Egg-gate

I resist the description of myself as a Christian Socialist. I am, rather, a socialist who happens to be a Christian, or a Christian who happens to be a socialist. My point is that I don't think there is a particular type of socialism for Christians. There is just socialism, towards which one might well be motivated by Christianity. In any case, I am suspicious that the designation 'Christian' has functioned historically to drive a wedge between Christian Socialism and the ungodly forces of Marxism. Whereas I think we need a good deal more Marx in the mix.

Nevertheless sometimes Christian identity does insert itself into political life. In a case of life imitating art (the art in question being The Day Today) Theresa May broke off last week from a busy schedule of cosying up to torturers and tyrants to bemoan the fact that the National Trust and Cadbury's had dared to advertise an egg hunt without using the word 'Easter'.

That was laughable. Other attempts to hint at anti-Christian discrimination, and to respond to it by reasserting Christian identity, are considerably less so. Britain First has mounted Christian patrols and harassed Muslims with the assertion that Britain is a "Christian country". One suspects this concern for Christianity is denominationally partial; my Catholicism is unlikely to pass muster, still less the faith of a black-majority Pentecostal church.

As with Theresa May's egg crusade, the fascists' claimed championing of a 1st century Jewish political prisoner is short on detail. Is the Jesus of John's gospel, who claims that his kingdom is "not of this world", the inspiration for the idea of Christian Britain? In these days before Easter, are we to reflect on the passion narratives and their portayal of religious and political authority brutally murdering a man who has opposed social barriers and staged a religio-political protest in the Temple? These are are not themes designed to fit into the Conservative Party conference.

In the same way as Christmas, Easter is a problem for political power in Britain. It is a symbolic resource which can be presented wrapped up in nostalgia and fellow-feeling. If kept vague and unthreatening, a certain amount of religiosity around it can bolster the current vogue for backward-looking conservatism - weren't things better when we believed? But the content of it as a religious festival is at best dubiously helpful to the political right. As a Catholic Worker once put it to me, "the Resurrection is an act of civil disobedience. When the state kills you, you're supposed to stay dead".

Now you, readers, may well have no time for any of this. But still, the thought behind the celebrations of the next few days is that the meaning of human history is disclosed by a battered body, that in order to gain life one must lose it. In order to rise again, for this creed, one must die. Marx says something similar about the international proletariat.

Bashing the Bishops

If it is true, as I think, that the class struggle is the revolution - not just a means towards it, but the thing itself - and if it is true that the Christian gospel of love is incompatible with this, then quite evidently the Christian gospel is incompatible with revolutionary liberation: one of the few positions shared by the International Marxist Group, Mrs Thatcher and Joseph Stalin.

Thus the late Dominican friar and socialist Herbert McCabe sets up the position he will argue against in his wonderful essay 'The class struggle and Christian love' (published as part of his book God Matters). Of McCabe more later. For now we must turn our attention to less sublime intellects. I refer to the Archbishop of Canterbury who, along with his fellow Anglican hierarchs, has offered his lucky flock advice on the coming General Election.

The earnest, aphorism sodden, tract will not be remembered as a great moment in political thought, and I would not trouble you with it - dear readers - were it not for the following  passage, which a friend draws to my attention:

Parties of the extreme right and extreme left have sometimes sought to rekindle the language of class – but by trying to tap into class resentments rather than speaking of the warmer virtues of mutuality and solidarity. Stirring up resentment against some identifiable “other” always dehumanises some social group or people. Ethnic minorities, immigrants, welfare claimants, bankers and oligarchs – all have been called up as threats to some fictitious “us”. They become the hated “other” without whose presence among us all would be well. It is a deep irony that the whole political class is often regarded as an alien “other” by many sectors of the population.

Where to start? Well, I'm very much in favour of extremism, and to that extent thankful to their Lordships for putting it on the political map - the no doubt thousands upon thousands of eager readers who download  "Who is my neighbour?" from the internet will know that there is such a thing as extremism. Like the Tree of Knowledge it lurks beyond the bounds of the permissible and is therefore tantalising. For this publicity for my political creed, I am profoundly grateful to the authors. It is curious that people, who presumably subscribe (as indeed do I), a religion brimful of claims about the eschatological overthrow of the existing order should think extremism a bad thing; refusing to stay dead when the State have killed you is, by anybody's standards, fairly extreme. But we'll allow these matters to rest there.

