I guess I'm looking for myth that promotes communal ideas, relates to worker alienation, etc.? I think of the book of Acts in the bible, that's somewhere between an example of how christians are supposed to live and a defense of paul before he's executed, right? but incidentally the book has ideas that can be carried forward and developed into a marxist-friendly understanding of how to live, even if it's loaded in stuff a well read marxist would find objectionable, there will be no perfect examples and i find it tiresome to get lost in pedantry about it so spare me!!!

I also wanna write some. Like "hades began to push and proliferate communism because he was horrified by the trauma of the humans coming through his gates and despised our cruel fates" feels like a decent basis for a mythic story idk

look i dont wanna get into the relationship of myth and religion to marxism, not really, i just like writing fake myth and i need an idea of what's out there in order to make something worthy of the concept

  • iridaniotter [she/her]
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    3 months ago

    None because they all predate dialectical materialist philosophy. But I guess stories about tricksters stealing knowledge from the gods and giving it to humanity (the organisms) in order to create humanity (the modern social being) are halfway there.

    Edit: also consider writing Till Eulenspiegel fanfic

    • sneak100
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      18 days ago

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      • iridaniotter [she/her]
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        3 months ago

        Well there are communist vibes but if you want to properly promote scientific socialism then your stories need to be grounded in dialectical materialism.

      • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
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        3 months ago

        Dialectical materials philosophy is a European philosophy based in other European philosophies

        • iridaniotter [she/her]
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          3 months ago

          It's the philosophical worldview of scientific socialism. Presumably it would have been developed even if the Paleocene stabilized and Paleolake Megachad civilization had an industrial revolution. But that's impossible to prove.

        • sneak100
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          18 days ago

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          • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
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            3 months ago

            Can you link something written? I.hagent read everything Marx ever wrote and am genuinely interested but asking 45 of my minutes in a reply is a bit much. And yeah, you're technically right but you're also being really pedantic. A German dude was inspired by another German dude in broad strokes here.

            • Wertheimer [any]
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              3 months ago

              Engels, in Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, discusses the work of Lewis Henry Morgan

              https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch03.htm

  • sorter_plainview@lemmy.today
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    3 months ago

    I would argue that myths and stories are written by the wealthy class of people, hence I won't expect anything that will undermine the interest of that class. I think denying education to workers or children of workers was a common tactic to suppress workers.

    Myths almost always involve kings and other figures of power. So as you vaguely mentioned most of the time it's the villains of the story that may hold a "progressive" view, but there is always a twist to make them look bad.

    From your post I understand that you are not necessarily looking for existing stories, but you also want to write. Maybe trying to work out how a common person may experience the events in a myth will give some ideas.

    Do post if you write anything. I'm really interested to read.

  • thebartermyth [he/him]
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    3 months ago

    Maybe the play Hadestown? Prometheus stealing fire from the gods probably works. Most of Aesops fables are vaguely left-ish and can definitely be spun as so. The bible-related commie phrase is usually the pre-king-james lord's prayer: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are indebted to us." There's a theory about the axial age being a response to coinage. I wouldn't say it's airtight, but it's a fun thing to believe lol. Honestly, I find myths more interesting without recontexualizing them because a lot of polytheistic stuff has regional and cultural aspects to it that doesn't really get translated to "god of fire, goddess of death, etc.

  • Sebrof [comrade/them, he/him]
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    3 months ago

    @Philosophosphorous@hexbear.net here mentioned Daoism, and I'd like to drop this article from Red Sails that compares and contrasts Daoism with Dialectical Materialism. This isn't a mythology as you asked, but hopefully you may find it useful. There are similarities between when it comes to seeing the world as a constant flow with a unity of opposites. There are differences too, where Daoism sees change as cyclical (no progress) while Dialectical Materialism sees change as an upward-moving spiral (contradictions move systems forward and their "overcoming" moves the system to a higher set of contradictions). It also gives a good explanation of Dialectics.

    The article also discussed how Daoism influenced Mao and his military ideas.

    Here's the article: https://redsails.org/maoist-and-daoist-dialectics/

    In terms of stories, there's also an article on Red Sails of three short stories (one of which is very Daoist) and how they relate to ideas from Dialectical Materialism.

    Here are the stories: https://redsails.org/on-three-short-stories/#fn8

  • Philosophosphorous [comrade/them, null/void]
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    3 months ago

    Taoism has criticisms of 'great man theory' type thinking but also kinda falls into a kind of 'peasant tailism' laissez-faire-but-for-illiterate-peasant-farmers attitude. directly addresses how many problems are socially constructed, such as the 'lock creates the thief' idea where the guy locking up a hoard of treasure is the one creating the conditions for the crime to arise rather than the criminal being individually responsible for summoning evil into the world or something. probably more compatible with anarchism than democratic centralist conceptions of communism but i've only read like one book about it, theres kind of a current of 'don't rock the boat or interfere in things unnecessarily with proactive rulership' attitude.

  • sneak100
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    18 days ago

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  • UlyssesT
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    21 days ago

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  • Wertheimer [any]
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    3 months ago

    Just looking for a decent basis for a mythic story? Plenty of starting places - myths that promote acts of kindness toward and protection of strangers, certain civic myths that you could rewrite from a class-conscious perspective, Lives of the Saints who practiced communal living, etc.

    Perhaps of interest - the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and of Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet. They were all communist filmmakers who specialized in adapting classic literary texts. Pasolini has an Oedipus, a Medea, and a Gospel According to St. Matthew; Straub-Huillet have an Antigone, The Death of Empedocles, and Moses and Aron.

    Some other examples that might fit:

    • the secession(s) of the Plebs in the early Roman Republic (closer to mythology than history)
    • Yudhishthira's refusal to abandon his dog upon his ascension to heaven in the Mahabharata
    • Zeus going around incognito checking to see if people treat their guests correctly
    • the Euripides tragedies about refugees
  • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
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    3 months ago

    All mythologies were written by people in ancient times under essentially slave based economies or for say Norse stuff early mineral times and those myths were transcribed from folklore by like...the guy who could read and write and then assembles usually by a different culture later on. Norse myths were written in the early midevsl period but were for sure orally told much earlier for example and Homer wasn't writing about his contemporaries. Historically existing myths inherently tend to come from a time well before a Marxist framework would be relevant, comminism is a proposed system to emerge out of capitalism and if the early bourgeois revolutions hadn't overthrown the monarchal powers and the mercantile class not taken over then we'd probably still be trying to get liberalism done cause that was the class conflict du jour, it's an historic process. Honestly Christianity probably comes closest, which is no surprise, Marx lived in a very Christian time

  • GarbageShoot [he/him]
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    3 months ago

    No, but in terms of relatively more progressive religions that emphasize the people in kind of a good way, I'd encourage you to check out Cheondoism. It was at least good enough to get the critical support of Kim Il Sung.