To serve and give his life as a ransom for many

By 1964 the historical epic was on its way out. In the United States Cleopatra, doomed by its stupendous cost and the scandal surrounding its leads, had hastened the demise of the genre. In Italy pepla could always be cheaply made, but audiences were beginning to desert sword-and-sandal adventures in favour of the new kids on the block, the giallo and the spaghetti western. With the ancient epic as a whole went the colossal Bible adaptations of the fifties and early sixties, like The Ten Commandments (1956) and King of Kings (1961).

Curiously, though, the dying years of the biblical epic were in fact well suited to serious public explorations of religion. The papacy of John XXIII, culminating in the Second Vatican Council, marked an opening of the Catholic Church towards the world, a qualified departure from its previous defensive stance vis-à-vis modernity and possibly an ecclesiological revolution. As part of that, the Church became more willing to engage art produced by non-Catholics.

The non-Catholic that interests us here is Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italian novelist, director, poet, intellectual and pretty much every other cultural profession under the sun. An open atheist and communist, Pasolini was also followed by (well-founded) rumours of homosexuality in the tabloid press. He was, in short, precisely the sort of person the Syllabus of Errors of a more combative papacy was directed against. And yet Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Il vangelo secondo Matteo) - dedicated to the memory of John XXIII - is a stunning success, a far more interesting religious work than the often musty epics Hollywood had churned out. Armed with an unimpressive budget, Pasolini succeeds in making the most ubiquitous story in Western culture strange again.

He does this, first, by adapting only the Gospel of Matthew, shunning the usual approach of harmonising the gospels or filling in gaps in one with bits from the other. That approach often leads to ridiculousness in adaptation (witness talkative crucified Jesus in The Passion of the Christ) as well as cognitive dissonance, since we're taught not to realise that Matthew and Luke tell different and incompatible nativity stories. By sticking solely to Matthew, the film does not feature the birth of John the Baptist, the census and journey to Bethlehem (like Matthew's gospel, Pasolini implies Joseph and Mary are from Bethlehem), the birth of Jesus in a stable, the shepherds - and that's the nativity alone; later, we're not given the 'I am' statements, the woman caught in adultery, the wedding at Cana, Jesus and Zacchaeus, the parable of the Good Samaritan, doubting Thomas, and so on. By missing all these familiar elements, the narrative feels startling and strange; we see its shape, but it is not the shape of the gospel we think we know.

Instead, Pasolini - faithful to Matthew, I think - presents the story mostly as an escalating conflict between Jesus and the Jewish civil and religious authorities. He emphasises Herod's massacre of the innocent at Bethlehem, repeatedly stressing the violence of the authorities. We see Jesus react tearfully to the murder of John the Baptist, but determined to continue his mission. Under pressure in Jerusalem, he retreats into the company of the Twelve, with whom he eats a final supper at a safe house before being betrayed, arrested and executed, and rising again on Sunday.

At the heart of Pasolini's gospel story is Jesus (and, before him, John the Baptist) challenging the institutions and representatives of Israel to accept him as Messiah. Rejected, he begins forming an alternative Israel consisting of the poor, the disreputable and the sick - an upside-down kingdom that pointedly confronts the authorities. The victory of established Israel - capturing, convicting and executing Jesus - proves an illusion, as he rises and commissions his followers to extend his kingdom to the whole earth. Because the old Israel rejected Jesus, it has now been rejected by God.

That storyline, of course, is why Matthew's gospel is often accused of antisemitism - a charge that seems basically accurate, although anti-Jewish rhetoric from a precarious first-century Messianic sect is undoubtedly different from the modern-day scourge. Pasolini avoids that problem by de-contextualising Matthew's Jesus-against-the-Jews story through the deliberate use of anachronism. Herod's soldiers are dressed like medieval warriors and Spanish conquistadors, and the film uses the Romanesque and Gothic churches of Basilicata and Apulia for sets. The soundtrack features well-known pieces of religious music from Händel to Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night". By mixing symbols from two thousand years of Christian history, Pasolini's film is at once about first-century Palestine and the hope of a whole crushed humanity in Jesus. First-century events are thus imbued with an eschatological dimension.