I must confess to being confused about which parties of the extreme right are rekindling the language of class. I must further admit to being surprised that TUSC and/ or Left Unity are even on the radar. Although perhaps  Ed Miliband is the 'extreme leftist' foremost in the mitred minds; he did after all appeal to the transnational unity of the working class in his bid to persuade the Scots to stay in the Union. Clarification would be welcome, but never appears.

The action is elsewhere in any case: for we are bidden to think of the victims of the world. Those castigated and ignored; those persecuted, slandered, and outcast. To such the Kingdom belongs. Lest we not be able to identify these abandoned souls, a list is provided: "Ethnic minorities, immigrants, welfare claimants, bankers and oligarchs".

Yes, the oligarchs. Will nobody think of the oligarchs? In the spirit of this admirable solidarity, one assumes, all of that awkward stuff about the rich being put down from their seats will be excised from CofE bibles for the duration of the election season. Anyhow. 

It is all too easy, if fun, to mock this tripe; and it wouldn't matter too much were it not for the fact that the pious appeals for class peace find echoes far beyond the walls of Lambeth Palace. Many people who want the world to be a better place, many who hate capitalism, many even who would describe themselves as socialists draw the line at the language of class struggle. It all sounds rather violent, and isn't there something worrying about picking out one section of society and blaming them? Anyway, surely bankers aren't evil ? So, with variations, I've heard numerous thoroughly sincere and committed political activists, amongst others, argue.

Well, yes. Class struggle isn't particularly nice. It would indeed be better if human beings lived alongside one another peaceful and united, were this presently possible. But here's the thing - capitalism is premised on conflicting classes (and for that matter on conflicting corporations and - as it progresses - on the bloody conflict of nation-states*). The form of society we inhabit is one in which the bulk of the population are devoid of the means to produce the goods necessary for their existence and are compelled therefore to work for others, who do own those means. There is, as an immediate consequence of this, a basic conflict of material interests between these two groups. That this is the case is a fact about our society, it is a fact that obtains independent of anyone deciding to dislike people in another class, independent of some group of conspirators sitting down and deciding to have a class struggle. This is why, amongst other reasons, the comparison between appeals to class and politics which demonises immigrants and welfare claimants is dishonest.

Nevertheless, the report is correct in at least one thing that it seems to imply. Bankers, oligarchs and the rest of the ruling class are generally not uniquely dreadful people. They no doubt love their families, help elderly people onto tube trains, listen to their friends' problems, and give money to charity. Conversely, some members of the working class are bastards. The point of class politics is not that of finding a moral scapegoat for society's ills. That is not to say there isn't an ethical imperative behind it. For the commodity trader who kissed his kids goodbye fondly before setting off to work, when he arrives at that work starves hundreds of other peoples' children with the click of a mouse. The CEO of the 'ethical' food chain, who prides herself on the work her business is doing with women's co-operatives in the developing world holds down the wages of her already hard-up staff to face down competitive pressure. The pensions of those of those staff lucky enough to have them are invested, amongst other things, in a firm that makes a good living supplying the bombs that rain down not far from some of those co-operatives. In these, and a myriad other ways, the lives of people who are in many senses morally unremarkable are tied up with carnage, oppression, forced starvation, and every other imaginable form of avoidable human misery. So talk of "dehumanisation" is profoundly applicable. It's just the dehumanisation is real rather than imaginary - the point is not, as Welby et. al. seem to think - that the cruel propaganda of extreme leftists dehumanises an otherwise saintly bourgeoisie. No, the dehumanisation is implicit in the very workings of capitalism itself. Real alienation, real constraints on human flourishing are necessarily features of the way we currently live as a species. The banker is dehumanised simply by being a banker. He is fortunate in being dehumanised in such a slight way; capital dehumanises many others in a quite literal sense, by robbing them of life.

This hellish reality deserves all the condemnation it can get. More than that, it needs to be done away with. Then we will be rid of class struggle. As McCabe put it, "the only way to win the class war is to win it".

And to do that one needs to choose sides. Failure to do so is simply to side with the currently dominant, exploitative side. That is the path the Church of England's leaders have chosen.



*An attentive reader adds: " conflict between people for work, within the working class itself."

On Christmas

It's not a novel point, but there's a strange ideological two-facedness around the religious side of Christmas celebrations. The central narrative, or more strictly speaking narratives - Matthew and Luke offer us inconsistent accounts - is one in which that which is most significant in humankind is found in the poor and dispossessed, where deity is found in a manger, and which - in its Lukan version - is prefaced by an episode in which the newborn child's mother sings about the overthrow of the rich and powerful. This is not generally the kind of stuff that goes down well in Downing Street.

