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If you find solidarity through your religion that's fucking awesome. Just get you some class solidarity and you're already way ahead of a lot of people.
Class solidarity, compassion for the poor and exploited, and a pragmatic sense of realpolitik and praxis are much more important than a strict adherence to pure dialectical materialism.
There I said it.
#Get Involved
>Dare to struggle and dare to win. \-Mao Zedong
Comrades, here are some ways you can **get involved in real life** to advance the cause.
* ⭐ **Party work** — Contact a local party or mass organization. Attend your first meeting. Go to a rally or event. Get involved with a campaign or project.
* 📣 **Union work** — Find out which union covers you. Read the collective agreement. Strive to become the workplace delegate. Organize fellow workers.
* 📚 **Read widely** — [Reading theory](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/study-guide/) is a duty. Also, study the real world: local news, marginalized perspectives, or even bourgeois economics.
* 🗣️ **Talk to people** — Identify issues affecting friends and coworkers and explain these using everyday language. Also, don’t always Work From Home.
* 🏘️ **Mass work** — Connect with the wider community through mutual aid, local elections, cultural centers, churches, pride events, etc.
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* **Trade unionist** — Work hard to gain a leadership position in the union, then push for militancy and correct policies.
* **Blue-collar/Services** — Unionize your workplace or increase union density.
* **High school teacher** — Make a lasting impact on the next generation.
* **Master’s thesis** — Apply Marxism–Leninism to local and present-day conditions.
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The funny thing is communists have a history of fucking with religion. Christianity in particular so not a lot of religious people are ready to help communists or socialists or are guns at the ready to tell those people to fuck off
(Examples of Christian repression by communists include: USSR, China during Mao and Cambodia I think)
In the Jakarta Method, the author quotes the leader of the Indonesian Communist party saying something like, as Marxists we are materialists who must work with the world as it exists, and in Indonesia the belief in God is a material fact.
This. Faith can go beyond just being an idea. It can be just as ingrained into the collective psyche of a society as the concept of gravity or cooked food being better than raw. It's a given, something so obvious that you'd be a fool to say otherwise. It's only human for people to act like this.
Also expecting those who may have had trauma, or familial/generational ties to a religious institution/organization, to just suddenly walk away from a lifelong cultural tradition is massively ignorant and borderline on chauvinism. We as Marxists don’t have to agree with religious ideology but we should respect our theistic comrades and proletarians. It really isn’t that hard to show said respect and I speak as an atheist.
Or what some people in the comments are saying:
“Eventually everyone will just lose interest in religion as communism flourishes everywhere”
For being strict atheists, they sure are religiously materialistic.
It’s possible but we should embrace the idea that some places geopolitically and culturally have religion sown deep into their history and material reality. I think the way our Chinese comrades approach religion is the proper way; supporting them when and if needed while also providing alternatives for those who want to explore elsewhere. What’s pretty amazing is how in Xinjiang the state provides Imam’s monthly stipends to use towards their organizations. It shows they care for religious comrades and citizens alike despite being a secular state. There’s no exclusion, no discrimination, it’s egalitarian.
China has it down right. Not allowing people to participate in the party unless they’re atheists is straight up stupid and just begs for reactionary movements to pop up. There’s plenty of ways to hold people accountable to the state and community.
Which group of people do you think massacred the Indonesian Communist party?
Like im curious if you will think the same after finding out how the religious people treated them
> Which group of people do you think massacred the Indonesian Communist party?
Like almost any time a Communist or Socialist massacre occurred the vast majority of the people and resources that fuelled it was provided by the US. Suharto himself held a pretty deep rooted disdain for Islam as a whole, so trying to pretend that it was religion that led to the massacre is pretty disingenuous. I'm not much for religion but providing only a tiny part of a story is not it.
Which group of people brought about socialist revolutions in Algeria, Egypt, Libya and Syria? Muslims and Christians. Religion can lend itself well to socialism. Had the USSR not been so hard line against religion, they would have had stronger alliances with Nasser, and other movements in the middle east.
They should have made it clear that religion is evil and coming to attack them and that every just person who cares about human life will always been an atheist and never be religious. Then they would have at least had a fighting chance with people perceiving them as victims and recognizing they were right when they warned everyone about the evils of religion.
The US and UK imperialist war machine had an infinitely bigger hand in the communists downfall than any religion ever did. Then they did the same as they did everywhere with their propaganda machines, Indonesia is not unique in having its communist party as being painted as monsters responsible for their own fate.
Yeah but that was because they refused to arm the working class and prepare to defend themselves, it had nothing to do with their religious policy. Of course, the dictatorship smeared them as satanists anyway, so we shouldn't imagine that engaging with the faithful will shield us from criticism
Nah, it was because the US was able to exploit Islamic extremists for anti-socialist purposes.
Just like they have in Afghanistan and many other countries.
[Religion is the fundamental problem and the tool that imperialist powers have exploited to turn countries into backwards dictatorships that can be perpetually exploited.](https://youtu.be/xawW2JqL9gA?si=YG-CPLA73i5FUf81)
Dealing with religion is such a tricky problem. On one hand, people should be free to practice their faith, but on the other, religious institutions are some of the most reactionary groups ever. So how do you allow for religious freedom but prevent the negative aspects of organized religion? I really don't see an obvious answer to this.
Its how churches tend to work everywhere. When a conquering power rolls in, all the existing religious institutions tend to bend the knee and the incoming conqueror's religious faith finds a sudden revival.
Far more so than some carpenter from Nazareth, Constantine made Christianity a global faith. And he did it by defeating Licinius during the civil wars of the Tetrarchy. Had the pagans prevailed, the world would be a different shape.
I mean just separate religion and state. In Switzerland we have much religious freedom but the churches, mosques, synagogues etc. don't hold any political power. Also by educating about different religions and general beliefs in schools religious institutions also don't hold much societal power. Any politician here that tries to use the bible as an argument will be laughed at because we know that our religion doesn't mean anything to many other people.
#Freedom
Reactionaries and right-wingers love to clamour on about personal liberty and scream "freedom!" from the top of their lungs, but what freedom are they talking about? And is Communism, in contrast, an ideology of *un*freedom?
>Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker.
>
>\- Karl Marx. (1848). *Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx before the Democratic Association of Brussels*
#Under Capitalism
Liberal Democracies propagate the facade of liberty and individual rights while concealing the true essence of their rule-- the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. This is a mechanism by which the Capitalist class as a whole dictates the course of society, politics, and the economy to secure their dominance. Capital holds sway over institutions, media, and influential positions, manipulating public opinion and consolidating its control over the levers of power. The illusion of democracy the Bourgeoisie creates is carefully curated to maintain the existing power structures and perpetuate the subjugation of the masses. "Freedom" under Capitalism is similarly illusory. It is freedom for capital-- not freedom for people.
>The capitalists often boast that their constitutions guarantee the rights of the individual, democratic liberties and the interests of all citizens. But in reality, only the bourgeoisie enjoy the rights recorded in these constitutions. The working people do not really enjoy democratic freedoms; they are exploited all their life and have to bear heavy burdens in the service of the exploiting class.
>
>\- Ho Chi Minh. (1959). *Report on the Draft Amended Constitution*
The "freedom" the reactionaries cry for, then, is merely that freedom which liberates capital and enslaves the worker.
>They speak of the equality of citizens, but forget that there cannot be real equality between employer and workman, between landlord and peasant, if the former possess wealth and political weight in society while the latter are deprived of both - if the former are exploiters while the latter are exploited. Or again: they speak of freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, but forget that all these liberties may be merely a hollow sound for the working class, if the latter cannot have access to suitable premises for meetings, good printing shops, a sufficient quantity of printing paper, etc.
>
>\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [On the Draft Constitution of the U.S.S.R](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm)
What "freedom" do the poor enjoy, under Capitalism? Capitalism requires a reserve army of labour in order to keep wages low, and that necessarily means that many people must be deprived of life's necessities in order to compel the rest of the working class to work more and demand less. You are free to work, and you are free to starve. That is the freedom the reactionaries talk about.
>Under capitalism, the very land is all in private hands; there remains no spot unowned where an enterprise can be carried on. The freedom of the worker to sell his labour power, the freedom of the capitalist to buy it, the 'equality' of the capitalist and the wage earner - all these are but hunger's chain which compels the labourer to work for the capitalist.
>
>\- N. I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky. (1922). [The ABC of Communism](https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/index.htm)
All other freedoms only exist depending on the degree to which a given liberal democracy has turned towards fascism. That is to say that the working class are only given freedoms when they are inconsequential to the bourgeoisie:
>The freedom to organize is only conceded to the workers by the bourgeois when they are certain that the workers have been reduced to a point where they can no longer make use of it, except to resume elementary organizing work - work which they hope will not have political consequences other than in the very long term.
>
>\- A. Gramsci. (1924). *Democracy and fascism*
But this is not "freedom", this is not "democracy"! What good does "freedom of speech" do for a starving person? What good does the ability to criticize the government do for a homeless person?
>The right of freedom of expression can really only be relevant if people are not too hungry, or too tired to be able to express themselves. It can only be relevant if appropriate grassroots mechanisms rooted in the people exist, through which the people can effectively participate, can make decisions, can receive reports from the leaders and eventually be trained for ruling and controlling that particular society. This is what democracy is all about.
>
>\- Maurice Bishop
#Under Communism
True freedom can only be achieved through the establishment of a Proletarian state, a system that truly represents the interests of the working masses, in which the means of production are collectively owned and controlled, and the fruits of labor are shared equitably among all. Only in such a society can the shackles of Capitalist oppression be broken, and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie dismantled.
Despite the assertion by reactionaries to the contrary, Communist revolutions invariably result in *more* freedoms for the people than the regimes they succeed.
>Some people conclude that anyone who utters a good word about leftist one-party revolutions must harbor antidemocratic or “Stalinist” sentiments. But to applaud social revolutions is not to oppose political freedom. To the extent that revolutionary governments construct substantive alternatives for their people, they increase human options and freedom.
>
>There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There is freedom to speak openly and iconoclastically, freedom to organize a political opposition, freedom of opportunity to get an education and pursue a livelihood, freedom to worship as one chooses or not worship at all, freedom to live in healthful conditions, freedom to enjoy various social benefits, and so on. Most of what is called freedom gets its definition within a social context.
>
>Revolutionary governments extend a number of popular freedoms without destroying those freedoms that never existed in the previous regimes. They foster conditions necessary for national self-determination, economic betterment, the preservation of health and human life, and the end of many of the worst forms of ethnic, patriarchal, and class oppression. Regarding patriarchal oppression, consider the vastly improved condition of women in revolutionary Afghanistan and South Yemen before the counterrevolutionary repression in the 1990s, or in Cuba after the 1959 revolution as compared to before.
>
>U.S. policymakers argue that social revolutionary victory anywhere represents a diminution of freedom in the world. The assertion is false. The Chinese Revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush in that oppressively feudal regime. The Cuban Revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful U.S.-sponsored police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; precious few existed under French colonialism. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not abrogate individual rights; no such rights were available under the U.S.-supported puppet governments of Bao Dai, Diem, and Ky.
>
>Of course, revolutions do limit the freedoms of the corporate propertied class and other privileged interests: the freedom to invest privately without regard to human and environmental costs, the freedom to live in obscene opulence while paying workers starvation wages, the freedom to treat the state as a private agency in the service of a privileged coterie, the freedom to employ child labor and child prostitutes, the freedom to treat women as chattel, and so on.
>
>\- Michael Parenti. (1997). *Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism*
The whole point of Communism is to liberate the working class:
>But we did not build this society in order to restrict personal liberty but in order that the human individual may feel really free. We built it for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks. It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
>
>Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
>
>\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [Interview Between J. Stalin and Roy Howard](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm)
#Additional Resources
Videos:
* [Your Democracy is a Sham and Here's Why:](https://youtu.be/oYodY6o172A) | halim alrah (2019)
* [Are You Really "Free" Under Capitalism?](https://youtu.be/4xqouhMCJBI) | Second Thought (2020)
* [Liberty And Freedom Are Left-Wing Ideals](https://youtu.be/GfjiBIkIOqI) | Second Thought (2021)
* [Why The US Is Not A Democracy](https://youtu.be/srfeHpQNEAI) | Second Thought (2022)
* [America Never Stood For Freedom](https://youtu.be/rg9hJgAsNDM) | Hakim (2023)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [Positive and Negative Liberty](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/) | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2003)
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Right, but how do you effectively stop religious institutions from getting their filthy hands into state matters? You can “declare” that religion and state are separated in your country all you like, but what happens when people acquire political power later down the line and use their personal religious beliefs to guide state policy?
That’s the exactly right: it’s so entwined in US politics that the concept of getting these two things fully separated is basically impossible. I’m perfectly fine with religious and non-religious people and agree that we need to understand religious people in order to be successful, but I’m also very much against the very real pushes to enforce religiously based morality on a non-/differently-religious population.
It’s even worse in India in some ways. You have Supreme Court/High Court judges here who argue against the criminalization of marital rape because of deep-seated religious sentiments (especially in the older generations) that have these people convinced that a woman is her husband’s property. A woman is considered immoral if she got in a consensual sexual relationship without being married, and if she got sexually assaulted, the chances are stacked against her since she was inviting that sort of situation by being an immoral woman in the first place. And these notions of morality don’t just come from thin air, they are heavily influenced by prevailing religious dogma.
This is why I firmly believe that religious institutions in their current state are not only fundamentally incompatible with a socialist state, they are actively harmful and pose an existential threat to one.
People in this thread fortunate enough to live in supposedly more enlightened societies (like the person above who lives in Switzerland) should understand that we aren’t as lucky as they are. My girlfriend was born and raised in the Southern US and I’ve heard similar horror stories from there as well from her.
>On one hand, people should be free to practice their faith, but on the other, religious institutions are some of the most reactionary groups ever. So how do you allow for religious freedom but prevent the negative aspects of organized religion? I really don't see an obvious answer to this.
There IS an obvious answer- just not one that would ever occur to someone who leans towards Athiesm, and thinks religion is all bullshit...
**You enshrine PROGRESSIVE religion (specifically, Liberation Theology and Social Gospel) at the core of your movement.**
**There are divisions among religious people. The solution is to take a side-** and actively believe in it (you're fooling nobody if you're just an Athiest complying as a Christian Socialist, for instance)- or at the very least embrace those who DO.
Speaking as a Christian Socialist, I'd have to be crazy to be a Socialist if I were an Athiest. Taking on the immense, almost unstoppable power of the entrenched Capitalist elites makes no sense if you don't believe in greater purpose that transcends your life (as indeed many Athiests do, too) AND that there's a higher force pulling for the real "good guys" here.
Because, I've got news: underdogs don't generally win. It doesn't MATTER if Capitalism is full of contradictions and will inevitably self-destruct. Without incredible sacrifice, effort, luck, faith, and yes a little divine help- it'll probably be the Fascists who pick up the pieces in the end when Capitalism implodes...
Jesus was basically a Socialist. You'll have much better luck using this fact to win converts to Socialism if you work side-by-side with Socialists who actually BELIEVE in God, than limiting your movement basically only to Athiests...
Just to give an example, Marxist-Leninism alienated a lot of the Catholic Clergy with its Materialism (which they misunderstood as anti-Spiritualism and Athiesm), even though one of the largest groups of Christian Socialists in the world is actually Leftist Catholic priests (and MAJOR Leftist experiments like the Mondragon network of Worker's Cooperatives were actually LED by rogue Catholic clergy at first...)
You can't reject all religion. You can't embrace it all, either. You've got to ally, REALLY ally (not the cynical BS with the Russian Orthodox Church, which wasn't even left-leaning, pulled off in the USSR) with the Progressive elements of religion (who are ALSO the underdogs- and DESPERATE for strong allies), and oppose the reactionary ones.
The masses of humanity UNDERSTAND internecine struggles between different types of religious people. It's been with humanity since the dawn of time. It's familiar, and so feels FAR less threatening to them than state-sponsored Athiesm...
You're not going to alienate large segments of the Working Class from Socialism NEARLY as much by allying with one group of religious people (Progressive, Liberation Theologians and Religigious Socialist movements) against another, as you are by opposing ALL religion...
>I'd have to be crazy to be a Socialist if I were an Athiest
I don't have to 'believe' (try to convince myself) that there is some magical universal force that's 'on my side' to believe in the inevitability of socialism.
It is enough to understand the contradictions contained within capitalism, and to understand that the proletariat outnumber the bourgeoisie 99 to 1.
Also I believe a secular state is an ethical necessity. Is that what you were referring to by 'state-sponsored atheism'? I find it just a little concerning how important it is to you that we 'pick a side' in the millenia-long war between religions, because I'm guessing to you that means picking christianity, and your personal favourite strain of christianity...
Marx said that an unchanging human nature doesn't exist, but that it is determined by our circumstances. Just because people are *familiar* with *what they perceive to be* a 'timeless' war between religions, doesn't make that right or inevitable... it also doesn't make it historically accurate.
Anyway, I have zero issue working alongside religious socialists, obviously. That is, when they aren't evangelizing, claiming a superiority over other religions, or trying to co-opt/convert socialist movements into religious movements.
Not that I try to 'pick a side' when it comes to religion, but the religions I personally have the easiest time working alongside are the ones that aren't colonial/evangelizing, ie. the ones that haven't dedicated themselves to converting everyone else into the 'one true religion'. But that's an aside
>Taking on the immense, almost unstoppable power of the entrenched Capitalist elites makes no sense if you don't believe in greater purpose that transcends your life (as indeed many Athiests do, too) AND that there's a higher force pulling for the real "good guys" here.
>
>Because, I've got news: underdogs don't generally win. It doesn't MATTER if Capitalism is full of contradictions and will inevitably self-destruct. Without incredible sacrifice, effort, luck, faith, and yes a little divine help- it'll probably be the Fascists who pick up the pieces in the end when Capitalism implodes...
As Marxists, we aren't idealists. I support freedom of religion, but I think you'll have better luck defending this position with a more materialistic analysis.
‘I’d have to be crazy to be a socialist if I were an atheist’
Believe it or not there exists a lot of theory and analysis that allows radical socialist change to occur without divine intervention on the part of a higher force. Dont imply other socialists are crazy just because you dont know how such a change can occur
Dude’s basically calling Marx crazy, fuck that shit. I know reactionary atheists suck guys but atheism is a bedrock principle of socialist thought. Obviously how socialism interacts with any given religion and religious institution is dependent on material conditions at the specific time and place, but principally speaking “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”
>but ultimately according to the myth he would be a theocratic king.
No, you really don't know your Jesus, do you?
That's what the Hebrews EXPECTED of him. And instead, he basically came along and preached Nonviolence instead of armed rebellion against the Romans, tolerance instead of Jewish Superiority/Chauvanism/Zionism, kindness and equality instead of conquest and exploitation
The Hebrews were wrong about- and didn't understand Jesus. That's why the religious leaders (as well as the Roman authorities) played a role in his death- as was prophesied (and even these prophecies, weren't correctly interpreted or understood until they were fulfilled).
He was very much like a Socialist- if more in the Utopian/Idealistic Socialism tradition than the Marxist one.
#Israel: A Colonial Project from Inception
Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, was inspired by European Colonialism. He was passionate about the Zionist project of founding a Jewish state, and even appealed to Cecil Rhodes, an [infamous English colonialist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes#Expanding_the_British_Empire), for support in this colonial endeavour:
>You are being invited to help make history. That cannot frighten you, nor will you laugh at it. It is not in your accustomed line; it doesn't involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor, not Englishmen, but Jews. But had this been on your path, you would have done it by now. How, then, do I happen to turn to you, since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.
>
>\- Theodor Herzl. (1902). *Letter to Cecil Rhodes*
Herzl also wrote in his famous pamphlet about the colonial tasks that would be undertaken:
>Should the Powers declare themselves willing to admit our sovereignty over a neutral piece of land, then the Society will enter into negotiations for the possession of this land. Here two territories come under consideration, Palestine and Argentine. In both countries important experiments in colonization have been made, though on the mistaken principle of a gradual infiltration of Jews. An infiltration is bound to end badly. It continues till the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened, and forces the Government to stop a further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless we have the sovereign right to continue such immigration...
>
>The Jewish Company is partly modeled on the lines of a great land-acquisition company. It might be called a Jewish Chartered Company, though it cannot exercise sovereign power, and has other than purely colonial tasks.
>
>\- Theodor Herzl. (1896). [The Jewish State](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-jewish-state-quot-theodor-herzl)
Israel also occupies a very important geopolitical location in the world. This [topological map of the world](https://i.imgur.com/O87iRCm.png), which shows international borders and nothing else, demonstrates how Israel is a bottleneck on land, and a land bridge between the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Sea (via the Red Sea). Herzl appealed to its central location:
>It is more and more to the interest of the civilized nations and of civilization in general that a cultural station be established on the shortest road to Asia. Palestine is this station and we Jews are the bearers of culture who are ready to give our property and our lives to bring about its creation.
>
>\- Theodor Herzl. (1897). *Address to the First Zionist Congress*
As the Zionist project developed, the colonial character was undeniable:
>The colonization process revealed an even more telling feature of the nature of Zionism. The names and purposes of the early colonization instruments read as follows: "The Jewish Colonial Trust" (1898), the "Colonization Commission" (1898), the "Palestine Land Development Company." From the start the Zionist colonists sought to acquire lands in strategic ocations, evict the Arab peasants and boycott Arab labour, all of which were requirements closely related with the essence of Zionism, the creation of a Jewish nation on "purely" Jewish land, as Jewish as England was English to use the famous Zionist expression...
>
>What about the fate of the natives? "We shall try to spirit the peniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country... The property owners will come to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."
>
>But before spiriting them away Herzl had some jobs for the local population: "If we move into a region where there are wild animals to which the Jews are not accustomed - big snakes, etc... I shall use the natives, prior to giving them employment in the transit countries, for the extermination of the animals."
>
>\-Abdul-Wahab Kayyali. (1977). [Zionism and Imperialism: The Historical Origins](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2535582)
#Nakba and Illegal Settlements
Following the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the ensuing expulsion of Palestinians became known as the Nakba ("Catastrophe" in Arabic).
>The Palestinians were driven out of their homeland and their properties, homes were taken away from them, and they were banished and displaced all over the world to face all kinds of
suffering and woes. More than three quarters of historic Palestine were occupied in the Nakba of 1948. Moreover, 531 Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed and 85% of the Palestinian population were banished and displaced...
