Whenever I see people working community farms or churches helping homeless people I feel like it’s a bad thing because people may get their needs met within capitalism and we should be doing it instead as part of base building. When I was reading ‘Cows save the planet’ and hearing about petite bourgeoisie doing things that relatively help the environment I was thinking that we are screwed as communists if [people are made to think that] entrepreneurs are saving the planet. Then I, of course realized we are screwed instead because of climate apocalypse. Is it bad if a church who is communist at heart is doing good work without intending to transcend capitalism as opposed to an anti-capitalist group doing the same? Am I being irrational, and/or is this normal?
Honestly, kind of a bit of an awful attitude to have. As others have said, it is understandable, but an attitude we should fight in ourselves.
Hoping for people’s lives to worsen under capitalism is monstrous, accelerationism is not a path we should go down. We care about people, we want to help people, we shouldn’t look at people like statistics, but as living breathing people.
Those people who sacrifice their time and money to help others are already halfway towards becoming socialists, these are the people we should work with, support and educate.
That last part is the key here. These people understand something is wrong with the system, even if they personally benefit from it. They are some of the people who are most likely to be interested in socialist ideas (even if you have to avoid scary words like “Socialism” or “Communism” at first).
Charity work is a band-aid solution, not a proper permanent fix, it doesn’t tackle the root causes of these issues at all, so it doesn’t actually do anything to prevent these problems from occurring in the first place. What it does do, is make people’s lives under capitalism a little less horrible, makes them more likely to survive, and when the revolution comes, those people will support it. Hell, they might even be inspired to start it. You help a homeless guy one day, and he could end up being your country’s Lenin in the future.