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
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.
Maybe the play Hadestown? Prometheus stealing fire from the gods probably works. Most of Aesops fables are vaguely left-ish and can definitely be spun as so. The bible-related commie phrase is usually the pre-king-james lord’s prayer: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are indebted to us.” There’s a theory about the axial age being a response to coinage. I wouldn’t say it’s airtight, but it’s a fun thing to believe lol. Honestly, I find myths more interesting without recontexualizing them because a lot of polytheistic stuff has regional and cultural aspects to it that doesn’t really get translated to "god of fire, goddess of death, etc.
I would argue that myths and stories are written by the wealthy class of people, hence I won’t expect anything that will undermine the interest of that class. I think denying education to workers or children of workers was a common tactic to suppress workers.
Myths almost always involve kings and other figures of power. So as you vaguely mentioned most of the time it’s the villains of the story that may hold a “progressive” view, but there is always a twist to make them look bad.
From your post I understand that you are not necessarily looking for existing stories, but you also want to write. Maybe trying to work out how a common person may experience the events in a myth will give some ideas.
Do post if you write anything. I’m really interested to read.
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.
