Communism

"These are revolutionary times; all over the globe people are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. ‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.’ We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-antirevolutionaries."
 
   - Martin Luther King, Jr. ; The Trumpet of Conscience


"The contrast between the discipleship rejection story of the rich man and the discipleship acceptance story of Bartimaeus—representing opposite ends of the social scale—would appear to be another indication of a clear 'class bias' of Mark. The conclusion to that story in turn identifies the discipleship community with and alternative economic order based on sharing. The reader has been prepared for both the class-criticism and the communist solution in the first construction cycle, especially in the wilderness feeding stories, in which the little on hand is transformed into 'enough' through the practice of sharing. This symbolic action becomes concretized in the new community of shared assets and extended family. Mark reflects an economic ideology of neither charity-dependent 'wandering charismatic poverty,' nor respectable middle-class autonomy (the ideology of the 'ten percent tithe'). It was a community of shared production and consumption."    - Ched Myers ; Binding the Strong Man: a political reading of Mark's story of Jesus




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