That’s because there are no brown people in their version of heaven.
Ah now it all makes sense
Heaven was literally 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
Ooh baby, do you know what that’s worth?
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?
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Marx outlined that socialism and communism each had to be transitioned to
No. Socialism is an economic mode of production. Communism is a set of social relations that are theorized to appear out of material abundance. Communism uses socialism as a mode of production. There is no transition from Socialism to Communism.
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.
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I do be mentioning Marx
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.
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.
difference is that in heaven people dont have need to produce, so presumably no means of production even exist
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 overt violent supression ever did.
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.
They didn’t keep the mythological stuff, that got edited out too as needed once it started disagreeing with the State and the Church.
This is why christian fascism should not be the least bit surprising.
Oh it makes sense now, recuperation is not a capitalist concept, it is an imperialist concept!
The description of the first primitive church in Jerusalem is very close to an ideal anarchist commune.
Well, it does not have an economy, so why would it have money?
Also, it doesn’t have politics and society in the conventional sense, but men are clearly subordinate to God. Christ is king, this is the way Christians think, so I am not sure this is a correct comparison.
The question of “should Christians strive for a classless society” is a complex one. Egalitarian ideals are very new compared to Christianity, but some Christians now think that in the “fallen world” authority is undesirable as it can be abused. This is not common though.
However, Marxism is an anti-religious ideology. Marxists both believe that religion will disappear after “the base” changes and it will become, ultimately, obsolete, and also have historically persecuted and enacted violence on Christians. So I am not surprised there are not many Marxist Christians.
“the question of “should Christians strive for a classless society” is a complex one.”
Not to the early Christians it wasn’t. The early Christians movements (before they were co-opted by Empire) were radically egalitarian.
Not to the early Christians it wasn’t. The early Christians movements (before they were co-opted by Empire) were radically egalitarian.
That would be irrelevant even if it was true. We are not in the second century. It is a very controversial position either way.
Egalitarian values certainly did emerge out of Christianity, and there was a change in that direction even then, but they were not egalitarian in the modern sense.
Also, please be careful when generalising early Christianty, as it was a very diverse group of sects that hardly agreed on anything.
Early religious communities sometimes were very accepting, and women played a role as well, but they still existed in a very patriarchal culture, so you should not expect their women to be equal to men in society, and there were absolutely positions of authority.
They opposed the empire because initially, they were not perceived by anyone as a group distinct from Jews, which were very hostile to it. However, there were appeals made by powerful Christians later to be recognized as a non-threat to imperial power, and ultimately, they succeeded.
Even so, the Jews simply wanted independence, not equality. The idea of social equality did not even exist then. They were equal in Christ, not in society.
Christianity was not coopted by the empire, it conquered it.
The idea that early christianity was somehow “more pure” I do not accept as well. I would say the Christian tradition has only been enriched over the years, and without a unified basic set of dogmas it would really make much sense.
But the original interpretation!!! /s
Hey, do you mind telling me why I got down voted, if you have an idea why, of course?
I do not believe I said anything particularly contentious this time, and I do not believe I said anything factually wrong either.
I feel like the majority of Lemmy users are non-religious and definitely a good bit of us are antireligion, so when you make a post sorta outlining that modern Christianity is better then a more egalitarian and less dogmatic society it doesn’t sit well.
Not sure if that’s the case fully, and you’re only at like -2/3 lol
If only these nonreligious people recognised how little they know about religion.
I might have changed my views on certain things after coming to the fediverse, and now I see that Lemmy is an echochamber. It seems like right wing and even moderate people just stayed on twitter and “truth social”, which are echochambers as well, especially the latter, clearly, and I end up arguing with everyone all the time.
Sure, but comparing what people thought 2000 years ago to what they think now is a fruitless endeavor.
The concept of democracy came about around that time too (at least the Greek one, which arguably wasn’t the first but I digress) but should we exclude women and foreigners from it? That’s what the early proponents of democracy wanted.
Yes, just because it was written in a book doesn’t really means anything, we can change it, create bew editions of the book, even invert the meaning of inconvenient passages. These old code need to be made ambiguous and adaptible, endlessly reinterpretable to suit any situation that the priesthood needs to get themselves out of
The concept of democracy came about around that time too (at least the Greek one, which arguably wasn’t the first but I digress)
The Athenian concept of democracy had existed for the better part of a millennium by the time Christianity appeared.
Hmm you’re right. I thought it was closer to 0 ad, but it looks like it was closer to 600-300 bc.
Doesn’t change my point though.
You could literally describe early christianity as the spiritual arm of a revolutionary front.
Actually sir, have you considered that religion bad?
I have read a quote by Marx, and am very smart.
Egalitarian ideals are very new compared to Christianity
Run that one by Jesus and I think he’d be surprised
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.
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Communism is just people trying to create heaven on earth but without God.
lots of unironic communists on lemmy?
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
I spent enough time in my teens and early 20’s doing that. I grew out of it when I got smarter and more jaded.
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 somehow keep capitalism
Yep, but that’s just how it is, and why I focus on outreach all the same.
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.
just wanna second what @[email protected] 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.
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.
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 🤯🤯🤯🤯
Shoutout to my boy Camilo Torres who famously said, “If Jesus was alive today he’d be a guerrillero.”
That only works when there’s no scarcity. Then its up to communists/capitalists/anarchists/dictators how to slice the cake
There already is no scarcity for basic needs
Yeah, pretty massive fundamental difference, lol.
