The 75th Anniversary Issue of Monthly Review, and Left Nostalgia

 

The May 2024 issue of the self-described “independent socialist magazine” Monthly Review was its 75^th Anniversary issue.  Founded in May 1949 by two 1930s socialist radicals who became its first Editors, economist Paul Sweezy and labor journalist Leo Huberman, Monthly Review declared itself to have no allegiance to any particular left or socialist party, although its articles all veered to the “far left,” or “revolutionary left,” especially to those declaring themselves Marxists of one sort or another.   Over the decades, Monthly Review carried articles mainly by intellectuals of Trotskyist or Maoist persuasions, as well as more orthodox communists and even neo-Stalinists, but decidedly not those who were anarchists or social democrats, as Monthly Review’s orientation was for “revolutionary socialism” as opposed to “mere reformism.”  (However, Monthly Review did once carry an article by Marxist-turned-anarchist Murray Bookchin highly critical of Mayor Bernie Sander’s socialist programs in Burlington Vermont.)    Monthly Review, of course, catalogued the various ills and crises of capitalism while always saying the only remedy was socialism.  But as it was overwhelmingly an intellectual journal, it was appealing not so much to a beleaguered proletariat to make the Revolution as it was for left and socialist intellectuals to educate for socialism, especially among the young, and proclaim themselves socialists instead.  In fact, Monthly Review steered clear of discussing programmatic proposals, of answering the question, “What Is to Be Done Next?” except on only one occasion, when in 1969 it effusively supported SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, the leading 1960s New Left group in the US) recognizing the Black Panther Party as the revolutionary “vanguard.”  That was its only direct foray into concrete left politics of any day, although it did also, in 1966, openly support the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and split on the Soviet Union’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, with Editor Leo Huberman roundly denouncing it while the other Editor, Paul Sweezy, stayed airily above the fray and discussed “revisionism” in abstract terms, indirectly accusing Dubček and his Czech allies of engaging in it.  Further, while in 1957, on the 40^th Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which had installed the “temporary” Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Editors did say critically that “forty years was too long” for such a dictatorship, during the Sino-Soviet Split Monthly Review came out firmly on the side of the Chinese, who were even more hardline and authoritarian than the Soviets!

 

Monthly Review has gone through many Editors since then, replacing the deceased Leo Huberman with Harry Magdoff, and then, after the retirement and death of Paul Sweezy, having as Editors Ellen Meiksin Wood, Robert McChesney, and presently, John Bellamy Foster, all the while keeping its “revolutionary socialist” orientation intact.  Bellamy Foster is very much the orthodox Marxist, looking especially to the 1930s and 1940s Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) as the halcyon model of socialism in America, still awaits the final collapse of capitalism, and, as someone particularly ecologically-minded, sees Marx as especially someone with full-throated ecological concerns, a harbinger of contemporary ecological thinking on de-growth and only limited sustainability being possible in a world of finite resources—something this author sees as highly improbable coming from a thinker living entirely in the 19^th Century (1818-1883, as did his friend and collaborator Frederick Engels [1820-1895], when developmentalism and unlimited growth were in intellectual vogue.  Although, even then, Marx and Engels had serious environmental reservations about unlimited capitalist growth.)  But that is Monthly Review—for whom Marx and Engels were not so much great, incisive thinkers as they were infallible prophets, whose insights are eternal and never wrong, irrelevant, or even conditional.

 