And yet, there's a notable trend amongst our ruling class to push for a more explicitly 'Christian' celebration of the season. David Cameron's Christmas message, not something - I have to say - that I make a priority on 25th December, has taken a more stridently religious tone over the past couple of years. This is of a piece with his rather improbable recent claim that he is an 'evangelical' about the Christian faith.

Even in secular Britain, religious stories, if not the content of religious belief, have a symbolic power, a capacity to secure a certain social unity in a world whose every tendency is to dissolve social bonds. This is too much of a gift for the guardians of that world to give up. Not only can the Christmas story bind together symbol, emotion, and collectivity: its background religious basis can be invoked on behalf of 'morality'. The characteristic bourgeois use for religion is as a kind of celestial superego, a means of establishing moral norms and an economy of reward and blame long after the social basis that would make such things genuinely intelligible has been swept away by the drive for profit. This policing function would have surprised no small number of more classical Christian authors, for whom their faith has rather more to do with human moral failure, and its overcoming by a thoroughly unsentimental yet gratuitous love, than with securing social respectability. No matter; austerity Britain needs a populace who behave.

There is a circle to be squared, then. How to tell the Christmas story in a way that serves order, without awakening what Bloch called 'the subversive memory' of the text? One way, of course, is the typical ideological disavowal whereby the manner in which something is said shows the speaker not to mean what they are really saying. When the words "he hath put down the mighty from their seats" are proclaimed in a crisp RP accent in King's chapel, Cambridge, even the most anxious burgher is unlikely to call the police. Things have been different when those same words issue from the mouths of Latin American protesters.

These days sentiment and nostalgia play an equal part. We live in a gruesomely mawkish age, moved to tears by the most superficial, manufactured, feelings, yet unmoved by the starvation of a good proportion of the world's population. We are encouraged to yearn for an imagined national past, replete with bunting, cupcakes, parsons on bicycles, and Bisto in a jug on the table. It's a vision that looks a bit like the 1950s, is suspiciously white, and offers a world where women seem to spend most of their time in aprons. We pretend to remember an age when things were more straightforward, where at least we had a place, and could navigate our way around the world - even if our wanderings only ever lead us from the kitchen to the factory and back again. Better that than zero hour contracts and the relentless threat of the future. Christmas, or rather, the celebration of Christmas, fits nicely into this cultural niche. Remember when we all believed? Let's sing along like we used to, for old time's sake. And we'll do it as a family. Just like the good old days, simpler, days. It causes the eyes to well up, and the mind to conjure smell of chestnuts roasting. The child in the crib ceases to be a sign of contradiction, and becomes a prop in a living museum.

All of which is really to say that religion, like the rest of the culture in which it exists, is a site of ideological contest. Remember that when you're eating your sprouts.

Iraqi Christians

As if the past few days didn't contain their fair share of human misery, the accounts coming out of Iraq about the treatment of Christians at the hands of ISIS are harrowing in the extreme. I urge you to read Tim Stanley's account here, lightly inflected though it may be with problematic politics.

One paragraph mid-way through the piece merits attention here:

Yet, having been so intimately involved in the collapse of Iraq, the West is now bizarrely silent about events in Mosul. The streets of London fill with thousands marching against Israel’s military operation in Gaza; the West rails mightily against the Russian separatists in Ukraine. But of Iraq there is nothing. Why?

Unlike Stanley I don't think there is any such thing as 'the West' which has raged against Israel and the Moscow-aligned separatists. On the contrary, the rulers of some Western countries have focused on the latter, some (but not all by any distance) of the ruled on the former. Nevertheless, there is a fair question to be asked of the Left. What have we to say about the persecution of Christians by groups like ISIS? More pointedly, the question could be rephrased: why the silence?

Now, I think the silence has been well-motivated. Any case of Christians suffering at the hands of Muslims is, in the current climate, ripe for appropriation by the Islamophobic Right in the cause of a warmed-over clash-of-civilisations narrative. This whole area is made difficult by the fact that plenty of concern for persecuted Christians, and not a few agencies devoted to their relief, are tainted with this politics. The Barnabas Fund is an example of one British group this blogger would not touch with a bargepole.

