And I use "normal" in scare quotes, because, according to whom, exactly, capitalism? Society? Yourself? Some of the "weirdest" people I've met in my life where also some of the nicest and actually helped me out. People you'd peg as "normal"? Well I've had my fair share of shit with them. I'm not about to put up with some reddit lord trying to score points with cool kid podcasters by throwing people who feed the homeless under the bus, fuck you very much.

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[–] ComradeRat@hexbear.net 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

My own path to becoming a wannabe communist (because I am just a capitalist subject that wishes they weren't ) was abandoning my own religion first which allowed space for me to actually begin understanding how the world works.

And, like Marx when he abandoned deism, you concluded that all class societies (including capitalist society) are religious because they operate via fetishism, veiled relations between person and person and people and nature, and that struggling against religion means abolishing the conditions that give birth to it rather than any idealist conception of it being a matter of spreading the truth to combat false gods, right?

[–] Monk3brain3@hexbear.net 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Do you want to make a point or be sarcastic? Maybe decide that before you write something

[–] ComradeRat@hexbear.net 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Can you answer the question you were asked, or do you just like asking rhetorical questions to deflect?

But if you wanna serious take with no snark, Marx argues all the gods have existed insofar as people have believed and acted as they existed; this is a consistent line in his writings from his doctoral dissertation through to his death. Capitalism itself is a religion, with people acting as though things like "value" have real transhistorical existence rather than, treating commodities fetishistically ("personification of things, thingification (reification) of people" etc). The state too, in all its forms, is a religion, with people only recognising each other as people through it. The replacement of one religion for another doesnt take one any steps closer towards emancipation from religion. (Cf. "On 'The Jewish Question'" in particular marx's rejection of bauer's idea that jews move closer to emancipation by leaving judaism). These religions arise from the material and social relations in society. Until these material realities are upended, people will continue to consume religious opium, whether its sourced from the catholic church or from obama or from trump. There are no benefits to struggling against religious claims except and insofar as they are sources of oppression struggled against by many of the religionists themselves. To engage in the struggle of ideas, to think one has moved towards emancipation by replacing one idea for another, is idealism.

[–] Monk3brain3@hexbear.net 1 points 2 days ago

firstly someone already responded to you

secondly nobody is arguing that fighting religion is going to lead to a change in material conditions or that religions do not arise from the material and social relations in society. The worldview provided by religions is patently wrong form a material analysis/viewpoint and many religious worldviews are literally roadblocks or counter to forces that want to change material conditions in a Marxist direction (Judaism is an ethnosupremacist religion as is Hinduism with its caste system). And I don't care one bit about religious reformation, its simply an attempt by these institutions to adjust to maintain relevancy, whatever the motivations are to maintain that relevancy.