But back to the 75^th Anniversary issue.  Monthly Review commemorates its anniversary with four particular cases of left nostalgia.  First is a long article by Editor John Bellamy Foster (who always writes a long article monthly for the magazine, or else is featured in a long interview.  These are featured as “Review of the Month,” a practice begun under Huberman and Sweezy.) on how Albert Einstein created one of his best-known essays outside of physics for the first issue of the magazine, his short introductory essay on the topic titled “Why Socialism?”  Like all such “Reviews of the Month,” it is excruciatingly and pedantically footnoted with every possible reference or aside, in this particular case, with 91 such.  This author took to re-reading Einstein’s “Why Socialism?” and found it a good essay, but not a great one.  Only eight pages long in this author’s copy of the Einstein anthology Ideas and Opinions (New York:  Crown Publishers, 1954), Einstein’s actual discussion of the ills of capitalism and the consequent necessity of socialism takes up only the last three of these pages, and Einstein’s brief for socialism only the last two paragraphs!  (Making it indeed a—brief brief!  Yes, pun intended.)  However, in the very last paragraph, Einstein does raise the possibility that the benefits of a planned economy under socialism could be thwarted or denied if it degenerated into bureaucracy—a notable caveat, given than on the left, especially the orthodox Communist left, adulation of the Soviet Union under Stalin (which prided itself on a planned economy) was de rigueur for anyone calling himself socialist or communist, or in many cases, even liberal or progressive!  Monthly Review’s willingness to discuss and publish such straying from orthodoxy even got it called out by the CPUSA for possible “Trotskyite or Titoite” deviations!  (Huberman and Sweezy responded by firmly upholding Monthly Review as not “Titoite,” and did not even deign to address whether it was “Trotskyite”!)

 

In addition to being a socialist, Einstein also viewed himself as a Zionist, and had been ever since the rise of Nazism in his native Germany in the 1920s, which the May 2024 “Review of the Month” tried manfully, though unsuccessfully, to downplay.  Yes, Einstein was a humane Zionist, meaning nothing more than he believed in a Jewish home in what was then Palestine, and little more; although, citing Ideas and Opinions once again, Einstein pointedly noted that, with the emancipation of the Jews in Europe from the ghettoization and discrimination inflicted previously on them, many Jews gave up their Jewish ways and tried to assimilate—only to be thwarted by antisemitism, by being painfully reminded that, to the European Gentiles, they remained Jews, and would always remain Jews! (pp. 181-82)  Hence, his humane Zionism.

 

As for the other three pieces of nostalgia in this particular issue, there is a “Notes from the Editors” (another regular feature of Monthly Review) on then-Editors Huberman and Sweezy’s essentially dismissive take from 1974 that Watergate was of no major political import as far as maintaining capitalism was concerned, and that also, Huberman and Sweezy’s preoccupation with pollution as a specific environmental threat brought Huberman and Sweezy into accord with Bellamy Foster’s radical ecologism.  There is a also a brief quote from Paul Sweezy that, in response to his left critics who state otherwise, he still upholds Marx’s Theory of Value, and a 2000 note by then-Editors Harry Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney that the beginning of the 21^st Century was no time to abandon belief in revolutionary socialism, and that Monthly Review readers should still keep the socialist faith.  All reminiscent of the old saying, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”  Yes, since 1949 Stalin, Brezhnev and Mao have died, Khrushchev and Gorbachev tried to reform Soviet Communism and were deposed for their efforts, the dictatorial socialist Soviet Union became the kleptocratic capitalist dictatorship Russia, China dabbled in capitalism and transformed its formerly  “pure socialist” economy from underperformance to  world-power status, the welfare state waxed and waned but never disappeared despite capitalist wishes otherwise, public opinion in the US and other Western parliamentary democracies went from largely center-left to now substantially center-right, and much else besides, yet the hoary shibboleths traceable back to Marx and Engels are still as relevant as they ever were!  Supposedly.  What will Monthly Review write on its 100^th Anniversary?  No, the whole world is not waiting and wondering!   

While left ideals are excellent, and left theory overall is pretty good…

 

Yes, while left ideals are excellent, and left theory overall is pretty good, left practice leaves much, very much, to be desired.  Our left political practice is not good enough for our left movement, to put it bluntly.  We of the left lack not only political understanding and sophistication, but our tactical and strategic acumen is woefully inadequate.  As a result, all we can appeal to is our ideals, which we ofttimes simply can’t put into practice, make realizable.  That is why, while the left ofttimes punches above its weight (to borrow a phrase from fellow critical leftist Barry Finger, my closest political comrade), we leftists normally remain a minority, and an often beleaguered and marginalized minority at that.  While we incessantly talk of galvanizing the masses, typically we don’t galvanize them; they ignore us, or express hostility to us.  And that is our great tragedy as leftists.  Try as we may to be effective, ofttimes we fail at that.

