Well, something that the Mormons have is they tried out communism. They called it the law of consecration. They had some fun times with trying to handle being productive and redistribution and poligamous. They ultimately concluded that they weren’t ready for it yet so they went back to default capitalism with tithing and poor/fast offerings.
Tl;dr: Mormons believe in a kind of communism in heaven, and they go hungry for 2 meals (24 hrs) to remember to give generously to the poor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_consecration?wprov=sfla1
‘They’ didn’t decide they weren’t ready. It was used to fleece the pathetic true believers for a short period until the inner circle felt sufficiently capitalized.
Heaven was literally [re]invented to be a description of utopia specifically so that toiling workers wouldn’t get distracted trying to create it on Earth.
“oooh heaven is a place on earth” take that shit literally, fam
Pie in the sky By and by
That’s because there are no brown people in their version of heaven.
Ah now it all makes sense
The thing to understand about Christianity is that it was originally a reaction against the Roman empire and then got co-opted and integrated into it. As a result, ever since like the 4th century Christianity has been about basically the opposite of what Jesus talked about. It turns out all that stuff about turning the other cheek stops being relevant if the emperor has his soldiers paint crosses on their shields while they’re out conquering and enslaving the Gauls. Of course, you can keep all the mythological stuff, who cares, but anything relevant to politics or the material world mysteriously seemed to reverse once they entered the halls of power.
The carrot of being accepted into the empire was matched with the stick that if you didn’t go along with the imperial-approved form of Christianity you’d be burned at the stake as a heretic. Any sects still clinging to anti-imperial sentiment get hunted down and exterminated just like when they were being fed to lions, but it’s the Christians doing it to each other now, so you don’t even have to get your own hands dirty. This approach worked way better at suppressing dissent than just trying to ban Christianity altogether.
Of course, a lot has changed over the centuries. And originally it wasn’t perfect or anything either. But imo, it was when Rome Christianized that Christianity Romanized, and ever since its real values have had more to do with Rome than with Jesus. The meme’s, “moneyless, classless, stateless” ideal of heaven is a relic of the original teachings that gets shunted off to the purely mythological side, where it not only doesn’t matter, but also occupies a place in their brain that could have otherwise been sympathetic to making good things happen in the material world. That’s already resolved, there’s no need to worry about it, there’ll be pie in sky when you die.
This is why christian fascism should not be the least bit surprising.
Great writeup comrade, I also wanna share this really interesting article from Roland Boer, going over this history a bit, and also outlining the historical intersections of communism and christianity.
Oh it makes sense now, recuperation is not a capitalist concept, it is an imperialist concept!
They didn’t keep the mythological stuff, that got edited out too as needed once it started disagreeing with the State and the Church.
That only works when there’s no scarcity. Then its up to communists/capitalists/anarchists/dictators how to slice the cake
Yeah, pretty massive fundamental difference, lol.
I don’t think communism is a moneyless system. Pretty sure people paid money for things in the USSR. Have there been any communist countries without money?
To understand this you need to understand the theory. Marx outlined that socialism and communism each had to be transitioned to after reaching a given level of social/economic development. In particular there is the notion of “withering away of the state” which would happen after a global revolution, which is the aim of this classless/moniless society they outlined.
The communist manifesto is a short read!
In fact the USSR implemented explicit market policies, a sort of contained capitalism, which was designed to facilitate reaching the necessary preconditions for socialism and communism. Essentially all of the “communist” states we’ve seen so far have been some play on the notion of just “socialism in one country” in the Marxist-Leninist version of communist parties, who have/had the goal of eventually reaching communism.
What’s probably most interesting is that the idea behind the USSR wasn’t initially to have the state direct everything from the top, but in fact to facilitate worker councils (soviets) to direct their workplaces.
But you have to remember this all happened in the context of a state which had recently undergone a revolution, was rife with counterrevolutonary action (see revolutionary France and civil war Britain to see how this played out during the birth of liberalism) and was then plunged into WW2 where most states involved were acting fairly dictatorially for the duration of it. Followed shortly by the US making it an explicit goal to prevent world communism through e.g. CIA intervention because they feared “domino theory”
Yes, which is why the USSR never once in its history claimed to have built communism. The best they claimed was “developed socialism” with promises to build Communism someday
something that I don’t get about communism: how do you prevent people from redistributing their wealth unequally over time?
I don’t really have any politic views because the discourse on it is so big and the issues so complex, but lean more towards socialism
By the time we reach Communism, that is, the Marxist vision of a fully publicly owned and planned world economy, distribution of wealth will likely be based on need. There is no necessity for equal wealth, as humans have very unequal needs. Equal ownership of property is certified through public ownership.
