Bulletins and News Discussion from May 6th to May 12th, 2024 - The Nagorno-Karabakh Nosedive - COTW: Armenia

Every single left-wing movement that has ever and will ever exist is approaching liberation via a set of ideas that was created, developed, and modified by generations of people who lived before them, and sometimes formed even under the conditions of the system that they are rebelling against. Whether that's organized religion, or a vague sense of spirituality, or a belief in freedom, or human/labor rights for the 99%, etc. This includes every single person on this website, including obviously myself. Nobody on earth is 100% rational and objective, all the time (and what "objective" and "rational" even means is itself dependent on the conditions and ideology under which those concepts are described, because objectivity implies something to maximize, like efficiency, or an output - but why should we subscribe to those kinds of Taylorist notions instead of, like, maximizing happiness and chilling out?). I find that many people who describe themselves as "objective" or "rational" tend to be the most ideological and idealistic.

So I guess it's cope all the way down - but that doesn't mean that cope isn't useful. Opium for the masses is very useful when they're in intense pain to keep them trucking towards a better future, and isn't useful when it just leads to hedonistic addiction to treats that prevents them acting towards a better future. Systems can be progressive in some contexts and reactionary in others, they don't exist in eternal stasis.

I think this needs its own post because I can see a struggle session coming.

I'm spiritually agnostic. I think any organized religion can and likely will become reactionary given enough time, although there can be progressive elements, too. However, organized religion can also offer a lot of material and especially social benefits to people that marxists have historically overlooked because those benefits can be hard to quantify.

Religion is certainty more useful than doomerism or pessimism.

I’ll just leave this comment I made a few months back when both Lemmygrad and Hexbear had a cross-instance struggle session about this topic.

There are things that I could have phrased more elegantly, but I think overall the meaning still carries through.

وًا وٌ فؤِ جُو وْ يوْ جٍ جوْ مُو هًا مْ دْ شِ جٍ جْو دْ شِ جْ

万物非主唯有真主,穆罕默德是真主的使者

أشهد أن لا إله إلا الله وأشهد أن محمدًا رسول الله

They do have a strong point that there's no God but God. May the Green pill prove Nitzche wrong

It's probably the least bad of the major Abrahamic religions if only because it hasn't been completely subsumed by liberalism. Whether the religion is feudal or not is not detrimental since feudal ideologies/religions like Confucianism can be weaponized to serve anti-capitalist ends. Those feudal ideologies, by virtue of being feudal ideologies, ideologically oppose all non-feudal modes of production, which includes capitalism and socialism. People mostly focus on how feudal ideologies are reactionary because of the anti-socialist parts, but they have anti-capitalist parts as well. One good example is that all feudal ideologies, whether it's Confucianism or Catholicism, see individualism as something anathema to being a good person. They oppose individualism for mostly shitty feudal reasons and recommend shitty feudal solutions, but that opposition towards individualism can be weaponized by savvy socialists without merely repackaging the feudal ideology in socialist jargon. Ho Chi Minh adopted the feudal Confucian concept of filial piety but modified it so that it's the Communist party that has to practice piety to the masses of people. He didn't just say that children had to practice filial piety with social characteristics to their parents.

It's a religion. It has reactionaries and progressives. It has great revolutionary potential, but also serious problems and limits. Lots of extremely sharp muslim comrades out there doing good work.

Keep in mind there isn't one Islam any more than there's one Christianity or one Buddhism. It runs a wild gamut from hard core liberatory communists to the reactionary innovator Salafists. It's over a billion people and you can't make generalizations about it.