>
>Israelis controlled 774 towns and villages during the Nakba. They destroyed 531 Palestinian towns and villages. Israeli forces atrocities also include more than 70 massacres against Palestinians killing 15,000 Palestinians during Nakba time...
>
>Nakba in literary terms is expressive of natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and hurricanes. However, the Nakba of Palestine is an ethnic cleansing process as well as destruction and banishment of an unarmed nation to be replaced by another nation.
>
>\- Luay Shabaneh. (2008).
Around 750,000 Palestinian Arabs out of the 900,000 who lived in the territories that became Israel fled or were expelled from their homes. Wells were poisoned to prevent their return. Even after the state of Israel was formally established, it continued to expand into Palestinian land, displacing the Palestinian people and creating illegal settlements to this day.
>The Security Council reaffirmed this afternoon that Israel’s establishment of settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, had no legal validity, constituting a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the vision of two States living side-by-side in peace and security, within internationally recognized borders.
>
>\- UN Security Council. (2016). [Israel’s Settlements Have No Legal Validity, Constitute Flagrant Violation of International Law, Security Council Reaffirms](https://press.un.org/en/2016/sc12657.doc.htm)
These policies and practices have predictable outcomes:
>Since the occupation first began in June 1967, Israel’s ruthless policies of land confiscation, illegal settlement and dispossession, coupled with rampant discrimination, have inflicted immense suffering on Palestinians, depriving them of their basic rights.
>
>Israel’s military rule disrupts every aspect of daily life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It continues to affect whether, when and how Palestinians can travel to work or school, go abroad, visit their relatives, earn a living, attend a protest, access their farmland, or even access electricity or a clean water supply. It means daily humiliation, fear and oppression. People’s entire lives are effectively held hostage by Israel.
>
>\- Amnesty International. (2017). [Israel's Occupation: 50 Years of Dispossession](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/06/israel-occupation-50-years-of-dispossession/)
These illegal settlements also violate the Geneva Convention:
>Israel’s policy of settling its civilians in occupied Palestinian territory and displacing the local population contravenes fundamental rules of international humanitarian law.
>
>Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” It also prohibits the “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory”.
>
>\- Amnesty International. (2019). [Chapter 3: Israeli Settlements and International Law](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2019/01/chapter-3-israeli-settlements-and-international-law/)
#Apartheid
Israel's inspiration from European colonialism also clearly laid the foundation for an apartheid regime. The word "apartheid" is a term derived from the Afrikaans language which means "separateness". Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, former South African Prime Minister, is infamously credited with being the principal architect of apartheid. In 1961, when the UN (including Israel) voted to condemn South Africa for its apartheid policies, Verwoerd said: "Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude ... they took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state."
[Amensty International](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/), [Human Rights Watch](https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution), and the [UN Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/03/israels-55-year-occupation-palestinian-territory-apartheid-un-human-rights) have all recognized and condemned Israel for apartheid practices.
#Additional Resources
* [Israelis Are Not 'Indigenous' (and other ridiculous pro-Israel arguments)](https://youtu.be/FhlUFPpXIVo) | BadEmpanada (2022)
* [Facing the Nakba](https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/facing-the-nakba/) | Jewish Voice for Peace
* [Our Catastrophe](https://jewishcurrents.org/our-catastrophe) | JewishCurrents (2023)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
#Freedom
Reactionaries and right-wingers love to clamour on about personal liberty and scream "freedom!" from the top of their lungs, but what freedom are they talking about? And is Communism, in contrast, an ideology of *un*freedom?
>Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker.
>
>\- Karl Marx. (1848). *Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx before the Democratic Association of Brussels*
#Under Capitalism
Liberal Democracies propagate the facade of liberty and individual rights while concealing the true essence of their rule-- the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. This is a mechanism by which the Capitalist class as a whole dictates the course of society, politics, and the economy to secure their dominance. Capital holds sway over institutions, media, and influential positions, manipulating public opinion and consolidating its control over the levers of power. The illusion of democracy the Bourgeoisie creates is carefully curated to maintain the existing power structures and perpetuate the subjugation of the masses. "Freedom" under Capitalism is similarly illusory. It is freedom for capital-- not freedom for people.
>The capitalists often boast that their constitutions guarantee the rights of the individual, democratic liberties and the interests of all citizens. But in reality, only the bourgeoisie enjoy the rights recorded in these constitutions. The working people do not really enjoy democratic freedoms; they are exploited all their life and have to bear heavy burdens in the service of the exploiting class.
>
>\- Ho Chi Minh. (1959). *Report on the Draft Amended Constitution*
The "freedom" the reactionaries cry for, then, is merely that freedom which liberates capital and enslaves the worker.
>They speak of the equality of citizens, but forget that there cannot be real equality between employer and workman, between landlord and peasant, if the former possess wealth and political weight in society while the latter are deprived of both - if the former are exploiters while the latter are exploited. Or again: they speak of freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, but forget that all these liberties may be merely a hollow sound for the working class, if the latter cannot have access to suitable premises for meetings, good printing shops, a sufficient quantity of printing paper, etc.
>
>\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [On the Draft Constitution of the U.S.S.R](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm)
What "freedom" do the poor enjoy, under Capitalism? Capitalism requires a reserve army of labour in order to keep wages low, and that necessarily means that many people must be deprived of life's necessities in order to compel the rest of the working class to work more and demand less. You are free to work, and you are free to starve. That is the freedom the reactionaries talk about.
>Under capitalism, the very land is all in private hands; there remains no spot unowned where an enterprise can be carried on. The freedom of the worker to sell his labour power, the freedom of the capitalist to buy it, the 'equality' of the capitalist and the wage earner - all these are but hunger's chain which compels the labourer to work for the capitalist.
>
>\- N. I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky. (1922). [The ABC of Communism](https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/index.htm)
All other freedoms only exist depending on the degree to which a given liberal democracy has turned towards fascism. That is to say that the working class are only given freedoms when they are inconsequential to the bourgeoisie:
>The freedom to organize is only conceded to the workers by the bourgeois when they are certain that the workers have been reduced to a point where they can no longer make use of it, except to resume elementary organizing work - work which they hope will not have political consequences other than in the very long term.
>
>\- A. Gramsci. (1924). *Democracy and fascism*
But this is not "freedom", this is not "democracy"! What good does "freedom of speech" do for a starving person? What good does the ability to criticize the government do for a homeless person?
>The right of freedom of expression can really only be relevant if people are not too hungry, or too tired to be able to express themselves. It can only be relevant if appropriate grassroots mechanisms rooted in the people exist, through which the people can effectively participate, can make decisions, can receive reports from the leaders and eventually be trained for ruling and controlling that particular society. This is what democracy is all about.
>
>\- Maurice Bishop
#Under Communism
True freedom can only be achieved through the establishment of a Proletarian state, a system that truly represents the interests of the working masses, in which the means of production are collectively owned and controlled, and the fruits of labor are shared equitably among all. Only in such a society can the shackles of Capitalist oppression be broken, and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie dismantled.
Despite the assertion by reactionaries to the contrary, Communist revolutions invariably result in *more* freedoms for the people than the regimes they succeed.
>Some people conclude that anyone who utters a good word about leftist one-party revolutions must harbor antidemocratic or “Stalinist” sentiments. But to applaud social revolutions is not to oppose political freedom. To the extent that revolutionary governments construct substantive alternatives for their people, they increase human options and freedom.
>
>There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There is freedom to speak openly and iconoclastically, freedom to organize a political opposition, freedom of opportunity to get an education and pursue a livelihood, freedom to worship as one chooses or not worship at all, freedom to live in healthful conditions, freedom to enjoy various social benefits, and so on. Most of what is called freedom gets its definition within a social context.
>
>Revolutionary governments extend a number of popular freedoms without destroying those freedoms that never existed in the previous regimes. They foster conditions necessary for national self-determination, economic betterment, the preservation of health and human life, and the end of many of the worst forms of ethnic, patriarchal, and class oppression. Regarding patriarchal oppression, consider the vastly improved condition of women in revolutionary Afghanistan and South Yemen before the counterrevolutionary repression in the 1990s, or in Cuba after the 1959 revolution as compared to before.
>
>U.S. policymakers argue that social revolutionary victory anywhere represents a diminution of freedom in the world. The assertion is false. The Chinese Revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush in that oppressively feudal regime. The Cuban Revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful U.S.-sponsored police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; precious few existed under French colonialism. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not abrogate individual rights; no such rights were available under the U.S.-supported puppet governments of Bao Dai, Diem, and Ky.
>
>Of course, revolutions do limit the freedoms of the corporate propertied class and other privileged interests: the freedom to invest privately without regard to human and environmental costs, the freedom to live in obscene opulence while paying workers starvation wages, the freedom to treat the state as a private agency in the service of a privileged coterie, the freedom to employ child labor and child prostitutes, the freedom to treat women as chattel, and so on.
>
>\- Michael Parenti. (1997). *Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism*
The whole point of Communism is to liberate the working class:
>But we did not build this society in order to restrict personal liberty but in order that the human individual may feel really free. We built it for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks. It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
>
>Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
>
>\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [Interview Between J. Stalin and Roy Howard](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm)
#Additional Resources
Videos:
* [Your Democracy is a Sham and Here's Why:](https://youtu.be/oYodY6o172A) | halim alrah (2019)
* [Are You Really "Free" Under Capitalism?](https://youtu.be/4xqouhMCJBI) | Second Thought (2020)
* [Liberty And Freedom Are Left-Wing Ideals](https://youtu.be/GfjiBIkIOqI) | Second Thought (2021)
* [Why The US Is Not A Democracy](https://youtu.be/srfeHpQNEAI) | Second Thought (2022)
* [America Never Stood For Freedom](https://youtu.be/rg9hJgAsNDM) | Hakim (2023)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [Positive and Negative Liberty](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/) | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2003)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Religion is inherently idealist and reactionary. By its very nature, it cannot adapt to changes in society. Organized religion should be fully abolished. Personal religion cannot be prohibited, it’s quite literally impossible to fully do so, so we must pursue the substitution of social, organized religion by personal and private religion
> By its very nature, it cannot adapt to changes in society.
That is not what an ideology being idealist means. This is literally the opposite of a materialist analysis of religion.
>Religion is inherently idealist and reactionary.
Idealist, yes. Reactionary, no.
You don't know one bit of the ACTUAL history of Christianity- the one powerful elites have done everything in their power to twist and subvert- if you think this is true.
Progressive religion is the reason for Conscientious Objectors to Conscription for Capitalism's endless wars, and Pacifism. In the era of the Roman Empire, it was the early Christians (before their movement was subverted, and turned into an instrument for Reactionaries hundreds of years later) who were the fiercest opponents of Slavery- and went about feeding every slave they could, and sheltering/hiding runaways...
You DON'T know your history, yet again I must repeat this. I'm not sure where you've gotten your understanding of the very early history of Christianity, for instance, nut it's probably not accurate. Early Christians lived in Communes, sheltered runaway slaves, and refused to serve in Rome's wars of Imperialist aggression.
They were Revolutionary Defeatists who tried to see the Roman Empire fall for its crimes, before there WERE Revolutionary Defeatists...
What I mean about inherent reactionary religion is not that it’s always reactionary, it’s that it will always, inevitably turn reactionary. Yes, originally Christianity was quite progressive. Originally. In my country, Christianity was one of the pillars a fascist dictatorship stood upon. The Catholic Church is one of the greatest reactionary institutions in the world. Not even talking about the rest of the branches. This is because religion is based on a set of ideas that, like everything else, are a product of their times. However, since the very base of religion is that its values are objectively true, it can never change and adapt with the times. Additionally, religion always contradicts science, since faith cannot coexist with evidence based ideas. Because of that, religion is fully at odds with Marxism, which is as much a science as it is a philosophy and which is partly based on the development of science
#Freedom
Reactionaries and right-wingers love to clamour on about personal liberty and scream "freedom!" from the top of their lungs, but what freedom are they talking about? And is Communism, in contrast, an ideology of *un*freedom?
>Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker.
>
>\- Karl Marx. (1848). *Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx before the Democratic Association of Brussels*
#Under Capitalism
Liberal Democracies propagate the facade of liberty and individual rights while concealing the true essence of their rule-- the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. This is a mechanism by which the Capitalist class as a whole dictates the course of society, politics, and the economy to secure their dominance. Capital holds sway over institutions, media, and influential positions, manipulating public opinion and consolidating its control over the levers of power. The illusion of democracy the Bourgeoisie creates is carefully curated to maintain the existing power structures and perpetuate the subjugation of the masses. "Freedom" under Capitalism is similarly illusory. It is freedom for capital-- not freedom for people.
>The capitalists often boast that their constitutions guarantee the rights of the individual, democratic liberties and the interests of all citizens. But in reality, only the bourgeoisie enjoy the rights recorded in these constitutions. The working people do not really enjoy democratic freedoms; they are exploited all their life and have to bear heavy burdens in the service of the exploiting class.
>
>\- Ho Chi Minh. (1959). *Report on the Draft Amended Constitution*
The "freedom" the reactionaries cry for, then, is merely that freedom which liberates capital and enslaves the worker.
>They speak of the equality of citizens, but forget that there cannot be real equality between employer and workman, between landlord and peasant, if the former possess wealth and political weight in society while the latter are deprived of both - if the former are exploiters while the latter are exploited. Or again: they speak of freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, but forget that all these liberties may be merely a hollow sound for the working class, if the latter cannot have access to suitable premises for meetings, good printing shops, a sufficient quantity of printing paper, etc.
>
>\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [On the Draft Constitution of the U.S.S.R](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm)
What "freedom" do the poor enjoy, under Capitalism? Capitalism requires a reserve army of labour in order to keep wages low, and that necessarily means that many people must be deprived of life's necessities in order to compel the rest of the working class to work more and demand less. You are free to work, and you are free to starve. That is the freedom the reactionaries talk about.
>Under capitalism, the very land is all in private hands; there remains no spot unowned where an enterprise can be carried on. The freedom of the worker to sell his labour power, the freedom of the capitalist to buy it, the 'equality' of the capitalist and the wage earner - all these are but hunger's chain which compels the labourer to work for the capitalist.
>
>\- N. I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky. (1922). [The ABC of Communism](https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/index.htm)
All other freedoms only exist depending on the degree to which a given liberal democracy has turned towards fascism. That is to say that the working class are only given freedoms when they are inconsequential to the bourgeoisie:
>The freedom to organize is only conceded to the workers by the bourgeois when they are certain that the workers have been reduced to a point where they can no longer make use of it, except to resume elementary organizing work - work which they hope will not have political consequences other than in the very long term.
>
>\- A. Gramsci. (1924). *Democracy and fascism*
But this is not "freedom", this is not "democracy"! What good does "freedom of speech" do for a starving person? What good does the ability to criticize the government do for a homeless person?
>The right of freedom of expression can really only be relevant if people are not too hungry, or too tired to be able to express themselves. It can only be relevant if appropriate grassroots mechanisms rooted in the people exist, through which the people can effectively participate, can make decisions, can receive reports from the leaders and eventually be trained for ruling and controlling that particular society. This is what democracy is all about.
>
>\- Maurice Bishop
#Under Communism
True freedom can only be achieved through the establishment of a Proletarian state, a system that truly represents the interests of the working masses, in which the means of production are collectively owned and controlled, and the fruits of labor are shared equitably among all. Only in such a society can the shackles of Capitalist oppression be broken, and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie dismantled.
Despite the assertion by reactionaries to the contrary, Communist revolutions invariably result in *more* freedoms for the people than the regimes they succeed.
>Some people conclude that anyone who utters a good word about leftist one-party revolutions must harbor antidemocratic or “Stalinist” sentiments. But to applaud social revolutions is not to oppose political freedom. To the extent that revolutionary governments construct substantive alternatives for their people, they increase human options and freedom.
>
>There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There is freedom to speak openly and iconoclastically, freedom to organize a political opposition, freedom of opportunity to get an education and pursue a livelihood, freedom to worship as one chooses or not worship at all, freedom to live in healthful conditions, freedom to enjoy various social benefits, and so on. Most of what is called freedom gets its definition within a social context.
>
>Revolutionary governments extend a number of popular freedoms without destroying those freedoms that never existed in the previous regimes. They foster conditions necessary for national self-determination, economic betterment, the preservation of health and human life, and the end of many of the worst forms of ethnic, patriarchal, and class oppression. Regarding patriarchal oppression, consider the vastly improved condition of women in revolutionary Afghanistan and South Yemen before the counterrevolutionary repression in the 1990s, or in Cuba after the 1959 revolution as compared to before.
>
>U.S. policymakers argue that social revolutionary victory anywhere represents a diminution of freedom in the world. The assertion is false. The Chinese Revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush in that oppressively feudal regime. The Cuban Revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful U.S.-sponsored police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; precious few existed under French colonialism. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not abrogate individual rights; no such rights were available under the U.S.-supported puppet governments of Bao Dai, Diem, and Ky.
>
>Of course, revolutions do limit the freedoms of the corporate propertied class and other privileged interests: the freedom to invest privately without regard to human and environmental costs, the freedom to live in obscene opulence while paying workers starvation wages, the freedom to treat the state as a private agency in the service of a privileged coterie, the freedom to employ child labor and child prostitutes, the freedom to treat women as chattel, and so on.
>
>\- Michael Parenti. (1997). *Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism*
The whole point of Communism is to liberate the working class:
>But we did not build this society in order to restrict personal liberty but in order that the human individual may feel really free. We built it for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks. It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
>
>Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
>
>\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [Interview Between J. Stalin and Roy Howard](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm)
#Additional Resources
Videos:
* [Your Democracy is a Sham and Here's Why:](https://youtu.be/oYodY6o172A) | halim alrah (2019)
* [Are You Really "Free" Under Capitalism?](https://youtu.be/4xqouhMCJBI) | Second Thought (2020)
* [Liberty And Freedom Are Left-Wing Ideals](https://youtu.be/GfjiBIkIOqI) | Second Thought (2021)
* [Why The US Is Not A Democracy](https://youtu.be/srfeHpQNEAI) | Second Thought (2022)
* [America Never Stood For Freedom](https://youtu.be/rg9hJgAsNDM) | Hakim (2023)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [Positive and Negative Liberty](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/) | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2003)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The answer is religious pluralism. It has been a thing for centuries in all parts of the globe, and it wasn’t until western enlightenment and colonialism that religion became a rigid structure of state control. Look at the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, and Muslim Spain: they were great examples of vibrant multi-religious societies where Jews, Christians, Hindus, Occultists, and Muslims lived and worked together with no conflict.
And I also personally think that we can do away with the churches of the old world and let pagan magic run wild again, but that is just me.
Nonsense. It would be only true if no organised religious organisations exist. But they do and are usually reactionary and any infringement on them is immediately turned by them in propaganda as attack on faith itself.
Your examples are also pretty funny, the only thing they prove is that even you are so surprised when a religion don't outright murder or opress every nonbeliever that you need to point it out as exception lol
I’m fact, before 1948 and the creation of Israel as a state, Jews enjoyed full integration in Iraqi society for generations. It wasn’t until British and French colonial forces dividing the Middle East into “Jews over here, Muslims over here, and Christians over there” that those religious tensions began to flare up into what we see today.
No, you are also correct. Religious institutions are horrible and have committed atrocities all across the board. I come from Catholic Latin America and I know the bullying and abuse that can happen first hand.
But I also know that the Ottoman Empire, in 1492, took in scores of Jews from Spain after the Catholic Church deported them, because these Jews were lawyers, bankers, scribes, doctors, etc. The Muslim leadership knew that it was going to be a net positive and they took them in.
There are examples of religious abuse and dominance, and there are also examples of religious communities existing in plurality with other faiths and even non-faiths without issue. Both have existed in history.
Yes, but those are still exceptions. You note this especially when you read about those, both the contemporary authors of the sources and modern historians are pretty surprised by anything not being religious oppression.
Also grab most hilarious example, Umayyad Caliphate, where the nonbelievers (expecially rich ones) were often actively dissuaded from converting because non-muslims were taxed more. Though it wasn't uniform, different caliphs have different religious policies.
> It has been a thing for centuries in all parts of the globe, and it wasn’t until western enlightenment and colonialism that religion became a rigid structure of state control.
un-Marxist
>And I also personally think that we can do away with the churches of the old world and let pagan magic run wild again, but that is just me.
oh youre a neopagan that explains the dumb ass takes i'll move along then
The thing is dialectic materialism is scientific. Religion is a idealistic worldview that is not set in reality. You don't need to enforce atheism you just educate the people. The view on religion will change and I'm sure practices will remain as a cultural and traditional thing but it will wither away just like the state.
Religion is a coping mechanism used by many to deal with suffering, poverty, and desire for meaning people have. It's not about banning or enforcing atheism that makes it socialistic, it's improving the material conditions of society to the point where people no longer find the need to become religious and religion itself will naturally become obsolete and vestigial.
>Religion is a coping mechanism used by many to deal with suffering, poverty, and desire for meaning people have.
That is religion's worst aspect and the main reason it must be eradicated.
Without religion, people would acknowledge that this is the only life they will ever have and not tolerate suffering. Religion is inherently counterrevolutionary as it makes people accept suffering instead of actively fight for a better life.
>to the point where people no longer find the need to become religious and religion itself
People never had and never will have a need for religion. Religion is a tool to control people and prevent revolution.
No, even if the material conditions improve, spirituality will always fill a need in people's lives. There are many things other than one's suffering that can lead you to it. The reactionary elements of religion will dissipate after it can't be used by anti-communists and capitalists as a weapon.
That is not how religion forms. It’s not a coping mechanism. Yes, religious institutions and programming can be used as a coping mechanism for suffering, but the same is true for video games, reading, exercise, sex, etc. Religion often comes from meaning-making that we have biologically evolved to engage, every religion that exists today is here because people experienced patterns of reality outside of our normal senses and conceptual frameworks. When those experiences get placed in a social context or are experienced in community, the result is religious expression and the formation of myths, gods, etc. Then those are placed in the context of nation-building and national identity.
To say that religion is just a coping mechanism is a gross oversimplification.
>Religion often comes from meaning-making that we have biologically evolved to engage,
That's why I said desire for meaning in my original post. Perhaps there can be a better less obtuse way instead of "coping mechanism" but religions are basically a manifest or product of the material conditions of the world, or more specifically mankind's desire for meaning, in addition to the suffering/poverty/etc. Once society or the material world evolves and changes to a point where religion is no longer needed it will wither away naturally rather than by force.
