Dave B
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I am very familiar with the Cathars eg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade
Which had similarities with Marcionism.
As these things go the theology of stuff fragmented into various related strands.
As with the Cathars some of the basic ideas continued.
By the time of anti-Cathar holocaust; the established Christian church or organised state religion with its bishops living in palaces and becoming the Mainstream media and talking heads of the ruling class with its divine rights of autocratic dictators.
Were not happy with the idea that the rich and powerful were the agents of Satan and contemporary or neo Pharisees’and Sadducees of the ruling elite etc.
So Christianity by that point became what it was originally opposed to; just as Marxism became Stalinism?
Although that only took 50 years rather than 500.
Saint John Chrysostom was probably the last advocate of a leftist anti rich Christianity a sort Kautsky to 19<sup>th</sup> century Marxism.
There had been a concern that the attacks and descriptions by 3<sup>rd</sup> century Christians of Marcionism and related forms of Gnosticism had been sensationalised.
Until written hidden ‘heretical’ stuff was recently dug up in the Egyptian desert from the 5<sup>th</sup> century?
So it turned out the 2<sup>nd</sup> and 3<sup>rd</sup> century christian intellectuals ‘anti-marcionist and anti gnosticists were describing them fairly accurately.
So for instance Tertullian went overnight from a bulll-shitter to an accurate honest ‘historian’.
I made a contribution to this kind of thing with as below.
I did the Apion and Origen thing; egotistical plug.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito
Sad git!
It shouldn’t be overlooked that there was quite a evolving spectrum of ideas by that stage.
Since the ‘Essene’ dead sea scroll and other stuff; there is a growing body of evidence the JC and his palls were part a splinter group from the Essenes who were cryto communists.
There are two independent texts on communist essenes from the period which is a dead cert when it comes to stuff like that.
Philo and Josephus.
Rosa quoted one of them
[as inccorrectly being of christian origin but is in fact extremely close translation of Josephus describing Essenes]
I asked MIA to footnote it but they wouldn’t.
…..It was indeed in this way that the first Christian communities were organized. A contemporary wrote,….
https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1905/misc/socialism-churches.htm
that is worth a read.
It is fairly interesting and important as;
The Essenes did passover on a different date following the lunar calender rather than the solar or the other away around.
They can do stuff now with that kind of stuff and work it all out with the moon was etc.
Went to an astronomy lecture by the guy who wrote the programme in the 1980’s I think.
So in AD 29 I think essene passover fell a couple of days before the orthodox non essene one and then all the past problems with dates and time scales of his last days fall away and make sense.
They are noramaly weeks apart , apart from that year.
Not only that but the John narrative that had looked the worst and the most flawed and impossible then looked disturbingly accurate.
The catholic church has surprisingly recently accepted that theory.
The communist theologian and the atheist christian scholars/historians don’t like Jesus as a Essene as the Essenes didn’t hang out with the ‘impure’[deseased] and prostitutes and they were misogynists.
The Jewish religion then was in general was a bit ‘Calvinistic’.
People were ill and poor because they were sinners and God was punishing them for stuff that they had done or what they were, or what the ancestors had done.
Eg sins of the fathers etc.
Jesus according to the ‘narrative’, going around and ‘healing’ these kind of ‘cursed’ unclean people would have been theologically outrageous.
People can miss the ‘narrative’ or contemporary theological context of that.
We did early Christian communism pre 250AD ish on this forum not long ago and had an author of a book on the subject who collected a load of material or quotes on the subject covering that period.
Even an anti Christian pagan author from circa 180AD said they were communists ; as a criticism.
One of the earliest splits from present day orthodoxy was Marcionism 100-200AD which was a major current perhaps even the dominant one it the east.
We probably know more about them than we know about what became the orthodox position as much of the early surviving written material spent more time criticising the Marcion position than putting their own.
Marcionist rejected the old testament as a load evil shit and the ‘God’ in it was war criminal who broke his own commandments, and took the view that Satan ruled the world rather than Jesus’s dad.
