Halo / Tiny Tips
Halo, halo
You can’t say that! There’s lots of things wrong with wanting and attempting to police language. Something guaranteed to shock and surprise is saying: I’m a socialist; I’m an atheist, I like churches. Oh, and cathedrals. Chapels not so much. Too functional, too severe.
Socialist says, I like mosques, synagogues and temples too but they’re not so easily accessible. Now obviously it’s not the reason for their existence that one likes, they are, after all, brainwashing centres and indoctrination edifices for despots. No, it’s the aesthetic qualities, the enduring link to the class that laboured with their blood, sweat and tears to produce something long-lasting and magnificent in its grandeur and splendour or in its simplicity.
Churches are a bit like pubs, disappearing fast. The headline to a piece in the Mail Online of March 2025 said ‘Britain’s vanishing churches: More than 3,500 have shut in the past decade and been turned into mosques, nightclubs, luxury homes, pubs and even swimming pools as congregations plummet.’ And ‘… the Church of England has seen 400+ closures since 2010, it lacks a specific breakdown for the Catholic Church. The context mentions that the Catholic Church in the UK still has approximately 3,200 churches and that mainstream denominations are facing declines, but it does not provide a five-year sales figure for Catholic properties’.
Once upon a time sold-off churches always seemed to become carpet warehouses.
In Australia, New South Wales, there is an example of a catholic church that, like a battleship, was decommissioned/deconsecrated in the nineteen thirties. Presumably it has, since then been used for capitalist purposes, rental, leasing, making money. It would appear that the church was merely ‘resting’ and was not a dead church. A group of LGBT Australians who had a contract to use the church, sorry, ex-church, were getting kicked out by whoever owns it, because of a lifestyle incompatibility with ‘religious groups’ who objected to the ‘offensive trade’ taking place there. Offence can only be taken, not given.
Perhaps not quite the same as getting thrown out of a bar or public house for causing a disturbance, I’ve been thrown out of better places than this, you cry. Around the same time this LGBT group was being turfed out, the Roman Catholic Church said, “Hold my beer” and excommunicated at least 750 priests because of some malarkey that the Supreme Leader, Pope Leo XIV, didn’t like. Don’t do it, he said, but they did it anyway. It could also affect thousands of worshippers who have not been immediately expelled. The Society of St. Pius X wants to remain traditional but if you piss off the ones in power and they can subject you to sanctions then what are you to do? As the Australian group found out.
A socialist society will not preserve ex-religious buildings solely so that religious mumbo jumbo can take place in them. Instead, community decisions will decide what is the best purpose that these places can be put to for the greater good.
DC
Tiny Tips
Money may not grow on trees, but according to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), it appears to be growing exceptionally well for a tiny fraction of Americans. In a recent post on X, Sanders renewed his long-running criticism of wealth concentration in the U.S. ‘Never before have we had so much income inequality’, he wrote. ‘Last year, the bottom 50% saw their income go down by $27, on average, while the top 0.01% gained $2.9 million’, Sanders continued. ‘And the top 0.001%? They saw their income go up by $20 million. In a single year. “Yes. We must tax the rich,”’ (Yahoo, tinyurl.com/y2vymxy7).
‘“Democratic Socialist” is to the Communist what “National Socialist” was to the Nazi’, reality TV star and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt [sic] posted on X (Fox News, tinyurl.com/vsp4av73).
Zinn expressed the source of his motivations. ‘I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel – let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing’, he said. ‘I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers’ (Portside, tinyurl.com/3yyd95c3).
… Petrograd’s local Soviet government and Bolshevik Party organizations struggled to implement the Bolshevik Party program, fight domestic and foreign counterrevolutionaries, quiet labor unrest, and provide food, fuel, and education to the local population. The methods and strategies used by the government and party organizations to organize public life and fight enemies, domestic and foreign, not only preserved the infant Soviet regime but proved to be the first manifestation of what would become the one-party authoritarian Soviet political system (The Bolsheviks Survive. Petrograd 1919. By Alexander Rabinowitch, tinyurl.com/3zmz8rmu).
We emphasized, with Marx, that the proletarian revolution is not only necessary to overthrow capitalist rule but also to change the proletarians, so that they become fit to transform the world. Through the experience of prolonged collective struggle and being forced to reinvent their social practices to survive, proletarians throw off ‘the muck of ages’ as Marx put it, the weight of capitalist and pre-capitalist ideology and practices. Fredo thinks it is utopian to put that much ‘faith in revolutionary transformation of attitudes’. But isn’t it utopian to think that the revolution can succeed without attitudes and social practices being thoroughly transformed? (Internationalist Perspective, tinyurl.com/ya85fvj6).
The fear of acting incorrectly, of causing harm, or of being criticized by others can become politically paralyzing. One interviewee captured this dynamic succinctly when she explained that she would rather refrain from acting than risk doing something wrong. Such statements reveal an important contradiction. The ethical demand to act responsibly can, under certain conditions, undermine political action itself. This is not because ethical concerns are inherently conservative. Nor is it because criticism lacks political value. The problem is rather that individualized responsibility offers a weak response to problems that are fundamentally collective (Jacobin, tinyurl.com/2r9wbfpa).
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