I’ll acknowledge that I am not up on all the different historical and theoretical varieties of communism. I don’t want to be like “the problem with Christianity is the Pope,” you know?
That said, my main concern in evaluating any government system is its vulnerability to capture by assholes, and what levers of power are available to dislodge assholes. Assholes who want personal power, assholes who want prestige, assholes who want to roll around in excessive material comfort: these will always be with us, this side of the eschaton. This is central to my Christian theology and also, I believe, solidly empirically attested.
I have not yet seen successful models of resistance within communism, that retain communism. It seems like a model that struggles with resiliency (in the structural sense). It seems like it has a weak theory of dissent. This makes me very nervous.
(Now what we have in Western “democracies” in practice is *highly managed* resistance and dissent. In every system, power protects itself, ruthlessly.)
Communism has great resonances for Christians. The church of Acts, the monastic ideal (including nuns in that, not sure if there’s a separate word), general Sermon on the Mount and Matthew 25:35 stuff, this is what we are *supposed to be doing*. But for me, this also plays into the idea of Christian unity, which has far more frequently been used to enable abuse than practice solidarity, in practice. Plus, even if a given community can thrive organized in such a way, to scale up to an entire society takes guns. Lots of guns.
And that gets to my remaining issue with communism: revolution. I have firm pragmatic objections to revolution, both in terms of impact on material conditions and what it incentivizes in the future. But I have even deeper theological objections to revolution.
Well, not categorically. But in our shared American context, yes.
We all carry the divine image within us. Our persons, however imperfectly, can respond to Spirit and show Spirit to others. This necessitates taking the discernment of others seriously. We can’t just retreat to “false consciousness” in the face of others whose priorities and analyses of risks and costs-and-benefits differs from ours.
In this moment, the great majority of Black people are not agitating for revolution. The great majority of the “working poor” are not agitating for revolution. And etc. and etc. One can argue that they haven’t been educated about alternatives to a free market economy governed by a constitutional republic, and that is undeniably true. But what revolution ends up meaning is impatience on the part of the educators, a reaching of the point where they decide they know better than the masses they are supposedly championing.
And that is a fundamental failure of right relations, a fundamental failure of solidarity. It is a very white supremacy culture move: urgency, perfectionism, the works.
So for myself, I’m a fan of Marxist analysis, to the extent that it recognizes that white patriarchy will persist outside of any given class hierarchy. But to look toward a communist government as the way to resolve the problems identified in that analysis…not so much.
What I genuinely would love to see is for a smaller-sized city, like 30,000 people, try to get as communist as possible. Libertarians have tried it. Christian nationalists have done it repeatedly. I would feel better about the idea on a larger scale if I saw governance principles succeeding on a local scale.
I’ll have to check out the movie!
I’ll acknowledge that I am not up on all the different historical and theoretical varieties of communism. I don’t want to be like “the problem with Christianity is the Pope,” you know?
That said, my main concern in evaluating any government system is its vulnerability to capture by assholes, and what levers of power are available to dislodge assholes. Assholes who want personal power, assholes who want prestige, assholes who want to roll around in excessive material comfort: these will always be with us, this side of the eschaton. This is central to my Christian theology and also, I believe, solidly empirically attested.
I have not yet seen successful models of resistance within communism, that retain communism. It seems like a model that struggles with resiliency (in the structural sense). It seems like it has a weak theory of dissent. This makes me very nervous.
(Now what we have in Western “democracies” in practice is *highly managed* resistance and dissent. In every system, power protects itself, ruthlessly.)
Communism has great resonances for Christians. The church of Acts, the monastic ideal (including nuns in that, not sure if there’s a separate word), general Sermon on the Mount and Matthew 25:35 stuff, this is what we are *supposed to be doing*. But for me, this also plays into the idea of Christian unity, which has far more frequently been used to enable abuse than practice solidarity, in practice. Plus, even if a given community can thrive organized in such a way, to scale up to an entire society takes guns. Lots of guns.
And that gets to my remaining issue with communism: revolution. I have firm pragmatic objections to revolution, both in terms of impact on material conditions and what it incentivizes in the future. But I have even deeper theological objections to revolution.
Well, not categorically. But in our shared American context, yes.
We all carry the divine image within us. Our persons, however imperfectly, can respond to Spirit and show Spirit to others. This necessitates taking the discernment of others seriously. We can’t just retreat to “false consciousness” in the face of others whose priorities and analyses of risks and costs-and-benefits differs from ours.
In this moment, the great majority of Black people are not agitating for revolution. The great majority of the “working poor” are not agitating for revolution. And etc. and etc. One can argue that they haven’t been educated about alternatives to a free market economy governed by a constitutional republic, and that is undeniably true. But what revolution ends up meaning is impatience on the part of the educators, a reaching of the point where they decide they know better than the masses they are supposedly championing.
And that is a fundamental failure of right relations, a fundamental failure of solidarity. It is a very white supremacy culture move: urgency, perfectionism, the works.
So for myself, I’m a fan of Marxist analysis, to the extent that it recognizes that white patriarchy will persist outside of any given class hierarchy. But to look toward a communist government as the way to resolve the problems identified in that analysis…not so much.
What I genuinely would love to see is for a smaller-sized city, like 30,000 people, try to get as communist as possible. Libertarians have tried it. Christian nationalists have done it repeatedly. I would feel better about the idea on a larger scale if I saw governance principles succeeding on a local scale.