None because they all predate dialectical materialist philosophy. But I guess stories about tricksters stealing knowledge from the gods and giving it to humanity (the organisms) in order to create humanity (the modern social being) are halfway there.

Edit: also consider writing Till Eulenspiegel fanfic

I would argue that myths and stories are written by the wealthy class of people, hence I won’t expect anything that will undermine the interest of that class. I think denying education to workers or children of workers was a common tactic to suppress workers.

Myths almost always involve kings and other figures of power. So as you vaguely mentioned most of the time it’s the villains of the story that may hold a “progressive” view, but there is always a twist to make them look bad.

From your post I understand that you are not necessarily looking for existing stories, but you also want to write. Maybe trying to work out how a common person may experience the events in a myth will give some ideas.

Do post if you write anything. I’m really interested to read.

Maybe the play Hadestown? Prometheus stealing fire from the gods probably works. Most of Aesops fables are vaguely left-ish and can definitely be spun as so. The bible-related commie phrase is usually the pre-king-james lord’s prayer: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are indebted to us.” There’s a theory about the axial age being a response to coinage. I wouldn’t say it’s airtight, but it’s a fun thing to believe lol. Honestly, I find myths more interesting without recontexualizing them because a lot of polytheistic stuff has regional and cultural aspects to it that doesn’t really get translated to "god of fire, goddess of death, etc.

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@[email protected] here mentioned Daoism, and I’d like to drop this article from Red Sails that compares and contrasts Daoism with Dialectical Materialism. This isn’t a mythology as you asked, but hopefully you may find it useful. There are similarities between when it comes to seeing the world as a constant flow with a unity of opposites. There are differences too, where Daoism sees change as cyclical (no progress) while Dialectical Materialism sees change as an upward-moving spiral (contradictions move systems forward and their “overcoming” moves the system to a higher set of contradictions). It also gives a good explanation of Dialectics.

The article also discussed how Daoism influenced Mao and his military ideas.

Here’s the article: https://redsails.org/maoist-and-daoist-dialectics/

In terms of stories, there’s also an article on Red Sails of three short stories (one of which is very Daoist) and how they relate to ideas from Dialectical Materialism.

Here are the stories: https://redsails.org/on-three-short-stories/#fn8

Taoism has criticisms of ‘great man theory’ type thinking but also kinda falls into a kind of ‘peasant tailism’ laissez-faire-but-for-illiterate-peasant-farmers attitude. directly addresses how many problems are socially constructed, such as the ‘lock creates the thief’ idea where the guy locking up a hoard of treasure is the one creating the conditions for the crime to arise rather than the criminal being individually responsible for summoning evil into the world or something. probably more compatible with anarchism than democratic centralist conceptions of communism but i’ve only read like one book about it, theres kind of a current of ‘don’t rock the boat or interfere in things unnecessarily with proactive rulership’ attitude.

Any mythology that suggests an ongoing struggle between rulers and subjects where old systems are destroyed and replaced by new systems has some leftist potential.

No, but in terms of relatively more progressive religions that emphasize the people in kind of a good way, I’d encourage you to check out Cheondoism. It was at least good enough to get the critical support of Kim Il Sung.

Just looking for a decent basis for a mythic story? Plenty of starting places - myths that promote acts of kindness toward and protection of strangers, certain civic myths that you could rewrite from a class-conscious perspective, Lives of the Saints who practiced communal living, etc.

Perhaps of interest - the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and of Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet. They were all communist filmmakers who specialized in adapting classic literary texts. Pasolini has an Oedipus, a Medea, and a Gospel According to St. Matthew; Straub-Huillet have an Antigone, The Death of Empedocles, and Moses and Aron.

Some other examples that might fit:

• the secession(s) of the Plebs in the early Roman Republic (closer to mythology than history)
• Yudhishthira’s refusal to abandon his dog upon his ascension to heaven in the Mahabharata
• Zeus going around incognito checking to see if people treat their guests correctly
• the Euripides tragedies about refugees

All mythologies were written by people in ancient times under essentially slave based economies or for say Norse stuff early mineral times and those myths were transcribed from folklore by like…the guy who could read and write and then assembles usually by a different culture later on. Norse myths were written in the early midevsl period but were for sure orally told much earlier for example and Homer wasn’t writing about his contemporaries. Historically existing myths inherently tend to come from a time well before a Marxist framework would be relevant, comminism is a proposed system to emerge out of capitalism and if the early bourgeois revolutions hadn’t overthrown the monarchal powers and the mercantile class not taken over then we’d probably still be trying to get liberalism done cause that was the class conflict du jour, it’s an historic process. Honestly Christianity probably comes closest, which is no surprise, Marx lived in a very Christian time