At the same time, Pasolini undercuts folk orthodoxy at several points. Salome, whose dance before Herod II leads to the execution of John the Baptist, is portrayed as a nervous teenage girl under the thrall of her mother, not the lascivious temptress of tradition. Jesus, meanwhile, is not the serenely smiling figure of religious art; Spanish student Enrique Irazoqui portrays him as angry, driven, and ultimately inscrutable. The other actors, local amateurs all, predictably give flat, affectless performances - which, given Pasolini's copious use of the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, is as it should be.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew is not the plain Marxist allegory Pasolini was expected to produce. Pasolini's Jesus is, instead, the Christ of liberation theology: in his ministry God's kingdom - inaugurated by his death at empire's hands - and the embrace of the oppressed are inextricably bound up. The audience, though, is not put in a comfortable position of solidarity. Pasolini films the trial of Jesus over the shoulders of the jeering crowd, implicating the viewer in the rejection of Jesus. His Jesus is not reducible to a single lesson or pat truth. The suffering of mankind bound up in him, he remains mysterious - but endlessly fascinating.

Let the little children come unto me

When I was seventeen, I spent three weeks serving as a 'senior camper' at a Christian summer camp. The purpose of Iwerne Holidays was to present the gospel to teenagers from independent schools in a fun environment including sports, excursions, and all sorts of activities. It was just like being a 'camp counselor' across the pond, except we weren't hacked to pieces by machete-wielding madmen.*

It was, however, nothing at all like Jesus Camp. Therein lies much of what makes the film so fascinating and irritating.

Jesus Camp, released in 2006, is an artifact of the culture wars of the 2000s, that appalling time in history when 'religion' (whatever that means) was at the forefront of public debate in the Anglo-Saxon world. The days of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, James Dobson and Pat Robertson, all of them thankfully increasingly irrelevant in an age where culture war has dissolved into the naked class struggle whose halo it was from the beginning.

Anyway! The film follows evangelical culture around a Pentecostal children's camp called 'Kids on Fire' in North Dakota. There, pastor Becky Fischer 'equips' children to be 'warriors for Christ' to 'take America back' by evangelism as well as fighting abortion and other forms of ungodliness in the public sphere. Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady focus on three of the children: twelve-year-old Levi, homeschooled by his mother, who teaches him that evolution is a hoax; nine-year-old Rachael, who regularly engages in evangelism towards strangers; and ten-year-old Tory, who breakdances to Christian metal.

At Kids on Fire, these and other children are taught to be wary because 'the devil goes after the young' and to distrust secular entertainment ('Had it been in the Old Testament, Harry Potter would've been put to death!'). Among themselves, the children discuss their feelings about films and books, revealing their struggles with what they're being taught. In a service that can in good conscience only be described as mass hysteria, the children break down weeping and pledge to end abortion by political activism and asking God for 'righteous judges'.

We meet Levi again at New Life Church in Colorado Springs. In an interview, Pastor Ted Haggard expresses his delight at evangelical Christians forming a decisive voting bloc against homosexuality, abortion and the teaching of evolution. This scene, of course, now has a potency the filmmakers couldn't be aware of at the time: just a few months later, Haggard fell from grace when it was revealed he'd indulged in adulterous gay sex and illegal drugs for years.

As you'll have guessed by now, Jesus Camp is a liberal message picture. Despite the lack of a narrator, Ewing and Grady clearly think the formation of a political evangelicalism focused on anti-abortion, anti-homosexual 'family values' is a very bad thing, and I agree with them. Even so, I didn't really need the constant scare music they lather on every scene of Pentecostal worship. The snippets of Mike Papantonio's radio show, in which he criticises the Religious Right, are editorialising I welcome: it's good to see a Christian offer an alternative view to the one pushed by the film's subjects.

Even while Jesus Camp sternly disapproves of its subject matter, it's a respectful, humane film. When Becky Fischer says, offhand, 'I get exhausted doing this' while preparing for another session, it's the rawest, truest moment in the film. While I don't think we learn enough about them (which isn't really excusable, given the film's short running time), the children are never treated as less than full human beings with dreams and ambitions. Levi's worldview may be a mess of cruel lies - if global warming is true, ye are yet in your sins - but we learn to rejoice and mourn with him.

