- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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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
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
Well that description suits better anarchism. Also Heaven doesn’t exist it was invented by catholic church like many other stuff they made out of nowhere. Christian God wants to make a non-human monarchy (so God and Jesus as king) and remove all human based States. So pretty much not a communist. Of course you can argue is not anarchism either and is just common monarchy, since there is still some form of authoritarianism, even if not human-based, but from my personal perspective if it truly were a perfect reign I wouldn’t mind at all
if it truly were a perfect reign I wouldn’t mind at all
You wouldn’t care about somebody else having total control over you?
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Not like that!” My dads response when I tell him Jesus was a communist.
difference is that in heaven people dont have need to produce, so presumably no means of production even exist
Communism is stateless ?? LMAO. OP has no clue what communism really is
Communism is stateless, but not without government, or what Engels calls “The Administration of Things.” For Marx, the “state” is made up of the instruments of society that uphold class distinctions, such as private property rights, and special bodies of armed people for those purposes. Public ownership and socialized ownership quite literally makes those aspects of society redundant, and thus “whithers away.”
So it’s stateless but there’s a state according to the common definition but not according to a different definition that is less common. Got it.
Basically. Marx wrote in the 1800s, so there can be confusion from those who only keep a surface-level understanding of Marxism, say, by sticking to Wikipedia summaries. If you want, I can provide sources that help elaborate on what I’m talking about.
Yes, and eggs are perfect spheres in Vacuum. In real world, any and every attempt at communism will lead to a situation where government becomes an all encompassing over bearing State. that’s why Socialism is a far better and much more practical model than communism ever will be.
I think you’re a bit confused on terms, here, as well as history.
Socialism is just an economy where public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, rather than private. It’s a transitional system towards Communism, because markets naturally cebtralize and create efficient networks for central planning all by themselves. Cuba, the PRC, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, former USSR, etc are all examples of Socialism.
Communism, the point at which the entire global economy can be publicly owned and planned, has not been reached. There have been Communist parties in charge of Socialist economies, but Communism itself is still in the future.
I think if you’re going to be discussing the practicality of Communism and Socialism, you’d do well to familiarize yourself with the systems more. Socialism is not in opposition to Communism, and is a prerequisite for it. I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list if you want to become more knowledgeable about Socialism and Communism.
The description of the first primitive church in Jerusalem is very close to an ideal anarchist commune.
lots of unironic communists on lemmy?
Yeah, it was literally created by communists
Libs when free, open source, distributed and community supported platforms are not made by people who love capitalism and corporations 🤯🤯🤯🤯
Yup, but Lemmy is a federated service so if that fact makes you uncomfortable or something you can always spin up a liberal instance with corporations and classism.
Yep! Lemmy is primarily developed by Marxist-Leninists, and is generally structured in opposition to Capitalist networks. It allows Communists to form our own spaces without corporate censorship.
Which is why it’s a big irony when people come to Lemmy to complain about communism/socialism.
Like, man, you are on a decentralized network run by volunteers who don’t want to be monetized. You want to enjoy the benefits of socialism but at the same time complain about how bad it is and promote capitalism.
Yep, but that’s just how it is, and why I focus on outreach all the same.
just wanna second what @moonmelon@lemmy.ml said. you’re awesome.
i’d say “keep up the good work” but like you deserve a break.
Thanks for the kind words, and don’t worry! I do take frequent breaks, that’s why I made a Hexbear alt in the first place, haha.
You’re fucking incredible, Cowbee. I’ve watched you spend literally days patiently and politely responding to dozens of confrontational, probably bad-faith posters in thread after thread with nothing but solid information. I really admire it.
Thanks, I really do appreciate it! At the end of the day, I try to only speak on what I know, so that helps me not get frustrated if someone comes in in clearly bad-faith, haha.
Unfortunately, yes. Ignore the downvotes from the the mad people, and prepare your blocklist. It’s your right, after all.
Or… perhaps… talk to people and try to understand why they think the way they do. Who knows, maybe you’d hear something that makes sense. Just an idea! :D
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…
Core spirituality vs institutional religious baggage
military like hierarchy of the church.
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