This abstractly expressed argument above was made concrete for me recently, as I read a book about how Jeremy Corbyn became British Labour Party head in 2015, staved off a challenge to is leadership in 2016 (where the book ended), only to go down to ignominious defeat in the British elections of 2019, where Labour was trounced, suffering its greatest defeat since 1935.  Corbyn, who in 2015 was a little-known left backbencher Labour MP (Member of Parliament) from a safe district near London with no previous leadership experienced, galvanized many Labour Party members, it is true; he was especially strong among the young (under 39) and with women, but garnered only a plurality among trade unionist Labour members, had the open hostility of many fellow Labour MPs and the Labour bureaucracy, and his stunning win in 2015, coupled with his stunning reduction to ignominy in 2019, proved decisively that it takes more than a surprise insurgent candidacy to transform a party hierarchy that is strongly in place.  He came out of the antiwar and Palestinian movements, and many of his political views can be described as naïve at best.  Personally a nice, if somewhat colorless, person, he was drafted reluctantly as the left Labour leadership candidate, and while probably not anti-Semitic himself, had a real blind spot to left anti-Semitism, which rendered him open to attack on that front; also, his campaigning in support remaining in the EU, both in 2016 and in 2019, was tepid at best also.  He also had a campaign team that was enthusiastic and earnest, but inexperienced.  His seeming strengths overshadowed his glaring weaknesses.

There were similarities, of course, between Corbyn’s insurgency and the insurgent Democratic Presidential campaign of 2016 by Bernie Sanders, which also started in 2015.  But there were important differences.  For one thing, Sanders was a much more adept and eloquent politician than Corbyn, who, coming from a safe Labour seat of little importance for decades, where he was just another backbencher, had never been tested as a leader.  Also, Sanders was much more discriminating in who he publicly allied with and supported than was Corbyn, whose past uncritical and campist solidarities came back to haunt him not only throughout his campaign for Labour leadership, but also his time serving in office.  (Chief among these was his seeming support for “left” antisemitism, to which he was notably blind.)  Further, although British English is notably drier and more formal than American English, Corbyn’s spoken English in speeches (of which this writer has only seen snippets in print; but revealing snippets) was far more colorless and lackluster than was Sanders’s, who could be notably aggressive and forceful in making points—which he did with cogency and alacrity!  In short, Sanders was much more a natural-born leader than was Corbyn; and he had demonstrated that successfully not only while in legislative (and executive—he began his political career as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont) office, but during his campaign for the Presidential nomination.  Notably in this regard was the way Sanders responded on Sunday-morning TV to journalist George Stephanopoulos’s redbaiting objection that calling himself a “democratic socialist” would only hurt him, Sanders snapped back, “What’s wrong with that?” and proceeded to briefly but effectively explain what democratic socialism was. 

Both Corbyn and Sanders galvanized youth support for their candidacies, and turned out the youth vote.  Corbyn won the Labour Party leadership by strong support among new Labour members (62%), women (63%), those 25-39 (67%) and newly affiliated trade unionists (57.6%), but among overall Labour members who voted, only won a plurality (49.6%), not an absolute majority.  (Data taken from Alex Nunn, The Candidate [New York and London: OR Books, 2016], the book I read referred to above, pp. 301-302.)  Bernie Sanders, though arguably his base of support was larger and more diversified, was also only a minority candidate—he won 47% of the Democratic primary votes in 2016, and before he aborted his Presidential campaign in 2020, 40% of the vote.  Which indicates that, in both cases, while support for the left is strong, it does not constitute an absolute majority.  In forming his shadow cabinet after winning, Jeremy Corbyn reached out to his opponents and non-supporters in Parliament, only to have them turn against him in the summer of 2016 (ironically, among his most vocal opponents was Hilary Benn, a right-wing Labourite, and son of noted left-wing Labour leader Tony Benn!); while Corbyn won that battle, and under his leadership in the elections of 2017, led Labour to an admirable showing (though not enough to form a government), Labour with him at the helm was massacred in the election of 2019, ousting him not only from power, but making him very vulnerable to his Labour enemies.  (2019 was Labour’s worst showing since 1935, as mentioned above.)  Truth be told, Corbyn had important baggage he carried, and it was very noticeable in 2019:  although possibly (no one is really sure) not personally an antisemite, he had a serious antisemitism problem due to his uncritical pro-Third Worldism, notably in support of the Palestinians against Israel, no matter what; he was also a tepid supporter of Britain remaining in the European Union, and his call for a second Brexit referendum, after three years of Brexit, Brexit, Brexit! turned many past Labour voters against him.  As for the ambitions Labour Party manifesto of 2019, exit polls indicated that a large number of voters thought it unrealistic, and doubted it Labour could fulfill it.  This in sharp contrast to Conservative Party Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s cry on long-regurgitated and talked-about Brexit, “Get it done!” 