As such, the film's ostensibly simple message constantly rebels against the much more complex response the film actually induces in the viewer - especially if that viewer, like me, is himself an evangelical Christian. Becky Fischer's ministry is horrifying: she's convinced children need to be indoctrinated because most people's Weltanschauung is fixed from a young age, so better get in early; and she's worried because 'the enemy' - Islam - is supposedly training young children to blow themselves up, an amount of dedication she seems to view with envy rather than horror. (It was 2006, remember.)

In Fischer's call that children should be 'warriors' the Christian concept of spiritual warfare thus comes worryingly close to real, physical warfare. The 'Christian pledge of allegiance' one of the families recites at home has nothing to do with the gospel but a lot with a brand of Christian nationalism - something I can't imagine Jesus approving of. Faith in radical, counter-cultural grace - following an executed criminal - does not sit comfortably with colonising the public sphere because 'our nation was founded on Judaeo-Christian values' (Fischer).

Although the film is unmistakeably a product of its time - witness the scene in which the children are invited to bless a cardboard cutout of George Bush by stretching out their hands towards it - it seems prescient in other ways. The language of 'taking back America', now secularised in the Republican Right's crusade against ostensible Marxists, socialists, and liberals, is used here in religious garb. This rhetoric of national rebirth in the face of an ungodly, totalitarian government - a narrative that is a pack of lies, remember, no matter what we might feel about Obama otherwise - has given rise to the uniquely American permutations of fascism that are now flourishing at the even-loonier end of the Tea Party.

Jesus Camp runs into problems in failing to notice that Fischer and her ilk are engaged in intra-evangelical point-scoring, too: Rachael believes that churches with ordered, sedate services are 'dead'. The raucous Pentecostal manifestations of Kids on Fire - dancing, weeping, speaking in tongues, the whole vocabulary of the charismatic movement - would be regarded with bemusement if not outright horror by many evangelicals; fundamentalists, who trace their tradition back to the Puritans and disapprove of both dancing and what Jonathan Edwards called 'enthusiasm', would be especially appalled.**

The filmmakers don't seem to realise that the Religious Right is less a terrifying monolith than a collection of increasingly disparate forces provisionally united around certain political issues: opposing homosexuality, abortion and secularism, championing the military and the death penalty. Just like Fischer herself, Ewing and Grady never investigate the loci of structural power and privilege among their subjects: the power of leaders over followers, adults over children, men over women. Jesus Camp would be a richer film for it, but it remains an eye-opening portrait of the Religious Right.

*What did you expect? Being a Christian summer camp, the experience lacked the weed-smoking and fornication necessary to enrage Norfolk's homicidal maniac population.
**Perhaps more embarrassingly, many evangelicals would not be comfortable with a female pastor.

Ed Miliband, class traitor

Ed Miliband also likes cuts, and won't promise them reversed. He uses the exact same rhetorical strategy of divide-and-rule as his toady Balls (and if you're a toady to Ed Miliband, I feel sorry for you) by presenting it as a choice between 'protecting jobs or... pay rises'.

Wherefore see my earlier post on Balls, substituting Miliband's name where appropriate.

Ed Balls, class traitor

Ed Balls is a class traitor. He's accepting that 'we are going to have keep all these cuts'. He's using the government's language of 'pay restraint' when discussing the effective public sector pay cuts in addition to job losses that the Tories are imposing. He's attempting to play workers against each other by creating a false dichotomy between 'higher pay and bringing unemployment down'. In the conflict between the government and the working class, he's positioned the Labour Party firmly in the enemy camp.

Some people don't get upset with Labour anymore because they've come to expect this. I think the reason this sort of betrayal still angers me - the reason it still feels like betrayal at all - is that the Labour Party was founded to be the political arm of the working class, to fight capital and get a fair deal for the great majority, whereas both the Liberals and the Tories have always been bourgeois parties. In capturing Labour, the odious neoliberal flunkeys of the Balls-Miliband variety have turned a weapon of the working class against it.

