion that shows just exactly what happens when dudes with white, western ideas of how the world works try to impose those on native indigenous populations.
Your point of view of how the situation works, or your understanding of the powers at play, is not reality. That is your interpretation of reality, a very useful abstraction that is very usually right. But that abstraction has contexts where it is appropriate to apply it, and contexts where it is inappropriate to apply it. And trying to apply it to deny the very real primary motivation that Palestinian people say is motivating them is not a great place to apply that abstraction.
Yeah, and what happened to the secular forces, I wonder? Did they just lack the stick-to-it-ness powers granted by religion, or were they actively trampled by forces that wanted the conflict in the region to have an ethnoreligious character?
an organization whose primary driving force is Islam
What Islam? A collection of beliefs? A set of believers?
The defining contention of materialism is that ideas are not the primary driver of history. Hakim’s post says, without qualification, that Islam is the driving force of the resistance.
The backflips folks are doing in this thread (including obliterating the very distinction between the ideal and the material, which is revisionism) to reconcile these two blindingly obvious, incompatible things are incredible.
That is a materialist analysis of the situation lol because that is what the Palestinians themselves are saying
Self-report (unadorned by any commentary or context, even) is ‘material analysis’ now? What?
I would maybe shut up and listen to someone who is closer to the situation, but then again I’m just a corgi with a laptop, the fuck do I know?