There was also a clear class divide between the young who supported the Labour left, and the older, more socially conservative and traditionalist, working class and trade unionists who had formerly voted Labour—just as there is such a divide here in the U.S., although the left doesn’t want to admit it, or even talk about it.  The young are often college-educated, in contrast to the older, and come from backgrounds of privilege that enable them to go to college.  They are often better employed than older workers, and despite the rise of the precariat among the young, have better prospects for the future.  This is especially noticeable in the U.S. in the death rate for white males 55 and older, many of whom have lost their once-secure blue-collar and ordinary white-collar jobs—and now die prematurely of opioid addiction, alcoholism, and suicide, while other demographic groups see their lifespans increase.  Today’s left, both in Europe and in the U.S., is focused on social issues rather than economic ones because, truth be told, youth are more beneficiaries of neoliberalism than have been older workers.  Deindustrialization and globalism have brought layoffs and job disappearance to the traditional working class, or else severe drops in income and status as workers are forced to trade higher-income employment (often in manufacturing) for lower-income employment (often in services).  While youth doesn’t have it that great anymore either, they have employment options in NGOs and in professional employment lacking for the non-college educated.  For the youth, economic precarity is not a compelling issue, despite neoliberalism making it more prevalent.  Hence the turn of youth to social issues away from economic ones, and of course, the rise of neoliberal, pro-capitalist modes of supposedly radical “isms” such as feminism and anti-racism.  But as many a worker will tell you, in the end, there’s no difference, except perhaps stylistically, between a woman boss and a man boss, a boss of color and a boss who’s white!  As The Who sang tellingly, “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss.”  Bernie Sanders grasped that.  I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn ever did.  Among other left leaders in the U.S. besides Bernie, only AOC seems to grasp what is really going on—and she often gets accused of “selling out” by certain persons on the U.S. left!

The Sanders, Corbyn, struggles for leadership encapsulate many of the failings of the contemporary left.  We are long past the golden days of Marxism and Marxist leaders of the first part of the 20^th Century such as Trotsky, Max Shachtman, Rosa Luxemburg, her nemesis Eduard Bernstein, Gramsci, even Lenin and Kautsky, not to mention Marx and Engels themselves, who lived and died entirely within the 19^th Century; and we are sorely missing later leaders such as Michael Harrington.  In my opinion, our current left “leadership,” as represented by such figures as Noam Chomsky, Vijay Prashad, and Medea Benjamin, are really not suitable leaders at all; hence our left descent into mediocrity, obsessive focus on cultural and social issues, including identity politics to the detriment of real class analysis and focus on economics and economic reality.  Today’s left, as it has been since the 1960s, is overwhelmingly college-educated, but not any smarter because of it.  We of the left are not terribly good at talking to average workers; we are far “better” talking (or rather, lecturing, hectoring) at them!  That is especially noticeable in the rise of “cancel culture,” the left equivalent of irredeemable Original Sin.  If we of today’s left were truly honest, we would read to everyone we talk to or about this version of their Miranda Rights:  “Not only will anything and everything you ever said or wrote be held against you, it will mark you forever, even at the expense of losing your reputation and employment.”  While leftists may protest, “But we have good intentions!” such intentions are never enough; politics, especially left politics, is not a morality play; it is a push to achieve power to effect substantive change.  It is not, decidedly not, about forming consensus-agreeing affinity groups, it is about forming coalitions, often diverse and even on some issues, contradictory coalitions, where not everyone agrees on every single issue.  It is also about using tact, sophistication, and nuance in organizing, and having a healthy skepticism of what we advocate, what we are for, so that we of the left are able to say to ourselves, “While I think I’m right in this, I will also admit I could be wrong.  I do not think so at present, because I have thought this over thoroughly.  But I may have overlooked something.”  Let us recall as leftists, many of us as Marxists, the dialectic, and how the dialectic means change, transformation, over time, so that what is so certain today may be substantially not so in the future.  That is what we of the left must do today—come to that understanding.

