Did religion provide the hierarchy or the relations of production? I imagine there’s quite a strong dialectical relationship as I see religion as adaptable to material conditions. E.g. Catholicism mapped perfectly to feudal society. Then Christians needed a new form for the capitalist era. And in comes Protestantism with is work ethic and whatever the fuck those fundamentalists in the US do where the Christians screech for war, refuse to help the poor, and deny medical care to each other.
I’m not saying this to say that religion can survive without hierarchy. Maybe there are theories about that. Only to ask whether there’s an order to this. If religion provides the hierarchy does that make it part of the base? And if religion no longer provides the hierarchy, would it now be part of the superstructure? Or was it always part of the superstructure? (Recognising, still, that the base-superstructure is shorthand for something that is more flexible in practice than in some vulgar theory.)
Did religion provide the hierarchy or the relations of production? I imagine there’s quite a strong dialectical relationship as I see religion as adaptable to material conditions. E.g. Catholicism mapped perfectly to feudal society. Then Christians needed a new form for the capitalist era. And in comes Protestantism with is work ethic and whatever the fuck those fundamentalists in the US do where the Christians screech for war, refuse to help the poor, and deny medical care to each other.
I’m not saying this to say that religion can survive without hierarchy. Maybe there are theories about that. Only to ask whether there’s an order to this. If religion provides the hierarchy does that make it part of the base? And if religion no longer provides the hierarchy, would it now be part of the superstructure? Or was it always part of the superstructure? (Recognising, still, that the base-superstructure is shorthand for something that is more flexible in practice than in some vulgar theory.)