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askchapo @hexbear.net Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them] @hexbear.net

What religion, if any, is most compatible with communist ideology?

I always believed religion was incompatible with a society rooted in addressing material reality, although I know we have have religious users and wanted to hear people's takes.

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  • GNU/Linux for sure.

  • I'm bracing for people to say Buddhism but tbh Buddhism has a strong inclination towards not helping out others because "it's their karma" as well as the catholic church version of Buddhism, namely Vajrayana, being culpable for lots of criticisms that people level against the Catholic church.

    Islam gets an honourable mention because of their fairly strict prohibition on riba, which is like usury except a souped-up version of it (which is more or less enforced in Islam, unlike most forms of Christianity) and a genuine, enforced commitment to actual charity and not just tithing. Islam is often pretty hostile towards communism but that's mostly because of material conditions and the fact that their version of Liberation Theology-type leaders mostly get killed.

    I also think that Sikhism gets an honourable mention because it's quite radical, abolishing caste and demanding that justice be upheld, even if it requires violence or putting one's life on the line to defend it. I know in India there was a split in the communist movements in the north, where Sikhism is most prevalent, over whether the revolution would be fought with modern weapons or with the traditional weapons of Sikhism (the kirpan, the khanda, the katar, the chakram etc.) I get why they are of central religious significance to Sikhs but idk why it's cause for a split though; the last human Sikh guru owned a musket.

    It's probably due to being culturally adjacent as much as anything but I'd say that Christianity, specifically Liberation Theology, is the most compatible with communism especially given the Colombian ELN and the FSLN (Sandinistas) in Nicaragua.

    Personally I think that religion requires a foundation of idealism that is inherently incompatible with materialism and I would like to see the gradual erosion of religion such that it exits the political and ideological spheres and gets relegated to cultural practice, like what you see with something like Shintoism as practiced by most Japanese people or ancestor worship in East Asia; lots of people build shrines to their ancestors and celebrate relevant days of observance but plenty of people don't actually pray to their ancestors or believe that the heavens have influence on the world. This is a lot like how westerners visit graves and do things like talk to the deceased or write letters to them or leave flowers, alcohol, and mementos (*gasp!* almost as "offerings" except that only the Orientals leave offerings - westerners are above such superstitious practices, right??) If the world can reach a stage where religious rites and observances are performed due to cultural habit rather than belief in the supernatural then I think we would be on the right track.

    • Islam gets an honourable mention because of their fairly strict prohibition on riba, which is like usury except a souped-up version of it (which is more or less enforced in Islam, unlike most forms of Christianity)

      With how Islamic banking/finance is currently widely being practiced, can you really say that prohibition of riba is being strictly, or even "more or less", enforced in contemporary Islamic practice? I think the best that can be said is that the prohibition is observed in form, but not in spirit. In my very limited experience (please take all this jabbering with a ton of salt; I'm neither Muslim myself nor any sort of specialist in Islamic finance) with Islamic financing on the legal side, it largely seems to involve private or sometimes state-owned financial institutions using profit-sharing, joint-venture, and/or commodity sale contracts to imitate the practical effects and consequences of conventional fixed or variable interest financing instruments while still formally complying with the riba prohibition. Essentially, the bank's technically not earning any interest off the principal; just "profit" from commodity sales/company shares. Seems to me that what's been done is just a thousand convoluted and fancy ways of ensuring that the surplus value reaped by the bank is not vulgar "interest", but some other technically non-prohibited form of (or names for) extracting value from the labour of others, thus reducing the practice to basically a matter of formal compliance without any application of its underlying or originally intended principles - i.e., the moral idea that any financial exploitation of others (in other words, capitalism) inherently corrodes your soul.

      I also can't see any real difference in material interests between Islamic and non-Islamic financial institutions: both are typically just extreme concentrations of financial capital, privately owned, within capitalist societies motivated by their own reproduction/perpetuation/expansion through systemic extraction of surplus value through investment in market commodities and productive concerns. In the worst case scenario, I can see how leftists fixating on riba as a theoretical concept leads to idealist mystification of productive/property relations, frustrating the materialist analysis of that which is central to Marxism.