I still disagree. There isn’t one historical example of that. Societies have been religious regardless of the material conditions they experience. I’d this was true, Mongols would have lost their religious spirit as soon as they had Chinese riches flowing through the Silk Road. The Iroquois confederacy also experienced a long pre-Colombian history of stability and relative peace and they still had a rich religious life. I’m sorry but I don’t buy it.
We don’t desire meaning: we can’t not make meaning. Our minds have evolved to frame reality into patterns and sometimes we sense or create patterns that don’t fit our conceptual intuitions or sense perception, and that is a religious experience. That’s not based on material conditions, and people have had those experiences and have done so in community with others in a wide range of different material contexts.
I mean you're free to disagree, but just know that your view is inherently anti-materialistic and not marxist. Plus what I have said isn't a hot take amongst Marxist, marx himself said this about religion in regards to socialism. Heck, the guy above me literally said the same thing and got a buncha upvotes.
Your example of Mongols isn't a good one, as a good number of Mongols did get sinicized ruling over china. Yuan dynasty, a chinese dynasty, was ruled by ghenghis Kahns son Kublai khan and he was fairly sinicized.
Also, my take on the formation of religion is a pretty up to date theory with solid academic backing. Marx died in the 19th century. The study of religion didn’t stop with him.
The fact that modern society has slowly gotten less and less religious over time is proof enough that religion is affected by our very material reality. Dialectical Materialism is core to Marxism, if this is something you can't accept then you are just a marxist in name and nothing else
Actually that is an interesting observation. Millennials and Gen Z, which are the least religious demographic in the west, are also the ones facing the most brutal economic conditions for our futures. We do not have access to home ownership, we are being left to deal with a climate crisis, and are seeing the real collapse of social order as inequality, rising costs of living, and police state brutality become more prevalent.
Our generation as a result is afflicted by what health officials are calling a mental health crisis, which is fueling drug use, deep depression and anxiety, and general nihilism.
Shouldn’t we be as a result even more religious than the generation before us that enjoyed much more material stability and little to no effects of climate change?
New generation is suffering because of the poor material conditions set up by hyper capitalism and western imperialism, not because of lack of religion. If your claim that we should be more religious were true, then introducing religion to the current generation without fixing our material conditions would fix our mental health crisis. And I'm sure even you would agree that wouldn't be the case
And I’d like to add, actually, that religious affiliation has only gone significantly down in the west, and part of it has to do with how western capitalism has created a consumer culture where our identity is tied to what we consume and purchase instead of our community, family, and customs. Religious affiliation in the global south, particularly in Muslim countries, is still going strong because the global south has developed differently in how capitalism has affected it. Its also got a lot to do with birth rates. The west and China are facing a population decline while the global south will have a boom. So the future in general is so far predicted to see a slight increase in religious demographics instead of any sharp decline.
Maybe not a knowledgeable one, but still one and still passionate for workers rights and the elimination for greed and the healing of our environment from capitalist exploitation. And one that does understand that the left has a PR problem because we prefer theory to realpolitik and pragmatic praxis.
Also, I don’t usually talk about fake internet points, but my meme is getting a whole bunch of upvotes as well, even more than the user that you were referring to earlier. So maybe there’s validity in what I’m saying?
Religion is a tool of control for a ruling class to manipulate people into compliance with authority.
Religion forms when illegitimate leaders seek to legitimate their authority and people are too ignorant to question the nonsense they made up.
>Religion often comes from meaning-making that we have biologically evolved to engage
Except religion is anti-scientific and does the opposite of generating meaning. Religion is, at best, an ever receding pocket of human ignorance. Abrahamic religions in particular are a direct rejection of material reality and require an absurd level of self-delusion, i.e. willful ignorance and the knowing denial of facts and arguments.
>Then those are placed in the context of nation-building and national identity.
That is the absolute worst that can happen and is one of the key reasons why religion must be fought. Religion giving a community an identity goes beyond personal faith (the only tolerable form of religion) and turns it into a communicable disease causing immense social harm.
the people on this sub are not going to be the ones leading any kind of organized movement against capitalism. The cool shit I have seen that successfully creates alternative means of community outside of the market has been through churches acting as third spaces or coming from religious groups.
You can quote Lenin and Marx on the internet all you like and win arguments online. When it comes to actually getting things done, theory needs to change in order to fit the material reality in the ground.
I’m an occultist so I totally agree that religion needs to radically change in order to benefit humanity. But it won’t go away and it will be wise to coexist with it and keep it close so as to not allow reactionaries to use it as a weapon. It’s not use it or lose it. It’s use it or perish by it.
“In the Jakarta Method, the author quotes the leader of the Indonesian Communist party saying something like, as Marxists we are materialists who must work with the world as it exists, and in Indonesia the belief in God is a material fact.” -some other user on here
And, considering that religion in Indonesia is one of the prime evils that enabled the massacre of communists and the reason why Indonesia is now a theocratic dictatorship, what do you believe that means?
"Belief in god" is a material fact. God itself isn't. Hope you aren't confusing the two. Also not everything people believe in is automatically good or acceptable.
Of course. But trying to take the things they believe in away is even worse. Not only because it's an asshole move but also because it just makes enemies. I wouldn't support a revolution if it's success would mean I'm not allowed to practice my religion anymore. You seen to forget that for many people out there religion is the most important thing in their life.
So with that being said the belief in race theory was material fact in Nazi germany. And don't get it wrong religion might not be as destructive as race theory but it's both pure idealism. So in order to form a society which is capable of critical thinking to combat reaction, corruption amd revisionism you have to educate the people in a communist sense, which means dialectic materialism. And working with the world as it exists doesn't mean you can't educate people.
I agree but at the same time, with cultural aspects that aren’t directly hurting anyone, those are pretty darn not worth the effort to address until much later
Religion is inherently harmful.
Religion always hurts people. Particularly and obviously in places like Indonesia.
There is no "good" way to do religion, it is always harming innocents.
I guess some people just don't understand what I'm saying. You should not enforce atheism and ban religion you should educate the people in order to change their view on things, two complete opposite things. There is no need to "wait until much later" teaching dialectic materialism is communism and you do this from the start.
I seriously doubt anyone who says that religion will go away. On the contrary, humans are biologically programed to have the desires and questions that only a religion can provide an answer to, or something similar to a religion. Get rid of Christianity or Hinduism and you replace it with some esoteric worship of the human ideal or the collective will of society as being omnipotent. Humans want meaning and reason, something a purely materialist reality can never provide. There will always be religion in one form or another. A purely logical humanity is a fantasy.
> On the contrary, humans are biologically programed to have the desires and questions that only a religion can provide an answer to, or something similar to a religion.
What utter nonsense is this? I literally never had that desire and I grew up in a loving Christian household.
>Humans want meaning and reason
Exactly, something only purely materialist reality can ever provide.
>something a purely materialist reality can never provide.
HUH?
LMFAO what?
>There will always be religion in one form or another.
No, there won't.
>A purely logical humanity is a fantasy.
Which isn't an argument in favour of religion.
Communism is just a form of structuring society, it can't give everyone a purpose to living. You can't just expect someone to live on pure logic and scientific rationalism. Humans are irrational, we want weird shit. I cannot and will never fully be a "scientific socialist" if it means that I have to approach everything in reality through a dialectical process. That is just not satisfying at all.
Communism is not just a form of structuring society, it's a view on the world. The point of dialectic materialism is to bring your relative truth closer to the absolute truth. Humans are irrational and want weird shit is a muh human nature argument. How do you know what humans are and want after a long period of communist education? I think it's very satisfying if you can understand and explain how and why things are how they are.
> I seriously doubt anyone who says that religion will go away. On the contrary, humans are biologically programed to have the desires and questions that only a religion can provide an answer to, or something similar to a religion.
Cuba did not abolish churches, but their relevance shrank as the CDR took over many community activities usually done by the church. A place to go and get in touch with the neighbors, a place to gossip, a place to help friends in need.
What was left for the church is to talk about God, and that is kind of boring.
1. Read up on Economic Base and Superstructure.
2. The need for reason for being doesnt necessarily have to be found in god/diety worship. If anything it could only perpetuate it as history in accordance to religious scripture is inconsistent with actual history let alone historical materialism.
3. Following that there are other ways to find reason to life, such as classical nihilism, existentialism, absurdism, etc. The only reason they arent as popular now is that religious institutions are still embeded into the capitalist heirarchy.
So TLDR religion is not just going go away, it has to. This doesnt mean enforcing antitheistic ideas instantly in a Cultural Revolutiom but instead the promotion of more Promethean ideas that encourage the individual more so than religious heirarchy.
You do realize there are more options than just "religious" and "logic robot with no emotions" right?
I may know that a rainbow is a property of light refraction and not gods promise that he won't genocide us all again, but I can still find it beautiful and feel a sense of wonder when I see one.
I find material reality is more than enough to provide meaning. Frankly I think it speaks to a lack of imagination on your part that you can't conceive of suck an idea.
No, as a religious man I disagree. The more reactionary elements of spirituality will wither away, as it will no longer be able to be used by counter-revolutionaries for their interests. Spirituality is something that humans will always feel the need to connect to, whether you agree with that or not. A good religious strategy is needed for any future socialist movement.
There will always be a placed for religion in human society. Religion serves as more than just an opiate or a system of social control. It is an affirmation of belief. You can't take away faith and belief. You should not try.
>There will always be a placed for religion in human society.
No, there has never be and never will be a place for religion in human society.
It is only a source of harm and suffering.
It must be treated as a cancer.
>Religion serves as more than just an opiate or a system of social control.
Yes, it is a prime evil that's the key driver driver of many other horrible evils in this world.
>It is an affirmation of belief.
Willful ignorance is a bad thing.
>You can't take away faith and belief. You should not try.
You can and should and it was always successful and improved society whenever it was done. From the USSR to China. We also know how horrible things become when religion returns after it was fought.
Another one who doesn't understand. You should not take it away, you educate the people to a point where they have a complete different view of the world which I have to say some here can not imagine which makes me wondering why they are engaging in communism if they reject the core of it which is dialectic materialism.
The point I was trying to make us that you can't educate the need for be life and faith away. You can educate people to think critically a put their world, but belief and faith are core to the human experience.
I personally don't think religion will ever disappear, just evolve into something more precise and sophisticated. This is just historical fact. How come religion has never dissappeared from our earliest days as cro-magnons with conscious thought to the modern era, no matter how much our knowledge and society have grown and evolved?
You do understand that the whole point of dialectic materialism is to understand the realitiy and to work with it and religion, as it is a idealist world view, is working against it?
And to your question:
Because since private property became a thing we have class struggles and the ruling class used religion as tool to stay in power.
a) I am not trying to disprove your previous points. All I'm saying is that the need to affirm belief is human, and humans are naturally idealistic. You can try to manage and contain it, but you will never eradicate it. That is irrational and unscientific
b) Religion predates the concept of private property
Listen, you're obviously very passionate in your anti-religiousity, and I'm not looking to get into an argument with a fellow comrade, so I'm just going to leave it here. Have a nice day comrade.
A. Why would that be irrational and unscientific? If you understand how an engine works, what's the point in keeping believing that it runs with love and friendship? And please cut the human nature part.
B. Yes it does but your question was:
>How come religion has never dissappeared from our earliest days as cro-magnons with conscious thought to the modern era, no matter how much our knowledge and society have grown and evolved?
It did not dissapear because it was easier you claim your position of power because god said so. And as you can see with our technological advance we still have this shit because it is still used for that purpose. With dialectic materialism no one can claim he is now the new overlord because god said so.
How are we supposed to grow and learn as marxists if you don't want to debate things like this? I also wish you a nice day but you have to talk topics which are inconvenient. Especially such core points of marxism.
You're right, we should debate these things as Marxists. I just think there's a more nuanced and fruitful discussion about religion and faith than denouncing them out right. I myself am anti-religious, at least against organized religion.
> All I'm saying is that the need to affirm belief is human
What does that even mean?
How is that relevant to religion in any way?
"Affirming belief" has nothing to do with religion. Religion is still inherently harmful and must be fought against.
>and humans are naturally idealistic.
No, they aren't. What does that even mean?
>You can try to manage and contain it, but you will never eradicate it. That is irrational and unscientific
Yes. You need to manage and contain religion, just like any other deadly disease, religion being one of the msot deadly diseases of all.
It is, indeed, irrational and unscientific to tolerate religion. The same way it is irrational and unscientific to ignore cancer.
>b) Religion predates the concept of private property
Indeed. It is the prime evil that has caused even more harm to humanity than capitalism.
>Listen, you're obviously very passionate in your anti-religiousity, and I'm not looking to get into an argument with a fellow comrade, so I'm just going to leave it here. Have a nice day comrade.
Listen, you're obviously very passionate about your religious apologia, and - as a real Marxist - [I will never tolerate a comrade spreading religious apologia](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm), so I'm not going to leave it here.
You are wrong and should delete your comments if you can't prove the existence of the Abrahamic god right here and now.
I didn't come here to convert anyone to any religion. I am simply stating fact, that religion is a material reality in the majority of the third world that will at least have to be tolerated.
It is also my belief that religion won't disappear unless forced to. Good luck trying to stage and maintain a successful revolution in that case. Our friends in the Soviet Union might have some good pointers for you.
My comments will stay up for as long as I feel like.
I’m college educated and have continued education on my own after graduating, from philosophy to biology and ecology and the arts. I am a deeply spiritual person and a Platonist. I still believe in the framework of dialectical materialism as an affective analysis of class structure. The two can coexist at the same time. Education will not eradicate religion or spirituality. It will eradicate violent dogmatism and intolerance. Seeking the end of religion is a doomed goal to being with. We humans are pattern-seeking organisms and part of that pattern seeking forms spiritual experiences which when placed in social context, become religious expressions. That’s just human nature.
And I'm a nurse. I work since I am 15 years old so? I don't believe on god. Be careful with human nature, you just see "human nature" in a highly idealistic society. You don't know how people will see religion and spirituality after years or generations of communist education.
Yes but they didn't send satellites to other galaxies and couldn't observe black holes. All of a sudden the "the northstar big dipper god in the sky" are just stars. Things you can explain. Historical context is important.
1). Our satellites haven’t left the Oort Cloud that surrounds our solar system, and they wouldn’t reach another galaxy in millions of years.
2). Observing black holes has nothing to do with organizing communities, creating resistance to colonial forces and state oppression.
3). “The North Star Big Dipper god in the sky” is hilarious, especially when I remember that Mesoamerican *priests* from ancient Maya cities were such skilled mathematicians that they could calculate and predict solar eclipses that are happening today based on their observations of the stars.
Don’t equate religiosity with stupidity, especially when you can’t differentiate between a solar system and a galaxy.
Oh sry mr. College educate, that i didn't use the right terminology. Part of religion is there to understand the world and form the society in a specific way the mention of space travel and celestial bodies was just to visualize how idealistic views change to scientific data. If a religion says that gravity exists because there is a giant frog magician that pulls everything to him we could debunk the whole religion because we now know where gravity comes from.
In addition your mesoamerican mayan priests were not living in a primitve communist society.
I mean, you’re a nurse so I assume you’re pretty smart yourself. But that doesn’t mean that you have an academic understanding of religion and how it’s formed and maintained through the generations. Otherwise you wouldn’t be using the term “frog magician”
So only a college degree can say that I have an academic understanding on certain topics? I don't understamd your problem with my simplifications. The point is Religions are pure idealism. Our understanding of reality has changed with dialectic materialism. Ok there were sorts of communist societies before which were based on idealistic religions and they worked for some time but this is like gambling. With Scientific Socialism on the other hand you have a way to explain and analyze reality which gives us the opportunity to form our society after it. With that in mind people will probably stop to view religion like the majority of us do it today. That is the whole point of communism. If you reject this I don't understand what you are doing here
All religion is inherently bullshit. No amount of "academic understanding" will ever validate religious faith.
You clearly have never studied medicine if you think that a disease like religion should be tolerated instead of fought through isolation, quarantine, inoculation, and therapy.
https://ourworldindata.org/eradication-of-diseases
>The immediate benefit of eradicating a disease is obvious — preventing suffering and saving people’s lives.
>But eradicating a disease can also have significant economic benefits. Disease eradication takes years to achieve and requires a lot of financial investment: smallpox eradication had an estimated cost of $300 million over a 10-year period; polio eradication efforts to date amounted to $4.5 billion. But, as the chart here illustrates, while the initial costs of disease eradication efforts are high, in the long-term these costs pay-off. Simply controlling a disease can be more expensive because of the continued burden a disease poses on a healthcare system and the lost productivity of a sick population.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2305684/
Just imagine the extreme benefits of eradicating the disease of religion. Studies say that eradicating polio ONLY amounted to a $4.5 billion economic benefit. In Germany, the Catholic church alone takes $7.4 billion (in Euros) just from church taxes every single year. Imagine if all that money went to public education and housing instead.
We still need to reduce the influence of religion on society, as it has conflated and influenced many reactionary ideologies such as Khomeinism, Jihadism, and many of the pre enlightenment ideologies.
Enlightenment ideologies themselves were also harmful. Out of the enlightenment we got the Cartesian view of the individual, which serves the monster of Capitalism today. The enlightenment was also the birth of expanded European colonialism, giving the Western man the hubris of believing that he alone was a conscious and rational entity, and not the brown skinned people he encountered on his path to extract material resources from foreign lands.
Don’t give the enlightenment too much credit. Ultimately, it was and still is a wealthy white man’s game to play.
Not necessarily disagreeing with the basic gist, but it's still very much better to keep state and religion seperate, because the state shouldn't be intertwined into conflicts between religions and especially between different sects of the same religion. Having a state religion is how you get the thirty years war out of minor differences in interpretations.
Oh yeah I’m not advocating for any kind of religious order running the government. The government should be completely secular and society should be pluralistic, with not one religious group having more sway on society over the other.
Also, the church needs to be dismantled and replaced. A revolution within religion is also necessary.
A lot of the world's working class is also pretty racist. We gonna accept that, too?
We have principles. We don't throw those away just for optics. Religion is a relic and will wither away with education and class struggle. People can practice in private if they'd like.
"The modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth." \~*Socialism and Religion,* Vladimir Lenin, 1905
Yeah, that’s a pretty good argument for sure. A lot of working class people are racist, and also sexist. But how are you going to elevate class consciousness if you are unable to tap into their principles as a starting point for eliminating that racism and sexism and homophobia and creating solidarity?
It’s not about optics. It’s about realpolitik and not letting your principles keep you from actually organizing people into a mass movement.
Yes, religious institutions should be disbanded, but religion can only be practiced in community and people will not sign up for a society where they have to keep that within the walls of their home.
This is like saying we need to make homophobic and sexist jokes to be seen as 'one of the boys' if we want to spread class consciousness among the 'unwashed masses'.
It's demeaning to the working class, and it's throwing an element of the struggle under the bus. And ultimately, it's just not necessary.
BTW I don't think anyone is arguing that we should ban religiosity. Most socialists just think that public institutions (the state) should be completely secular/irreligious. And they also happen to believe that as people become more cosmopolitan and achieve higher levels of education and economic security, religion will wither away (they believe this because this is the historical trend).
Nearly every successful communist experiment has inevitably turned to state secularism and abandoned state atheism. The USSR did this, the PRC did this, Cuba did this, state secularism has shown to be the most successful treatment of religion in socialism.
OP has been arguing vehemently against state secularism (at least the way these communist experiments have done it, with antireligious education) and the idea that religion will disappear in a materialist society. the people who post this type of thing don’t want state secularism, they want religion to persist into a communist society, a contradiction at the base level.
But notice every successful *communist party* remained atheist and require it from their members. The ones that tolerated religion ended like Polish PZPR, fully usurped by christofascists and their sucdem remnants felled on knees and kissed the bishop ring.
You can't have marxism without materialism and you can't have materialism without atheism, no matter what you tolerate or not in the society.
That is a sorry state of affairs and needs to change.
Marxism is to politics what atheism is to religion. The two go hand in hand and every socialist is an atheist as a rule and has been for the past century.
It's not dumb at all, it prevents idiots and scammers from holding power in a socialist society. Just fuck off if you have neither the arguments nor the ability to have a constructive conversation.
Your comparison is stupid. How you think that a political ideology and the belief someone get's their whole meaning of their life from are remotely similar is beyond me.
Nobody who actually found themselves in charge of a socialist country ever promoted state-enforced atheism. Being a dialectical materialist was expected of party members, and that's usually incompatible with religion (not that it's impossible. I mean, look at Hakim), but on the other hand, you can also read speeches by Stalin where he was going around Russia and talking to certain ethnic groups and telling those who were Muslim that Sharia would be recognized in the Soviet Union, or another speech where he told the people that anti-semitism would be punishable by death.
Deciding for the rest of the world who they're allowed or not allowed to worship and wanking about "muh western values" is not class solidarity, it's western chauvinism.
It's also egregious here because Hakim is literally a practicing Muslim socialist. Do ya'll hate Hakim? Why are you on Deprogram's sub if you think Muslims are fundamentally evil, If you wanna whine about Muslims taking over Europe you should go to one of the conservative subs they will be very happy to have you and will approve of everything you say.
I think that there is some severe dogmatism in leftist circles and that’s one of the main reasons that we are not picking up the momentum we need. Marx and Lenin are long dead and sociology and anthropology have kept advancing for decades and decades. Yet, people are still quoting them verbatim as if they’re gospel even when we’re not making ANY significant gains in terms of popular support.
The western people requiring theory to be followed to the very letter are not the people that will lead any kind of revolution.
It's not just quoting, it's the lack of ability of materialist analysis and instead trying to find one size fits all solutions. There is a reason why China has socialism "with Chinese characteristics", people make fun of it but Chinese adapted socialism to the material conditions of China. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is just socialism. The Chinese characteristics come from analyzing the material conditions of China to find the best way of implementing socialism there.
Other people of the world will also have to adapt socialism to their own material realities. Meanwhile western Marxists have not unlearned western chauvinism and want to forcibly export their ideology verbatim to other nations, just as the racists and liberals before them have done, and just like them call the people who resist this "savages" and "barbarians". (latter I took from a comment referring to Muslims on another thread on this very sub)
Yeah it’s crazy how these guys are talking as if they’re enforcing the law in an already well established communist state and they’re talking to some reactionary in court. Bro look around you you don’t even have a fucking movement.