That is a long way from the protestant notions of ‘providence’.
I so happen to think and share the idea with some that there is some Buddhism and Greek cynicism in early Christianity.
Just briefly skimmed thro it now and remember.
There is Buddhism and Marxist/ Hegelian dialectics in there.
I went from Karen Horney to Fromm to Buddhism and then thought this looks a little bit like dialectics.
Then found that link which agreed a bit with me?
Hence I ‘liked’ it a bit?
There is this that I have filed away.
Not read it in years must have saved for some reason.
I think I spent some time on it on the old Forum years ago.
http://www.vgweb.org/bsq/marxbud.htm
There so many different types of Buddhism.
I sort of dipped into a while ago.
Not all them are the cranky type like the re incarnation ones and the more familiar ‘Tibetan’ Buddhism for example.
Some of them are quite sensible and insist there is or are no metaphysical or supernatural forces.
And quote Buddha himself on it.
A lot of it can look quite ‘dialectical’ with loads interacting effects and affects and looks at the universe as an interactive whole.
And stuff like butterflies and hurricane type thing with as with one of chomskys friend about radical change not being about special individuals but a composite of many people doing little apparently insignificant things etc.
There is a lot of psychoanalytical stuff in it and the ‘Marxist’ Fromm got very interested in them or the Zen school anyway.
And it seems to be now entering into mainstream clinical psychoanalytical practice.
It sort of arrived in Western Europe as something for study really late as in late 19<sup>th</sup> century.
Thus nothing from Karl or Fred on it.
Not really clued up on all this.
But I believe Fentanyl is a substitute for heroin and has similar affects and is used to cut heroin.
It is cheap to produce I think and more powerful per mg and thus is easier and more lucrative to smuggle in as it packs a bigger punch.
Incidentally?
“….Early reports suggested that colonel Skripal and the unnamed woman may have been exposed to the synthetic drug, Fentanyl, which is up to 10,000 times more powerful than heroin and has been linked to scores of deaths in the UK….”
The doctors very early on said they had suspected and treated them for it.
They are making in China for nothing $ wise and bringing it into the US via mexico apparently.
I have been led to believe that is true rather than Trump nonsense.
The demand is quite high know as big pharmaceuticals have been peddling and pushing opiod based ‘pain killers’; and large sections of the US population got to like it and are now hooked.
Now that they are clamping down on doctors prescriptions the addicts are finding other sources.
The overdose and death rates in the US are phenomenal.
…number of opiod overdoses has increased in recent years, in part due to the increased use of opioids in the management of chronic non-cancer pain<sup>1</sup>. In the United States of America alone in 2016, there were an estimated 63 632 deaths due to drug overdose, which is a 21% increase from previous years. This was largely due to a rise in deaths associated with prescription opioids. This group of opioids (excluding methadone) was implicated in 19 413 deaths in the country, more than double the number in 2015…..
https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/information-sheet/en/
Things used to be bad in the inner city UK 10-15 years ago and we had the crack cocaine thing.
Smack heads would rob your house crack users would go in for mugging as well, thing seem to be better know maybe were a live has got better?
It ‘seems’ less of a problem anyway.
I suppose the problem from a narrow capitalist perspective is that fossil fuel is to cheap, abundant and easy or profitable to extract.
That is progressively changing but probably just too late.
https://www.offgridenergyindependence.com/articles/13703/renewable-power-generation-costs-in-2017
This one ?
…Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation…..
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
They have been in these economic places before.
Trashing the environment for short term profit.
Until it starts to affect profits; even by indirect processes.
Thus, eg;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_1956
Some countries had already switched to non fossil fuel energy production for geo-political strategic reasons due to the undesired dependency on fossil fuels over which they had limited control.
Thus France and Japan were producing 40% of their electricity with nuclear power.
Even though earth quake prone Japan was always probably the worst place in the world to build nuclear reactors.