      Basically, it's all like this mostly because of (like you said) the destruction of pretty much all 20th century efforts towards socialism in Muslim-majority countries (except Libya? But I'm not aware whether Gaddafi promoted Islamic financial principles), resulting in those Muslim-majority countries being dominated by reactionary politics, leading to this utterly debased version of Islamic finance being the global industry norm.

      • I don't disagree with what you have said here but I was also intentionally avoiding getting into the weeds with interpretation and real-world application of Sharia because it's super complex.

        Of course Riba has been one of those things that has always been hotly debated in Islam and it's something that an Islamic jurist could spend a lifetime debating and you'd be able to split a denomination in two over your take on it.

        Ultimately I think that Islamic jurisprudence was a product of its time and, at that time, critique of the economy in a fully-realised way didn't exist. Speaking as an outsider, I think that some of the basic problems were identified in trading and finance but the root of the economic problem was not fully ascertained until much later; if you can't diagnose a complex societal problem accurately then you're almost certainly not going to be able to fix it. At best you're going to be taking a stab in the dark, which is what I think Islamic jurisprudence was doing with Riba or with edicts about charity or what shape a caliphate should take or what have you. So my sympathy for the prohibition on Riba is limited because it lacked a material basis (and I think this is where religious jurisprudence more broadly tends to fall down - the inherent idealism at the core makes it critically flawed.)

        A+ for effort, but as for execution? Ehh, not so great.

        I also think that this is where other things fall down like religious decrees on not turning away the needy from your door - is that in a literal sense? What implications does it have for refugees in the modern world where your government can effectively maintain its borders very strictly? What implications does today's ability for transporting masses of people anywhere around the world in a matter of hours have? Obviously back in Muhammad's era, refugees would almost always travel within their local region and it was extremely rare to have vast masses of people or entire populations fleeing from one part of the world to somewhere entirely different. Also the economic implications are very complex - in Muhammad's day constructing housing was a much simpler affair and if people needed extra food or work then they'd be able to utilise the commons or to work the untended land on the outskirts of a town or village. These sorts of things options rarely exist in the developed world today. So while it probably worked quite well for the time it existed in, the world is a very different place today and shit is so much more complex than it was.

        And you're absolutely right about the creation of infinite loopholes to arrive at roughly the same destination in a way that circumvents the spirit of the law while technically adhering to the letter of the law (more or less). This is exactly why Ikea is a non-profit organisation lol.

        And there's no doubt in my mind that probably every Islamic financial institution that exists today bends the rules to the breaking point by charging things like "administrative" fees and stuff like that.

        And really, if we look at this from a broad perspective, I think that the prohibition on Riba could be grouped in with all sorts of socialist utopian and reformist efforts as being guilty of the same general attempts to fix the system by tweaking at the dials rather than rebuilding it from the ground up.

        This is why I give it an honourable mention - it was a good attempt. Flawed, insufficient, poorly articulated, vulnerable to exploitation, yes, but it was a good attempt all the same.

        I think that a serious discussion on Riba would be a really good angle to agitate for socialism with a Muslim though and tbh as an atheist Marixst, it's those kinds of pressure points that I'm most interested in; I'd be fascinated in hearing what a Muslim would have to say about how they think Muhammad would respond today if he saw how private equity firms like BlackRock are grossly distorting the property market and squeezing every last penny out of people who have no other options for housing available. Something tells me he wouldn't just be like "Alright guys, this arrangement is totally fine as long as you don't jack the rents up too high, okay?"

    • Check out the writings of BR Ambedkar, who was a contemporary of Gandhi. He rewrote a lot of Buddhist stories to give them a very socialist bent, with the aim of converting millions of low-caste Indians from Hinduism (which kept them down) to Buddhism which would give them greater representation in India's parliamentary system.