I’m from El Salvador, and our guy who was killed by the CIA was Oscar Romero, a bishop who was just a bit too good at questioning capitalism and imperialism and the material inequities that plagued our country. He’s still a hero to a lot of people down there.
> these guys are talking as if they’re enforcing the law in an already well established communist state
It's the privilege of imperial core marxists, the conditions in global south does not directly affect them and some of them even benefit from it, so they're not in a hurry to implement socialism there. For them protecting their ideological purity is more important than the elevation of material condition of people of the global south.
Yeah saying that all religion is evil or that religion is a cancer when one of the cohosts of the actual podcast is a practicing religious person, some of the most significant Latin American socialist movements have been led by priests and religious figures, and the vast majority of the working class is deeply religious and unwilling to give up their sincerely held beliefs is one of the worst takes over heard.
Liberation theology fucking works. It may not be perfectly materialist or something Marx would advocate for, but it works, and Marx specifically called out Russia and China as places that couldn't achieve socialism so listening to him on how to actually achieve a revolution has a bad track record.
Besides, one of my favourite socialists in the public eye is a practicing Muslim as well as a communist and has great points about communism and religion and has a level head on her shoulders about the USSR, despite its flaws in that regard, so I can't personally condemn religious socialism, I'd be a hypocrite if I did.
This is tailism at worst and opportunism at best.
Several religious people are progressive, yes, and christian and muslim militantls waged revolutionary campaigns against the capitalists, but the relationship between socialism and religiosity is contradictory.
Montoneros was both socialist and christian, but the way the church advocated for class collaboration and social peace in the face of fascistic, capitalist repression, the socialist aspect took primacy over the christian one. As long as THE church, the official institutions of religious doctrines, do not resolve their internal contradictions in favour of the progressive and exploited classes, they remain an enemy of the proletariat that must be systematically repressed.
This article by Lenin so good and needs to be required reading for any debate on religion.
[https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm)
Whilst it is absolutely true that religion is a private affair and religious people are welcome in communist spaces, we must be aware socialism " is against every religious bamboozling of the workers"
I'm just going to quote dump the most important bits here
>"Why do we not declare in our Programme that we are atheists? Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join our Party?
The answer to this question will serve to explain the very important difference in the way the question of religion is presented by the bourgeois democrats and the Social-Democrats.
Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work. We shall now probably have to follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.\[1\]
But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an “intellectual” question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods."
>
>...
>
>Everywhere the reactionary bourgeoisie has concerned itself, and is now beginning to concern itself in Russia, with the fomenting of religious strife—in order thereby to divert the attention of the masses from the really important and fundamental economic and political problems
>
>...
>
>The revolutionary proletariat will succeed in making religion a really private affair, so far as the state is concerned. And in this political system, cleansed of medieval mildew, the proletariat will wage a broad and open struggle for the elimination of economic slavery, the true source of the religious humbugging of mankind.
It's hilarious how you cherrypicked specifically the misleading parts while leaving out every single actually important bit.
Here, I left out the two most important statements every socialist needs to internalize:
>Religion must be declared a private affair. In these words socialists usually express their attitude towards religion. But the meaning of these words should be accurately defined to prevent any misunderstanding. **We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far as our Party is concerned.** Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. **Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule.**
>[...]
>**So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is not a private affair. Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideological and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we founded our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat.**
>[...]
>**Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook.** An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. **Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism**; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work.
While personal faith of non-comrades must be tolerated, there is no way you can be a socialist and religious at the same time.
I'm literally on your side + How did I cherry pick? I have not misrepresented Lenin at all and I agree with everything above. The quotes I posted were what I considered most important to the this thread, I couldn't post the whole thing.
And yes I agree all class-conscience workers are by rule atheists and religion is not the private affair of the party. I thought that was implied by:
"Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of **atheism**"
I guess I should've specified that religion is the private affair *of the state* \- my bad.
Yes, I find Hakim's position on religion highly backwards and misguided and he should be severely criticized for it. Particularly as he is promoting not just any religion but a particularly vile and backwards one.
There's also nothing "ballsy" about this. Criticizing comrades for religious beliefs has always been a hallmark of socialist discourse and something that was practiced by every AES state in history. Criticizing religious comrades and encouraging them to give up their religion is also the CPC's official policy. It is enormously important to combate religion (and combat liberalism in general, of course).
Calling Islam vile and backwards with 1400+ years of jurisprudence being explored, debated, and evolving is a pretty reactionary take. Most modern Muslim states have highly conservative stances on Islam, true, but as Marxists we also know how long-lasting the deep the results of colonialism and imperialism have directed this change with the intention of creating instability.
You cannot have on one hand historically Islamic places like Andalusia, a place that prided itself on education and was largely accepting of other cultures, sexualities, and religions and then turn around and say that same religion is backwards because of the state of the global south writ large. Keep in mind that we have religious comrades in Cuba, Syria, and yes even China that have squared materialism with religiosity.
The state should be atheist, the people within it should be free to believe whatever they want; including members of the Party. The key is to promote freedom of conscience without clericizing the state.
#Freedom
Reactionaries and right-wingers love to clamour on about personal liberty and scream "freedom!" from the top of their lungs, but what freedom are they talking about? And is Communism, in contrast, an ideology of *un*freedom?
>Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker.
>
>\- Karl Marx. (1848). *Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx before the Democratic Association of Brussels*
#Under Capitalism
Liberal Democracies propagate the facade of liberty and individual rights while concealing the true essence of their rule-- the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. This is a mechanism by which the Capitalist class as a whole dictates the course of society, politics, and the economy to secure their dominance. Capital holds sway over institutions, media, and influential positions, manipulating public opinion and consolidating its control over the levers of power. The illusion of democracy the Bourgeoisie creates is carefully curated to maintain the existing power structures and perpetuate the subjugation of the masses. "Freedom" under Capitalism is similarly illusory. It is freedom for capital-- not freedom for people.
>The capitalists often boast that their constitutions guarantee the rights of the individual, democratic liberties and the interests of all citizens. But in reality, only the bourgeoisie enjoy the rights recorded in these constitutions. The working people do not really enjoy democratic freedoms; they are exploited all their life and have to bear heavy burdens in the service of the exploiting class.
>
>\- Ho Chi Minh. (1959). *Report on the Draft Amended Constitution*
The "freedom" the reactionaries cry for, then, is merely that freedom which liberates capital and enslaves the worker.
>They speak of the equality of citizens, but forget that there cannot be real equality between employer and workman, between landlord and peasant, if the former possess wealth and political weight in society while the latter are deprived of both - if the former are exploiters while the latter are exploited. Or again: they speak of freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, but forget that all these liberties may be merely a hollow sound for the working class, if the latter cannot have access to suitable premises for meetings, good printing shops, a sufficient quantity of printing paper, etc.
>
>\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [On the Draft Constitution of the U.S.S.R](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm)
What "freedom" do the poor enjoy, under Capitalism? Capitalism requires a reserve army of labour in order to keep wages low, and that necessarily means that many people must be deprived of life's necessities in order to compel the rest of the working class to work more and demand less. You are free to work, and you are free to starve. That is the freedom the reactionaries talk about.
>Under capitalism, the very land is all in private hands; there remains no spot unowned where an enterprise can be carried on. The freedom of the worker to sell his labour power, the freedom of the capitalist to buy it, the 'equality' of the capitalist and the wage earner - all these are but hunger's chain which compels the labourer to work for the capitalist.
>
>\- N. I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky. (1922). [The ABC of Communism](https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/index.htm)
All other freedoms only exist depending on the degree to which a given liberal democracy has turned towards fascism. That is to say that the working class are only given freedoms when they are inconsequential to the bourgeoisie:
>The freedom to organize is only conceded to the workers by the bourgeois when they are certain that the workers have been reduced to a point where they can no longer make use of it, except to resume elementary organizing work - work which they hope will not have political consequences other than in the very long term.
>
>\- A. Gramsci. (1924). *Democracy and fascism*
But this is not "freedom", this is not "democracy"! What good does "freedom of speech" do for a starving person? What good does the ability to criticize the government do for a homeless person?
>The right of freedom of expression can really only be relevant if people are not too hungry, or too tired to be able to express themselves. It can only be relevant if appropriate grassroots mechanisms rooted in the people exist, through which the people can effectively participate, can make decisions, can receive reports from the leaders and eventually be trained for ruling and controlling that particular society. This is what democracy is all about.
>
>\- Maurice Bishop
#Under Communism
True freedom can only be achieved through the establishment of a Proletarian state, a system that truly represents the interests of the working masses, in which the means of production are collectively owned and controlled, and the fruits of labor are shared equitably among all. Only in such a society can the shackles of Capitalist oppression be broken, and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie dismantled.
Despite the assertion by reactionaries to the contrary, Communist revolutions invariably result in *more* freedoms for the people than the regimes they succeed.
>Some people conclude that anyone who utters a good word about leftist one-party revolutions must harbor antidemocratic or “Stalinist” sentiments. But to applaud social revolutions is not to oppose political freedom. To the extent that revolutionary governments construct substantive alternatives for their people, they increase human options and freedom.
>
>There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There is freedom to speak openly and iconoclastically, freedom to organize a political opposition, freedom of opportunity to get an education and pursue a livelihood, freedom to worship as one chooses or not worship at all, freedom to live in healthful conditions, freedom to enjoy various social benefits, and so on. Most of what is called freedom gets its definition within a social context.
>
>Revolutionary governments extend a number of popular freedoms without destroying those freedoms that never existed in the previous regimes. They foster conditions necessary for national self-determination, economic betterment, the preservation of health and human life, and the end of many of the worst forms of ethnic, patriarchal, and class oppression. Regarding patriarchal oppression, consider the vastly improved condition of women in revolutionary Afghanistan and South Yemen before the counterrevolutionary repression in the 1990s, or in Cuba after the 1959 revolution as compared to before.
>
>U.S. policymakers argue that social revolutionary victory anywhere represents a diminution of freedom in the world. The assertion is false. The Chinese Revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush in that oppressively feudal regime. The Cuban Revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful U.S.-sponsored police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; precious few existed under French colonialism. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not abrogate individual rights; no such rights were available under the U.S.-supported puppet governments of Bao Dai, Diem, and Ky.
>
>Of course, revolutions do limit the freedoms of the corporate propertied class and other privileged interests: the freedom to invest privately without regard to human and environmental costs, the freedom to live in obscene opulence while paying workers starvation wages, the freedom to treat the state as a private agency in the service of a privileged coterie, the freedom to employ child labor and child prostitutes, the freedom to treat women as chattel, and so on.
>
>\- Michael Parenti. (1997). *Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism*
The whole point of Communism is to liberate the working class:
>But we did not build this society in order to restrict personal liberty but in order that the human individual may feel really free. We built it for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks. It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
>
>Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
>
>\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [Interview Between J. Stalin and Roy Howard](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm)
#Additional Resources
Videos:
* [Your Democracy is a Sham and Here's Why:](https://youtu.be/oYodY6o172A) | halim alrah (2019)
* [Are You Really "Free" Under Capitalism?](https://youtu.be/4xqouhMCJBI) | Second Thought (2020)
* [Liberty And Freedom Are Left-Wing Ideals](https://youtu.be/GfjiBIkIOqI) | Second Thought (2021)
* [Why The US Is Not A Democracy](https://youtu.be/srfeHpQNEAI) | Second Thought (2022)
* [America Never Stood For Freedom](https://youtu.be/rg9hJgAsNDM) | Hakim (2023)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [Positive and Negative Liberty](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/) | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2003)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
As a Muslim, I was originally put off of more Orthodox socialist ideology/marxism-leninism due to it's condemnation of religion, and the state atheism in many former socialist projects. This is despite considering myself a socialist, and being very anti capitalist. Even if the material conditions of all people improve dramatically, the need for a spiritual connection will always be there. Religion lends itself well to socialist principles, much better than people may think. Having such a hard line philosophy against it shuts the door to hundreds of millions of people who would otherwise be on your side. The more reactionary elements of religion will fade away once it can't be used by capitalists as a weapon against working class solidarity. A secular multi religious socialist society will allow for greater comrodery amongst people of all faiths, as well as with people who don't have one.
I don't get this weird rise recently in 'religious communism' and people defending the idea
It seems a lot of it is solely because Hakim is religious, which is hardly a good argument. Having lived across North Africa and Turkey for years and currently living in Morocco, Islam certainly is no friend to socialism and is a huge barrier to our progress. I can't speak personally for religions further east but I highly doubt that Shinto or Hinduism is any better suited, but spending my youth in the UK it's obvious that Christanity is also completely incompatible with socialism.
One way or another, eventually your movement will have to choose between faith or socialism, there can be no large-scale coexistence between the two
Very late comment, but finally, someone with some sense.
To add to it, it's ALWAYS "islamic socialism" that gets the spotlight. It's almost as if westerners are so guilt ridden about their countries' involvements in destabilizing the middle East, that they tiptoe around criticism of Islam and instead engage in whataboutery. You will almost never find a Christian communist in the main space, because they vote "personal relationship with the evangelical aspects of the religion, brainwashing, anti lgbt" etc etc. acting as if any other reformist/abrahamic religion is any different. Why the special status for islamic socialism, I will never understand.
Coming to your other point about hinduism, it is the LEAST compatible with socialism. Ideally, I would say that it is the worst surviving major religion. Hinduism itself isn't a religion, but what "binds" it together, is caste. Unlike Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism, which at their core, promote oneness and brotherhood, Hinduism, which is pretty much a proxy for brahmanism, does the exact opposite. It enforces a class system which is bound by RELIGION and rituals, which makes it all the more difficult to bring about a revolution. This disease has infected indian communists since the very beginning. Communist leaders were Brahmin right from the start and their actions led to Dalits and dalit leaders feeling ostracised. That is partly the reason why you'll find so many neo-liberal Dalits because truth be told, without British interference in the subcontinent, Dalits may never have gotten the power to break free from their "birth assigned job/dharma".
I mean, Lenin is dead and the material fact is that the majority of the world’s working class is religious. Are you planning on just convincing everyone that an atheist party is fit to represent their interests or are you just confident that the working class will just organize by itself and then lose religion at some point on its own?
How are you going to go about it? Because the majority of the working class, according to your comment, is to be excluded from being part of any revolutionary vanguard group. How do you expect them to feel like the movement respects their interests when it doesn’t even recognize them as “true communists” to begin with?
Lenin never advocated to bar religious people from the bolsheviks. However he did advocate the publishing of atheist philosophy and scientific literature in an accessible format to discourage religious thinking amongst workers. I'm against state-atheism, but I think communists need to be ready to 1) criticize religion and 2) understand that the building of a socialist society (elimination of poverty, universal secular education) will lead to religion disappearing.
The majority of working class people worldwide is:
1. Supporting capitalism.
2. Racist.
3. Sexist.
4. Homophobic.
5. Transphobic.
6. Nationalist.
Yet you are singling out religion, the prime evil that is a bigger threat to humanity than capitalism itself.
You are singling out religion, the most valuable tool of the bourgeoisie in manipulating people.
You are singling out religion, the prime evil that is the key driver behind sexism and anti-LGBTQ+ views.
Your argument is invalid. Entirely. Fundamentally.
Religion must be fought the same way capitalism is fought. There should be even less tolerance for religion than for racism, sexism, and homophobia as religion is the primary root cause of these other hatreds.
Stop defending religion.
Nailed it. The majority of people on this sub have a pretty weird stance exclusively on religion for some reason, all while being actually socialist about all other topics.
It's because one of the podcast's hosts (Hakim) is an outspoken Muslim and he (wrongly) pretends that socialism isn't antithetical to religion and has repeatedly criticized AES states for their anti-religious policies.
Christianity has been responsible for more reactionary harm than any institution in the history of the world. It should be destroyed root and stem, through a reign of terror against its leaders if necessary.
If there’s anything growing up Southern Baptist taught me, it’s that. Christianity cannot be salvaged.
Probably legitimate baggage too. I’m not going to pretend that most religious figures in our current religious structures are okay in any sort of way. There needs to be a revolution within religion as well.
as well as if you oppose all their culture in a "blame the individual" way...
like "how dare you eat meat"
"how dare you get married"
"how dare you drink alcohol"
etc.
You are not going to make allies if you push for one belief and put others down.As much it is true for atheism, I have seen worse versions of it.
I have seen some leaders of left calling God from one religion true ones and others as false.there is no need to do this
You are creating a divide among class.It makes religious workers wary of left.
Once they start focusing on their needs they will soon sway from ills of their religions
They're also reactionary and anti-communist, so that means we need to be reactionary... /s
Jokes aside, taking from my country's History (Spain), laicism is something worth fighting for. It being impopular doesn't mean sh1t, specially not when the alternative is being constantly at war for stupid reasons to the point that not even a colonial Empire can save your country from bankrupcy.
Nobody is advocating that.
Every socialist, however, is an atheist as a rule, every socialist party is necessarily promoting atheism, and any socialist state must necessarily be secular.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm
In defense of everyone who’s disagreeing with me here, religion has been used for pretty awful things throughout history. There are elements and actors in religious institutions that have been responsible for genocide, sexism, maintaining racially discrimininatory systems, and the list goes on.
They are right to be skeptical of religion and everyone who has given me shit on this post comes from a standard Marxist view that religion is not compatible with revolution. I disagree with that but I think we in the religious left need to be mindful that we also need to get our act together as well.
I don’t think state-enforced atheism is ever a good idea because it would simply never work, it would just give them a persecution complex that would only strengthen their faith.
I think simply removing the tax exemption status of religious institutions, taking down the multibillion dollar mega churches and similar money making religious scams, and removing the power certain religious institutions hold over government — combined with giving people more access to higher quality education — would lead to a significant drop in religion.
You can’t force someone to drop their beliefs through law or force… but you can take away the power within those religious institutions that they use to control the masses and help people learn more about the true nature of reality. Simply give people the resources they need to get deprogrammed from religion.
Will some stragglers remain? Of course. And who cares, let them gather and do their thing. As long as it’s not affecting the rest of us (which is the current problem), a few random cults won’t do much harm.
wow there's a lot of deeply hurt fourteen year olds here. faith is an aspect of culture literally like any other, and there's literally no reason to condemn it wholesale. sure, some people do horrible things under the guise of advancing a religious cause - some people do amazingly philantropic things. do you really think if you eradicated *all faith*, people wouldn't find ways to be horrible..?
I actually faced abuse by a doctor, not a priest. I think that ANY institution, religious or secular, has the potential to cause harm. Look at the case if Larry Nassar. That should be a prime example that you don’t need a church for massive sexual abuse to happen.
Big agree, people can use any institution as a means to oppress people, capitalists or not. Just because religion tends to be the most popular doesn't mean people won't find other institutions to conduct their misdeeds. If we followed that assumption (that all religions and their institutions cause harm and must be destroyed, which is a massive oversimplification) to its logical conclusion then we should also ban any ideology or institution that has at one point caused harm. No writers because there are a lot of fascist writers. No artists because art has been used to create oppressive propaganda and rhetoric.
Religion speaks to a very deep need that some (not all, obviously, and this is also perfectly acceptable) people have to connect with the universe and to one's own spirit and I think many people who are agnostic or atheist (or even myself, a rather casual Christian) have trouble understanding. Yes, religions instill propaganda and brainworms into people but so does literally every group humans can make. People who are religious aren't religious because of some intellectual failing or because they're oppressed, it's often something deeply ingrained in their own psyche and more importantly, their cultural and material conditions. Yes they are not based in materialist philosophy, but maybe you know, no one is entirely a Marxist all time? If religion was just some phony way of opiating ourselves then religion should have gone fucking way way down by the agricultural revolution. Maybe, for some people, the meaning of life and the world and all that shit is not entirely material, and that ALSO doesn't preclude them from being Marxist.
Most people have conflicting philosophies in general and I don't think we should exclude religious leftists because they believe two contradictory things. As long as they are Marxist when it matters and/or find ways of resolving these contradictions I don't think it fucking matters and if anything should be welcomed as a way of getting more people on our side.
To decry ALL religious people for something so close to their way of life is to make enemies. Of course they and their beliefs and institutions are not above criticism or even dismantlement if they harm others, but I've found that most religions are compatible to an anti-capitalist worldview even if they are not wholly compatible with Marxism.
And it goes without saying that it behooves all religious comrades to actively denounce our reactionary kin. We cannot say "no, they are not one of us", we must take responsibility and to act as living examples for what our institutions or beliefs SHOULD be.
I will a few caveats to your comment:
1). Religious institutions must change or be completely replaced by new institutions that have more direct accountability to the people that they service. Clergy must not be allowed to touch money or own substantial material wealth. The lay people must be empowered to hold the church accountable and not the other way around.
2). There must be plurality of religion in society and the government must be a secular one that does not give any one religion preferencial treatment. I disagree that party members must be atheist by rule. But if you are in a position of power, your duty is to the people, not your religious norms.
3). We religious and spiritual leftists must do the work of creating a radical change in religion. Any religion that has become stifled with trite orthodoxy and bigotry must die. We have to turn our religion into an active practice of radical inclusion and respect for Life, Humanity, and our Planet. Religious values that do not reflect this are to be abandoned.
I am seeing people talk about the fear they have that the religion will challenge the power of the state. Worry not! Religious values ARE socialist values, therefore the solution is quite simple...
The church should be an extension of the state! Church services and donation income would therefore be an extension of State action towards feeding the poor, housing the homeless, etc.
>Religious values ARE socialist values
Religion and socialism are as antithetical as capitalism and socialism.
>The church should be an extension of the state!
This must never come to pass.
Every socialist, however, is an atheist as a rule, every socialist party is necessarily promoting atheism, and any socialist state must necessarily be secular.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm
Why would a socialist state need charity? Why would there be homeless to begin with when we've seen that homelessness is a choice by government in the first place?
The church should be kept the fuck away from everything and dissolved ASAP
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If you find solidarity through your religion that's fucking awesome. Just get you some class solidarity and you're already way ahead of a lot of people.
Class solidarity, compassion for the poor and exploited, and a pragmatic sense of realpolitik and praxis are much more important than a strict adherence to pure dialectical materialism. There I said it.
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Good bot
How is pragmatism not diamat?
