Recently, modern witchcraft has been on the rise. I am interested to hear some discussion and discourse from your perspective, on any aspect of modern witchcraft. Myself, I try to be respectful of most religions. That said, I have always been a little annoyed by anyone who believes they can, for example, control the weather or read peoples minds, which seems to be the case in this article, and in several witchcraft-related memes and stuff I've seen floating around. In addition, I think the whole idea of witchcraft as an opposition to the status quo is very much a bourgeois/liberal mindset. Instead of using affirmative action to actually work for change, it's turning to faith and a belief in the occult in order to solve your issues. It seems to me to be almost entirely composed of young, upper-middle class white women that have not needed to struggle or known the struggle of other classes. In essence, a liberal reaction to the people in power. Any thoughts? Willing to change my mind.
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I've met a ton of anarchists into witchy stuff, but none on the internet.
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A materialist worldview in the Marxist sense doesn't preclude a spiritual worldview in the more common sense. Historical materialism and ontological materialism are two separate ideas.
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Leninism and Maoism for sure are, and most redditors are ontological materialists, but if you go to Latin America you're going to see a ton of comingling between Marxism and Catholicism or Marxism and Indigenous worldviews.
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Many indigenous people have non materialist ontologies that predate colonialism, that they work hard to preserve into the present. It's unfair to see this as "the soul of a soulless" society or "the opiate of the masses." If your vision for communism erases that work, it's got a significant blind spot.
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I'm not going to link you Marxists because I think the way Marxism thinks about history is counterproductive. Instead, I'll point you to a couple of places where indigenous people have pushed back against the European philosophical tradition.
On the shorter side is For America to Live, Europe Must Die. I expect you to disagree with it. I just want you to secularize and entertain the arguments means is making, because he's highlighting a real gap between the American Indian Movement and Marxis and we need to understand that gap.
The other place I'll point you is the book Decolonizing Methedologies. It's targeted at the academy, so it's a much more comfortable read, and while it doesn't criticize marxism it criticizes the same kind of historical thinking Marxism does.
For me one of the big things is that Marxism imagines a path from primitive to communist that picks up all cultures along the way and ends in second phase communism which is centralized and industrialized. This is a vision that erases whole cultures and assumes a European centered trajectory.
Instead I'd like to ask what kind of world a mosaic of anti-capitalist configurations would create. I want activism and organizing that seeks not to organize indigenous people but to organize with indigenous anti capitalists.
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I want to add that there's a materialist aspect here. Most working people are indigenous just because of the nature of the relationship between colonialism and capitalism. Any significant revolution will have a strong anti colonial current, and the preservation of indigenous worldviews is one of the most important parts of anti colonial struggles.
Rhyd Wildermuth and the Gods & Radicals crew are anarchist pagans online. their Pagan Anticapitalist Primer is pretty good
https://abeautifulresistance.org/