Workers of the World Unite!

Now that we are celebrating in the United States the holiday dedicated to the great Worker, I thought I should post this commentary from Joseph Campbell on Communism in comparison to other religions including Islam.

One more remark concerning the contrast of the Jewish, Byzantine, Moslem, and Communism conceptions of the ungainsayable consesus: The first three of the four Magian churches obviously are distinguished from the last in as much as their ultimate appeal is to God, whereas the last takes particular pride in its Robert Ingersoll type of hard-skulled late-nineteenth-century atheism: its sacred object, the Worker, is a mythic being supposed to be incarnate in every factory of the world. But this transfer of the mystique of authority from heaven to a supposed social entity on earth simply adjusts to a modern, secular mode of symbolization the shared concept of an authentic law, known only to those of the faithful in whom orthodox knowledge resides, whcih is to break into full manifestation when the day of days arrives. Meanwhile, the so-called laws of the nations are but delusions, afflicting all in whose hears the light has not yet dawned.

.... Koran 74:49-50, 76:4-5 and 13-16 quotes.

The contrast between the Jewish and the other three ideals of the Law [Byzantine, Moslem, and Communism - author added], on the other hand, is that between a law derived, in some measure at least, organically from life, the actual experiences of an actual community, and laws spun out of an established text, to be impressed upon, or rendered through an ideal community to come. The Jewish is an organic, pliant growth, the others, in contrast, being of a cerebrated, relatively brittle, and - for those standing outside of the system - unconvincing artificiality, or even incredible absurdity, to which their claims to universal application give a threatening turn of terror that far surpasses the merely fairytale threat of the Jewish-Apocalyptic Day of the Lord.
--- The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, The Cross and the Crescent, pg 439-440. 1964.

Hope everyone enjoys the long weekend. Since all of us are Workers, the Proletariat that such as Lenin claimed to represent as they stole from Kerensky the reigns of rightful governance.