It’s a liminal stage, one I went through. Often, this is a plateau for petty bourgeoisie people who have accepted intellectually that proletarian revolution is morally correct and necessary, but who are unwilling to risk their position yet. A common justification is “I don’t know enough to take action.” (where does knowledge come from? social practice and lived experience.) or worse “The best thing I have to contribute is my intellectual/cultural labor.” (divorced from organization and direct struggle, this labor can have no outlet.)
As Liv Agar describes smoking: we have the contradictory desires to 1) quit smoking because we know intellectually it is bad for us and 2) continue smoking because it feels good. Often this is reconciled by justifying each cigarette.
‘Oh, I had a hard day at work and deserve a treat.’ ‘Oh, I am out dancing and you just can’t dance without smoking.’ ‘Oh, I’m going to quit soon but I’m not ready yet and so its not really bad to have this one since its practically my last cigarette.’
Of course, what’s really motivating this thinking is a chemical addiction to nicotine; the material conditions of your body are pushing you towards a decision and you are just rationalizing what you were going to do anyways.
Similarly, many posters and other armchair leftists are essentially motivated by their fear of losing their petty bourgeois positionality—which is to say their class interest—but are compelled to justify ~inaction to maintain psychological integrity.
Fundamentally, communism is Jewish and not Christian; it is about actions and not beliefs. It is good to have sympathies (even sympathies it is not safe or possible to act on, as @Leninismydad@lemmygrad.ml and @DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml point out below) but ultimately to be a communist is to be engaged in the class struggle for the working class and the abolition of Capitalism. As Marx puts it, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
The idea is that faith is a practice rather than upholding a doctrine, and even that you’re a member of the religion if you do the things (‘keep the faith’) regardless of what you believe.
I think the analogy makes sense, as Christianity placed a new emphasis on belief, which displaced on the one hand membership via kinship and also a whole host of religious practices/rules by declaring them obsolete or void or optional.
There are some major Christian thinkers who retained a partially action-centered notion of belief (Pascal, for instance) and there are some sects that give some primacy to behavior (see various doctrines of ‘sinlessness’, which take very seriously the imperative to ‘go and sin no more’). But I think the analogy still basically makes sense.
I think one could argue that communist internationalism has more in common with Christian universalism than the ethnocentrism of Judaism, but I guess one could draw an analogy between a vanguard and a ‘chosen people’ (though I wouldn’t!).
Imo these religious analogies aren’t central to socialism but they are kinda interesting and a useful way to quickly allude to or illustrate a point for those who have some knowledge of comparative religions/history of Christianity.
I’m a bit curious about what analogies people culturally grounded in other religious traditions would make! Maybe we’ll get lucky and a comrade with knowledge of some other faith traditions will chime in.
In addition, I also wonder whether this is where many Western Marxists go wrong – not realising that they’re seeing Marxism through an incompatible Christian lens. Hence there search for betrayers who bring in ‘original sin’ e.g. Stalin or Deng, depending on who you ask. This may be in Losurdo. I remember it summarised in Roland Boer, SWCC: A Guide for Foreigners (iirc).
I’m not at all qualified to say whether Marxism and Judaism are a better fit. It’s not possible to know what Marx would’ve done if he’d come from a different background but it’s interesting to think about that influence and see whether it gives us any fresh insight. Marxism as distinct from Marx is a different thing, again.
Then there’s the wariness with which I approach the relationship between Marxism and Judaism because of the Nazi/fascist thing of equating communism with a Jewish plot. Got to be careful of the source of and motivation for the claim of that equation!
I’m disinclined to say that Marxism is truly like any religion at all, but I do think it might be productive to compare certain moments, aspects or divisions within Marxism to religious counterparts. I think your example of the search for a moment of ‘the fall’ in Trotskyist histories of the USSR or Maoist histories of China is a good example.
