Socialism and Religion

mcolome1; are you an SPGB chatbot? It's something I've long thought about proposing but didn't realise the internet committee already got there first. Not sure if you'd pass the Turing test though.

I know that you won't like my participation in this thread, mcolome1, but here's my ten pence worth, anyway.Whilst the SPGB regards itself as 'materialist', it is adhering to what amounts to a religion. That's why I often characterise your beliefs as 'Religious Materialism'.As many thinkers over the years have pointed out, 'materialists' simply replace the 'absolute' of the 'idealists' with their own 'absolute'. That is, the 'materialists' replace 'god' with 'matter'.Belief in 'Matter' requires a religious faith, in an 'absolute' that 'exists', has always 'existed', and will always 'exist'. The Religious Materialists become furious at those Communists who insist that 'matter' is a social product (just like Communists insist that 'god' is a social product).And since 'matter' is a social product, it's easy to show workers that the Religious Materialists are either lying to workers or are totally unaware of the political effects of an 'absolute' of any kind.An 'absolute' (since it doesn't really 'exist') necessarily requires an elite minority who insist to the majority that the 'absolute' does 'exist', but the majority do not have the required consciousness to 'know the absolute', and so an 'elite special consciousness' must determine the nature of the 'absolute', and this determination cannot be made by the majority (by a democratic vote).That is, the Religious Materialists politically insist that the majority do not have the right to vote 'matter' out of 'existence' and replace 'matter' with something more suited to the interests and purposes of the majority.Once this is understood by workers, they can soon realise why Kautsky and Lenin (for example) regarded themselves as 'materialists' – it's because their elite politics require an 'absolute' which provides the elite with a basis which is unable to be controlled or changed by the proletariat.Unless the SPGB confront this issue, they will continue to have faith in an 'absolute', and Democratic Communists will continue to point out this underlying elitism of the SPGB to workers who wish to know about how workers can, as Marx argued, change their world.'Absolutes', as the term suggests, cannot be changed.

But, alas, it won't pass your 'Materialism test'!

Isn't any bot more sophisticated than the SPGB-bot?

I'm glad we're going to get an answer – that's what debate is supposed to be about.As for my 'repetitive argumentation', that's only a response to your 'repetitive religiosity' regarding 'matter'. Repetitive claims of the need for 'faith' must be argued against.

Unfortunately, it's precisely your 'definitions' that are at issue. It's no proper response to criticisms of your 'materialist' claim for the need for 'faith in Matter' to say that we can't discuss this.There will be no need for 'faith in Matter' in a socialist society which is controlled by the democratic producers. Only the democratic producers can determine for themselves what they produce.'Materialists' make the anti-democratic claim that only the minority of 'materialists' can determine 'matter', and it is apparent that the SPGB also makes this claim – and this is a religious claim, which will end in priestly rule, just like it did with Lenin.This, of course, has been the response of many socialists since the 19th century about the dangers of 'materialism' – it's not a novel claim by me. The Stalinists even reinstated the Orthodox church.As for me 'making a religion of Marx', anyone who's read my posts for the last three years will know that I'm very critical of Marx – I think that he's a terrible writer (even Engels didn't understand much of what Marx wrote – and we're not talking about 'handwriting', but 'explanation'), and that he sometimes undermined his own stated ideas (Engels did the same, but much more often), by saying the very opposite to his key claims.In fact, I think that only a comprehensive re-assessment of Marx's ideas in the 21st century by the emerging class conscious proletariat, can solve many of our problems with Marx. We need to read, discuss, discard, re-formulate, re-iterate, and create new ways of understanding the core of what Marx was trying (very poorly) to say about democratic social production and the building towards socialism/communism.Marx's ideas have to be made understandable to any worker – and that task is the job of socialists.