 

The "Correspondence" Monthly Review Declined to Print

I submitted the "Correspondence" to the long-established socialist magazine Monthly Review in January 2016.  Since its founding in 1948, Monthly Review has been a theoretical mainstay of the Marxist left, especially the self-styled "revolutionary left."  In December 2015 it published an article by French Marxist Michael Lowy, a leading figure in one of the sections of the Trotskyist Fourth International, that was uncritically laudatory of Pope Francis's enclclical on climate change, Laudato Si'.  As a socialist influenced strongly by Marxism and Trotskyism as well as an ex-Catholic atheist, I found Lowy's paean to what was a mundane eucyclical that only repeated what scientists themselves had been saying for over a decade really over-the-top, and his embrace of "papal socialism" most untoward.  While in the absence of major activity of a strongly socialist charcter absent from the working classes in especially the advanced capitalist countries apparent for some time now, many Marxists have shifted ground in search for a new "revolutionary" substitute for the moribund proletariat--some, such as the Maoists, have embraced the peasantry and the dispossed in the Third World, while others have cast their lot with various racial and social "vanguards" that Marxist intellectuals can oorganize through the all-purpose means of the Leninist party.  But to see the Catholic Church as suddenly a force for socialism, for a new political consciousness, for a new critical awareness, given its nearly-two-millennia record of obfuscation, obscurantism, reactionary social and political policies, and open support for reactionary and repressive political regmes?  For this decidedly ex-Catholic who was himself a victim of Catholic abuse, that was too much!  Hence, this "Correspondence," whch Monthly Review declined to prnt, thus casting its lot with those who would align with alleged "Catholic social conscence" and its new PR-frendly Pope rather than those who were abused and dispossed by Catholicism itself--GF

To the Editors of Monthly Review:

 

Michael Löwy’s paean to Pope Francis’s “ecological encyclopedia” (as he calls it) in the December 2015 issue of Monthly Review, “Laudato Si—The Popes Anti-Systemic Encyclical,” http://monthlyreview.org/2015/12/01/laudato-sithe-popes-anti-systemic-encyclical/,

is, by far, too much a glossing-over of the dark side of both the Pope and the Catholic Church;   it is able to extend fulsome praise to Laudato Si’ only by overlooking, by separating it out abstractly from, the many other failures and considerable limitations of Pope Francis’s refurbished Catholicism itself.  For ex-Catholic atheists and Marxists such as myself, these failures and limitations are especially glaring; and while we are perhaps willing to march partially with the Pope on ecological concerns, on so many issues which still fester in Catholicism, issues on which leadership and eloquence from Pope Francis have been noticeably lacking, we must dissent and demur.  The supposed “anti-systemic” critique of global capitalism, which Löwy sees in Laudato Si’, simply cannot cancel out  the inaction, indeed even the hidebound reaction, that is still integral to the Catholicism of Pope Francis just as much as it is of his predecessors, and which is still part and parcel of Catholic theology and ethical teachings.  The Pope is more than “naïve,” as Löwy would have it; despite certain advances he’s promulgated in some areas of Catholic teaching (which have actually garnered more favorable publicity than actual substance would justify—i.e., they are more achievements in public relations than they are in loosening the grip of reaction on official Catholicism), the Pope is still preaching doctrine that, while partially recognizing the Twenty-First Century, in other crucial ways is still mired in the medieval scholasticism that is the Catholic Church’s continuing legacy as a whole—whether we wish to recognize it or not. 