  • Yeah, some of those Reddit-Atheist takes were painful to read on one of the other recent posts. There's a whole tradition of religious individuals being pushed towards anarchist and communist ideologies. Some Catholic priests have even had an about-face, getting so involved in liberation theology as to be excommunicated. Still making painfully slow progress in the Quran, but there's a lot of stuff about supporting the poor, hungry, and sick. I've worked with a lot of (non-Evangelical) Christians on praxis. You can also say a lot about stuff like Wicca and its dogshit creator, but I've known a few witches to also get involved in stuff. If religious people couldn't be revolutionary, then the government wouldn't have killed people like Malcolm X, MLK, John Brown, and the preachers behind so many peasant riots in England back in the day.

  • All religions are compatible with communism except for american [and by extension western] protestantism

  • So I'm an Atheist but here's a hot take: most if not all religions are kind of equally compatible and incompatible with communism in the same way they're equally compatible and incompatible with capitalism. The concept of Diagetic Existentialism is largely concerned with realities that are understood to be fictional in nature but I also think it goes a long way towards explaining how you can simultaneous have the American religious right as well as people unironically proclaiming that "JESUS WAS A SOCIALIST" in the same timeline. They're both working with the same material and sources but at the end of the day its all kinda in what you choose to take away from it.

  • religions that come from communal cultures (that's most of them) are compatible with communism. religions that develop under the material conditions that promote the development of fascism and capitalism, not so much.

  • at the risk of being called a reddit atheist, i have to say it's frustrating that this discourse keeps abstracted to 'is religion compatible with communist ideology' and not 'is being reactionary compatible with communist ideology'

    because that's what it ultimately comes down to - a lot of the issues people have with religion stem from reactionary thinking and actions, which on a surface level seems like it can be separated from religion as a whole, but I would argue that the two functionally can not be unlinked. At the end of the day, at it's very core many religious beliefs rely on, and encourage, reactionary behaviour - and while some are better and more communal minded/liberation adjacent than others, I would say that this is by coincidence and we cannot make the mistake of trying to make reactionary ideologies 'work for us'. You need only look at stupidpol to see what happens when you throw people under the bus in order to not turn away what you might see as potential comrades - you will not drag them left with you, you'll only poison your own well and create yet another avenue for reactionary ideology to bolster itself.

    This is not to say that no religious person can be a revolutionary, or that religious people cannot be our comrades - but they would have to be communist first and religious second or else I'd be wary that at some point some oppressed group is going to be thrown to the grinder, and I'll be honest - anecdotally, not a lot of religious people are like that, nor a lot of religions encourage such a relationship with their faith, no matter what denomination.

  • From an intro to a book on modern druids (what I consider my self)

    “We (Druids) therefore recognize that our individuality is only an illusion, or a temporary state while we are in physical bodies. We are therefore not subordinate to anyone or anything, but rather interdependent upon each other. We recognize that if one person hurts, everyone hurts, if one person is homeless, everyone is affected by that state, that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. So certain political philosophies, such as libertarianism, are anathema to us. Selfishness is the greatest evil there is. We really are our brothers keeper as he is ours."

    I think that quote probably captures how a lot of us feel. Capitalism is in direct contradiction to that way of thinking. If we feel that all people are equals, all deserving of respect and compassion then the exploitation and suffering caused by the capitalist class must be opposed by us. And if you believe that you're connected to all living things then seeing your self as part of a collective is natural. Druidism is basically green anarchy with extra steps.

  • To at least give a slightly novel answer relative to the usual ones: Cheondoism was famously defended by Kim Il-Sung as being a "progressive" religion that should not disqualify someone from Party membership because it's fundamentally oriented around the liberation of the masses.

    Also, I'm going to be That Guy and say that Theravada Buddhism is relatively compatible, as it was almost-inconceivably progressive for its time and still compares positively to many religions, including the more popular sects. It has its own issues, but in general I think the Buddha of the Pali Canon, the one who said there is no soul and risked his life to save a goat, is someone worth emulating from a communist perspective. I also think he bears little resemblance, for hopefully obvious reasons, to the Buddhas who have celestial empires and believe that those who suffer should be left to suffer because of Karma.