If you’re asking what’s preventing someone from starting a business, it would be the sheer difficulties of actually starting one that can compete with the highly developed productive forces in the rest of the economy. Communism isn’t so much about outlawing private property, as developing beyond it.
Communism is a post-Socialist society, it must be global, highly developed, and have full public ownership, or close enough to those. The Soviet Union was, instead, Socialist, ie an economy where public ownership is the principle aspect. That being said, there were attempts at Cybernetics, and moving beyond money. These are actually incredibly interesting, and anyone interested in Socialism should look into those attempts.
If you want to learn more about Socialism and Communism, I recommend checking out my introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list.
There is also the great Documentary by Plastic Pills Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile
Oh shit, I need to watch that! Thanks, comrade!
It’s great, it goes further into how post coup the nascent proto-neolib ghouls went down to examine cybersyn and essentially stole the whole idea behind it which eventually became the model for just in time supply chains at places like amazon and walmart. Oh what could have been.
Interesting, and heartbreaking, of course. I never knew about the link to JIT from Cybersyn, I’ll have to give that a watch. Thanks!
I mean that stuff wouldn’t emerge for the next couple decades, but you can certainly see where the capitalist vampires saw it and went “damn that looks real efficient, bet if we made a privatized version we’d make more money than god”.
Of course as we know it was only so efficient because of its socialized nature which made such supply chains less prone to disruption as the computational power could be used to centrally monitor supply chains between all sorts of different nationalized industries, that could then be allocated in an agile manor so as to minimize any one industry or population running out of materials or basic needs. It was so efficient materials could even be reallocated mid route. It was a really sophisticated system and could serve as a blueprint for large scale socialized economies.
Absolutely! It’s kinda surreal seeing Marx get vindicated, he predicted markets would eventually develop these kinds of technologies in order to deal with ever-increasing complexity in production.
Marx mentioned
I do be mentioning Marx
And no one has to work, they are provided with everything they need. Almost like a universal basic income or something.
More like post-scarcity. I don’t think even the wildest leftist thinks we’re quite there yet.
On calories housing and most everyday things we are post scarcity if we ignore distribution. In fact we over commission and under deliver all these things. We over produce food by a factor of around 1.5, housing is much less transferable but even there we’re unbelievably wastefull, energy is basically the only thing that isn’t outright overproduced but really only because when we have cheap energy we just tend to use it, often to produce more stuff.
So imo we are by bookkeeping standards post scarcity, delivery/distribution is just fucked and partially because of that we are creating tons of waste.
We could all live in comfort and those who want to could work less, and none of this would break. The real world economy(things, energy, housing , food, water, logistics capabilities…) is so large and secure it could support the world population. If not for the barriers and assumptions, the intrinsic I’ve got mine fuck you of the systems.
For me that is being there, and I hope that even if you can’t agree on that point, it at least illustrates that we are incredibly close to post scarcity.
I stand corrected. I guess some people do think we’re there.
Personally, I don’t think we’re close yet, but there could exist a better system where we’d at least be closer.
I’m pretty sure most of this is is loosely from “Half earth socialism”, which might not consider us already in post scarcity, but is at least sympathetic to the position while trying to approach the arguably more important factors,- climate change and biodiversity decline- through such a lens.
Examining how our lives could be lived, in accordance with the natural world systems, with a socialist organization of the world economy.
It’s pretty readable as far as these books go, I think it might even be the first explicitly socialist book I read /listened to.
I actually take a critical eye to the word “work” itself and think that it’s too encompassing a term. In our society it’s a blanket word that covers all labor. From punitive, fruitless toil all the way up to invigorating, actualizing applications of trained skill. Lots of what we call “work” are actually things we could want for ourselves in a utopia and would miss without, while IRL we’re currently on the crest of an economic trend in which the majority of society are trapped in ultimately meaningless and forgettable toil under wage coercion. Literally just being kept occupied and oppressed.
Put very simply I think you can slice our current idea of what work is into two halves, work that removes happiness from ourselves and society and work that adds happiness to ourselves and society. As utopians I think a society that contains only the latter is a reasonable prize to keep our eyes on.
The description of the first primitive church in Jerusalem is very close to an ideal anarchist commune.
Sadly… that doesn’t really track with Christianity.
I mean you can add the overall benefits of everyones needs are automatically met. There’s no talk of toiling for food etc…
But on top of the automatic fact that angels clearly have a hierarchy, god is clearly a full power ruler, there’s tons of verses that talk about people that will be the least in heaven, or greatest in heaven (Matthew 5:19). On top of building treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:19) etc…
military like hierarchy of the church.