I am skeptical, though, that we should take those patterns of thought within certain schools of Marxism to originate with or be caused by religious belief, and I think one test might be the prominence (or obscurity) of such a narrative in China itself, where there is much less Christian influence, among Maoist dissidents or CPC members who see themselves as pushing a return to Maoist roots. (I don’t know the answer, idk which way it goes.) I’m more inclined to think of the Christian fall from grace as an incidental instance of a more universally accessible archetype of decisive corruption or working, which may take other forms in other societies. But idk; I’m really out of my depth here, and that may be some Christocentrist ignorance on my part.
It does feel like somewhere in the vast world of Marxist writing, there has to be some good faith thought on Marx’s relationship to Judaism and how it might have influenced his thinking and work. Obviously, he was himself pretty hostile to religion and also sometimes wrote (arguably satirically, with a polemical aim against anti-Semitic thinkers) in some anti-Semitic idioms of his time. At the same time, hostility to a religion, or explicit disavowal, doesn’t actually mean being free of its cultural or ideological influence. Lots of atheists, myself included, find themselves nonetheless marked by their relationship to a predominantly Christian culture of origin. Idk why that would be different for other religions.
But yeah, your wariness is warranted given the vicious myth of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ and the violence it rationalized. And imo there are more obviously worthwhile points of departure to examine as major influences, like the usual big three (German Idealist philosophy, French utopian socialism, and British political economy, all contemporaneous with Marx).
I was being a little bit overwrought or silly here so take with as much salt as you please. But the core of Judaism is not ‘I believe in God who has features x y and z’. Rather it is ‘I am committed to living an ethical life’. Whereas you see in almost every Christian church a ‘statement of belief’ that has clear theological assertions which must be accepted to be in communion with that church. e.g. (making these up) ‘God is triune in the Father Son and Ghost, but also unitary’, ‘Jesus’ ring fingers was longer than his middle fingers’. Which is to say, in order to be Christian one must believe certain things and in order to be Jewish one must act in a certain way.
Often, this is a plateau for petty bourgeoisie people who have accepted intellectually that proletarian revolution is morally correct and necessary, but who are unwilling to risk their position yet.
Literally me. I have a lot to lose if I start doing praxis, and none of those things are chains.
It’s a liminal stage, one I went through. Often, this is a plateau for petty bourgeoisie people who have accepted intellectually that proletarian revolution is morally correct and necessary, but who are unwilling to risk their position yet. A common justification is “I don’t know enough to take action.” (where does knowledge come from? social practice and lived experience.) or worse “The best thing I have to contribute is my intellectual/cultural labor.” (divorced from organization and direct struggle, this labor can have no outlet.)
As Liv Agar describes smoking: we have the contradictory desires to 1) quit smoking because we know intellectually it is bad for us and 2) continue smoking because it feels good. Often this is reconciled by justifying each cigarette.
Of course, what’s really motivating this thinking is a chemical addiction to nicotine; the material conditions of your body are pushing you towards a decision and you are just rationalizing what you were going to do anyways.
Similarly, many posters and other armchair leftists are essentially motivated by their fear of losing their petty bourgeois positionality—which is to say their class interest—but are compelled to justify ~inaction to maintain psychological integrity.
Fundamentally, communism is Jewish and not Christian; it is about actions and not beliefs. It is good to have sympathies (even sympathies it is not safe or possible to act on, as @Leninismydad@lemmygrad.ml and @DankZedong@lemmygrad.ml point out below) but ultimately to be a communist is to be engaged in the class struggle for the working class and the abolition of Capitalism. As Marx puts it, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
Can you please elaborate on this?
I’m not GP, but:
The idea is that faith is a practice rather than upholding a doctrine, and even that you’re a member of the religion if you do the things (‘keep the faith’) regardless of what you believe.
I think the analogy makes sense, as Christianity placed a new emphasis on belief, which displaced on the one hand membership via kinship and also a whole host of religious practices/rules by declaring them obsolete or void or optional.
There are some major Christian thinkers who retained a partially action-centered notion of belief (Pascal, for instance) and there are some sects that give some primacy to behavior (see various doctrines of ‘sinlessness’, which take very seriously the imperative to ‘go and sin no more’). But I think the analogy still basically makes sense.