These concerns of mine as precisely an ex-Catholic Marxist and atheist moved me to prepare the following flyer I distributed to a meeting here in Indianapolis, Indiana, that was convened to discuss Laudato Si’.  In trying to write with an appropriate balance, especially to the audience gathered that was primarily comprised of religious believers, I think I achieved precisely this in the short space of less than 650 words, and summed up my arguments appropriately in my very subtitle:  “Kudos to the Pope, but Not to Catholicism.”  I present this flyer below as a contribution to discussion of the Pope’s encyclical and the ongoing nature of Catholicism itself.

 

POPE FRANCIS’S CLIMATE CHANGE ENCYCLICAL—

KUDOS TO THE POPE, BUT NOT TO CATHOLICISM!

written on June 22, 2015

 by George Fish, Indianapolis, Indiana:

ex-Catholic, atheist, democrat, socialist, humanist, secularist

 

While we can indeed take heart at the Pope’s recent, very positive and needed, affirmative encyclical message and call for action on climate change, Laudato Si’—a message issued so strongly, so urgently, and with such scientific validity it upset climate-change denialists and conservative Catholics to a degree that drove them into frothing rage—let it not stand as a vindication or a prettifying of a still-ugly and ominously regressive Catholic Church.  Of course, we who are secular and democratic in our instincts should be delighted at the viciousness and obtuseness it has excited among the likes of the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue and Republican Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum, notoriously right-wing Catholics and ardent opponents of both science and secularism.  Yet that not serve as pretext for overlooking the still-seamy underside, indeed, even the public face, of official Catholicism:  as illustrated by remarks, and their lack, from Pope Francis himself.

In all honesty, even as we celebrate the Pope’s directness and scientific correctness evinced in Laudato Si’, let us also pointedly note that scientists and secularists have been saying the very same things as the Pope is now saying, and for a good decade previously.  And in honesty, let us also pointedly note that Pope Francis, ever true to official Catholicism even in its open obscurantism, felt obliged to gratuitously insert into his climate change encyclical yet more inappropriate, dogmatic and obscurantist screeds against not only abortion, but even birth control, “officially Catholic” positions even much of the forced-to-remain-silent Catholic lay body objects to; not to mention all of us outside of the Catholic Church who are sick and tired of hearing these monotonous, one-sided mantras that indicate so firmly that Catholicism has yet to actually enter the 21^st Century.

Let us not also forget the Pope’s, and the Vatican’s, denunciation of the recent historic vote in traditionally-Catholic Ireland firmly upholding same-sex marriage, a fundamentally decent political and human rights position the still-viciously homophobic Catholic Church insists on repeatedly negating and denouncing; thus denying in its ecclesiastical fulminations the fundamental dignity and humanity or non-heterosexual humanity.  Let us not forget either the Pope’s own backhanded approval given to the Muslim fanatics who committed the Charlie Hedbo massacre, as the Pope himself gave backhanded justification to the murders of the magazine’s staff for “offending” another religion—as if the magazine’s open secularism and anti-clericalism even justified horrific mass murder!  Let us also note the Pope’s own glaring silence on the ethnic cleansing being carried out today in Myanmar (Burma) and Sri Lanka that is being fomented by chauvinistic Buddhist monks.  As well his silence on the ever-prevailing atrocities continually carried out in the name of Islam not only by supposedly “rogue” groups such as ISIS, but even by Islamic states themselves, as in Saudi Arabia and under the military dictatorship in Egypt—not to mention the Islamic suppression of the Arab Spring!

 

Nor let us forget the still-festering scandal within Catholicism due to rampant priest-pedophilia, and the Vatican’s still-prevailing do-nothing-effective approach to it (Pope Francis did nothing more except appoint yet another commission to “study” the problem).  Nor let us forget the centuries of abuse and suffering meted out to Catholics and non-Catholics alike through the official actions of the Church, in the rampant abuse and abuse of power in the Catholic school system, and the systematic oppression meted out to whole populations, even those that were comprised of stalwart Catholics, in such Catholic countries as Ireland, Spain, and throughout Latin America.  Despite the Pope’s new encouraging words on climate change, Catholicism still has a lot to answer for before the body of secular, democratic humanity.