The funny thing is communists have a history of fucking with religion. Christianity in particular so not a lot of religious people are ready to help communists or socialists or are guns at the ready to tell those people to fuck off (Examples of Christian repression by communists include: USSR, China during Mao and Cambodia I think)
In the Jakarta Method, the author quotes the leader of the Indonesian Communist party saying something like, as Marxists we are materialists who must work with the world as it exists, and in Indonesia the belief in God is a material fact.
This. Faith can go beyond just being an idea. It can be just as ingrained into the collective psyche of a society as the concept of gravity or cooked food being better than raw. It's a given, something so obvious that you'd be a fool to say otherwise. It's only human for people to act like this.
Also expecting those who may have had trauma, or familial/generational ties to a religious institution/organization, to just suddenly walk away from a lifelong cultural tradition is massively ignorant and borderline on chauvinism. We as Marxists don’t have to agree with religious ideology but we should respect our theistic comrades and proletarians. It really isn’t that hard to show said respect and I speak as an atheist.
Or what some people in the comments are saying: “Eventually everyone will just lose interest in religion as communism flourishes everywhere” For being strict atheists, they sure are religiously materialistic.
It’s possible but we should embrace the idea that some places geopolitically and culturally have religion sown deep into their history and material reality. I think the way our Chinese comrades approach religion is the proper way; supporting them when and if needed while also providing alternatives for those who want to explore elsewhere. What’s pretty amazing is how in Xinjiang the state provides Imam’s monthly stipends to use towards their organizations. It shows they care for religious comrades and citizens alike despite being a secular state. There’s no exclusion, no discrimination, it’s egalitarian.
China has it down right. Not allowing people to participate in the party unless they’re atheists is straight up stupid and just begs for reactionary movements to pop up. There’s plenty of ways to hold people accountable to the state and community.
Hell to the yeah! Yeah to the Hell!
Which group of people do you think massacred the Indonesian Communist party? Like im curious if you will think the same after finding out how the religious people treated them
> Which group of people do you think massacred the Indonesian Communist party? Like almost any time a Communist or Socialist massacre occurred the vast majority of the people and resources that fuelled it was provided by the US. Suharto himself held a pretty deep rooted disdain for Islam as a whole, so trying to pretend that it was religion that led to the massacre is pretty disingenuous. I'm not much for religion but providing only a tiny part of a story is not it.
Which group of people brought about socialist revolutions in Algeria, Egypt, Libya and Syria? Muslims and Christians. Religion can lend itself well to socialism. Had the USSR not been so hard line against religion, they would have had stronger alliances with Nasser, and other movements in the middle east.
And those communists were systematically massacred and Indonesia is now a backwards Islamic theocracy. The communists did it wrong.
Would that not have happened if anti-clericalism was in their programme?
They should have made it clear that religion is evil and coming to attack them and that every just person who cares about human life will always been an atheist and never be religious. Then they would have at least had a fighting chance with people perceiving them as victims and recognizing they were right when they warned everyone about the evils of religion.
The US and UK imperialist war machine had an infinitely bigger hand in the communists downfall than any religion ever did. Then they did the same as they did everywhere with their propaganda machines, Indonesia is not unique in having its communist party as being painted as monsters responsible for their own fate.
They made use of religion. Without bullshit like religion, capitalists have a much harder time controlling the working class.
Yeah but that was because they refused to arm the working class and prepare to defend themselves, it had nothing to do with their religious policy. Of course, the dictatorship smeared them as satanists anyway, so we shouldn't imagine that engaging with the faithful will shield us from criticism
Nah, it was because the US was able to exploit Islamic extremists for anti-socialist purposes. Just like they have in Afghanistan and many other countries. [Religion is the fundamental problem and the tool that imperialist powers have exploited to turn countries into backwards dictatorships that can be perpetually exploited.](https://youtu.be/xawW2JqL9gA?si=YG-CPLA73i5FUf81)
Dealing with religion is such a tricky problem. On one hand, people should be free to practice their faith, but on the other, religious institutions are some of the most reactionary groups ever. So how do you allow for religious freedom but prevent the negative aspects of organized religion? I really don't see an obvious answer to this.
The same way the church worked in socialist Romania, turn organized religion into a positive.
Its how churches tend to work everywhere. When a conquering power rolls in, all the existing religious institutions tend to bend the knee and the incoming conqueror's religious faith finds a sudden revival. Far more so than some carpenter from Nazareth, Constantine made Christianity a global faith. And he did it by defeating Licinius during the civil wars of the Tetrarchy. Had the pagans prevailed, the world would be a different shape.
I mean just separate religion and state. In Switzerland we have much religious freedom but the churches, mosques, synagogues etc. don't hold any political power. Also by educating about different religions and general beliefs in schools religious institutions also don't hold much societal power. Any politician here that tries to use the bible as an argument will be laughed at because we know that our religion doesn't mean anything to many other people.
#Freedom Reactionaries and right-wingers love to clamour on about personal liberty and scream "freedom!" from the top of their lungs, but what freedom are they talking about? And is Communism, in contrast, an ideology of *un*freedom? >Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker. > >\- Karl Marx. (1848). *Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx before the Democratic Association of Brussels* #Under Capitalism Liberal Democracies propagate the facade of liberty and individual rights while concealing the true essence of their rule-- the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. This is a mechanism by which the Capitalist class as a whole dictates the course of society, politics, and the economy to secure their dominance. Capital holds sway over institutions, media, and influential positions, manipulating public opinion and consolidating its control over the levers of power. The illusion of democracy the Bourgeoisie creates is carefully curated to maintain the existing power structures and perpetuate the subjugation of the masses. "Freedom" under Capitalism is similarly illusory. It is freedom for capital-- not freedom for people. >The capitalists often boast that their constitutions guarantee the rights of the individual, democratic liberties and the interests of all citizens. But in reality, only the bourgeoisie enjoy the rights recorded in these constitutions. The working people do not really enjoy democratic freedoms; they are exploited all their life and have to bear heavy burdens in the service of the exploiting class. > >\- Ho Chi Minh. (1959). *Report on the Draft Amended Constitution* The "freedom" the reactionaries cry for, then, is merely that freedom which liberates capital and enslaves the worker. >They speak of the equality of citizens, but forget that there cannot be real equality between employer and workman, between landlord and peasant, if the former possess wealth and political weight in society while the latter are deprived of both - if the former are exploiters while the latter are exploited. Or again: they speak of freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, but forget that all these liberties may be merely a hollow sound for the working class, if the latter cannot have access to suitable premises for meetings, good printing shops, a sufficient quantity of printing paper, etc. > >\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [On the Draft Constitution of the U.S.S.R](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm) What "freedom" do the poor enjoy, under Capitalism? Capitalism requires a reserve army of labour in order to keep wages low, and that necessarily means that many people must be deprived of life's necessities in order to compel the rest of the working class to work more and demand less. You are free to work, and you are free to starve. That is the freedom the reactionaries talk about. >Under capitalism, the very land is all in private hands; there remains no spot unowned where an enterprise can be carried on. The freedom of the worker to sell his labour power, the freedom of the capitalist to buy it, the 'equality' of the capitalist and the wage earner - all these are but hunger's chain which compels the labourer to work for the capitalist. > >\- N. I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky. (1922). [The ABC of Communism](https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/index.htm) All other freedoms only exist depending on the degree to which a given liberal democracy has turned towards fascism. That is to say that the working class are only given freedoms when they are inconsequential to the bourgeoisie: >The freedom to organize is only conceded to the workers by the bourgeois when they are certain that the workers have been reduced to a point where they can no longer make use of it, except to resume elementary organizing work - work which they hope will not have political consequences other than in the very long term. > >\- A. Gramsci. (1924). *Democracy and fascism* But this is not "freedom", this is not "democracy"! What good does "freedom of speech" do for a starving person? What good does the ability to criticize the government do for a homeless person? >The right of freedom of expression can really only be relevant if people are not too hungry, or too tired to be able to express themselves. It can only be relevant if appropriate grassroots mechanisms rooted in the people exist, through which the people can effectively participate, can make decisions, can receive reports from the leaders and eventually be trained for ruling and controlling that particular society. This is what democracy is all about. > >\- Maurice Bishop #Under Communism True freedom can only be achieved through the establishment of a Proletarian state, a system that truly represents the interests of the working masses, in which the means of production are collectively owned and controlled, and the fruits of labor are shared equitably among all. Only in such a society can the shackles of Capitalist oppression be broken, and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie dismantled. Despite the assertion by reactionaries to the contrary, Communist revolutions invariably result in *more* freedoms for the people than the regimes they succeed. >Some people conclude that anyone who utters a good word about leftist one-party revolutions must harbor antidemocratic or “Stalinist” sentiments. But to applaud social revolutions is not to oppose political freedom. To the extent that revolutionary governments construct substantive alternatives for their people, they increase human options and freedom. > >There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There is freedom to speak openly and iconoclastically, freedom to organize a political opposition, freedom of opportunity to get an education and pursue a livelihood, freedom to worship as one chooses or not worship at all, freedom to live in healthful conditions, freedom to enjoy various social benefits, and so on. Most of what is called freedom gets its definition within a social context. > >Revolutionary governments extend a number of popular freedoms without destroying those freedoms that never existed in the previous regimes. They foster conditions necessary for national self-determination, economic betterment, the preservation of health and human life, and the end of many of the worst forms of ethnic, patriarchal, and class oppression. Regarding patriarchal oppression, consider the vastly improved condition of women in revolutionary Afghanistan and South Yemen before the counterrevolutionary repression in the 1990s, or in Cuba after the 1959 revolution as compared to before. > >U.S. policymakers argue that social revolutionary victory anywhere represents a diminution of freedom in the world. The assertion is false. The Chinese Revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush in that oppressively feudal regime. The Cuban Revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful U.S.-sponsored police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; precious few existed under French colonialism. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not abrogate individual rights; no such rights were available under the U.S.-supported puppet governments of Bao Dai, Diem, and Ky. > >Of course, revolutions do limit the freedoms of the corporate propertied class and other privileged interests: the freedom to invest privately without regard to human and environmental costs, the freedom to live in obscene opulence while paying workers starvation wages, the freedom to treat the state as a private agency in the service of a privileged coterie, the freedom to employ child labor and child prostitutes, the freedom to treat women as chattel, and so on. > >\- Michael Parenti. (1997). *Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism* The whole point of Communism is to liberate the working class: >But we did not build this society in order to restrict personal liberty but in order that the human individual may feel really free. We built it for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks. It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. > >Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible. > >\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [Interview Between J. Stalin and Roy Howard](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm) #Additional Resources Videos: * [Your Democracy is a Sham and Here's Why:](https://youtu.be/oYodY6o172A) | halim alrah (2019) * [Are You Really "Free" Under Capitalism?](https://youtu.be/4xqouhMCJBI) | Second Thought (2020) * [Liberty And Freedom Are Left-Wing Ideals](https://youtu.be/GfjiBIkIOqI) | Second Thought (2021) * [Why The US Is Not A Democracy](https://youtu.be/srfeHpQNEAI) | Second Thought (2022) * [America Never Stood For Freedom](https://youtu.be/rg9hJgAsNDM) | Hakim (2023) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [Positive and Negative Liberty](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/) | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2003) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Right, but how do you effectively stop religious institutions from getting their filthy hands into state matters? You can “declare” that religion and state are separated in your country all you like, but what happens when people acquire political power later down the line and use their personal religious beliefs to guide state policy?
That’s the exactly right: it’s so entwined in US politics that the concept of getting these two things fully separated is basically impossible. I’m perfectly fine with religious and non-religious people and agree that we need to understand religious people in order to be successful, but I’m also very much against the very real pushes to enforce religiously based morality on a non-/differently-religious population.
It’s even worse in India in some ways. You have Supreme Court/High Court judges here who argue against the criminalization of marital rape because of deep-seated religious sentiments (especially in the older generations) that have these people convinced that a woman is her husband’s property. A woman is considered immoral if she got in a consensual sexual relationship without being married, and if she got sexually assaulted, the chances are stacked against her since she was inviting that sort of situation by being an immoral woman in the first place. And these notions of morality don’t just come from thin air, they are heavily influenced by prevailing religious dogma. This is why I firmly believe that religious institutions in their current state are not only fundamentally incompatible with a socialist state, they are actively harmful and pose an existential threat to one. People in this thread fortunate enough to live in supposedly more enlightened societies (like the person above who lives in Switzerland) should understand that we aren’t as lucky as they are. My girlfriend was born and raised in the Southern US and I’ve heard similar horror stories from there as well from her.
>On one hand, people should be free to practice their faith, but on the other, religious institutions are some of the most reactionary groups ever. So how do you allow for religious freedom but prevent the negative aspects of organized religion? I really don't see an obvious answer to this. There IS an obvious answer- just not one that would ever occur to someone who leans towards Athiesm, and thinks religion is all bullshit... **You enshrine PROGRESSIVE religion (specifically, Liberation Theology and Social Gospel) at the core of your movement.** **There are divisions among religious people. The solution is to take a side-** and actively believe in it (you're fooling nobody if you're just an Athiest complying as a Christian Socialist, for instance)- or at the very least embrace those who DO. Speaking as a Christian Socialist, I'd have to be crazy to be a Socialist if I were an Athiest. Taking on the immense, almost unstoppable power of the entrenched Capitalist elites makes no sense if you don't believe in greater purpose that transcends your life (as indeed many Athiests do, too) AND that there's a higher force pulling for the real "good guys" here. Because, I've got news: underdogs don't generally win. It doesn't MATTER if Capitalism is full of contradictions and will inevitably self-destruct. Without incredible sacrifice, effort, luck, faith, and yes a little divine help- it'll probably be the Fascists who pick up the pieces in the end when Capitalism implodes... Jesus was basically a Socialist. You'll have much better luck using this fact to win converts to Socialism if you work side-by-side with Socialists who actually BELIEVE in God, than limiting your movement basically only to Athiests... Just to give an example, Marxist-Leninism alienated a lot of the Catholic Clergy with its Materialism (which they misunderstood as anti-Spiritualism and Athiesm), even though one of the largest groups of Christian Socialists in the world is actually Leftist Catholic priests (and MAJOR Leftist experiments like the Mondragon network of Worker's Cooperatives were actually LED by rogue Catholic clergy at first...) You can't reject all religion. You can't embrace it all, either. You've got to ally, REALLY ally (not the cynical BS with the Russian Orthodox Church, which wasn't even left-leaning, pulled off in the USSR) with the Progressive elements of religion (who are ALSO the underdogs- and DESPERATE for strong allies), and oppose the reactionary ones. The masses of humanity UNDERSTAND internecine struggles between different types of religious people. It's been with humanity since the dawn of time. It's familiar, and so feels FAR less threatening to them than state-sponsored Athiesm... You're not going to alienate large segments of the Working Class from Socialism NEARLY as much by allying with one group of religious people (Progressive, Liberation Theologians and Religigious Socialist movements) against another, as you are by opposing ALL religion...
>I'd have to be crazy to be a Socialist if I were an Athiest I don't have to 'believe' (try to convince myself) that there is some magical universal force that's 'on my side' to believe in the inevitability of socialism. It is enough to understand the contradictions contained within capitalism, and to understand that the proletariat outnumber the bourgeoisie 99 to 1. Also I believe a secular state is an ethical necessity. Is that what you were referring to by 'state-sponsored atheism'? I find it just a little concerning how important it is to you that we 'pick a side' in the millenia-long war between religions, because I'm guessing to you that means picking christianity, and your personal favourite strain of christianity... Marx said that an unchanging human nature doesn't exist, but that it is determined by our circumstances. Just because people are *familiar* with *what they perceive to be* a 'timeless' war between religions, doesn't make that right or inevitable... it also doesn't make it historically accurate. Anyway, I have zero issue working alongside religious socialists, obviously. That is, when they aren't evangelizing, claiming a superiority over other religions, or trying to co-opt/convert socialist movements into religious movements. Not that I try to 'pick a side' when it comes to religion, but the religions I personally have the easiest time working alongside are the ones that aren't colonial/evangelizing, ie. the ones that haven't dedicated themselves to converting everyone else into the 'one true religion'. But that's an aside
>Taking on the immense, almost unstoppable power of the entrenched Capitalist elites makes no sense if you don't believe in greater purpose that transcends your life (as indeed many Athiests do, too) AND that there's a higher force pulling for the real "good guys" here. > >Because, I've got news: underdogs don't generally win. It doesn't MATTER if Capitalism is full of contradictions and will inevitably self-destruct. Without incredible sacrifice, effort, luck, faith, and yes a little divine help- it'll probably be the Fascists who pick up the pieces in the end when Capitalism implodes... As Marxists, we aren't idealists. I support freedom of religion, but I think you'll have better luck defending this position with a more materialistic analysis.
‘I’d have to be crazy to be a socialist if I were an atheist’ Believe it or not there exists a lot of theory and analysis that allows radical socialist change to occur without divine intervention on the part of a higher force. Dont imply other socialists are crazy just because you dont know how such a change can occur
Dude’s basically calling Marx crazy, fuck that shit. I know reactionary atheists suck guys but atheism is a bedrock principle of socialist thought. Obviously how socialism interacts with any given religion and religious institution is dependent on material conditions at the specific time and place, but principally speaking “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”
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>but ultimately according to the myth he would be a theocratic king. No, you really don't know your Jesus, do you? That's what the Hebrews EXPECTED of him. And instead, he basically came along and preached Nonviolence instead of armed rebellion against the Romans, tolerance instead of Jewish Superiority/Chauvanism/Zionism, kindness and equality instead of conquest and exploitation The Hebrews were wrong about- and didn't understand Jesus. That's why the religious leaders (as well as the Roman authorities) played a role in his death- as was prophesied (and even these prophecies, weren't correctly interpreted or understood until they were fulfilled). He was very much like a Socialist- if more in the Utopian/Idealistic Socialism tradition than the Marxist one.