…..China sees renewables as a source of energy security and not just only to reduce carbon emission.[3] China’s Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Air Pollution issued by China’s State Council in September 2013, illustrates the government’s desire to increase the share of renewables in China’s energy mix.[4] Unlike oil, coal and gas, the supplies of which are finite and subject to geopolitical tensions, renewable energy systems can be built and used wherever there is sufficient water, wind, and sun.[5]
As Chinese renewable manufacturing has grown, the costs of renewable energy technologies have dropped dramatically. Innovation has helped, but the main driver of reduced costs has been market expansion.[5] In 2015, China became the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic power, with 43 GW of total installed capacity.[6][7] From 2005 to 2014, production of solar cells in China has expanded 100-fold.[5] However, China is not expected to achieve grid parity – when an alternate source of energy is as cheap or cheaper than power purchased from the grid—until 2022.[8] In 2017, investments in renewable energy amounted to US$279.8 billion worldwide, with China accounting for US$126.6 billion or 45% of the global investments.[9] …………
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China
The problem with non fossil fuel energy in the say 1970’s was that oil was so cheap.
It still is really at 50 cents a litre or whatever.
When they did hydro electric power they knew beforehand what they were doing.
Building dams was old hat for water supply as was water going downhill and turbines.
Nuclear energy looked great on paper or theoretically even if the technology was driven by military bomb making and other stuff.
Apparently some scientists wrote some blue sky science fiction stuff in the 1950’s or something about miniature nuclear generators that you could put into a submarine and how great that would be!
When the idiots at the US department of defence asked the scientist to ‘make it happen’ they responded that it was impossible and crazy or ‘utopian’ .
They actually did it in about 5 years or something.
Then the nuclear energy tails were up then; and we shouldn’t have been so timid and we can do anything with this.
The solar or photoelectric stuff, which is now looking quite good, is part of ‘material science’.
That was ‘utopian’ science and has moved ahead but mainly not from any theoretical on paper optimism but just from scientists prating about with alchemical eye of toad and tail of frog stuff.
As with flat colour screens on mobile phones etc.
It is difficult to explain why it took so long to look into wind power as the basics were in place, perhaps scientists can be shits in the sense that researching into and pushing the idea of windmills was silly and less exciting than nuclear fusion or fission.
Can’t help wondering if the situation we are in is a universal problem?
I mean if not here why not elsewhere?
Too much fossil fuel and universal capitalism burns it up and trashs the environment double quick.
Too little and the development of energy dependent technology stops or never really starts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
I think it has gone too far and it is brace for impact.
Although it is an interesting philosophical ‘egotistical’ issue; as I suspect as it won’t start to get really horrible until another 20 years or so.
I will be a bit creaky by then but the young ones will have to live or die with it more or longer than me.
It is hard when you are older and have spare cash not to use it on luxurious bling, stay vegetarian and turning the heating down so as not to trash the planet.
On paper money and gold etc
There was an article by Kautsky attacking Hilferding as below.
However I am on Hilferding’s side.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1912/xx/gpcc.htm
The idea was originated with Locke and Cantillon?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cantillon#Monetary_theory
Paper money had history in places like Russia , China , and Prussia.
And in the USA;
The Epistle of Barnabas circa 130AD
CHAPTER XIX.–THE WAY OF LIGHT.
……..Thou shalt communicate in all things with thy neighbour; thou shalt not call things thine own; for if ye are partakers in common of things which are incorruptible, how much more [should you be] of those things which are corruptible!……….
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/barnabas-roberts.html
….with the dative of the thing which one shares with another, Galatians 6:6 (κοινωνησεις ἐν πᾶσι τῷ πλησίον σου καί οὐκ ἐρεῖς ἰδίᾳ εἶναι, Epistle of Barnabas 19, 8 ….
https://biblehub.com/greek/2841.htm
Looks like I was getting my latin derivation mixed up with the greek!