I think one could argue that communist internationalism has more in common with Christian universalism than the ethnocentrism of Judaism, but I guess one could draw an analogy between a vanguard and a ‘chosen people’ (though I wouldn’t!).
Imo these religious analogies aren’t central to socialism but they are kinda interesting and a useful way to quickly allude to or illustrate a point for those who have some knowledge of comparative religions/history of Christianity.
I’m a bit curious about what analogies people culturally grounded in other religious traditions would make! Maybe we’ll get lucky and a comrade with knowledge of some other faith traditions will chime in.
Interesting answer to an interesting question.
In addition, I also wonder whether this is where many Western Marxists go wrong – not realising that they’re seeing Marxism through an incompatible Christian lens. Hence there search for betrayers who bring in ‘original sin’ e.g. Stalin or Deng, depending on who you ask. This may be in Losurdo. I remember it summarised in Roland Boer, SWCC: A Guide for Foreigners (iirc).
I’m not at all qualified to say whether Marxism and Judaism are a better fit. It’s not possible to know what Marx would’ve done if he’d come from a different background but it’s interesting to think about that influence and see whether it gives us any fresh insight. Marxism as distinct from Marx is a different thing, again.
Then there’s the wariness with which I approach the relationship between Marxism and Judaism because of the Nazi/fascist thing of equating communism with a Jewish plot. Got to be careful of the source of and motivation for the claim of that equation!
I’m disinclined to say that Marxism is truly like any religion at all, but I do think it might be productive to compare certain moments, aspects or divisions within Marxism to religious counterparts. I think your example of the search for a moment of ‘the fall’ in Trotskyist histories of the USSR or Maoist histories of China is a good example.
I am skeptical, though, that we should take those patterns of thought within certain schools of Marxism to originate with or be caused by religious belief, and I think one test might be the prominence (or obscurity) of such a narrative in China itself, where there is much less Christian influence, among Maoist dissidents or CPC members who see themselves as pushing a return to Maoist roots. (I don’t know the answer, idk which way it goes.) I’m more inclined to think of the Christian fall from grace as an incidental instance of a more universally accessible archetype of decisive corruption or working, which may take other forms in other societies. But idk; I’m really out of my depth here, and that may be some Christocentrist ignorance on my part.
It does feel like somewhere in the vast world of Marxist writing, there has to be some good faith thought on Marx’s relationship to Judaism and how it might have influenced his thinking and work. Obviously, he was himself pretty hostile to religion and also sometimes wrote (arguably satirically, with a polemical aim against anti-Semitic thinkers) in some anti-Semitic idioms of his time. At the same time, hostility to a religion, or explicit disavowal, doesn’t actually mean being free of its cultural or ideological influence. Lots of atheists, myself included, find themselves nonetheless marked by their relationship to a predominantly Christian culture of origin. Idk why that would be different for other religions.
But yeah, your wariness is warranted given the vicious myth of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ and the violence it rationalized. And imo there are more obviously worthwhile points of departure to examine as major influences, like the usual big three (German Idealist philosophy, French utopian socialism, and British political economy, all contemporaneous with Marx).
I was being a little bit overwrought or silly here so take with as much salt as you please. But the core of Judaism is not ‘I believe in God who has features x y and z’. Rather it is ‘I am committed to living an ethical life’. Whereas you see in almost every Christian church a ‘statement of belief’ that has clear theological assertions which must be accepted to be in communion with that church. e.g. (making these up) ‘God is triune in the Father Son and Ghost, but also unitary’, ‘Jesus’ ring fingers was longer than his middle fingers’. Which is to say, in order to be Christian one must believe certain things and in order to be Jewish one must act in a certain way.
Literally me. I have a lot to lose if I start doing praxis, and none of those things are chains.
They are golden chains if they withhold you from the ultimate actualization of your beliefs-self. Still gold is a much softer metal than iron.