The Christian Ethic
Your reply to a correspondent and the article "Communism, Religion and the USSR” both make hostile reference to religion, and I would like you to amplify the SPGB’s attitude to religion.
In the two articles you claim: that religion and socialism are incompatible; that religion is “crude and primitive mumbo-jumbo”; and that “clinging to religious ideas anchors the workers to capitalism”. It might be said that Christ was a more thoroughgoing revolutionary than any who came after. For Christ did not say that the transformation of society from one based on self-interest to one founded on solidarity depended on a change in the economic system. His entire message implies that only a prior change in attitudes and values would safeguard the economic change and ensure its permanency.
Marx’s analysis of capitalism does not in itself prove capitalism to be repugnant: for why is it wrong for humanity to live by man exploiting man? To answer that it is wrong is a value judgement incapable of proof. Scientific socialism has no more a scientific basis than the New Testament. Socialists condemn capitalism for the dehumanizing consequences of commodity production, wealth, and wage- labour. Why don’t you admit that Socialism is applying a standard of judgement to the world which cannot be justified by reference to any society which has yet been in the world?
Must socialists reject the possibility of Christian tenets having any relevance to the struggle because they have been distorted and used by the ruling class? It is as rational to reject Marx because his philosophy was used to cloak the oppressions of Stalin and his successors. Would you deny that if the Christian ethic were taken seriously it would make the transition to socialism more practicable? Would you agree that socialism will only be worth having if non-economic goods are valued?
P. McDonald
Glasgow
Reply:
Your statements that Socialists consider exploitation “wrong” and that this is “a value judgement” show a misunderstanding of the Socialist position. Values and ethics do not come into it. The Socialist case is the expression of the material interests of the working class.
In all property societies there is a division into classes, and each class is constituted as such by its relationship to the means of production and distribution. The inevitable conflict of interests between them, the class struggle, is the agent of social change.
When a class which is identified with the development of the productive forces in society finds itself shackled because another class owns the means of living, it has to overthrow that social system and create its own. This is how capitalism was established. Though “right”, “wrong”, “reason”, “freedom” etc. were talked about, they were rationalizations from the fundamental class issue.
Since all ideas arise in this way from what is happening in the real world, it is impossible to maintain that Christ was a Socialist. The idea of Socialism and the drive towards it are produced by capitalism. Christ and other leaders of small groups in the ancient world represented the discontent of oppressed sections; but their “message” survived because it was compatible with the interests of existing or aspiring rulers.
The “Christian ethic” of harmony and brotherliness is not the special preserve of Christianity. It is social behaviour, the tendency to co-operation and order that characterizes human beings but it is obstructed by capitalism’s class division and production for profit. The Socialist Party opposes religion because its institutional forms are invariably on the side of the ruling class, but also because of idealist beliefs which are an obstacle to understanding the world. Your references to “self-interest” and “valuing non-economic goods” illustrate this point. The working class has been addressed on these lines continually by preachers. Socialists advocate not less but more self-interest by workers as a class. They should reject the opiate doctrine that “non-economic goods” are the thing to strive for, and ask instead why the material wealth they produce is not theirs.
Editors.
Blogger's Note:
I'm not 100% sure what letter P. McDonald is referring to in the opening paragraph of his letter, but it may have been this letter from George Pearson that appeared in the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard.
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