I guess I’m looking for myth that promotes communal ideas, relates to worker alienation, etc.? I think of the book of Acts in the bible, that’s somewhere between an example of how christians are supposed to live and a defense of paul before he’s executed, right? but incidentally the book has ideas that can be carried forward and developed into a marxist-friendly understanding of how to live, even if it’s loaded in stuff a well read marxist would find objectionable, there will be no perfect examples and i find it tiresome to get lost in pedantry about it so spare me!!!
I also wanna write some. Like “hades began to push and proliferate communism because he was horrified by the trauma of the humans coming through his gates and despised our cruel fates” feels like a decent basis for a mythic story idk
look i dont wanna get into the relationship of myth and religion to marxism, not really, i just like writing fake myth and i need an idea of what’s out there in order to make something worthy of the concept
Taoism has criticisms of ‘great man theory’ type thinking but also kinda falls into a kind of ‘peasant tailism’ laissez-faire-but-for-illiterate-peasant-farmers attitude. directly addresses how many problems are socially constructed, such as the ‘lock creates the thief’ idea where the guy locking up a hoard of treasure is the one creating the conditions for the crime to arise rather than the criminal being individually responsible for summoning evil into the world or something. probably more compatible with anarchism than democratic centralist conceptions of communism but i’ve only read like one book about it, theres kind of a current of ‘don’t rock the boat or interfere in things unnecessarily with proactive rulership’ attitude.
None because they all predate dialectical materialist philosophy. But I guess stories about tricksters stealing knowledge from the gods and giving it to humanity (the organisms) in order to create humanity (the modern social being) are halfway there.
Edit: also consider writing Till Eulenspiegel fanfic
Dialectical materials philosophy is a European philosophy based in other European philosophies
It’s the philosophical worldview of scientific socialism. Presumably it would have been developed even if the Paleocene stabilized and Paleolake Megachad civilization had an industrial revolution. But that’s impossible to prove.
No, but in terms of relatively more progressive religions that emphasize the people in kind of a good way, I’d encourage you to check out Cheondoism. It was at least good enough to get the critical support of Kim Il Sung.
Just looking for a decent basis for a mythic story? Plenty of starting places - myths that promote acts of kindness toward and protection of strangers, certain civic myths that you could rewrite from a class-conscious perspective, Lives of the Saints who practiced communal living, etc.
Perhaps of interest - the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and of Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet. They were all communist filmmakers who specialized in adapting classic literary texts. Pasolini has an Oedipus, a Medea, and a Gospel According to St. Matthew; Straub-Huillet have an Antigone, The Death of Empedocles, and Moses and Aron.
Some other examples that might fit:
- the secession(s) of the Plebs in the early Roman Republic (closer to mythology than history)
- Yudhishthira’s refusal to abandon his dog upon his ascension to heaven in the Mahabharata
- Zeus going around incognito checking to see if people treat their guests correctly
- the Euripides tragedies about refugees