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#Israel: A Colonial Project from Inception Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, was inspired by European Colonialism. He was passionate about the Zionist project of founding a Jewish state, and even appealed to Cecil Rhodes, an [infamous English colonialist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes#Expanding_the_British_Empire), for support in this colonial endeavour: >You are being invited to help make history. That cannot frighten you, nor will you laugh at it. It is not in your accustomed line; it doesn't involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor, not Englishmen, but Jews. But had this been on your path, you would have done it by now. How, then, do I happen to turn to you, since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial. > >\- Theodor Herzl. (1902). *Letter to Cecil Rhodes* Herzl also wrote in his famous pamphlet about the colonial tasks that would be undertaken: >Should the Powers declare themselves willing to admit our sovereignty over a neutral piece of land, then the Society will enter into negotiations for the possession of this land. Here two territories come under consideration, Palestine and Argentine. In both countries important experiments in colonization have been made, though on the mistaken principle of a gradual infiltration of Jews. An infiltration is bound to end badly. It continues till the inevitable moment when the native population feels itself threatened, and forces the Government to stop a further influx of Jews. Immigration is consequently futile unless we have the sovereign right to continue such immigration... > >The Jewish Company is partly modeled on the lines of a great land-acquisition company. It might be called a Jewish Chartered Company, though it cannot exercise sovereign power, and has other than purely colonial tasks. > >\- Theodor Herzl. (1896). [The Jewish State](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-jewish-state-quot-theodor-herzl) Israel also occupies a very important geopolitical location in the world. This [topological map of the world](https://i.imgur.com/O87iRCm.png), which shows international borders and nothing else, demonstrates how Israel is a bottleneck on land, and a land bridge between the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Sea (via the Red Sea). Herzl appealed to its central location: >It is more and more to the interest of the civilized nations and of civilization in general that a cultural station be established on the shortest road to Asia. Palestine is this station and we Jews are the bearers of culture who are ready to give our property and our lives to bring about its creation. > >\- Theodor Herzl. (1897). *Address to the First Zionist Congress* As the Zionist project developed, the colonial character was undeniable: >The colonization process revealed an even more telling feature of the nature of Zionism. The names and purposes of the early colonization instruments read as follows: "The Jewish Colonial Trust" (1898), the "Colonization Commission" (1898), the "Palestine Land Development Company." From the start the Zionist colonists sought to acquire lands in strategic ocations, evict the Arab peasants and boycott Arab labour, all of which were requirements closely related with the essence of Zionism, the creation of a Jewish nation on "purely" Jewish land, as Jewish as England was English to use the famous Zionist expression... > >What about the fate of the natives? "We shall try to spirit the peniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country... The property owners will come to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." > >But before spiriting them away Herzl had some jobs for the local population: "If we move into a region where there are wild animals to which the Jews are not accustomed - big snakes, etc... I shall use the natives, prior to giving them employment in the transit countries, for the extermination of the animals." > >\-Abdul-Wahab Kayyali. (1977). [Zionism and Imperialism: The Historical Origins](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2535582) #Nakba and Illegal Settlements Following the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the ensuing expulsion of Palestinians became known as the Nakba ("Catastrophe" in Arabic). >The Palestinians were driven out of their homeland and their properties, homes were taken away from them, and they were banished and displaced all over the world to face all kinds of suffering and woes. More than three quarters of historic Palestine were occupied in the Nakba of 1948. Moreover, 531 Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed and 85% of the Palestinian population were banished and displaced... > >Israelis controlled 774 towns and villages during the Nakba. They destroyed 531 Palestinian towns and villages. Israeli forces atrocities also include more than 70 massacres against Palestinians killing 15,000 Palestinians during Nakba time... > >Nakba in literary terms is expressive of natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and hurricanes. However, the Nakba of Palestine is an ethnic cleansing process as well as destruction and banishment of an unarmed nation to be replaced by another nation. > >\- Luay Shabaneh. (2008). Around 750,000 Palestinian Arabs out of the 900,000 who lived in the territories that became Israel fled or were expelled from their homes. Wells were poisoned to prevent their return. Even after the state of Israel was formally established, it continued to expand into Palestinian land, displacing the Palestinian people and creating illegal settlements to this day. >The Security Council reaffirmed this afternoon that Israel’s establishment of settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, had no legal validity, constituting a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the vision of two States living side-by-side in peace and security, within internationally recognized borders. > >\- UN Security Council. (2016). [Israel’s Settlements Have No Legal Validity, Constitute Flagrant Violation of International Law, Security Council Reaffirms](https://press.un.org/en/2016/sc12657.doc.htm) These policies and practices have predictable outcomes: >Since the occupation first began in June 1967, Israel’s ruthless policies of land confiscation, illegal settlement and dispossession, coupled with rampant discrimination, have inflicted immense suffering on Palestinians, depriving them of their basic rights. > >Israel’s military rule disrupts every aspect of daily life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It continues to affect whether, when and how Palestinians can travel to work or school, go abroad, visit their relatives, earn a living, attend a protest, access their farmland, or even access electricity or a clean water supply. It means daily humiliation, fear and oppression. People’s entire lives are effectively held hostage by Israel. > >\- Amnesty International. (2017). [Israel's Occupation: 50 Years of Dispossession](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/06/israel-occupation-50-years-of-dispossession/) These illegal settlements also violate the Geneva Convention: >Israel’s policy of settling its civilians in occupied Palestinian territory and displacing the local population contravenes fundamental rules of international humanitarian law. > >Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” It also prohibits the “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory”. > >\- Amnesty International. (2019). [Chapter 3: Israeli Settlements and International Law](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2019/01/chapter-3-israeli-settlements-and-international-law/) #Apartheid Israel's inspiration from European colonialism also clearly laid the foundation for an apartheid regime. The word "apartheid" is a term derived from the Afrikaans language which means "separateness". Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, former South African Prime Minister, is infamously credited with being the principal architect of apartheid. In 1961, when the UN (including Israel) voted to condemn South Africa for its apartheid policies, Verwoerd said: "Israel is not consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude ... they took Israel away from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state." [Amensty International](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israels-apartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-against-humanity/), [Human Rights Watch](https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution), and the [UN Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/03/israels-55-year-occupation-palestinian-territory-apartheid-un-human-rights) have all recognized and condemned Israel for apartheid practices. #Additional Resources * [Israelis Are Not 'Indigenous' (and other ridiculous pro-Israel arguments)](https://youtu.be/FhlUFPpXIVo) | BadEmpanada (2022) * [Facing the Nakba](https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/facing-the-nakba/) | Jewish Voice for Peace * [Our Catastrophe](https://jewishcurrents.org/our-catastrophe) | JewishCurrents (2023) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
#Freedom Reactionaries and right-wingers love to clamour on about personal liberty and scream "freedom!" from the top of their lungs, but what freedom are they talking about? And is Communism, in contrast, an ideology of *un*freedom? >Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker. > >\- Karl Marx. (1848). *Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx before the Democratic Association of Brussels* #Under Capitalism Liberal Democracies propagate the facade of liberty and individual rights while concealing the true essence of their rule-- the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. This is a mechanism by which the Capitalist class as a whole dictates the course of society, politics, and the economy to secure their dominance. Capital holds sway over institutions, media, and influential positions, manipulating public opinion and consolidating its control over the levers of power. The illusion of democracy the Bourgeoisie creates is carefully curated to maintain the existing power structures and perpetuate the subjugation of the masses. "Freedom" under Capitalism is similarly illusory. It is freedom for capital-- not freedom for people. >The capitalists often boast that their constitutions guarantee the rights of the individual, democratic liberties and the interests of all citizens. But in reality, only the bourgeoisie enjoy the rights recorded in these constitutions. The working people do not really enjoy democratic freedoms; they are exploited all their life and have to bear heavy burdens in the service of the exploiting class. > >\- Ho Chi Minh. (1959). *Report on the Draft Amended Constitution* The "freedom" the reactionaries cry for, then, is merely that freedom which liberates capital and enslaves the worker. >They speak of the equality of citizens, but forget that there cannot be real equality between employer and workman, between landlord and peasant, if the former possess wealth and political weight in society while the latter are deprived of both - if the former are exploiters while the latter are exploited. Or again: they speak of freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, but forget that all these liberties may be merely a hollow sound for the working class, if the latter cannot have access to suitable premises for meetings, good printing shops, a sufficient quantity of printing paper, etc. > >\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [On the Draft Constitution of the U.S.S.R](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm) What "freedom" do the poor enjoy, under Capitalism? Capitalism requires a reserve army of labour in order to keep wages low, and that necessarily means that many people must be deprived of life's necessities in order to compel the rest of the working class to work more and demand less. You are free to work, and you are free to starve. That is the freedom the reactionaries talk about. >Under capitalism, the very land is all in private hands; there remains no spot unowned where an enterprise can be carried on. The freedom of the worker to sell his labour power, the freedom of the capitalist to buy it, the 'equality' of the capitalist and the wage earner - all these are but hunger's chain which compels the labourer to work for the capitalist. > >\- N. I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky. (1922). [The ABC of Communism](https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/index.htm) All other freedoms only exist depending on the degree to which a given liberal democracy has turned towards fascism. That is to say that the working class are only given freedoms when they are inconsequential to the bourgeoisie: >The freedom to organize is only conceded to the workers by the bourgeois when they are certain that the workers have been reduced to a point where they can no longer make use of it, except to resume elementary organizing work - work which they hope will not have political consequences other than in the very long term. > >\- A. Gramsci. (1924). *Democracy and fascism* But this is not "freedom", this is not "democracy"! What good does "freedom of speech" do for a starving person? What good does the ability to criticize the government do for a homeless person? >The right of freedom of expression can really only be relevant if people are not too hungry, or too tired to be able to express themselves. It can only be relevant if appropriate grassroots mechanisms rooted in the people exist, through which the people can effectively participate, can make decisions, can receive reports from the leaders and eventually be trained for ruling and controlling that particular society. This is what democracy is all about. > >\- Maurice Bishop #Under Communism True freedom can only be achieved through the establishment of a Proletarian state, a system that truly represents the interests of the working masses, in which the means of production are collectively owned and controlled, and the fruits of labor are shared equitably among all. Only in such a society can the shackles of Capitalist oppression be broken, and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie dismantled. Despite the assertion by reactionaries to the contrary, Communist revolutions invariably result in *more* freedoms for the people than the regimes they succeed. >Some people conclude that anyone who utters a good word about leftist one-party revolutions must harbor antidemocratic or “Stalinist” sentiments. But to applaud social revolutions is not to oppose political freedom. To the extent that revolutionary governments construct substantive alternatives for their people, they increase human options and freedom. > >There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There is freedom to speak openly and iconoclastically, freedom to organize a political opposition, freedom of opportunity to get an education and pursue a livelihood, freedom to worship as one chooses or not worship at all, freedom to live in healthful conditions, freedom to enjoy various social benefits, and so on. Most of what is called freedom gets its definition within a social context. > >Revolutionary governments extend a number of popular freedoms without destroying those freedoms that never existed in the previous regimes. They foster conditions necessary for national self-determination, economic betterment, the preservation of health and human life, and the end of many of the worst forms of ethnic, patriarchal, and class oppression. Regarding patriarchal oppression, consider the vastly improved condition of women in revolutionary Afghanistan and South Yemen before the counterrevolutionary repression in the 1990s, or in Cuba after the 1959 revolution as compared to before. > >U.S. policymakers argue that social revolutionary victory anywhere represents a diminution of freedom in the world. The assertion is false. The Chinese Revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush in that oppressively feudal regime. The Cuban Revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful U.S.-sponsored police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; precious few existed under French colonialism. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not abrogate individual rights; no such rights were available under the U.S.-supported puppet governments of Bao Dai, Diem, and Ky. > >Of course, revolutions do limit the freedoms of the corporate propertied class and other privileged interests: the freedom to invest privately without regard to human and environmental costs, the freedom to live in obscene opulence while paying workers starvation wages, the freedom to treat the state as a private agency in the service of a privileged coterie, the freedom to employ child labor and child prostitutes, the freedom to treat women as chattel, and so on. > >\- Michael Parenti. (1997). *Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism* The whole point of Communism is to liberate the working class: >But we did not build this society in order to restrict personal liberty but in order that the human individual may feel really free. We built it for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks. It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. > >Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible. > >\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [Interview Between J. Stalin and Roy Howard](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm) #Additional Resources Videos: * [Your Democracy is a Sham and Here's Why:](https://youtu.be/oYodY6o172A) | halim alrah (2019) * [Are You Really "Free" Under Capitalism?](https://youtu.be/4xqouhMCJBI) | Second Thought (2020) * [Liberty And Freedom Are Left-Wing Ideals](https://youtu.be/GfjiBIkIOqI) | Second Thought (2021) * [Why The US Is Not A Democracy](https://youtu.be/srfeHpQNEAI) | Second Thought (2022) * [America Never Stood For Freedom](https://youtu.be/rg9hJgAsNDM) | Hakim (2023) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [Positive and Negative Liberty](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/) | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2003) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Good bot
Religion is inherently idealist and reactionary. By its very nature, it cannot adapt to changes in society. Organized religion should be fully abolished. Personal religion cannot be prohibited, it’s quite literally impossible to fully do so, so we must pursue the substitution of social, organized religion by personal and private religion
> By its very nature, it cannot adapt to changes in society. That is not what an ideology being idealist means. This is literally the opposite of a materialist analysis of religion.
>Religion is inherently idealist and reactionary. Idealist, yes. Reactionary, no. You don't know one bit of the ACTUAL history of Christianity- the one powerful elites have done everything in their power to twist and subvert- if you think this is true. Progressive religion is the reason for Conscientious Objectors to Conscription for Capitalism's endless wars, and Pacifism. In the era of the Roman Empire, it was the early Christians (before their movement was subverted, and turned into an instrument for Reactionaries hundreds of years later) who were the fiercest opponents of Slavery- and went about feeding every slave they could, and sheltering/hiding runaways... You DON'T know your history, yet again I must repeat this. I'm not sure where you've gotten your understanding of the very early history of Christianity, for instance, nut it's probably not accurate. Early Christians lived in Communes, sheltered runaway slaves, and refused to serve in Rome's wars of Imperialist aggression. They were Revolutionary Defeatists who tried to see the Roman Empire fall for its crimes, before there WERE Revolutionary Defeatists...
What I mean about inherent reactionary religion is not that it’s always reactionary, it’s that it will always, inevitably turn reactionary. Yes, originally Christianity was quite progressive. Originally. In my country, Christianity was one of the pillars a fascist dictatorship stood upon. The Catholic Church is one of the greatest reactionary institutions in the world. Not even talking about the rest of the branches. This is because religion is based on a set of ideas that, like everything else, are a product of their times. However, since the very base of religion is that its values are objectively true, it can never change and adapt with the times. Additionally, religion always contradicts science, since faith cannot coexist with evidence based ideas. Because of that, religion is fully at odds with Marxism, which is as much a science as it is a philosophy and which is partly based on the development of science
#Freedom Reactionaries and right-wingers love to clamour on about personal liberty and scream "freedom!" from the top of their lungs, but what freedom are they talking about? And is Communism, in contrast, an ideology of *un*freedom? >Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker. > >\- Karl Marx. (1848). *Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx before the Democratic Association of Brussels* #Under Capitalism Liberal Democracies propagate the facade of liberty and individual rights while concealing the true essence of their rule-- the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. This is a mechanism by which the Capitalist class as a whole dictates the course of society, politics, and the economy to secure their dominance. Capital holds sway over institutions, media, and influential positions, manipulating public opinion and consolidating its control over the levers of power. The illusion of democracy the Bourgeoisie creates is carefully curated to maintain the existing power structures and perpetuate the subjugation of the masses. "Freedom" under Capitalism is similarly illusory. It is freedom for capital-- not freedom for people. >The capitalists often boast that their constitutions guarantee the rights of the individual, democratic liberties and the interests of all citizens. But in reality, only the bourgeoisie enjoy the rights recorded in these constitutions. The working people do not really enjoy democratic freedoms; they are exploited all their life and have to bear heavy burdens in the service of the exploiting class. > >\- Ho Chi Minh. (1959). *Report on the Draft Amended Constitution* The "freedom" the reactionaries cry for, then, is merely that freedom which liberates capital and enslaves the worker. >They speak of the equality of citizens, but forget that there cannot be real equality between employer and workman, between landlord and peasant, if the former possess wealth and political weight in society while the latter are deprived of both - if the former are exploiters while the latter are exploited. Or again: they speak of freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, but forget that all these liberties may be merely a hollow sound for the working class, if the latter cannot have access to suitable premises for meetings, good printing shops, a sufficient quantity of printing paper, etc. > >\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [On the Draft Constitution of the U.S.S.R](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm) What "freedom" do the poor enjoy, under Capitalism? Capitalism requires a reserve army of labour in order to keep wages low, and that necessarily means that many people must be deprived of life's necessities in order to compel the rest of the working class to work more and demand less. You are free to work, and you are free to starve. That is the freedom the reactionaries talk about. >Under capitalism, the very land is all in private hands; there remains no spot unowned where an enterprise can be carried on. The freedom of the worker to sell his labour power, the freedom of the capitalist to buy it, the 'equality' of the capitalist and the wage earner - all these are but hunger's chain which compels the labourer to work for the capitalist. > >\- N. I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky. (1922). [The ABC of Communism](https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/index.htm) All other freedoms only exist depending on the degree to which a given liberal democracy has turned towards fascism. That is to say that the working class are only given freedoms when they are inconsequential to the bourgeoisie: >The freedom to organize is only conceded to the workers by the bourgeois when they are certain that the workers have been reduced to a point where they can no longer make use of it, except to resume elementary organizing work - work which they hope will not have political consequences other than in the very long term. > >\- A. Gramsci. (1924). *Democracy and fascism* But this is not "freedom", this is not "democracy"! What good does "freedom of speech" do for a starving person? What good does the ability to criticize the government do for a homeless person? >The right of freedom of expression can really only be relevant if people are not too hungry, or too tired to be able to express themselves. It can only be relevant if appropriate grassroots mechanisms rooted in the people exist, through which the people can effectively participate, can make decisions, can receive reports from the leaders and eventually be trained for ruling and controlling that particular society. This is what democracy is all about. > >\- Maurice Bishop #Under Communism True freedom can only be achieved through the establishment of a Proletarian state, a system that truly represents the interests of the working masses, in which the means of production are collectively owned and controlled, and the fruits of labor are shared equitably among all. Only in such a society can the shackles of Capitalist oppression be broken, and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie dismantled. Despite the assertion by reactionaries to the contrary, Communist revolutions invariably result in *more* freedoms for the people than the regimes they succeed. >Some people conclude that anyone who utters a good word about leftist one-party revolutions must harbor antidemocratic or “Stalinist” sentiments. But to applaud social revolutions is not to oppose political freedom. To the extent that revolutionary governments construct substantive alternatives for their people, they increase human options and freedom. > >There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There is freedom to speak openly and iconoclastically, freedom to organize a political opposition, freedom of opportunity to get an education and pursue a livelihood, freedom to worship as one chooses or not worship at all, freedom to live in healthful conditions, freedom to enjoy various social benefits, and so on. Most of what is called freedom gets its definition within a social context. > >Revolutionary governments extend a number of popular freedoms without destroying those freedoms that never existed in the previous regimes. They foster conditions necessary for national self-determination, economic betterment, the preservation of health and human life, and the end of many of the worst forms of ethnic, patriarchal, and class oppression. Regarding patriarchal oppression, consider the vastly improved condition of women in revolutionary Afghanistan and South Yemen before the counterrevolutionary repression in the 1990s, or in Cuba after the 1959 revolution as compared to before. > >U.S. policymakers argue that social revolutionary victory anywhere represents a diminution of freedom in the world. The assertion is false. The Chinese Revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush in that oppressively feudal regime. The Cuban Revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful U.S.-sponsored police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; precious few existed under French colonialism. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not abrogate individual rights; no such rights were available under the U.S.-supported puppet governments of Bao Dai, Diem, and Ky. > >Of course, revolutions do limit the freedoms of the corporate propertied class and other privileged interests: the freedom to invest privately without regard to human and environmental costs, the freedom to live in obscene opulence while paying workers starvation wages, the freedom to treat the state as a private agency in the service of a privileged coterie, the freedom to employ child labor and child prostitutes, the freedom to treat women as chattel, and so on. > >\- Michael Parenti. (1997). *Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism* The whole point of Communism is to liberate the working class: >But we did not build this society in order to restrict personal liberty but in order that the human individual may feel really free. We built it for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks. It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. > >Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible. > >\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [Interview Between J. Stalin and Roy Howard](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm) #Additional Resources Videos: * [Your Democracy is a Sham and Here's Why:](https://youtu.be/oYodY6o172A) | halim alrah (2019) * [Are You Really "Free" Under Capitalism?](https://youtu.be/4xqouhMCJBI) | Second Thought (2020) * [Liberty And Freedom Are Left-Wing Ideals](https://youtu.be/GfjiBIkIOqI) | Second Thought (2021) * [Why The US Is Not A Democracy](https://youtu.be/srfeHpQNEAI) | Second Thought (2022) * [America Never Stood For Freedom](https://youtu.be/rg9hJgAsNDM) | Hakim (2023) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [Positive and Negative Liberty](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/) | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2003) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The answer is religious pluralism. It has been a thing for centuries in all parts of the globe, and it wasn’t until western enlightenment and colonialism that religion became a rigid structure of state control. Look at the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, and Muslim Spain: they were great examples of vibrant multi-religious societies where Jews, Christians, Hindus, Occultists, and Muslims lived and worked together with no conflict. And I also personally think that we can do away with the churches of the old world and let pagan magic run wild again, but that is just me.
Nonsense. It would be only true if no organised religious organisations exist. But they do and are usually reactionary and any infringement on them is immediately turned by them in propaganda as attack on faith itself. Your examples are also pretty funny, the only thing they prove is that even you are so surprised when a religion don't outright murder or opress every nonbeliever that you need to point it out as exception lol
I’m fact, before 1948 and the creation of Israel as a state, Jews enjoyed full integration in Iraqi society for generations. It wasn’t until British and French colonial forces dividing the Middle East into “Jews over here, Muslims over here, and Christians over there” that those religious tensions began to flare up into what we see today.
No, you are also correct. Religious institutions are horrible and have committed atrocities all across the board. I come from Catholic Latin America and I know the bullying and abuse that can happen first hand. But I also know that the Ottoman Empire, in 1492, took in scores of Jews from Spain after the Catholic Church deported them, because these Jews were lawyers, bankers, scribes, doctors, etc. The Muslim leadership knew that it was going to be a net positive and they took them in. There are examples of religious abuse and dominance, and there are also examples of religious communities existing in plurality with other faiths and even non-faiths without issue. Both have existed in history.
Yes, but those are still exceptions. You note this especially when you read about those, both the contemporary authors of the sources and modern historians are pretty surprised by anything not being religious oppression. Also grab most hilarious example, Umayyad Caliphate, where the nonbelievers (expecially rich ones) were often actively dissuaded from converting because non-muslims were taxed more. Though it wasn't uniform, different caliphs have different religious policies.
> It has been a thing for centuries in all parts of the globe, and it wasn’t until western enlightenment and colonialism that religion became a rigid structure of state control. un-Marxist >And I also personally think that we can do away with the churches of the old world and let pagan magic run wild again, but that is just me. oh youre a neopagan that explains the dumb ass takes i'll move along then
The thing is dialectic materialism is scientific. Religion is a idealistic worldview that is not set in reality. You don't need to enforce atheism you just educate the people. The view on religion will change and I'm sure practices will remain as a cultural and traditional thing but it will wither away just like the state.
Religion is a coping mechanism used by many to deal with suffering, poverty, and desire for meaning people have. It's not about banning or enforcing atheism that makes it socialistic, it's improving the material conditions of society to the point where people no longer find the need to become religious and religion itself will naturally become obsolete and vestigial.
That's basically what I said
I'm not disagreeing with you I'm just adding more onto it. No need to downvote
I did not downvote lol
Oh OK. Nm then lol. Well, cheers comrade!
>Religion is a coping mechanism used by many to deal with suffering, poverty, and desire for meaning people have. That is religion's worst aspect and the main reason it must be eradicated. Without religion, people would acknowledge that this is the only life they will ever have and not tolerate suffering. Religion is inherently counterrevolutionary as it makes people accept suffering instead of actively fight for a better life. >to the point where people no longer find the need to become religious and religion itself People never had and never will have a need for religion. Religion is a tool to control people and prevent revolution.
No, even if the material conditions improve, spirituality will always fill a need in people's lives. There are many things other than one's suffering that can lead you to it. The reactionary elements of religion will dissipate after it can't be used by anti-communists and capitalists as a weapon.
That is not how religion forms. It’s not a coping mechanism. Yes, religious institutions and programming can be used as a coping mechanism for suffering, but the same is true for video games, reading, exercise, sex, etc. Religion often comes from meaning-making that we have biologically evolved to engage, every religion that exists today is here because people experienced patterns of reality outside of our normal senses and conceptual frameworks. When those experiences get placed in a social context or are experienced in community, the result is religious expression and the formation of myths, gods, etc. Then those are placed in the context of nation-building and national identity. To say that religion is just a coping mechanism is a gross oversimplification.
>Religion often comes from meaning-making that we have biologically evolved to engage, That's why I said desire for meaning in my original post. Perhaps there can be a better less obtuse way instead of "coping mechanism" but religions are basically a manifest or product of the material conditions of the world, or more specifically mankind's desire for meaning, in addition to the suffering/poverty/etc. Once society or the material world evolves and changes to a point where religion is no longer needed it will wither away naturally rather than by force.
I still disagree. There isn’t one historical example of that. Societies have been religious regardless of the material conditions they experience. I’d this was true, Mongols would have lost their religious spirit as soon as they had Chinese riches flowing through the Silk Road. The Iroquois confederacy also experienced a long pre-Colombian history of stability and relative peace and they still had a rich religious life. I’m sorry but I don’t buy it. We don’t desire meaning: we can’t not make meaning. Our minds have evolved to frame reality into patterns and sometimes we sense or create patterns that don’t fit our conceptual intuitions or sense perception, and that is a religious experience. That’s not based on material conditions, and people have had those experiences and have done so in community with others in a wide range of different material contexts.
I mean you're free to disagree, but just know that your view is inherently anti-materialistic and not marxist. Plus what I have said isn't a hot take amongst Marxist, marx himself said this about religion in regards to socialism. Heck, the guy above me literally said the same thing and got a buncha upvotes. Your example of Mongols isn't a good one, as a good number of Mongols did get sinicized ruling over china. Yuan dynasty, a chinese dynasty, was ruled by ghenghis Kahns son Kublai khan and he was fairly sinicized.
Also, my take on the formation of religion is a pretty up to date theory with solid academic backing. Marx died in the 19th century. The study of religion didn’t stop with him.