There are many among the Labour rank and file who are actively fighting cuts and working within the movement against austerity. Balls is betraying them, too. The old Blairite instincts of the party oligarchy are alive and well. We can't count on the Labour Party leadership - and if not now, will they ever be on the right side? There is no parliamentary opposition, and that means there isn't actually any politics left within parliament. But there have been, and will be, marches, strikes and occupations. We will fight, and we will win.

As for Balls, don't say that he's hypocritical - say rather that he's apolitical.

Against the anti-papists

(Note: this is an English paraphrase of an earlier post.)

The Left Party took a clear position on the pope's recent visit to Germany: half its MPs were to leave the room during the pope's speech before the Bundestag. I believe this attitude, widespread among the German Left both within and without parliament, is wrong both theoretically and strategically. The following is intended as a kick-off to a left-wing response to no-to-popery rhetoric in Germany: a critique of the critique of the pope, if you will.

Last year's papal visit to Britain, until recently my home, was similarly contested. At the time, Simon Hewitt outlined why hostility to the pope was suspect, but his argument, rooted as it is in historical materialism, applies mostly to a British context. But just as in Britain, German anti-Catholicism would do well to understand its own history.

Germany, almost uniquely among the European states, is divided into two denominations of roughly equal size.* The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ended in a draw. The decline of imperial authority left no power above the princes, who proceeded to enforce uniform religious observance among their subjects. (It may have been for this reason that my Protestant ancestors left Upper Austria for Pomerania in the early eighteenth century.) After Prussia expelled Austria from the German Confederation, sixteen million Catholics remained in the newly unified German state: mostly in the south and west, in Ermland, Upper Silesia and the Polish border regions - beside twenty-eight million Protestants.

The Hohenzollern emperors were none too fond of these Catholics. They suspected them, the 'inner France', of conspiring with foreign powers and branded them 'enemies of the Reich'. Bismarck waged a protracted war of position - the Kulturkampf of the 1870s - against the Catholic Church. In short, Catholicism served the rulers of the Junker State as an imaginary enemy to secure their own power. Catholics fought back in the political arena through the Centre Party; many also joined the fledgling Social Democrats. At the same time, German nationalists in Austria-Hungary founded the 'Away from Rome' movement, combining virulent anti-Catholicism with antisemitism; protofascists like Georg von Schönerer converted to Protestantism.

Though officially neutral with respect to religion, Nazism was suspicious of the Catholic Church as a 'foreign' power from the beginning. In Catholic regions the Nazis never achieved the electoral breakthroughs that made the rural Protestant North their stronghold. In his infamous Myth of the Twentieth Century, Alfred Rosenberg claimed the Papacy descended from the haruspices - Etruscan soothsayers - and was thus of Asiatic, 'non-Aryan' origin. In western Germany, Catholicism only won equality and the capacity to contribute equally to public life after 1945.

Of course most latter-day anti-papists will be appalled at the unsavoury history of German anti-Catholicism: many, indeed, will not be familiar with it. Most of those hostile to the papal visit are of a generally secular frame of mind rather than hailing from a traditionally Protestant backgrounds. Either way hostility to the Catholic Church is not neutral terrain: any critique of the pope must formulate a response to the historical persecution of Catholics and unequivocally defend Catholics' enduring right to practise their faith in Germany.

Rejecting simplistic criticisms of the pope does not, of course, mean a blithe acceptance of the Vatican's teachings. Critics are right to lambaste Rome's stance on gender and sexuality as well as its treatment of the abuse scandal. As a Protestant, I also have fairly wide-ranging disagreements with Catholic teachings, from salvation to ecclesiology, the Eucharist and the use of images. None of that means, however, that one shouldn't invite the pope and hear him out. Not to mention that anyone who rejects the pope must be consistent: will he or she show the same zeal protesting President Obama, who is responsible for the deaths of thousands through drone attacks - which, however hostile, no-one could quite claim of the pope?