 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE:  George Fish is an ex-Catholic Marxist atheist and writer whose work has appeared in many publications of the socialist and alternative press.  He contributed what many regard as one of the best short expositions of Marxist atheism so far published, “Two Kinds of Atheism,” in the February 1988 issue of Monthly Review.  He may be contacted via e-mail at georgefish666@yahoo.com. 

 

 

The "Correspondence" Monthly Review Declined to Prnt

I submitted the "Correspondence" to the long-established socialist magazine Monthly Review in January 2016.  Since its founding in 1948, Monthly Review has been a theoretical mainstay of the Marxist left, especially the self-styled "revolutionary left."  In December 2015 it published an article by French Marxist Michael Lowy, a leading figure in one of the sections of the Trotskyist Fourth International, that was uncritically laudatory of Pope Francis's enclclical on climate change, Laudato Si'.  As a socialist influenced strongly by Marxism and Trotskyism as well as an ex-Catholic atheist, I found Lowy's paean to what was a mundane eucyclical that only repeated what scientists themselves had been saying for over a decade really over-the-top, and his embrace of "papal socialism" most untoward.  While in the absence of major activity of a strongly socialist charcter absent from the working classes in especially the advanced capitalist countries apparent for some time now, many Marxists have shifted ground in search for a new "revolutionary" substitute for the moribund proletariat--some, such as the Maoists, have embraced the peasantry and the dispossed in the Third World, while others have cast their lot with various racial and social "vanguards" that Marxist intellectuals can oorganize through the all-purpose means of the Leninist party.  But to see the Catholic Church as suddenly a force for socialism, for a new political consciousness, for a new critical awareness, given its nearly-two-millennia record of obfuscation, obscurantism, reactionary social and political policies, and open support for reactionary and repressive political regmes?  For this decidedly ex-Catholic who was himself a victim of Catholic abuse, that was too much!  Hence, this "Correspondence," whch Monthly Review declined to prnt, thus casting its lot with those who would align with alleged "Catholic social conscence" and its new PR-frendly Pope rather than those who were abused and dispossed by Catholicism itself--GF

To the Editors of Monthly Review:

 

Michael Löwy’s paean to Pope Francis’s “ecological encyclopedia” (as he calls it) in the December 2015 issue of Monthly Review, “Laudato Si—The Popes Anti-Systemic Encyclical,” http://monthlyreview.org/2015/12/01/laudato-sithe-popes-anti-systemic-encyclical/,

is, by far, too much a glossing-over of the dark side of both the Pope and the Catholic Church;   it is able to extend fulsome praise to Laudato Si’ only by overlooking, by separating it out abstractly from, the many other failures and considerable limitations of Pope Francis’s refurbished Catholicism itself.  For ex-Catholic atheists and Marxists such as myself, these failures and limitations are especially glaring; and while we are perhaps willing to march partially with the Pope on ecological concerns, on so many issues which still fester in Catholicism, issues on which leadership and eloquence from Pope Francis have been noticeably lacking, we must dissent and demur.  The supposed “anti-systemic” critique of global capitalism, which Löwy sees in Laudato Si’, simply cannot cancel out  the inaction, indeed even the hidebound reaction, that is still integral to the Catholicism of Pope Francis just as much as it is of his predecessors, and which is still part and parcel of Catholic theology and ethical teachings.  The Pope is more than “naïve,” as Löwy would have it; despite certain advances he’s promulgated in some areas of Catholic teaching (which have actually garnered more favorable publicity than actual substance would justify—i.e., they are more achievements in public relations than they are in loosening the grip of reaction on official Catholicism), the Pope is still preaching doctrine that, while partially recognizing the Twenty-First Century, in other crucial ways is still mired in the medieval scholasticism that is the Catholic Church’s continuing legacy as a whole—whether we wish to recognize it or not. 

These concerns of mine as precisely an ex-Catholic Marxist and atheist moved me to prepare the following flyer I distributed to a meeting here in Indianapolis, Indiana, that was convened to discuss Laudato Si’.  In trying to write with an appropriate balance, especially to the audience gathered that was primarily comprised of religious believers, I think I achieved precisely this in the short space of less than 650 words, and summed up my arguments appropriately in my very subtitle:  “Kudos to the Pope, but Not to Catholicism.”  I present this flyer below as a contribution to discussion of the Pope’s encyclical and the ongoing nature of Catholicism itself.