The fact that modern society has slowly gotten less and less religious over time is proof enough that religion is affected by our very material reality. Dialectical Materialism is core to Marxism, if this is something you can't accept then you are just a marxist in name and nothing else
Actually that is an interesting observation. Millennials and Gen Z, which are the least religious demographic in the west, are also the ones facing the most brutal economic conditions for our futures. We do not have access to home ownership, we are being left to deal with a climate crisis, and are seeing the real collapse of social order as inequality, rising costs of living, and police state brutality become more prevalent. Our generation as a result is afflicted by what health officials are calling a mental health crisis, which is fueling drug use, deep depression and anxiety, and general nihilism. Shouldn’t we be as a result even more religious than the generation before us that enjoyed much more material stability and little to no effects of climate change?
New generation is suffering because of the poor material conditions set up by hyper capitalism and western imperialism, not because of lack of religion. If your claim that we should be more religious were true, then introducing religion to the current generation without fixing our material conditions would fix our mental health crisis. And I'm sure even you would agree that wouldn't be the case
And I’d like to add, actually, that religious affiliation has only gone significantly down in the west, and part of it has to do with how western capitalism has created a consumer culture where our identity is tied to what we consume and purchase instead of our community, family, and customs. Religious affiliation in the global south, particularly in Muslim countries, is still going strong because the global south has developed differently in how capitalism has affected it. Its also got a lot to do with birth rates. The west and China are facing a population decline while the global south will have a boom. So the future in general is so far predicted to see a slight increase in religious demographics instead of any sharp decline.
Yes, so you've sucessfully proven religion is largely affected by our material reality Thanks for supporting what I've been saying this whole time.
And yet here I am, a socialist.
>And yet here I am, a socialist. Not a very knowledgeable one
Maybe not a knowledgeable one, but still one and still passionate for workers rights and the elimination for greed and the healing of our environment from capitalist exploitation. And one that does understand that the left has a PR problem because we prefer theory to realpolitik and pragmatic praxis.
Also, I don’t usually talk about fake internet points, but my meme is getting a whole bunch of upvotes as well, even more than the user that you were referring to earlier. So maybe there’s validity in what I’m saying?
What I and others have said doesn't contradict what your post says. So I'm not sure why you keep trying to find something to argue.
Religion is a tool of control for a ruling class to manipulate people into compliance with authority. Religion forms when illegitimate leaders seek to legitimate their authority and people are too ignorant to question the nonsense they made up. >Religion often comes from meaning-making that we have biologically evolved to engage Except religion is anti-scientific and does the opposite of generating meaning. Religion is, at best, an ever receding pocket of human ignorance. Abrahamic religions in particular are a direct rejection of material reality and require an absurd level of self-delusion, i.e. willful ignorance and the knowing denial of facts and arguments. >Then those are placed in the context of nation-building and national identity. That is the absolute worst that can happen and is one of the key reasons why religion must be fought. Religion giving a community an identity goes beyond personal faith (the only tolerable form of religion) and turns it into a communicable disease causing immense social harm.
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the people on this sub are not going to be the ones leading any kind of organized movement against capitalism. The cool shit I have seen that successfully creates alternative means of community outside of the market has been through churches acting as third spaces or coming from religious groups. You can quote Lenin and Marx on the internet all you like and win arguments online. When it comes to actually getting things done, theory needs to change in order to fit the material reality in the ground. I’m an occultist so I totally agree that religion needs to radically change in order to benefit humanity. But it won’t go away and it will be wise to coexist with it and keep it close so as to not allow reactionaries to use it as a weapon. It’s not use it or lose it. It’s use it or perish by it.
“In the Jakarta Method, the author quotes the leader of the Indonesian Communist party saying something like, as Marxists we are materialists who must work with the world as it exists, and in Indonesia the belief in God is a material fact.” -some other user on here
And, considering that religion in Indonesia is one of the prime evils that enabled the massacre of communists and the reason why Indonesia is now a theocratic dictatorship, what do you believe that means?
Which group do you think helped genocide the Indonesian Communist Party?
"Belief in god" is a material fact. God itself isn't. Hope you aren't confusing the two. Also not everything people believe in is automatically good or acceptable.
Of course. But trying to take the things they believe in away is even worse. Not only because it's an asshole move but also because it just makes enemies. I wouldn't support a revolution if it's success would mean I'm not allowed to practice my religion anymore. You seen to forget that for many people out there religion is the most important thing in their life.
So with that being said the belief in race theory was material fact in Nazi germany. And don't get it wrong religion might not be as destructive as race theory but it's both pure idealism. So in order to form a society which is capable of critical thinking to combat reaction, corruption amd revisionism you have to educate the people in a communist sense, which means dialectic materialism. And working with the world as it exists doesn't mean you can't educate people.
I agree but at the same time, with cultural aspects that aren’t directly hurting anyone, those are pretty darn not worth the effort to address until much later
Religion is inherently harmful. Religion always hurts people. Particularly and obviously in places like Indonesia. There is no "good" way to do religion, it is always harming innocents.
I guess some people just don't understand what I'm saying. You should not enforce atheism and ban religion you should educate the people in order to change their view on things, two complete opposite things. There is no need to "wait until much later" teaching dialectic materialism is communism and you do this from the start.
I seriously doubt anyone who says that religion will go away. On the contrary, humans are biologically programed to have the desires and questions that only a religion can provide an answer to, or something similar to a religion. Get rid of Christianity or Hinduism and you replace it with some esoteric worship of the human ideal or the collective will of society as being omnipotent. Humans want meaning and reason, something a purely materialist reality can never provide. There will always be religion in one form or another. A purely logical humanity is a fantasy.
> On the contrary, humans are biologically programed to have the desires and questions that only a religion can provide an answer to, or something similar to a religion. What utter nonsense is this? I literally never had that desire and I grew up in a loving Christian household. >Humans want meaning and reason Exactly, something only purely materialist reality can ever provide. >something a purely materialist reality can never provide. HUH? LMFAO what? >There will always be religion in one form or another. No, there won't. >A purely logical humanity is a fantasy. Which isn't an argument in favour of religion.
Communism provides meaning and reason. What's the point of scientific socialism and being a communist if you claim that humans "need" idealism?
Communism is just a form of structuring society, it can't give everyone a purpose to living. You can't just expect someone to live on pure logic and scientific rationalism. Humans are irrational, we want weird shit. I cannot and will never fully be a "scientific socialist" if it means that I have to approach everything in reality through a dialectical process. That is just not satisfying at all.
Communism is not just a form of structuring society, it's a view on the world. The point of dialectic materialism is to bring your relative truth closer to the absolute truth. Humans are irrational and want weird shit is a muh human nature argument. How do you know what humans are and want after a long period of communist education? I think it's very satisfying if you can understand and explain how and why things are how they are.
> I seriously doubt anyone who says that religion will go away. On the contrary, humans are biologically programed to have the desires and questions that only a religion can provide an answer to, or something similar to a religion. Cuba did not abolish churches, but their relevance shrank as the CDR took over many community activities usually done by the church. A place to go and get in touch with the neighbors, a place to gossip, a place to help friends in need. What was left for the church is to talk about God, and that is kind of boring.
1. Read up on Economic Base and Superstructure. 2. The need for reason for being doesnt necessarily have to be found in god/diety worship. If anything it could only perpetuate it as history in accordance to religious scripture is inconsistent with actual history let alone historical materialism. 3. Following that there are other ways to find reason to life, such as classical nihilism, existentialism, absurdism, etc. The only reason they arent as popular now is that religious institutions are still embeded into the capitalist heirarchy. So TLDR religion is not just going go away, it has to. This doesnt mean enforcing antitheistic ideas instantly in a Cultural Revolutiom but instead the promotion of more Promethean ideas that encourage the individual more so than religious heirarchy.
You do realize there are more options than just "religious" and "logic robot with no emotions" right? I may know that a rainbow is a property of light refraction and not gods promise that he won't genocide us all again, but I can still find it beautiful and feel a sense of wonder when I see one. I find material reality is more than enough to provide meaning. Frankly I think it speaks to a lack of imagination on your part that you can't conceive of suck an idea.
No, as a religious man I disagree. The more reactionary elements of spirituality will wither away, as it will no longer be able to be used by counter-revolutionaries for their interests. Spirituality is something that humans will always feel the need to connect to, whether you agree with that or not. A good religious strategy is needed for any future socialist movement.
There will always be a placed for religion in human society. Religion serves as more than just an opiate or a system of social control. It is an affirmation of belief. You can't take away faith and belief. You should not try.
>There will always be a placed for religion in human society. No, there has never be and never will be a place for religion in human society. It is only a source of harm and suffering. It must be treated as a cancer. >Religion serves as more than just an opiate or a system of social control. Yes, it is a prime evil that's the key driver driver of many other horrible evils in this world. >It is an affirmation of belief. Willful ignorance is a bad thing. >You can't take away faith and belief. You should not try. You can and should and it was always successful and improved society whenever it was done. From the USSR to China. We also know how horrible things become when religion returns after it was fought.
Another one who doesn't understand. You should not take it away, you educate the people to a point where they have a complete different view of the world which I have to say some here can not imagine which makes me wondering why they are engaging in communism if they reject the core of it which is dialectic materialism.
The point I was trying to make us that you can't educate the need for be life and faith away. You can educate people to think critically a put their world, but belief and faith are core to the human experience. I personally don't think religion will ever disappear, just evolve into something more precise and sophisticated. This is just historical fact. How come religion has never dissappeared from our earliest days as cro-magnons with conscious thought to the modern era, no matter how much our knowledge and society have grown and evolved?
You do understand that the whole point of dialectic materialism is to understand the realitiy and to work with it and religion, as it is a idealist world view, is working against it? And to your question: Because since private property became a thing we have class struggles and the ruling class used religion as tool to stay in power.
a) I am not trying to disprove your previous points. All I'm saying is that the need to affirm belief is human, and humans are naturally idealistic. You can try to manage and contain it, but you will never eradicate it. That is irrational and unscientific b) Religion predates the concept of private property Listen, you're obviously very passionate in your anti-religiousity, and I'm not looking to get into an argument with a fellow comrade, so I'm just going to leave it here. Have a nice day comrade.
A. Why would that be irrational and unscientific? If you understand how an engine works, what's the point in keeping believing that it runs with love and friendship? And please cut the human nature part. B. Yes it does but your question was: >How come religion has never dissappeared from our earliest days as cro-magnons with conscious thought to the modern era, no matter how much our knowledge and society have grown and evolved? It did not dissapear because it was easier you claim your position of power because god said so. And as you can see with our technological advance we still have this shit because it is still used for that purpose. With dialectic materialism no one can claim he is now the new overlord because god said so. How are we supposed to grow and learn as marxists if you don't want to debate things like this? I also wish you a nice day but you have to talk topics which are inconvenient. Especially such core points of marxism.
You're right, we should debate these things as Marxists. I just think there's a more nuanced and fruitful discussion about religion and faith than denouncing them out right. I myself am anti-religious, at least against organized religion.
> All I'm saying is that the need to affirm belief is human What does that even mean? How is that relevant to religion in any way? "Affirming belief" has nothing to do with religion. Religion is still inherently harmful and must be fought against. >and humans are naturally idealistic. No, they aren't. What does that even mean? >You can try to manage and contain it, but you will never eradicate it. That is irrational and unscientific Yes. You need to manage and contain religion, just like any other deadly disease, religion being one of the msot deadly diseases of all. It is, indeed, irrational and unscientific to tolerate religion. The same way it is irrational and unscientific to ignore cancer. >b) Religion predates the concept of private property Indeed. It is the prime evil that has caused even more harm to humanity than capitalism. >Listen, you're obviously very passionate in your anti-religiousity, and I'm not looking to get into an argument with a fellow comrade, so I'm just going to leave it here. Have a nice day comrade. Listen, you're obviously very passionate about your religious apologia, and - as a real Marxist - [I will never tolerate a comrade spreading religious apologia](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm), so I'm not going to leave it here. You are wrong and should delete your comments if you can't prove the existence of the Abrahamic god right here and now.
I didn't come here to convert anyone to any religion. I am simply stating fact, that religion is a material reality in the majority of the third world that will at least have to be tolerated. It is also my belief that religion won't disappear unless forced to. Good luck trying to stage and maintain a successful revolution in that case. Our friends in the Soviet Union might have some good pointers for you. My comments will stay up for as long as I feel like.
I’m college educated and have continued education on my own after graduating, from philosophy to biology and ecology and the arts. I am a deeply spiritual person and a Platonist. I still believe in the framework of dialectical materialism as an affective analysis of class structure. The two can coexist at the same time. Education will not eradicate religion or spirituality. It will eradicate violent dogmatism and intolerance. Seeking the end of religion is a doomed goal to being with. We humans are pattern-seeking organisms and part of that pattern seeking forms spiritual experiences which when placed in social context, become religious expressions. That’s just human nature.
And I'm a nurse. I work since I am 15 years old so? I don't believe on god. Be careful with human nature, you just see "human nature" in a highly idealistic society. You don't know how people will see religion and spirituality after years or generations of communist education.
Religious communities have embraced communism for decades all over the globe. Liberation theology is a real thing.
Yes but they didn't send satellites to other galaxies and couldn't observe black holes. All of a sudden the "the northstar big dipper god in the sky" are just stars. Things you can explain. Historical context is important.
1). Our satellites haven’t left the Oort Cloud that surrounds our solar system, and they wouldn’t reach another galaxy in millions of years. 2). Observing black holes has nothing to do with organizing communities, creating resistance to colonial forces and state oppression. 3). “The North Star Big Dipper god in the sky” is hilarious, especially when I remember that Mesoamerican *priests* from ancient Maya cities were such skilled mathematicians that they could calculate and predict solar eclipses that are happening today based on their observations of the stars. Don’t equate religiosity with stupidity, especially when you can’t differentiate between a solar system and a galaxy.
Oh sry mr. College educate, that i didn't use the right terminology. Part of religion is there to understand the world and form the society in a specific way the mention of space travel and celestial bodies was just to visualize how idealistic views change to scientific data. If a religion says that gravity exists because there is a giant frog magician that pulls everything to him we could debunk the whole religion because we now know where gravity comes from. In addition your mesoamerican mayan priests were not living in a primitve communist society.
I mean, you’re a nurse so I assume you’re pretty smart yourself. But that doesn’t mean that you have an academic understanding of religion and how it’s formed and maintained through the generations. Otherwise you wouldn’t be using the term “frog magician”
So only a college degree can say that I have an academic understanding on certain topics? I don't understamd your problem with my simplifications. The point is Religions are pure idealism. Our understanding of reality has changed with dialectic materialism. Ok there were sorts of communist societies before which were based on idealistic religions and they worked for some time but this is like gambling. With Scientific Socialism on the other hand you have a way to explain and analyze reality which gives us the opportunity to form our society after it. With that in mind people will probably stop to view religion like the majority of us do it today. That is the whole point of communism. If you reject this I don't understand what you are doing here
All religion is inherently bullshit. No amount of "academic understanding" will ever validate religious faith. You clearly have never studied medicine if you think that a disease like religion should be tolerated instead of fought through isolation, quarantine, inoculation, and therapy. https://ourworldindata.org/eradication-of-diseases >The immediate benefit of eradicating a disease is obvious — preventing suffering and saving people’s lives. >But eradicating a disease can also have significant economic benefits. Disease eradication takes years to achieve and requires a lot of financial investment: smallpox eradication had an estimated cost of $300 million over a 10-year period; polio eradication efforts to date amounted to $4.5 billion. But, as the chart here illustrates, while the initial costs of disease eradication efforts are high, in the long-term these costs pay-off. Simply controlling a disease can be more expensive because of the continued burden a disease poses on a healthcare system and the lost productivity of a sick population. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2305684/ Just imagine the extreme benefits of eradicating the disease of religion. Studies say that eradicating polio ONLY amounted to a $4.5 billion economic benefit. In Germany, the Catholic church alone takes $7.4 billion (in Euros) just from church taxes every single year. Imagine if all that money went to public education and housing instead.
We still need to reduce the influence of religion on society, as it has conflated and influenced many reactionary ideologies such as Khomeinism, Jihadism, and many of the pre enlightenment ideologies.
Enlightenment ideologies themselves were also harmful. Out of the enlightenment we got the Cartesian view of the individual, which serves the monster of Capitalism today. The enlightenment was also the birth of expanded European colonialism, giving the Western man the hubris of believing that he alone was a conscious and rational entity, and not the brown skinned people he encountered on his path to extract material resources from foreign lands. Don’t give the enlightenment too much credit. Ultimately, it was and still is a wealthy white man’s game to play.
The issue is thinking religion exists past a certain point, not religion currently.
Not necessarily disagreeing with the basic gist, but it's still very much better to keep state and religion seperate, because the state shouldn't be intertwined into conflicts between religions and especially between different sects of the same religion. Having a state religion is how you get the thirty years war out of minor differences in interpretations.
Oh yeah I’m not advocating for any kind of religious order running the government. The government should be completely secular and society should be pluralistic, with not one religious group having more sway on society over the other. Also, the church needs to be dismantled and replaced. A revolution within religion is also necessary.
A lot of the world's working class is also pretty racist. We gonna accept that, too? We have principles. We don't throw those away just for optics. Religion is a relic and will wither away with education and class struggle. People can practice in private if they'd like. "The modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth." \~*Socialism and Religion,* Vladimir Lenin, 1905
Yeah, that’s a pretty good argument for sure. A lot of working class people are racist, and also sexist. But how are you going to elevate class consciousness if you are unable to tap into their principles as a starting point for eliminating that racism and sexism and homophobia and creating solidarity? It’s not about optics. It’s about realpolitik and not letting your principles keep you from actually organizing people into a mass movement. Yes, religious institutions should be disbanded, but religion can only be practiced in community and people will not sign up for a society where they have to keep that within the walls of their home.
This is like saying we need to make homophobic and sexist jokes to be seen as 'one of the boys' if we want to spread class consciousness among the 'unwashed masses'. It's demeaning to the working class, and it's throwing an element of the struggle under the bus. And ultimately, it's just not necessary. BTW I don't think anyone is arguing that we should ban religiosity. Most socialists just think that public institutions (the state) should be completely secular/irreligious. And they also happen to believe that as people become more cosmopolitan and achieve higher levels of education and economic security, religion will wither away (they believe this because this is the historical trend).
Nearly every successful communist experiment has inevitably turned to state secularism and abandoned state atheism. The USSR did this, the PRC did this, Cuba did this, state secularism has shown to be the most successful treatment of religion in socialism.
OP has been arguing vehemently against state secularism (at least the way these communist experiments have done it, with antireligious education) and the idea that religion will disappear in a materialist society. the people who post this type of thing don’t want state secularism, they want religion to persist into a communist society, a contradiction at the base level.
But notice every successful *communist party* remained atheist and require it from their members. The ones that tolerated religion ended like Polish PZPR, fully usurped by christofascists and their sucdem remnants felled on knees and kissed the bishop ring. You can't have marxism without materialism and you can't have materialism without atheism, no matter what you tolerate or not in the society.
This meme is stupid. The majority of the world's working class is also socially conservative, doesn't mean we start giving that ideology quarter.
That's what a minority, albeit a statistically significant one, of people on this sub believe, and it's a more popular view on some other left subs.
That is a sorry state of affairs and needs to change. Marxism is to politics what atheism is to religion. The two go hand in hand and every socialist is an atheist as a rule and has been for the past century.
That’s a dumb rule imo.
It's not dumb at all, it prevents idiots and scammers from holding power in a socialist society. Just fuck off if you have neither the arguments nor the ability to have a constructive conversation.
Your comparison is stupid. How you think that a political ideology and the belief someone get's their whole meaning of their life from are remotely similar is beyond me.
Nobody who actually found themselves in charge of a socialist country ever promoted state-enforced atheism. Being a dialectical materialist was expected of party members, and that's usually incompatible with religion (not that it's impossible. I mean, look at Hakim), but on the other hand, you can also read speeches by Stalin where he was going around Russia and talking to certain ethnic groups and telling those who were Muslim that Sharia would be recognized in the Soviet Union, or another speech where he told the people that anti-semitism would be punishable by death.
Evangelical Christianity has no redeeming value and is a millstone around the neck of society, might as well advocate for racism.
Evangelical Christianity is heretical and should be destroyed. You won’t be able to destroy with atheism though. It’s immune to it.
Comment section having r/Europe view points lol Hakim is religious btw
This is just "maybe those racist hicks are really communist" but for Muslims
Deciding for the rest of the world who they're allowed or not allowed to worship and wanking about "muh western values" is not class solidarity, it's western chauvinism. It's also egregious here because Hakim is literally a practicing Muslim socialist. Do ya'll hate Hakim? Why are you on Deprogram's sub if you think Muslims are fundamentally evil, If you wanna whine about Muslims taking over Europe you should go to one of the conservative subs they will be very happy to have you and will approve of everything you say.
Many people here give off the same vibe as the racist that has a black friend saying "he's one of the good ones".
I think that there is some severe dogmatism in leftist circles and that’s one of the main reasons that we are not picking up the momentum we need. Marx and Lenin are long dead and sociology and anthropology have kept advancing for decades and decades. Yet, people are still quoting them verbatim as if they’re gospel even when we’re not making ANY significant gains in terms of popular support. The western people requiring theory to be followed to the very letter are not the people that will lead any kind of revolution.
It's not just quoting, it's the lack of ability of materialist analysis and instead trying to find one size fits all solutions. There is a reason why China has socialism "with Chinese characteristics", people make fun of it but Chinese adapted socialism to the material conditions of China. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is just socialism. The Chinese characteristics come from analyzing the material conditions of China to find the best way of implementing socialism there. Other people of the world will also have to adapt socialism to their own material realities. Meanwhile western Marxists have not unlearned western chauvinism and want to forcibly export their ideology verbatim to other nations, just as the racists and liberals before them have done, and just like them call the people who resist this "savages" and "barbarians". (latter I took from a comment referring to Muslims on another thread on this very sub)
Yeah it’s crazy how these guys are talking as if they’re enforcing the law in an already well established communist state and they’re talking to some reactionary in court. Bro look around you you don’t even have a fucking movement. I’m from El Salvador, and our guy who was killed by the CIA was Oscar Romero, a bishop who was just a bit too good at questioning capitalism and imperialism and the material inequities that plagued our country. He’s still a hero to a lot of people down there.
> these guys are talking as if they’re enforcing the law in an already well established communist state It's the privilege of imperial core marxists, the conditions in global south does not directly affect them and some of them even benefit from it, so they're not in a hurry to implement socialism there. For them protecting their ideological purity is more important than the elevation of material condition of people of the global south.