    Also shout-out to Chan/Zen Buddhism with the major caveat that it has probably the worst co-opting by westerners into reactionary bullshit.

  • Lots of religions have principles that align with a love for mankind and communal sharing of resources.

    How many of them have the understanding of material conditions needed to organize people into a force capable of meaningfully fighting against capitalism?

  • None, all religions are cope and lies and thus impede human and societal development. (Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of humans who have either not yet won through to themselves, or have already lost themselves again.)

    Religious values and officials should not be seriously considered and should be always be excluded from important political decisions, and if they dare to insist on holding political power they should be suppressed until they learn to play along or stay quiet. But if people just want to pray or whatever because it makes them feel better then who cares, that's not a political matter. In a fully developed communist society religion will wither away anyway as self-actualization become universally available and exploitation is abolished.

    Edit: Thought that is not to say that certain religious movements couldn't be hijacked and co-opted to serve a revolutionary movement seeking the construction of scientific socialism, but that's probably not what you or most people mean by "compatible" with communism. (Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.)

  • Religions are not static, they also are subject to dialectical and historical materialism. The rooting out of feudalistic and capitalistic institutional structures from the religious world, and the solving of more material problems by the secular world under socialism, will change people's relationship to religion, which in turn will change religion further.

    I don't see any essential reason communists and religious entities have to step on each other's toes, but in the present a lot of incumbent reactionary power rides on existing religious institutions and formats. We can look to the histories of the socialist experiments to see examples both of the initial crushing of the reactionary religious elements, and later of more nuanced handling so that religious elements that pose little or no threat to the proletarian state are let be.

    Communists have the soundest and best demonstrated methods of resolving class struggle that I know of, and I also think the changed relationship to work and leisure under socialism goes a long way to healing the lingering wounds of class society. I really don't know if a niche for spirituality will be left open by a communist society, or if the questions that become religious ones will be addressed satisfactorily before they can grow into aches.

    For my part in the present, I use spiritual practice because my class enemies are still supplying me with plentiful wounds and aches, and my local communists are far from big or totalizing enough to have subsumed matters presently understood as spiritual. I'm working with the tools I've got.

  • I feel like the religions with high levels of non-theism are compatible. Quakers, Unitarian-Universalist, etc.

  • It doesn't answer your question, but I think this publication from the CPC Central Committee is worth reading: https://redsails.org/on-the-question-of-religion/

  • acid marxist taiping gnosticism

  • I hate feeling like a reddit atheist, but it feels really hard to imagine any organized religion not being a ticking time bomb in a communist society. You can bend most/all religions to fit communism in the same way you can bend them to fit capitalism and social conservatism, by ignoring the parts you don't like. However to me it seems like an organized religion is going to breed dogma and an in-group which is going to breed out group and discrimination. I'm pretty sure it's hard for me to look past my bias though, as my experiences with religions is mostly them wanting me dead.

  • I would argue that most religions are fine for this as long as you purge them of reactionaries.

  • unorganized shamanistic rituals int he middle of the forest high on mushrooms

  • Christianity. The Bible in multiple places states being rich one of the worst sins possible. It frequently states that giving what you have to help the less fortunate is the highest virtue. It's hard to imagine anyone messing this one up

  • all the ones that compartmentalize the unprovable "source: a guy said so" stuff can get along the same god-of-the-gaps way most religious people use cars, computers, and medicines despite the very same science that created those those things also invalidating doctrine and many supernatural claims.

  • None, however, those liberation and mutual aid tendencies that exist in near every religion will be ok until humanity can support itself enough to toss away the religious-mythical pain killers for the soul.