 

POPE FRANCIS’S CLIMATE CHANGE ENCYCLICAL—

KUDOS TO THE POPE, BUT NOT TO CATHOLICISM!

written on June 22, 2015

 by George Fish, Indianapolis, Indiana:

ex-Catholic, atheist, democrat, socialist, humanist, secularist

 

While we can indeed take heart at the Pope’s recent, very positive and needed, affirmative encyclical message and call for action on climate change, Laudato Si’—a message issued so strongly, so urgently, and with such scientific validity it upset climate-change denialists and conservative Catholics to a degree that drove them into frothing rage—let it not stand as a vindication or a prettifying of a still-ugly and ominously regressive Catholic Church.  Of course, we who are secular and democratic in our instincts should be delighted at the viciousness and obtuseness it has excited among the likes of the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue and Republican Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum, notoriously right-wing Catholics and ardent opponents of both science and secularism.  Yet that not serve as pretext for overlooking the still-seamy underside, indeed, even the public face, of official Catholicism:  as illustrated by remarks, and their lack, from Pope Francis himself.

In all honesty, even as we celebrate the Pope’s directness and scientific correctness evinced in Laudato Si’, let us also pointedly note that scientists and secularists have been saying the very same things as the Pope is now saying, and for a good decade previously.  And in honesty, let us also pointedly note that Pope Francis, ever true to official Catholicism even in its open obscurantism, felt obliged to gratuitously insert into his climate change encyclical yet more inappropriate, dogmatic and obscurantist screeds against not only abortion, but even birth control, “officially Catholic” positions even much of the forced-to-remain-silent Catholic lay body objects to; not to mention all of us outside of the Catholic Church who are sick and tired of hearing these monotonous, one-sided mantras that indicate so firmly that Catholicism has yet to actually enter the 21^st Century.

Let us not also forget the Pope’s, and the Vatican’s, denunciation of the recent historic vote in traditionally-Catholic Ireland firmly upholding same-sex marriage, a fundamentally decent political and human rights position the still-viciously homophobic Catholic Church insists on repeatedly negating and denouncing; thus denying in its ecclesiastical fulminations the fundamental dignity and humanity or non-heterosexual humanity.  Let us not forget either the Pope’s own backhanded approval given to the Muslim fanatics who committed the Charlie Hedbo massacre, as the Pope himself gave backhanded justification to the murders of the magazine’s staff for “offending” another religion—as if the magazine’s open secularism and anti-clericalism even justified horrific mass murder!  Let us also note the Pope’s own glaring silence on the ethnic cleansing being carried out today in Myanmar (Burma) and Sri Lanka that is being fomented by chauvinistic Buddhist monks.  As well his silence on the ever-prevailing atrocities continually carried out in the name of Islam not only by supposedly “rogue” groups such as ISIS, but even by Islamic states themselves, as in Saudi Arabia and under the military dictatorship in Egypt—not to mention the Islamic suppression of the Arab Spring!

 

Nor let us forget the still-festering scandal within Catholicism due to rampant priest-pedophilia, and the Vatican’s still-prevailing do-nothing-effective approach to it (Pope Francis did nothing more except appoint yet another commission to “study” the problem).  Nor let us forget the centuries of abuse and suffering meted out to Catholics and non-Catholics alike through the official actions of the Church, in the rampant abuse and abuse of power in the Catholic school system, and the systematic oppression meted out to whole populations, even those that were comprised of stalwart Catholics, in such Catholic countries as Ireland, Spain, and throughout Latin America.  Despite the Pope’s new encouraging words on climate change, Catholicism still has a lot to answer for before the body of secular, democratic humanity.

 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE:  George Fish is an ex-Catholic Marxist atheist and writer whose work has appeared in many publications of the socialist and alternative press.  He contributed what many regard as one of the best short expositions of Marxist atheism so far published, “Two Kinds of Atheism,” in the February 1988 issue of Monthly Review.  He may be contacted via e-mail at georgefish666@yahoo.com.