Origin of the word
The English term ‘Communication’ has been evolved from Latin language. ‘Communis and communicare’ are two Latin words related to the word communication. Communis is noun word, which means common, communiality or sharing.
Similarly, communicare is a verb, which means ‘make something common’. Some scholars relate the term communication with an English word community. Community members have something common to each other. communities are {supposed to be} formed with the tie of communication. It is the foundation of community. Hence, where there is no communication, there can’t be a community.
http://nepalicommunication.blogspot.com/2011/01/origin-of-word.html
I suppose it is interesting in that ‘own’ and ownership implies some kind of exclusive control or access to wealth etc.
In fact own and thus ownership implies individual or personal , of one, control.
That would be a Stirner like interpretation.
Thus common ownership would be an oxymoron like; true lies.
Thus due to the evolution and standardisation of private property concepts over the last 500 years there isn’t a modern word for such an alien thing as useful stuff that doesn’t have an owner or ownership, collective or otherwise.
Thus with multinational companies they are commonly owned by the shareholders,
The old English word for it was ‘commons’ ; thus?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons
As I understand it that is all derived from , like communism , from the Greek word ‘communicate’ which is similar but begins with a K.
And sort of had ‘double’ meaning of to ‘talk etc’ and to share; as in share knowledge and information or whatever.
It crops up in early Christian literature translated into English.
Rightwing christian translators liked to obscure what was being said about sharing; by translating it as ‘communication’ and giving it an obscure theological take of ‘communion’ etc.
It looks to me as our friend Roman Montero with his little book; which he tested the ground on by going onto Libcom , with me and then here.
Has shifted the debate somewhat and had an impact given the change of content google searches.
Montero, Roman A. (2017). All Things in Common The Economic Practices of the Early Christians. Foster, Edgar G. Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers. ISBN 9781532607912. OCLC 994706026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_communism
I have noticed the change as people know; I have been interested in that subject for sometime.
I think it has a like Ludwig Wittgenstein aspect to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein
[He was interested in planes and flying and used to hangout in a favourite pub of mine in the peak district.]
I mean how can you think things through using language, which you have to, if you don’t have sensible clear cut words for ideas or concepts.
Or for that matter 1984 in which dangerous ideology was dealt with by deleting words from language that were subversive.
Socialism itself was a word originated by a French bod just as an antonym to egotism or selfishness.
I think the North American ‘Indians’ thought the colonist were insane when they offered to buy the ‘commons’ of Dakota or whatever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
it was quite a good film as I remember it I think I saw the one with Ingrid in it
I think the most illuminating chapter on this ; or the crippling of labour power due to either over work or not providing labourers sufficient remuneration to maintain their labour power is in chapter 10 ;
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Ten: The Working-Day
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm
It broadens the subject out to slavery proper as well as wage slavery.
And talks about replacing crippled labour power of the [Manchester] manufacturers with fresh stock from the ‘peasantry’;
……..from pastures of Dorsetshire, to the glades of Devonshire, to the people tending kine in Wiltshire,……..
Or in the southern slave states or replacing the cripple labour power
…….of the swamps of the Mississippi….
… from the teeming preserves of Virginia and Kentucky……
Or fresh African stock from the slave markets of New Orleans
So it can ultimately be a bit like over working the land, without ‘guano’ like fertilisation to restore it, resulting in diminishing returns on productivity.
Which required remedial action like the Factory Acts;
………the English Factory Acts are the negative expression of the same greed. These acts curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining of labour-power, by forcibly limiting the working-day by state regulations, made by a state that is ruled by capitalist-and landlord. Apart from the working-class movement that daily grew more threatening, the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity which spread guano over the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living force of the nation. Periodical epidemics speak on this point as clearly as the diminishing military standard in Germany and France…………..
I suppose the ‘demoralisation’ of a national stock of labour power from overwork and/or underpay could have other effects other the obviously physical.
So you might see increasing mental health problems, addictive drug abuse and a rising prison population; as in the US?