  • Shinto. It lacks the problem of organised religions, although the Japanese state has previously put work in to create state Shintoism it doesn't really work the same way other organised religions do. It's very in tune with the natural surroundings and it cares about taking care of the environment because it is the environment that produces the Kami, spirits that inhabit it and come from objects/environments.

    I see it as more of a spiritualist connection to our surroundings and even if you sincerely believe that the spirits are real they're never divinely perfect and are many of them are fought against entirely by humanity because they're obviously not good.

    It works well.

    Honestly though I've always thought the problem is not really religion or spirituality but organised religion functioning as an arm of the state.

  • Trotskyism

  • Wokeness smuglord

  • I ain't no theologician, but I really like reading this thread and I'd also love it if someone could explain Judaism from this perspective. I'm not terribly knowledgeable on how Judaism really works internally, but I've heard a couple bits and pieces, particularly relevant here is the parable of the Oven of Akhnai, and I'd love to hear someone give more context and depth and then relate that to communist ideology

    • I think that Judaism is a particularly heterogeneous religion because it largely doesn't maintain a strict orthodoxy in the same way that a religion like Christianity or Islam does/attempts to do (e.g. how these different religions deal with heretical beliefs) so I'd guess that it's actually very difficult to describe internally because takes can be so varied that it makes it hard to generalise.

      That's not to say that historically it didn't or that there aren't some sects that strictly maintain an orthodoxy, just that Judaism as a political institution is largely a feature of history and not the modern day (Pissrael excluded) and so it doesn't maintain orthodoxy like Catholicism does, for example.

      Of course you can point to an example of sects like Alevis, which the majority of Muslims denounce as heretical, so this comment isn't really intended as anything more than broad brushstrokes - the general character of Judaism is closer to, say, Hinduism or Baha'ism with regard to heterogeneity and orthodoxy than it is to, say, Islam or Druze (although arguably Druze is a heretical sect of Islam but that's a massive discussion in itself...)

      Judaism, partly due to repression and partly due to how it is interpreted and practiced (and the stuff mentioned above), often had people who were more culturally Jewish or who were Jewish but only for Hanukkah and Passover and so it wasn't uncommon for these Jews to be amenable to communism or who were openly communist through history. Whether you can attribute that to Judaism itself or to the fact that people strayed from strict observance of Judaism is a matter for debate however.

      Hopefully someone who knows Judaism from the inside will chime in to contribute their take.

  • Any of them as long as you focus on the right now and not the afterlife stuff. That would technically make almost no religion compatible, but realistically not everyone will be devoted to the afterlife.

    I don’t care if you think bread and wine can transform to blood and flesh if you chant some words. Are you providing bread and wine to people to eat and sustain themselves? If so, everything else is your business.

  • Uhh probably cult of reason if I had to guess but it might be too bourgeois

  • I'm an atheist, one that was even kicked out and abused by the church and has no desire to ever join a religion again, so my answer will be surprising given that context: all of them. However, there is a catch. I'll attempt to explain.

    As Samir Amin says:

    Religions are not only metaphysics. They are major expressions of social reality as well. Metaphysics and social functions mix and determine each other in a continuing historical dialectic. The possible specificities of their metaphysical expression are, hence, difficult to separate from those connected to the major features of the social systems of which they are a part and which they influence.

    Religions are a part of our social reality in most societies, and the key is to have religion adapt to and be influenced by the social systems in a socialist society, and not have it the other way round, where fundamentalist religious interpretations are influencing and controlling societal norms. Such a thing is obviously incompatible with communism, or any form of societal advancement. This train of thought was even incompatible with the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which is why the major religions of the time had to adapt to the changing societal norms brought about by capitalism, and not the other way around.

    Modernization, secularism, and democracy are not the products of an evolution (or revolution) of religious interpretations. On the contrary, these [religious] interpretations have adjusted more or less happily to the necessities of the former... it created a new religious spirit freed from dogmas.

    However it should be noted that:

    There were not only "positive" adjustments, with the renovated religious interpretation opening up prospects for social transformation. There were also involutions, the religious interpretation becoming in its turn an obstacle to social progress. I will give as an example some forms of North American Protestantism.

