MARX AND THE MATRIARCHY Ancient women-oriented groupings were the original communism. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx recognized this. (...) But, poineers that they were, neither Morgan, Engels, nor Marx were fully aware of womens real functions and achievements in past cultures. Nor were they tuned in to the total gestalt of early peoples. With Marx and Engels - and in particular with their dogmatic interpreters and followers - a narrowing of focus to strictly economic and class analysis has totally obscured the original human state of being, which was more profoundly spiritual than economic. This Marxist narrowing of focus, and its consequent denial of human spiritual experience, has had tragic repercussions throughout the world. (...) The tragedy of Marx - and of Marxist followers - was to confuse spirit with established religions. They saw clearly, and historically, that established religion aligned itself with the oppressor - the oppressing class, the oppressing monarchy, the oppressing social and economic systems. (...) Seeing these things, Marxists rightly condemned the collusion of established religions in the historic oppression of human beings. Tragically, they also denied the reality of the human spirit and its genuine longings. They rightly wanted to save humanity from religioous exploitation; but in their narrowing of focus, their economic and class reductiveness, they split the human being into two conflicting parts: material existence vs. spiritual existence. This split was just the mirror-image of the already existing religious dualism. As dogmatic Marxist communism unfolded in country after country, this split re-inforced the same alienation of the human condition that Marx had wanted to resolve. It has created the dreary state capitalism of Soviet Russia and its satellites, in which the state works, dourly and mechanically, to enforce its definition of human life as spiritless mechanism. It has given fuel to the propaganda engines of the reactionary systems in all countries, so that the world is ripped apart in a false dichotomy between Godless communism and divine capitalism. For if communism is atheistic, its opponents can claim to be mandated by God, however phony this claim might be. --- Monica Sjöö, Barbara Mor: The Great Cosmic Mother, 1987
Posted on: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 22:39:48 +0000
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