Saturday morning. The English Summer manifests itself one day of the year. Today is the day. Location: an inner city Victorian church. Style: Gothic ugly. Opposite the soot engrained building is a shopping complex. God versus Mammon. Mammon is winning hands down. Inside the church is a pervasive stygian atmosphere despite the soaring seventies outside. Everyone talks in whispers. There is a preponderance of dark wood, which only adds to the sombre mood. The back of the pew directly in front of me has several initials carved into it. One set of initials is the same as mine. My mind wanders in lazy thoughts of the penknife owner. At last! Thank god. at least its not Mendelssohn's Wedding March or Bach's Toccata and Fugue. As the organ plays Bach's Concerto for Two Violins, the bride walks down the aisle.
Surely I’m not going to castigate and harangue these people for taking part in a harmless, traditional ritual? After all, don't most people only go to church three times in their life? Christenings, weddings and funerals? Of course, when filling in official forms that request their religion they'll generally put C of E. But it's only to save the bother of being different. It's not worth arguing about is it?
Capitalist society
We live in a capitalist society where most wealth is owned by a minority. This has the legal ownership of the factories, the land, the shops, the offices, the banks, transport facilities; in other words the means of production and distribution. You and I belong to the propertyless majority. Not having sufficient money in the bank to live off the interest: not owning sufficient stocks and shares to live off the dividends; not owning sufficient houses to live off the rent; not being able to exploit sufficient numbers of the working class to live off the wealth they create, we are forced to sell our labour power — our physical and mental ability to work — to the minority property owning class, who in return pay us a wage or salary.
Capitalism prides itself on the choice which it says free market competition offers to the consumer. Actually the choice for most of us as to where we live, what we eat, what we wear, what car we drive is restricted by the amount of money we have. Our means of living are dependent upon being able to sell our labour power to the capitalist class. The wage or salary we get in return is only sufficient for us to maintain ourselves in a condition to be able to fulfil capitalism's demands for wealth creating workers. But capitalism gives us the choice of whether we, the majority, want to continue to support a system of society that benefits the few whose concern is with production for profit, not need. However, capitalism is not about to hand over the economic and political power which its ruling class enjoys until a majority of the working class understand and want the only alternative to capitalism — socialism. Obviously, the political consciousness of the majority is insufficiently developed at the present time, and they do not comprehend the differences that living in a socialist society would make to their lives. Marx wrote that the prevailing ideas in society are those of the ruling class. Capitalism is prepared to use any method it can to persuade workers that under capitalism all things are for the best in the best possible world.
Inventing God
Voltaire wrote,"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”. Religion existed before capitalism became the dominant world-wide system it is today, thus saving capitalism the trouble of having to invent yet another means of confusing and controlling the propertyless class. Believing as most do, that capitalism is now, always was and always will be, most have no difficulty in swallowing the lie that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven.
The compulsory religious "education” that children are subjected to as soon as they enter infants school has them singing hymns in morning assembly. One of the most popular hymns for infants is All things bright and beautiful. The lyrics of this piece of propaganda would have them believe that, all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the lord god made them all. This nonsense is followed by a verse designed to make them aware of their subservient class position. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, god made them high or lowly and ordered their estate. No doubt in Israel, or Iran, or India, or Tibet, children are being brainwashed with a similar message.
The religion forced upon workers is to a large extent dictated by the part of the world in which they are born. But, it has to be said, capitalism offers a wide choice of omnipotent deities, gods, goddesses, devils, angels, archangels, cherubs, seraphs, nymphs, dryads, hamadryads, naiads, oreads, sylphs and gurus. For the emotionally disturbed, those seeking an emotional crutch, the inadequate, and those unable to cope with the harsh economic realities of capitalism,the opiate of the people runs the gamut from A to Z, from adventists to zen buddhism.
In Anti-Duhring Engels wrote:
All religion is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces. In the beginnings of history it was the forces of nature which were so reflected, and which in the course of further evolution underwent the most manifold and varied personifications among the various people.
Humans themselves, within their own ‘thinking processes, have been the creators and inventors of their own gods, and ascribed to them supernatural endowments and capabilities, which have included the creation of the earth, human kind, and the all-encompassing universe itself. The genesis of god and religion was not supernatural.
The differences between socialism and religion go deeper than saying that there are a hundred different religions, none of which a socialist believes in. Irrespective of race, sex or position in society, the path to socialism requires knowledge and understanding of how capitalism operates as a world-wide social system. Under capitalism society is divided into two classes: the propertyless working class, and the minority ruling class who legally own the means of production and distribution. Commodities are produced by the working class, who are paid less than the values they produce, and when the commodities are exchanged in the commercial market, the capitalist appropriates the surplus value produced by the workers. Capitalism, like religion, not only makes men and women servile, it has the supreme art of teaching them to love their chains.
Mrs Thatcher, a doughty class warrior for capitalism, well understands the important part that religion plays in diverting the working class away from any thoughts of a wageless, moneyless, stateless, classless. leaderless society. In a speech in Edinburgh on 21 May 1988, quoting the bible, she said:
We are told we must work and use our talents to create wealth. If a man will not work he shall not eat', wrote St. Paul to the Thessalonians. How could we respond to the many calls for help or invest for the future unless we had first worked hard and used our talents to create the necessary wealth? But intervention by the state must never become so great that it effectively removes personal responsibility. The same applies to taxation. for while you and I would work extremely hard whatever the circumstances, there are undoubtedly some who would not unless the incentive was there. The Christian religion is a fundamental part of our national heritage. For centuries it has been our very lifeblood.
Her argument is, of course, not a new one. God and right have been used as justification for massacre, murder and oppression throughout history. However, careful analysis of holy wars and crusades generally reveal economic reasons as their raison d’etre rather than spiritual indignation. In the 1960s Bob Dylan wrote a song called ‘With God on Our Side’ which mocked the historical claim of imperialism to have a supernatural force legitimising its actions.
In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx wrote:
The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. It is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of a natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological—forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.
If, with the transition from an insane society, capitalism, to a sane one. socialism, some people still wish to maintain a belief in fairies at the bottom of the garden, then they will be free to do so. But religion will no longer exist as a tool with which capitalism brainwashes, and frightens, those who it exploits.
Dave Coggan
No comments:
Post a Comment