    And obviously these positive or negative adjustments towards the needs of society can apply to any religion, not just Christianity or American protestant sects of it.

    Finally:

    The fact that these adjustments can be positive or negative argues in favor of an interpretation of historical materialism based on the concept of "under-determination." I mean by this that each of the various levels of reality (economic, political, ideological) contains its own internal logic, and because of this the complementary nature of their evolution, which is necessary to ensure the overall coherence of a system, does not define in advance a given direction for a particular evolution.

    In conclusion, as long as religious interpretations are adapting positively to the social needs and realities of socialism/communism, that religious belief is compatible with communism. However, if interpretations of a religion fail to adapt to the needs of a socialist society, or even adapt negatively towards them, such a religious belief is incompatible with socialism.

    • I have not read Samir Amin. My understanding of the passage you’re quoting is as follows:

      1. Religious interpretation, like many other social relations, is shaped by the structures of the society it is in.
      2. Religious interpretation has adapted to the rise of modernization, secularism, and democracy.
      3. Religious interpretation could adapt to the social forces that arise from a socialist society, potentially molding into something more compatible. That seems fine, and we can see shades of that in, for instance, how liberation theology emerged from the milieu of the Catholic Church and the material conditions of Latin America.

      Speaking of the Catholic Church, I think it’s worth pointing out that the material reality of most religions is not their interpretations, but their institutional power. I am not Catholic, but I have completed the relevant sacraments and education because of my family and where I live. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, I think we can see the religious interpretation of Catholicism liberalize, while the institutions don’t unless forced to. Just as the Catholics conceded that maybe lay people can have bread and wine at the same time without heresy, they maintained and reinforced social relics like the total exclusion of women from religious and political authority; strict hierarchies of seniority, both priest over laypeople, within the priesthood, and within the family; and the use of capital on gilded vanity projects.

      I am by no means saying the Catholic Church is the reason any of those social forces exist, or even the sole reason they are maintained. They exist as an institution to uphold them. Even if doctrinal interpretation might shift to match socialism, the institutional power will act conservatively (working only to maintain itself in stasis). The vast majority of religious institutions are reactionary organizations, and I am skeptical that they would change of their own accord. I agree with your point about the eventual compatibility between religious beliefs and communism. I don’t think any religions proper can be.

  • there are probably specific interpretations of pretty much any religion that are compatible with communism. i would think fundamentalism or literalism in any religion would be generally incompatible with communism. its important that any religious belief does not directly contradict any demonstrable empirical fact about reality. religion should not be a tool of political power or social control, tax-exempt status for churches is ridiculous and religious organizations need to be subjected to the usual standards of censorship for a healthy society (i.e. no promoting reactionary attitudes like nazi-ism or homophobia, etc.). it needs to be a way to increase empathy for others and to think about one's place in the world, a place of genuine intellectual engagement, rather than just a platform for an old white boomer funded by republican think tanks to rant and establish social hegemony while the hogs nod in agreement as they half-listen to his racist political screed.

  • Not ones that claim that there are sadistic supernatural entities that we should worship if we do not want to get punished. And which are also weirdly fixated on subjugating women, LGBTQ people and other vulnerable groups, but are fine with literal slavery and genocides.

    More generally, though, religion is fundamentally based on lies (whether the relevant claims are true or not, the people who confidently make them have no basis for those), and is, in a way, an opium for the people - a fundamentally not healthy way of coping with reality.
    It can be compatible with communist movements - religion in general can be changed, as it always has done in service of the interests of the ruling class. I am not a fan, though, as religious organisations/movements' existence fundamentally relies on people uncritically believing lies and they also generally seem to support reactionary policies regarding vulnerable people, most prominently women and LGBTQ people.

    On the other hand, I find this much less important than dealing with capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. I'll take a world dominated by religion if it means that those other three points are dealt with in a good manner.

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