[A-List] The Age of Materialism Is Over

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 8/19/07, james daly <james.irldaly at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Western leftists have not responded to Ahmedinejab's overtures of a dialogue
> from an Aristotelian perspective about the grossly materialistic, insatiably
> possessive individualist nature of capitalism, and the spiritual dimension
> of the socialist goal -- its abolition and replacement by community
> ownership and production for need. We have much more in common with him than
> with that embodiment of fanatical insatiability George W. Bush, and more
> need and duty to criticise W. than aspects of Islam.
>
> One thing we could do is to return to the Aristotelian criticisms of the
> money market and its destruction of community, which inspired Marx.
> Aristotle's "pleonexia" (insatiability) corresponds to "Accumulate!
> Accumulate! That is the law and the prophets!"
>
> The first thesis on Feuerbach which Yoshie appropriately quotes associates
> mechanistic materialism with huckstering, the basis of capitalism. It is no
> basis for socialism

Aristotle is surely one of the most important philosophers to revisit,
as we seek to consider what kind of historical materialism can speak
to people today, especially in the Middle East but also elsewhere,
too.

Unfortunately, the idea of dialog with those who come from political
and cultural traditions other than the Marxist one is still alien to
most Marxists when it comes to engaging Muslims.  (They have some
experience in talking as equals with Christians, due to Latin
American, US Black, Irish, and other struggles in which those from
various schools of Christian thought and practice have constituted
mass bases and have also played important leadership roles.)  Most
thinking Marxists today have reconsidered the idea of a vanguard party
that monopolistically takes the leadership of the working class, but
the line of thinking that belongs to that idea still makes a comeback
if anyone suggests we should ask why a lot of working people in the
predominantly Islamic world have turned to Islam as an ideology for
struggle (the only reason most Marxists would like to think about is
repression of socialists by regimes in power, which has certainly been
a factor but is hardly the only or even the most important factor) and
what its strengths are, though Marxists are quick to point out its
weaknesses.
-- 
Yoshie