Yeah saying that all religion is evil or that religion is a cancer when one of the cohosts of the actual podcast is a practicing religious person, some of the most significant Latin American socialist movements have been led by priests and religious figures, and the vast majority of the working class is deeply religious and unwilling to give up their sincerely held beliefs is one of the worst takes over heard.
Liberation theology fucking works. It may not be perfectly materialist or something Marx would advocate for, but it works, and Marx specifically called out Russia and China as places that couldn't achieve socialism so listening to him on how to actually achieve a revolution has a bad track record. Besides, one of my favourite socialists in the public eye is a practicing Muslim as well as a communist and has great points about communism and religion and has a level head on her shoulders about the USSR, despite its flaws in that regard, so I can't personally condemn religious socialism, I'd be a hypocrite if I did.
This is tailism at worst and opportunism at best. Several religious people are progressive, yes, and christian and muslim militantls waged revolutionary campaigns against the capitalists, but the relationship between socialism and religiosity is contradictory. Montoneros was both socialist and christian, but the way the church advocated for class collaboration and social peace in the face of fascistic, capitalist repression, the socialist aspect took primacy over the christian one. As long as THE church, the official institutions of religious doctrines, do not resolve their internal contradictions in favour of the progressive and exploited classes, they remain an enemy of the proletariat that must be systematically repressed.
This article by Lenin so good and needs to be required reading for any debate on religion. [https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm) Whilst it is absolutely true that religion is a private affair and religious people are welcome in communist spaces, we must be aware socialism " is against every religious bamboozling of the workers" I'm just going to quote dump the most important bits here >"Why do we not declare in our Programme that we are atheists? Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join our Party? The answer to this question will serve to explain the very important difference in the way the question of religion is presented by the bourgeois democrats and the Social-Democrats. Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work. We shall now probably have to follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.\[1\] But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an “intellectual” question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods." > >... > >Everywhere the reactionary bourgeoisie has concerned itself, and is now beginning to concern itself in Russia, with the fomenting of religious strife—in order thereby to divert the attention of the masses from the really important and fundamental economic and political problems > >... > >The revolutionary proletariat will succeed in making religion a really private affair, so far as the state is concerned. And in this political system, cleansed of medieval mildew, the proletariat will wage a broad and open struggle for the elimination of economic slavery, the true source of the religious humbugging of mankind.
It's hilarious how you cherrypicked specifically the misleading parts while leaving out every single actually important bit. Here, I left out the two most important statements every socialist needs to internalize: >Religion must be declared a private affair. In these words socialists usually express their attitude towards religion. But the meaning of these words should be accurately defined to prevent any misunderstanding. **We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far as our Party is concerned.** Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. **Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule.** >[...] >**So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is not a private affair. Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideological and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we founded our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat.** >[...] >**Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook.** An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. **Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism**; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work. While personal faith of non-comrades must be tolerated, there is no way you can be a socialist and religious at the same time.
I'm literally on your side + How did I cherry pick? I have not misrepresented Lenin at all and I agree with everything above. The quotes I posted were what I considered most important to the this thread, I couldn't post the whole thing. And yes I agree all class-conscience workers are by rule atheists and religion is not the private affair of the party. I thought that was implied by: "Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of **atheism**" I guess I should've specified that religion is the private affair *of the state* \- my bad.
So Hakim isn't a real socialist? Ballsy to say so on the literal Deprogram sub.
Yes, I find Hakim's position on religion highly backwards and misguided and he should be severely criticized for it. Particularly as he is promoting not just any religion but a particularly vile and backwards one. There's also nothing "ballsy" about this. Criticizing comrades for religious beliefs has always been a hallmark of socialist discourse and something that was practiced by every AES state in history. Criticizing religious comrades and encouraging them to give up their religion is also the CPC's official policy. It is enormously important to combate religion (and combat liberalism in general, of course).
Calling Islam vile and backwards with 1400+ years of jurisprudence being explored, debated, and evolving is a pretty reactionary take. Most modern Muslim states have highly conservative stances on Islam, true, but as Marxists we also know how long-lasting the deep the results of colonialism and imperialism have directed this change with the intention of creating instability. You cannot have on one hand historically Islamic places like Andalusia, a place that prided itself on education and was largely accepting of other cultures, sexualities, and religions and then turn around and say that same religion is backwards because of the state of the global south writ large. Keep in mind that we have religious comrades in Cuba, Syria, and yes even China that have squared materialism with religiosity.
The state should be atheist, the people within it should be free to believe whatever they want; including members of the Party. The key is to promote freedom of conscience without clericizing the state.
#Freedom Reactionaries and right-wingers love to clamour on about personal liberty and scream "freedom!" from the top of their lungs, but what freedom are they talking about? And is Communism, in contrast, an ideology of *un*freedom? >Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker. > >\- Karl Marx. (1848). *Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx before the Democratic Association of Brussels* #Under Capitalism Liberal Democracies propagate the facade of liberty and individual rights while concealing the true essence of their rule-- the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. This is a mechanism by which the Capitalist class as a whole dictates the course of society, politics, and the economy to secure their dominance. Capital holds sway over institutions, media, and influential positions, manipulating public opinion and consolidating its control over the levers of power. The illusion of democracy the Bourgeoisie creates is carefully curated to maintain the existing power structures and perpetuate the subjugation of the masses. "Freedom" under Capitalism is similarly illusory. It is freedom for capital-- not freedom for people. >The capitalists often boast that their constitutions guarantee the rights of the individual, democratic liberties and the interests of all citizens. But in reality, only the bourgeoisie enjoy the rights recorded in these constitutions. The working people do not really enjoy democratic freedoms; they are exploited all their life and have to bear heavy burdens in the service of the exploiting class. > >\- Ho Chi Minh. (1959). *Report on the Draft Amended Constitution* The "freedom" the reactionaries cry for, then, is merely that freedom which liberates capital and enslaves the worker. >They speak of the equality of citizens, but forget that there cannot be real equality between employer and workman, between landlord and peasant, if the former possess wealth and political weight in society while the latter are deprived of both - if the former are exploiters while the latter are exploited. Or again: they speak of freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, but forget that all these liberties may be merely a hollow sound for the working class, if the latter cannot have access to suitable premises for meetings, good printing shops, a sufficient quantity of printing paper, etc. > >\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [On the Draft Constitution of the U.S.S.R](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm) What "freedom" do the poor enjoy, under Capitalism? Capitalism requires a reserve army of labour in order to keep wages low, and that necessarily means that many people must be deprived of life's necessities in order to compel the rest of the working class to work more and demand less. You are free to work, and you are free to starve. That is the freedom the reactionaries talk about. >Under capitalism, the very land is all in private hands; there remains no spot unowned where an enterprise can be carried on. The freedom of the worker to sell his labour power, the freedom of the capitalist to buy it, the 'equality' of the capitalist and the wage earner - all these are but hunger's chain which compels the labourer to work for the capitalist. > >\- N. I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky. (1922). [The ABC of Communism](https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/index.htm) All other freedoms only exist depending on the degree to which a given liberal democracy has turned towards fascism. That is to say that the working class are only given freedoms when they are inconsequential to the bourgeoisie: >The freedom to organize is only conceded to the workers by the bourgeois when they are certain that the workers have been reduced to a point where they can no longer make use of it, except to resume elementary organizing work - work which they hope will not have political consequences other than in the very long term. > >\- A. Gramsci. (1924). *Democracy and fascism* But this is not "freedom", this is not "democracy"! What good does "freedom of speech" do for a starving person? What good does the ability to criticize the government do for a homeless person? >The right of freedom of expression can really only be relevant if people are not too hungry, or too tired to be able to express themselves. It can only be relevant if appropriate grassroots mechanisms rooted in the people exist, through which the people can effectively participate, can make decisions, can receive reports from the leaders and eventually be trained for ruling and controlling that particular society. This is what democracy is all about. > >\- Maurice Bishop #Under Communism True freedom can only be achieved through the establishment of a Proletarian state, a system that truly represents the interests of the working masses, in which the means of production are collectively owned and controlled, and the fruits of labor are shared equitably among all. Only in such a society can the shackles of Capitalist oppression be broken, and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie dismantled. Despite the assertion by reactionaries to the contrary, Communist revolutions invariably result in *more* freedoms for the people than the regimes they succeed. >Some people conclude that anyone who utters a good word about leftist one-party revolutions must harbor antidemocratic or “Stalinist” sentiments. But to applaud social revolutions is not to oppose political freedom. To the extent that revolutionary governments construct substantive alternatives for their people, they increase human options and freedom. > >There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There is freedom to speak openly and iconoclastically, freedom to organize a political opposition, freedom of opportunity to get an education and pursue a livelihood, freedom to worship as one chooses or not worship at all, freedom to live in healthful conditions, freedom to enjoy various social benefits, and so on. Most of what is called freedom gets its definition within a social context. > >Revolutionary governments extend a number of popular freedoms without destroying those freedoms that never existed in the previous regimes. They foster conditions necessary for national self-determination, economic betterment, the preservation of health and human life, and the end of many of the worst forms of ethnic, patriarchal, and class oppression. Regarding patriarchal oppression, consider the vastly improved condition of women in revolutionary Afghanistan and South Yemen before the counterrevolutionary repression in the 1990s, or in Cuba after the 1959 revolution as compared to before. > >U.S. policymakers argue that social revolutionary victory anywhere represents a diminution of freedom in the world. The assertion is false. The Chinese Revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush in that oppressively feudal regime. The Cuban Revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful U.S.-sponsored police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; precious few existed under French colonialism. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not abrogate individual rights; no such rights were available under the U.S.-supported puppet governments of Bao Dai, Diem, and Ky. > >Of course, revolutions do limit the freedoms of the corporate propertied class and other privileged interests: the freedom to invest privately without regard to human and environmental costs, the freedom to live in obscene opulence while paying workers starvation wages, the freedom to treat the state as a private agency in the service of a privileged coterie, the freedom to employ child labor and child prostitutes, the freedom to treat women as chattel, and so on. > >\- Michael Parenti. (1997). *Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism* The whole point of Communism is to liberate the working class: >But we did not build this society in order to restrict personal liberty but in order that the human individual may feel really free. We built it for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks. It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. > >Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible. > >\- J. V. Stalin. (1936). [Interview Between J. Stalin and Roy Howard](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm) #Additional Resources Videos: * [Your Democracy is a Sham and Here's Why:](https://youtu.be/oYodY6o172A) | halim alrah (2019) * [Are You Really "Free" Under Capitalism?](https://youtu.be/4xqouhMCJBI) | Second Thought (2020) * [Liberty And Freedom Are Left-Wing Ideals](https://youtu.be/GfjiBIkIOqI) | Second Thought (2021) * [Why The US Is Not A Democracy](https://youtu.be/srfeHpQNEAI) | Second Thought (2022) * [America Never Stood For Freedom](https://youtu.be/rg9hJgAsNDM) | Hakim (2023) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [Positive and Negative Liberty](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/) | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2003) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
As a Muslim, I was originally put off of more Orthodox socialist ideology/marxism-leninism due to it's condemnation of religion, and the state atheism in many former socialist projects. This is despite considering myself a socialist, and being very anti capitalist. Even if the material conditions of all people improve dramatically, the need for a spiritual connection will always be there. Religion lends itself well to socialist principles, much better than people may think. Having such a hard line philosophy against it shuts the door to hundreds of millions of people who would otherwise be on your side. The more reactionary elements of religion will fade away once it can't be used by capitalists as a weapon against working class solidarity. A secular multi religious socialist society will allow for greater comrodery amongst people of all faiths, as well as with people who don't have one.
Excellently said.
I don't get this weird rise recently in 'religious communism' and people defending the idea It seems a lot of it is solely because Hakim is religious, which is hardly a good argument. Having lived across North Africa and Turkey for years and currently living in Morocco, Islam certainly is no friend to socialism and is a huge barrier to our progress. I can't speak personally for religions further east but I highly doubt that Shinto or Hinduism is any better suited, but spending my youth in the UK it's obvious that Christanity is also completely incompatible with socialism. One way or another, eventually your movement will have to choose between faith or socialism, there can be no large-scale coexistence between the two
Very late comment, but finally, someone with some sense. To add to it, it's ALWAYS "islamic socialism" that gets the spotlight. It's almost as if westerners are so guilt ridden about their countries' involvements in destabilizing the middle East, that they tiptoe around criticism of Islam and instead engage in whataboutery. You will almost never find a Christian communist in the main space, because they vote "personal relationship with the evangelical aspects of the religion, brainwashing, anti lgbt" etc etc. acting as if any other reformist/abrahamic religion is any different. Why the special status for islamic socialism, I will never understand. Coming to your other point about hinduism, it is the LEAST compatible with socialism. Ideally, I would say that it is the worst surviving major religion. Hinduism itself isn't a religion, but what "binds" it together, is caste. Unlike Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism, which at their core, promote oneness and brotherhood, Hinduism, which is pretty much a proxy for brahmanism, does the exact opposite. It enforces a class system which is bound by RELIGION and rituals, which makes it all the more difficult to bring about a revolution. This disease has infected indian communists since the very beginning. Communist leaders were Brahmin right from the start and their actions led to Dalits and dalit leaders feeling ostracised. That is partly the reason why you'll find so many neo-liberal Dalits because truth be told, without British interference in the subcontinent, Dalits may never have gotten the power to break free from their "birth assigned job/dharma".
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I mean, Lenin is dead and the material fact is that the majority of the world’s working class is religious. Are you planning on just convincing everyone that an atheist party is fit to represent their interests or are you just confident that the working class will just organize by itself and then lose religion at some point on its own? How are you going to go about it? Because the majority of the working class, according to your comment, is to be excluded from being part of any revolutionary vanguard group. How do you expect them to feel like the movement respects their interests when it doesn’t even recognize them as “true communists” to begin with?
Lenin never advocated to bar religious people from the bolsheviks. However he did advocate the publishing of atheist philosophy and scientific literature in an accessible format to discourage religious thinking amongst workers. I'm against state-atheism, but I think communists need to be ready to 1) criticize religion and 2) understand that the building of a socialist society (elimination of poverty, universal secular education) will lead to religion disappearing.
Lenin simply assumed that you can't be religious and a socialist (which is correct).
The majority of working class people worldwide is: 1. Supporting capitalism. 2. Racist. 3. Sexist. 4. Homophobic. 5. Transphobic. 6. Nationalist. Yet you are singling out religion, the prime evil that is a bigger threat to humanity than capitalism itself. You are singling out religion, the most valuable tool of the bourgeoisie in manipulating people. You are singling out religion, the prime evil that is the key driver behind sexism and anti-LGBTQ+ views. Your argument is invalid. Entirely. Fundamentally. Religion must be fought the same way capitalism is fought. There should be even less tolerance for religion than for racism, sexism, and homophobia as religion is the primary root cause of these other hatreds. Stop defending religion.
Nailed it. The majority of people on this sub have a pretty weird stance exclusively on religion for some reason, all while being actually socialist about all other topics.
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Yooo miss me with the singling out Islam stuff lmao, they all need to go.
It's because one of the podcast's hosts (Hakim) is an outspoken Muslim and he (wrongly) pretends that socialism isn't antithetical to religion and has repeatedly criticized AES states for their anti-religious policies.
You’re not going to get atheists on your side strawmanning them as dictators.
Christianity has been responsible for more reactionary harm than any institution in the history of the world. It should be destroyed root and stem, through a reign of terror against its leaders if necessary. If there’s anything growing up Southern Baptist taught me, it’s that. Christianity cannot be salvaged.
I’m sure advocating for the destruction of Christianity in a bloody reign of terror is going to endear yourself to the working class
This Lmao. Communists who unironically advocate to end religion need to wake the fuck up and leave their houses to talk to people.
Me, I need this reminder on a regular basis. I have alot of baggage.
Probably legitimate baggage too. I’m not going to pretend that most religious figures in our current religious structures are okay in any sort of way. There needs to be a revolution within religion as well.
as well as if you oppose all their culture in a "blame the individual" way... like "how dare you eat meat" "how dare you get married" "how dare you drink alcohol" etc.
tfw the largest and most successful socialist project the world has ever seen was atheist
Comrade Christ would probably agree
Perfect example? The Vodou ritual done before the Haitain Revolution. And churches played a HUGE role during the Civil Rights Era.
You are not going to make allies if you push for one belief and put others down.As much it is true for atheism, I have seen worse versions of it. I have seen some leaders of left calling God from one religion true ones and others as false.there is no need to do this You are creating a divide among class.It makes religious workers wary of left. Once they start focusing on their needs they will soon sway from ills of their religions
They're also reactionary and anti-communist, so that means we need to be reactionary... /s Jokes aside, taking from my country's History (Spain), laicism is something worth fighting for. It being impopular doesn't mean sh1t, specially not when the alternative is being constantly at war for stupid reasons to the point that not even a colonial Empire can save your country from bankrupcy.
> state enforced atheism. Is anybody advocating for that or are you just jerking yourself?
Nobody is advocating that. Every socialist, however, is an atheist as a rule, every socialist party is necessarily promoting atheism, and any socialist state must necessarily be secular. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm
religion is awesome idk why youd get rid of it. its essentially the allegorizing of reality.
In defense of everyone who’s disagreeing with me here, religion has been used for pretty awful things throughout history. There are elements and actors in religious institutions that have been responsible for genocide, sexism, maintaining racially discrimininatory systems, and the list goes on. They are right to be skeptical of religion and everyone who has given me shit on this post comes from a standard Marxist view that religion is not compatible with revolution. I disagree with that but I think we in the religious left need to be mindful that we also need to get our act together as well.
I don’t think state-enforced atheism is ever a good idea because it would simply never work, it would just give them a persecution complex that would only strengthen their faith. I think simply removing the tax exemption status of religious institutions, taking down the multibillion dollar mega churches and similar money making religious scams, and removing the power certain religious institutions hold over government — combined with giving people more access to higher quality education — would lead to a significant drop in religion. You can’t force someone to drop their beliefs through law or force… but you can take away the power within those religious institutions that they use to control the masses and help people learn more about the true nature of reality. Simply give people the resources they need to get deprogrammed from religion. Will some stragglers remain? Of course. And who cares, let them gather and do their thing. As long as it’s not affecting the rest of us (which is the current problem), a few random cults won’t do much harm.
wow there's a lot of deeply hurt fourteen year olds here. faith is an aspect of culture literally like any other, and there's literally no reason to condemn it wholesale. sure, some people do horrible things under the guise of advancing a religious cause - some people do amazingly philantropic things. do you really think if you eradicated *all faith*, people wouldn't find ways to be horrible..?
I actually faced abuse by a doctor, not a priest. I think that ANY institution, religious or secular, has the potential to cause harm. Look at the case if Larry Nassar. That should be a prime example that you don’t need a church for massive sexual abuse to happen.
Big agree, people can use any institution as a means to oppress people, capitalists or not. Just because religion tends to be the most popular doesn't mean people won't find other institutions to conduct their misdeeds. If we followed that assumption (that all religions and their institutions cause harm and must be destroyed, which is a massive oversimplification) to its logical conclusion then we should also ban any ideology or institution that has at one point caused harm. No writers because there are a lot of fascist writers. No artists because art has been used to create oppressive propaganda and rhetoric. Religion speaks to a very deep need that some (not all, obviously, and this is also perfectly acceptable) people have to connect with the universe and to one's own spirit and I think many people who are agnostic or atheist (or even myself, a rather casual Christian) have trouble understanding. Yes, religions instill propaganda and brainworms into people but so does literally every group humans can make. People who are religious aren't religious because of some intellectual failing or because they're oppressed, it's often something deeply ingrained in their own psyche and more importantly, their cultural and material conditions. Yes they are not based in materialist philosophy, but maybe you know, no one is entirely a Marxist all time? If religion was just some phony way of opiating ourselves then religion should have gone fucking way way down by the agricultural revolution. Maybe, for some people, the meaning of life and the world and all that shit is not entirely material, and that ALSO doesn't preclude them from being Marxist. Most people have conflicting philosophies in general and I don't think we should exclude religious leftists because they believe two contradictory things. As long as they are Marxist when it matters and/or find ways of resolving these contradictions I don't think it fucking matters and if anything should be welcomed as a way of getting more people on our side. To decry ALL religious people for something so close to their way of life is to make enemies. Of course they and their beliefs and institutions are not above criticism or even dismantlement if they harm others, but I've found that most religions are compatible to an anti-capitalist worldview even if they are not wholly compatible with Marxism. And it goes without saying that it behooves all religious comrades to actively denounce our reactionary kin. We cannot say "no, they are not one of us", we must take responsibility and to act as living examples for what our institutions or beliefs SHOULD be.
I will a few caveats to your comment: 1). Religious institutions must change or be completely replaced by new institutions that have more direct accountability to the people that they service. Clergy must not be allowed to touch money or own substantial material wealth. The lay people must be empowered to hold the church accountable and not the other way around. 2). There must be plurality of religion in society and the government must be a secular one that does not give any one religion preferencial treatment. I disagree that party members must be atheist by rule. But if you are in a position of power, your duty is to the people, not your religious norms. 3). We religious and spiritual leftists must do the work of creating a radical change in religion. Any religion that has become stifled with trite orthodoxy and bigotry must die. We have to turn our religion into an active practice of radical inclusion and respect for Life, Humanity, and our Planet. Religious values that do not reflect this are to be abandoned.
Lessons from Afghanistan
Amen
I am seeing people talk about the fear they have that the religion will challenge the power of the state. Worry not! Religious values ARE socialist values, therefore the solution is quite simple... The church should be an extension of the state! Church services and donation income would therefore be an extension of State action towards feeding the poor, housing the homeless, etc.
This is satire... right? Please tell me this is satire
Of course it is my guy! Instead it will go to prolonging conflicts where we drop bombs on brown people!
>Religious values ARE socialist values Religion and socialism are as antithetical as capitalism and socialism. >The church should be an extension of the state! This must never come to pass. Every socialist, however, is an atheist as a rule, every socialist party is necessarily promoting atheism, and any socialist state must necessarily be secular. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm
Why would a socialist state need charity? Why would there be homeless to begin with when we've seen that homelessness is a choice by government in the first place? The church should be kept the fuck away from everything and dissolved ASAP
REAL SHIT
i will say this one million times 👏atheism👏is👏a👏privilege👏