Core spirituality vs institutional religious baggage
“Not like that!” My dads response when I tell him Jesus was a communist.
Shoutout to my boy Camilo Torres who famously said, “If Jesus was alive today he’d be a guerrillero.”
Is the 0 getting around a commie filter or?
It’s 0 because communism is a moneyless system
Shit i have got to read more the0ry
Even the more devout Christians I know (who actually have opinions about different theological positions) believe Earth and human society should not be modeled on heaven and attempts to do so will fail due to humans being inherently / essentially Fallen. This is part of how they rationalize their resistance / apathy towards movements for justice, at the very least they believe it is futile to seek justice in this life.
Seek out and meet a christian anarchist. Those folks are badass and will change your idea of christianity’s potential (I’m agnostic).
My concept of Christianity is rather expansive, and Christian anarchists are often inspired by Tolstoy, who is someone I have read about and whose works I have given some attention. I can confirm they are rather different than most Christians - Tolstoy in particular rejected the Church after he saw they were committed to enabling war, which is clearly un-Christian. Dorothy Day is another relevant Christian anarchist, and I have worked with a Catholic Workers House locally, so I have some IRL exposure to these folks as well.
I tend to think “Christian” is an almost meaningless term without more context or clarification, people who call themselves Christians hold opposite views on many different positions. “Buddhism” is no different, if anything it is worse, so this isn’t particular to Christianity. Nor is it particular to religion, Marx spent some time in the Communism Manifesto clarifying what he meant by “socialism” and the different kinds of socialism he was aware of - there are many such overloaded terms and concepts. It seems particularly common in any political context, where there is power struggle it seems there are struggles between meanings for a particular word.
This is part of how they rationalize their resistance / apathy towards movements for justice, at the very least they believe it is futile to seek justice in this life.
Sounds like bullshit an unjust leader would feed them.
It is religion …
Yes it is doomed to fail. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, at least help those in need. You know like our prophet/priest/king has told us to.
Also, the bible tells us literally nothing about how heaven actually works or what people even do there. Meanwhile Marx wrote extensively about how he thinks a communist system would work. Heaven is not a “system” we can conceivably implement, because there’s nothing to implement. It’s just an abstract concept, and a very broad and ambiguous one at that.
I don’t agree that it is doomed to fail, but I also don’t believe humans are inherently Fallen, and especially not in the particular soteriological sense that Christians believe (i.e. all later generations have inherited the guilt from the single act of disobedience by Adam & Eve dooming all of humanity to endless toil and suffering, as well as an evil nature).
That said, I do think humans behave in sometimes predictable ways, and it might be useful to look at what kinds of choices about society might alleviate suffering and promote well-being and fairness in society.
That said, I don’t think that’s going to happen without significant social upheaval, and that itself seems to bring about a lot of violence and the kinds of suffering I think we should all avoid … so, yeah - these are hard problems.
So, the people you have in mind don’t believe in free will? Isn’t that kind of un-Christian?
And if they believe that humans don’t have free will, then what’s the point of all the “SINNERS!” and punishment and threats of hell and whatnot? None of us are in meaningful control of our actions, so trying to coerce us to change those actions obviously isn’t going to work.
Also, if we’re all inherently evil, then we’re all going to hell regardless, so this whole religion is kinda pointless, no?
Yes, the Christians I am talking about believe in predestination, and they disagree with, for example, Baptists about whether people can save other people or whether people can save themselves. Instead they believe God predetermines who ends up being saved or not, through the grace of God alone.
And to answer your question about what is the ultimate point if there is no motivation through free-will, their answer is usually either “it’s a mystery” or “to glorify God”.
They still believe in a kind of free-will, but only within the confines of God’s pre-determined choices. God chose for you, but it was you that did the choosing and are responsible. One explanation I was given is that you make the choice out of free-will, and then God observes your choice and then goes back in time and determines it from the beginning. It’s not a coherent view, as far as I can tell - there is no compelling logical or reasonable compatibilist account they offer, it just sounds like contradiction and fantastic thinking.
Also, their view is that our nature is fallen (total depravity), and the only good is from God and God chooses who receives the gift of salvation and thus who will become cured of their evil nature. They believe they should do good things and proselytize to convert others to Christianity because God commands them to, not because those things will save themselves or anyone else. Obedience is very important to this mindset.
difference is that in heaven people dont have need to produce, so presumably no means of production even exist
