/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Within the West the left has a common circular conversation: We need to organize, we need a movement independent of liberal political parties, we need independent working class power. The common response: there's no sufficient labor movement, people are too atomized, they no longer live and work in proximity in ways that makes them easily reachable, existing platforms prevent dissemination of our message, etc.

What if the people need to come together to be reached, and what if they get what they need for their liberation, and what they are missing in their lives under capitalism such as community aid and belonging, in a church?

Consider the conditions under which Christianity arose. The older religions including Greco-Roman pantheon worship had declined. They had by no means lost their popularity completely but the awe of the primal forces of nature and the fatalistic philosophical personification and deification of aspects of human behavior no longer spoke as effectively to the increasingly urban masses where the bronze age conditions that inspired the religion in the first place were increasingly remote and abstract. Major rituals and festival were increasingly done by rote or performatively by elites for their political careers, or for the celebrations more than the meaning beneath them. Christianity filled that void, the thought of taking on the sins and failures and brutality of humanity from the top down and dying to absolve the human soul, the thought of an all encompassing and compassionate architecture to the universe and their place in it gave people more awe than witnessing a lightning storm or an earthquake.

We all know how things went since, there's more to criticize about Christianity's history than we have time to go over. But now we find ourselves once again in similar conditions for something new. Religious membership is declining in the west, the remaining membership are either increasingly secularized and bourgeois or increasingly hyper-reactionary or lumpen. These institutions are not able to speak to the problems of the day or any solution for them on a theological or material basis. If the old church was the theological logic of feudalism to come in the shadow of rome, if protestantism was the theological logic of capitalism to come in the shadow of feudalism, then something new whether christian or something distinct can be the theological logic of what is to come after capitalism and more people feel that need every day even if they don't understand it.

I don't expect we will form a new religion here of course, but we can recognize the void that exists in people's lives currently, the need to fill that void that all humans have, and anticipate that it will be filled by something eventually. There have been many attempts, experiments, to forge an alternative to the status quo on religious grounds in the form of various cults, movements and intentional communities through the ages. We can learn from them when framing the theological vision and logic of what comes next. Many of us are not religious at all to say the least, and producing a new religious paradigm is likely not something that is done intentionally from a place of insincerity. Perhaps we may yet inspire the vision of future figures and movements as they form organically, and find in them the allies we need. It may be that an existing institution will transform into the vessel of the new message that will de-atomize and educate the scattered masses in ways conventional organizing struggles to do, to make them see beyond their PMC jobs and treats or across culture war bullshit. I don't want to exaggerate the merits of the Catholic Church or Pope Leo but as the conflict between him and the Trump administration increases, as Latin America is menaced and the Vatican is told by the Pentagon to "pick a side", there is a degree of potential to be found there even if it's an emerging leftward fringe of where he may ultimately allow the Church to be led.