In 2009, Mark Fisher published Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? where he wrote about how, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” Amongst many other things (including a critical viewing of Disney Pixar’s WALL-E), Fisher updates historical materialism for the modern world. If our experience is formed by our material conditions, as opposed the hegelian notion that ideas form our conditions, then so too must our mental health be driven by the structural issues inherent in unchecked neoliberal capitalism. This isn’t just driven by precarity itself, but, to Fisher, Capitalism even codes our desires, our identities. He says that capitalism colonizes subjectivity, which is to say it even defines how we define ourselves—it provides a normative form for the self, one we could never obtain, but are also incapable of seeing an alternative.

Before that, Deleuze wrote about the “Oedipal Triangle” in Anti-Oedipus, which—as he and Guattari often did—was used as a synecdoche for the normative power of Freudian psychoanalysis, but also the State and the family, three sides, completing the triangle. An oedipalized individual was under the influence of these three forces, a productive member of society, while the schizophrenic—the anti-oedipus—is untethered, free in thought and will, a nomad following a line of flight.

Before that, Tolstoy wrote about state being an apparatus for violence and that the prevailing message of Christ was one of anti-violence, briefly in On Anarchy, but extensively in The Law of Violence and the Law of Love, he imagined a world without a need for the State, one animated by philadelphia rather than violence.

Before that, Marx wrote about the end of the State post-revolution, wherein the proletariat seize control from the bourgeoisie and eradicate it. Marxism, in its original form, was teleological; the goal wasn’t to simply raise up the proletariat and defeat the bourgeoisie, it was to erase class altogether. To Marx, for this to be possible, there must be permanent revolution.

Before that, Jesus said:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

The sword here isn’t literal, it’s a metaphor for division: the two references you find at this verse in the NRSV are Luke 12:51-52Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three[.]

, and Mark 13:12, both of which make literal that division. What Jesus is saying here isn’t about violence, it’s about radicalismI think an alternative reading could be the “Armor of God” where the sword is the Word, but this works too: Jesus’ message of radicalism is polemical, an inherent source of division.

, about revolution.

Let’s take it a little further. I think the most on the nose example has to be Acts 2:44-45:

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.

The early church was explicitly communalist, and there are plenty of other allusions to the Marxist inversion of power such as Luke 1:52-53 and 6:20-26, even the strange parable about the laborers in the vineyard in Matthew 20 where the vineyard owner pays each laborer equally whether they worked all day or a single hour has the patina of radical fairness.