It is tempting to think, therefore, that political discourse in this area is polluted beyond the possibility of emancipatory use. This is a temptation, however, and one to which we shouldn't succumb - it is an admission of intellectual defeat, and much more importantly a cowardly abandonment of innocent victims. Another reason for silence is more sophisticated: we make noise about Gaza because, as citizens of imperialist States closely aligned to Israel, our own ruling class is directly complicit in the attrocities there in a way they are not in ISIS. This strategy is compatible with the recognition of an indirect complicity in the actions of ISIS, which were - after all - a foreseeable probable outcome of the war in Iraq.

On this second point: the differing political relations between Western ruling classes and Israel, on the one hand, and ISIS on the other, constitute good reasons to treat the two cases differently. They are no reason to ignore the plight of Iraqi Christians altogether. There are things we can say about their situation. We can, for example, make the connection between ISIS and the Iraq war explicit (there are more intriguing questions to be asked about Western support for ISIS' antecedents as well). We can actually condemn ISIS - it is amazing how this is a somewhat controversial position in some radical quarters. If there are ways of expressing solidarity with the victims of religious oppression and violence in Iraq, we should make use of them (and this is something I need to explore). The time will come, I fear,  when we are supporting some of these people against the UK asylum and immigration system. Perhaps the biggest debt we owe, though, to suffering humanity is not to forget it. Thus far, we have failed.

Recovered Fragments : Marxism and Christianity

Thanks to Sub Speci Aeterni for preserving these. I'm annoyed that I've lost most of this series. Along with my reports on the 2010/11 UK student protests, it was my favourite stuff from the old blog.

....

I think that Marx’s account of alienated religion is correct, and backed by a mountain of empirical evidence. People do invest God with human properties (this, note, is the precisely the opposite of the move made by the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation); people do, moreover, look to some future afterlife for a happiness denied them here and now. God, for many, is a bloke (always a bloke) who behaves pretty much like a passive-aggressive petty dictator and who designed and made the world in much the same sense that Clive Sinclair designed and built the C5. Like the Thatcherite entrepreneur, this deity also has a beard (as Keith Flett will be delighted to learn). He is like us, only bigger. And he will make everything OK in heaven, so bear your poor pay and sexist boss with good grace.....

But, as Jesus might have said were he formed by reading Eagleton rather than Ezekiel, alas also for you New Atheists! This smug crowd are nothing more than the Feuerbachians of our own age, without the nuance. Precisely like Feuerbach they attend to the criticism of religious consciousness at the expense of the criticism of political oppression and economic exploitation. Turning the Marxian explanatory order on its head, they see religious illusion as primarily the cause of these evils, not as an effect of them. Religion, claimed Richard Dawkins shortly after 9/11, strapped the explosives to the bombers. In so doing, he occluded a clear understanding of the social conditions which give rise to fundamentalism, and stands subject to Marx’s critique..........

...if God gives rise to material, extended, temporal things, indeed to space and time themselves, then God cannot herself be one of these things. Or so argues a long tradition of religious thinkers including Maimonides and Aquinas. There is a problem, though. We can only speak and think, and for that matter worship, using concepts developed in our exploration of the material world. It is inevitable that our talk about God is somewhat unsuited to the task – we say God is strong, but we do not mean he can tug a truck, she has no body. “We can know that God exists”, writes Aquinas, “but not what he is”. This conceptual evasiveness is inevitable, but – so this tradition thinks – there is a danger in not taking these second-hand images of the divine with a healthy pinch of salt.

Marxism and Christianity : Living in a Material World

I'm in the process of retrieving bits of the old Latte Labour from the recesses of the internet.

This was the fifth in a series on Marxism and Christianity. Written late 2010

It's been too long since I wrote something for this series. Tonight, the first of two posts on materialism.

A fairly standard argument for the incompatibility of Marxism and Christianity goes as follows. Marxism is a materialist doctrine. Materialism involves the denial that there are non-material entities. Christianity claims that there are non-material entities. So Marxism is incompatible with Christianity. The argument, which readily generalises to non-Christian religions, finds a home in the mouth of cadre and cardinals alike. The religious opponents of Marxism see the doctrine's materialism as more than enough reason to denounce it as a Godless threat to the faith. Meanwhile, the Marxist who deploys the argument will often enough see its conclusion as obvious. The premise that materialism, in the sense of denial of non-material entities, is true rarely strikes her as something which needs support from argument. In this, at least, she finds company amongst the growing ranks of Dawkinsite skeptics (sic).

