• I think your comment is exactly showing something that we as communists should be aware of: calling someone an opportunist or a reactionary is not some heavenly stamp which forever makes that person incorrect or evil or some shit. Calling someone opportunist only needs to mean “currently in the process we call opportunism” and nothing more. We decide whether that’s true and expect the comrade to change or not depending on that result. If they don’t change after being opportunist then they are still performing that opportunism.

    Roderic doesn’t think Hakim is evil or something, that’s more idealist than believing in religion generally, just that the claims to religious power are opportunistic and through that Hakim is performing opportunism. We can disagree, but the idea that we can’t call someone something because it’s mean, even when that thing is a concrete description of a process, is bullshit that we take from some western Christian beliefs of unwashable guilt (without Jesus or whatever).

    Also to be clear, I disagree with Roderic only because I think that Hakim is doing the “their religion becomes material to their lives” thing and it seems probably true based on the form of resistance Palestinians are doing. The fact that he is also religious makes it complexer (and possible that he should not try to connect it to Marxism) but I’m not bothered by it until we’re already far enough in socialism that religion’s material presence isn’t necessary anymore.