dae want to take over an abandoned warehouse and start preaching the words of marx, lenin, and mao to the proletariat masses every saturday morning and communally smoke a blunt afterwards? communsim basically fills the god hole for me anyways.
My friend hosts one of these biweekly but he recently admitted to me that he's a liberal and he just doesn't want to look lame by admitting it to his cool commie friends. Which I guess makes me one of the uncool commie friends.
Actually it means you're a liberal, thus why he's comfortable admitting it to you but not the others.
maybe he'll keep running more and more communist stuff to look cool. ends up being Lenin 2 through some absurd comedy of errors
Back in the day there was this guy called Jim Jones who had the same idea you did.
It, uh, did not end well.
I was thinking more Fred Hampton, which did not end well either.
Just quoting Marx some of the time and saying the word Socialism a lot doesn't make you a communist. I think it's pretty clear that a dude who said "I am come as God Socialist" isn't talking about the same thing we're talking about.
Every regular commie meeting I go to basically is. Fightback even had the passing of a hat like a tithing plate to pay a member to go to commie school lol. The communist party of canada meetins usually include a couple songs like la internationale or it can be done, it must be done, it will be done. As a gal forced to go to a lot of church when I was younger, the resemblance was striking.
Oh shit you're right about Fightback meetings, I'm surprised I never made that connection since I too spent my fair share of Sundays at church. Slightly related, did your Fightback group do a Marx-mas party too?
I think OP wants more cult like chanting and stuff
Mass is definitely much different than just a Bible reading group
I would not admit this out in the open. Conservatives frequently say that “socialism is a religion” in order to draw a false equivalence, and you’re just giving them ammo.
I don't know, they get pretty sputtery when you tell them that something else fills the "god-shaped hole" they're always going on about better than their god ever did.
is there not a religious component to communism? are some communist writings (often the best of them) not spiritual in nature, extolling truths about the fundamental nature of reality that go beyond the mundane and the immediate? imagining great motivated powers and ways of being beyond the constrained existence of a single person? is there some way to look at the world that the capitalists have won and still be a communist without the facility of Faith?
I'm not a "you shouldn't say this because optics" person, because for the most part idc what conservatives think of us, but uh, no, I don't think there is a fundamental religious component to communism, nor does it require faith. I get the urge but I think it's mislaid and does not lead anywhere productive. No shade on any religious or spiritual comrades at all, I just don't think communism should be the religion, unless you want a cult. You can have community gatherings without it being a religion if that's what you want, and you can have compassionate religious beliefs that are fully compatible with communism without turning communism into a religion.
If anything this idea that being a communist requires religious faith is just a reflection of how little practical organizing is being done. Communism is a megaproject sure, like a cathedral that will take lifetimes to build, but we can all work towards it in small localized ways, it's not completely abstract, and it's not just going to show up one day like the return of christ.
tbh I don't much distinguish between my political and religious beliefs as they basically reach the same conclusions and are informed by the same life experiences
Just start a weekly reading group, you don't need the weird religious trappings to hang out with your communist buddies
nah the stained glass ceremony incense etc creates a powerful vibe
Never said it doesn't create a powerful vibe, just that it's a fucked up weird vibe to want in a communist reading group. To put it bluntly, miss me with that cult shit
I've found a Lutheran church near me whose pastor is openly critical of our city's stance towards the unhoused. They also run a Rainbow Closet. I intend to reach out to see how I could volunteer but the idea of affiliating with a religious institution makes me a little anxious, ngl. Still worth doing I think.
This is just a reading group with a cool meeting house.
Alternately, well funded and supported community center.
Unitarian church near me used to have a socialist pastor, I mostly stopped going after he retired. I could tell some of his more radical sermons made the mostly lib parishioners uncomfortable