Now, if materialism, in the sense in which it mattered to Marx and Marxists, really was the denial of non-material entities, then the argument would be sound. Christianity quite clearly does profess the existence of non-material entities, A good example here is God. Now, there is a growing cottage industry in the denial of this claim: perhaps Christians don't really want to say that God exists, or perhaps she ought not to be conceived of as an entity. I'm afraid I can't make any sense of these claims whatsoever. 'Exists' means exists, and to be an entity just is to exist. I fail to see the wiggle-room. This may be owing to an inadequacy on my part, but I am not going to take this easy route out. If Marxist materialism is of the sort suggested, then Christians have a problem in Marxist eyes. I'm going to suggest that materialism, in the distinctively Marxist manifestation, really shouldn't be understood as a metaphysical claim of the sort proposed. Instead, it is a view about the nature of human history and the agents which inhabit it. And this, I claim, is not incompatible with Christianity.

Here's the thing. Why on earth would someone whose priorities were the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society think it a sine qua non of struggle to disbelieve in non-material entities? Taking Alistair Campbell's advice to Tony Blair, let's leave God out of it for the time being. Suppose I believe, as plenty of philosophers and mathematicians of all religious and political persuasions do, that mathematics describes an objective reality that cannot be described as physical. Never mind, whether or not this belief is correct, or even warranted. In holding it, have I strayed into reaction? It's difficult to see how. Suppose it think that there arepropositions, or meanings, or properties, and that these things do not admit of reduction in the denying materialist's terms. Should I tear up my Party card?

The point is that these beliefs seem utterly irrelevant to my capacity to contribute to social transformation, or to develop a clear view of social reality. Only the most muddled utopian thinks that we will all agree on deep metaphysics come the revolution.

In fact, it's not even clear to me that the denying materialist's position is well-formed. It is only as definite as our understanding of the term "material". Sure we know how to use the word in day-to-day life. Tables and taxis are material; God and numbers, if such there are, aren't. But is that enough? Good old-fashioned materialists were only comfortable believing, more or less, in things they could bump into. Tables and taxis certainly fit the bill. It is far less clear that quarks and photons, superpositions and wave-functions, do. The world as our best science describes it is a strange and mathematicised affair. Borderline cases for standardly understood materiality abound. Suppose that to be material is to have a spatio-temporal location. What then are we to make of spacetime itself? Does this pass the materialist admission test?

All that is really, by the way, interesting though I think it is. It is clear to me that if Marxism were making the kind of materialist claim often attributed to it, it would be both irrelevant and uninteresting. Is there a better account of Marxist materialism to be had?

Part of what Marx's own discussions of materialism involve is a rejection of the inadequate materialisms of his own day. Marx is opposed to vulgar, mechanistic, versions of materialism. He is especially concerned to counter reductive understandings of human agency. In his view human beings, and their capacity to act transformitively in the world, are an irreducible component of material reality. Moreover, that capacity is intrinsically social. As he writes in the Theses on Feuerbach,

The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.

Marx is materialist in that he thinks of human beings, and their struggle for freedom, as an essentially animal, this worldly-affair. He has no time for any view which would diminish this, or locate the motive forces of human history on some transcendent plane. Marx is against vulgar materialism in that he thinks it is an important feature of the world that some of the animal this-worldly things are human beings.

Next time I'll say something about the positive content of Marxist materialism as a philosophy of history. For now, I'll just mention one common enough form of Christianity which certainly is incompatible with materialism as Marx understands it.

This goes as follows: human beings are basically spiritual beings, who are unfortunately trapped for the moment in bodies. The purpose of life is to realise our spiritual nature, and not to get distracted by mundane pursuits. Then, at death, we will go to heaven and be rid of our bodies for eternity.

There are a myriad of reasons to object to this. To start with, what on earth does it mean to speak of me in the absence of my body? The view appears to imply that a body is something I have, whereas it is surely more correct to say that a body is what I am (albeit a body of a particular kind, namely a thinking, acting, one - what the medievals would have called an animated body). Thankfully, the mainstream Christian tradition at its best disowns the problematic view - which sounds more like various gnostic heresies than anything one can find in orthodox creeds. It does so to the extent that it thinks it important to insist on the real humanity of Jesus, to pursue liturgies involving the most mundane things imaginable - water and oil, food, and drink, and to claim that human beings' ultimate post-mortem destiny is bodily. My purpose in these posts is not apologetic, however, so I'll freely acknowledge that Christian reality frequently falls short here. Some, but not all, of many churches' unhealthy obsession with things sexual can be explained by this.  And if Marxist criticism can encourage improvement, that is no bad thing.