“I'm actually in the midst attempting to theorize a communistic spiritual practice which could help provide a common ground for such institutions to come together around, based around "labor temples"which still exist in some north American cities. the idea is that they provided a meeting place for all trade unions to come together and hold meetings and cultural events and even provided a barricaded space to protect union organizers and general strike committees from cops!” _ a comment I left on this thread.

“I'm interested right now in the basic structure and missions of [a hypothetical labor] cult.” _ a DM i received in response to the above comment.

Alright, what would be the basic structure and missions of such a cult?

Influences

God-Building - A cultural, artistic, philosophical movement with some prominence in the early Bolshevik party:

The idea proposed that in place of the abolition of religion, there should be a meta-religious context in which religions were viewed primarily in terms of the psychological and social effect of ritual, myth, and symbolism, and which attempted to harness this force for pro-communist aims, both by creating new ritual and symbolism, and by re-interpreting existing ritual and symbolism in a socialist context. In contrast to Leninist atheism, the God-Builders took an official position of agnosticism.

Apost(le)ate - A work of Queer Marxist political theology

Chaos Magyk - An area of philosophy and practice which utilizes belief as a kind of tool (a “technology of the self” in Foucauldian terms") to orientate oneself in the world, create and observe synchronicities, and shape unconscious thought processes and actions towards specific ends.

Acid Horizon - A podcast which covers revolutionary philosophy. (They also recently released a Critical Theory and Revolutionary Politics-themed tarot deck which i’m hoping to bust out when i have some of my coworkers over for a tarot night, its specifically designed to generate conversations around workplace organizing, among other things!)

My experiences as a child attending high-church Episcopalian services, as well as my lifelong influence in magick, the occult, mysticism, near death experiences, mythology, witchcraft also influence me, as does my OCD, which for me often manifests in “magical thinking” A concept often implicitly derisive aimed at OCD and other disorders to describe cause-effect associations which do not hold up empirically, but which do have a more practical, every-day impact on my affectations and which i process partly through ritual and meditation.

Mythology

Literally creating one’s own gods, sharing dreams, interpreting the world and the place of one’s self and one’s community in it can be a venue for some pretty revolutionary consciousness raising. I don’t think a Revolutionary Pantheon necessarily needs a strict doxa or hierarchy of deities, but rather should be open-ended and flexible. Some figures on my own spiritual horizons include:

• The Spectre of Communism — a lot of early Marx is quite philosophical, even mystical, in its language. As I understand it, a spectre is a Ghost from the future, a Sign, or a Horizon, or a Vanishing Point where this world ends and the possibility of other worlds begin. The concept is also associated with Hauntology, the study of Lost Futures explored by Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher

• The Angel of History — “A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History)

• Santa Muerte — A folk saint popular in Mexico, Central America, and the Southwestern United States particularly popular with undocumented workers, gender-nonconformists, and prisoners, among others. A syncretic fusion of pre-Columbian death goddesses and european representations of the Grim Reaper, she represents a challenge to the spiritual hegemony of the Catholic Church.

• Jesus of Nazareth — The kingdom of God described in the earliest records of the teachings of suggest both a radical theological and political program, one by no means limited to the afterlife but rather a political order to be actively built in this world. Obviously the specific economic conditions have since changed, but the injunction to cancel debts, hold goods and land in common, free the prisoners, and emancipate the poor from the exploiters remains as relevant today as it was 2022 years ago. Furthermore, Jesus the Magician is a great socialist mascot—here’s a guy who provides free healthcare, free food, and free alcohol, outwits the religious authorities, and if rumors are to be believed (and they always are) overcame death itself. Revolutionary trickster-God isn’t his most well known guise, but its one of my favorites!

• The God in the Grove — There is a grove near where i live where i almost died a few months back. I go there to think and feel, to burn incense, to pray, to get angry, to commune with versions of myself whose timelines diverged from my own there. (I made a petition yesterday for my friend’s missing cat to be returned to her safely and while i was writing this post i received word that they’ve got him!) I don’t own the land (the buildings there belong to some company which rents them out to other companies) so I suppose technically trespassing everytime i make a pilgrimage there, which has an anarchistic vibe that I really like. similarly, there are fields and train tracks and vast parking lot complexes and grafiti-rich interstate where I’ve made art, gone on psychedelic trips, and generally worked to build another world inside the walls of our existing reality.

Sacred Space

One of the missions of such a cult would be the organization and sanctification of spaces where rituals of solidarity can be enacted. At the large scale, this would include Labor Temples, some of the functions of which have been/could be:

• Meeting and office space for local trade union chapters.

• A safe space for organizing and stocking resources for labor strikes, well defended from cops.

• Affordable, rent-controlled and/or tenant-owned housing.

• Community Centers — spaces to make and share art, music, food, host Labor Day Parties, art swaps, youth activities

• Multi-Faith Prayer Halls, Prayer Labyrinths, Meditation Gardens, etc.

• Community Defense Halls — dojos for teaching self-defence, run according to principles of solidarity, Queer feminism, anti-racism, etc.

• Daycare and afterschool programs

These kinds of places are not unheard of, but many have been defunded in the wake of the neoliberal turn, while others are owned and operated by Churches at which many people who live at society’s margins and who most need such spaces are turned away—queer people, addicts, the homeless, racial minorities, sex workers, the poor in general. Creating such spaces with these populations specifically in mind and put in positions of leadership

On the smaller scale, there is a table in my apartment buidling’s laundry room which is the unofficial site for leaving free furniture, books, decorations, etc. When you are as poor as i am, getting a nightstand for free versus for 20 bucks at the Goodwill can be critical. My partner and I refer to donations we see there as offering to the Laundry Gods. We’re working on getting a bulletin board so we can start organizing a Tool Lending Library and an apartment listserv. Hopefully we’ll be able to build these relationships into a formal Tenants Union.

Ideas for Rituals

Psychogeography — basically urban exploring meets critical theory, a concept from situationism which involves going on walkabouts in cities to organically discover and repurpose built and natural space.

Chalkings — one of the earliest articles on this blog is a photo essay about the a local far right guy who chalks fascist-conspiracy theory talking points on the sidewalk near where I work. In response, I and various friends have chalked our own socialist slogans, often with surrealistic undertones and homages to earlier revolutionary street art (for example, we wrote “Under the Asphalt, The Desert!” along with cacti and desert flowers, in a allusion to “Under the Cobblestones, the Beach!”) I’ve also seen what appear to be sigils (a technique from chaos magick) drawn around town, and last week I began adding some of my own! next time i go to a protest, i plan on bringing chalk to give out so that the protestors can write slogans and chants and other charms and protection wards.

Ceremonial Magick — Likewise, I want to develop a body of work around exorcisms, curses, hexes, banishing rituals, et cetera which can be used at protests, demonstrations, strikes, et cetera. I’ve noticed many of the protests i’ve gone to people mostly stand around awkwardly and occasionally mumble a chant off-beat, which is basically the opposite of the vibe you want at a protest. Harnessing play and provocative art aimed at bringing down and humiliating those in power has long been a part of protests—think of creating and burning effigies of your opponents, or this ritual curse seeking to topple the Thai government.

♂️ | 31 January 2023 | 12 Pluviôse CCXXXI | 🌔 | Surgery Day

Addendum: The cultivation of sacred spaces, practices, technology, resources, etc.

Dojos, horizontalist anti-fascist communities for the distribution of self-defense, disaster medicine, exercise.

!Read Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Safehouses=Temple sanctuary

Libraries