Liberal secularists opposing Protestants and Catholics as well as Muslims and religious Jews must be prepared to be self-critical and accept that, just like the Christianity of yore, their agitation has frequently been exploited in the cause of imperial aggression in recent years. Western Crusaders like Henryk Broder and Christopher Hitchens use a critique of religion to justify the invasion of Muslim countries as well as the continuing occupation and colonisation of Palestine. Secularism must be as wary of its false friends as it is of its supposed or real enemies. It must be critical of its own vocabulary and accept that it is counter-productive to stereotype Christians as, in the admirable words of Professor Dawkins, 'dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads'. Painting Joseph Ratzinger, a highly intelligent theologian, as an out-of-touch fuddy-duddy won't do much for anyone's credibility.

Most varieties of secularism find their origin not in Marxism but in a - particular and arguably wrong - interpretation of the Enlightenment, and the Left should be wary of applying them uncritically. Marx's real critique of religion cannot be separated from his critique of the social order, as a quick glance at the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right will show:

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Unlike Marx I do not believe 'religion' - which Marx rather unacceptably generalises as a universal phenomenon - to be an illusion, but the main thrust of Marx's argument is hard to argue with. Proclaiming the end of religion without at the same time fighting for the end of a state of affairs that leads people to long for a less terrible Beyond is not just an admission of impotence, but apologetics for the vale of tears. Unlike liberal atheism Marxism dissolves superstition into history, not vice versa: it seeks to overthrow the present society rather than pointlessly demand that people should bear it without illusions.

But left-wing anti-papism is wrong not only in theory but also in practice. The Left Party has struggled for years to overcome its own east-west division: a mass party in eastern Germany but often the weakest of five parliamentary parties in the West, it is faced by the task of establishing itself among the West German working class. The most industrialised regions of the West (the Ruhr and the Rhineland), however, are also among the country's most strongly Catholic. Spicing up democratic socialism with God-is-dead sloganeering is self-sabotage. Left-wing politics must approach workers without prejudice, not condemn their beliefs, whatever they may be, as antediluvian.** It must engage real human beings, not the sort it would like in a perfect world. The party oddly has no problem grasping this when it comes to Iraq or Palestine, which should make one at least a little uneasy.

In other news, the decline of Christianity in Germany has led to strange side-effects. When the pope declined to advance the ecumenical integration of the churches, the press considered this a 'disappointment' to Protestants, whose hopes were apparently 'dashed' by the Pontiff. It would appear that when he said he felt closer to the Orthodox than to the Protestant churches, the pope made Protestant bishops cry. One might imagine the Eastern and Lutheran churches as prodigal sons competing for the approval of a displeased father and eager to move back into his house at the earliest opportunity. Well, I must announce my disappointment is somewhat limited: the Protestant tradition, be it Lutheran or Calvinist, has long been sufficiently strong to survive without a papal blessing. We'll live.


*Yugoslavia and Ireland are somewhat similar in this respect.
** Of course there are limits: the Left must always be a force against racism and sexism among workers, for example, which are morally unacceptable and weaken the working class.

Los von Rom? Eine Kritik der Papstkritik

Die Linke bezog klar Stellung zum Papstbesuch. Die Hälfte ihrer Abgeordneten wollte zur Papstrede im Bundestag den Saal verlassen. Ich halte diese Ablehnung, die auch außerparlamentarisch in linken Kreisen weit verbreitet ist, für theoretisch und strategisch falsch. Wir bedürfen einer linken Antwort auf die Nein-zum-Papst-Rhetorik - eine Kritik der Papstkritik, wenn man so will.

Auch die Reise des Papstes nach England, bis vor kurzem meine Wahlheimat, war umstritten. Simon Hewitt legte damals dar, warum ihm die Gegnerschaft suspekt war, allerdings fußt sein Argument auf historischem Materialismus und damit einem britischen Kontext, der für Deutschland nicht gilt. Der deutsche Antikatholizismus täte gut daran, die eigene Geschichte zu verstehen.

Deutschland ist in Europa fast einzigartig in seiner Teilung in zwei Konfessionen ähnlicher Größe.* In den Religionskriegen des sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhunderts gelang keiner Seite der Sieg, und durch die Zermürbung der Kaisermacht gab es in Deutschland bald gar keine Instanz über den einzelnen Fürstenhäusern, die nach dem Prinzip cuius regio, eius religio ihre Untertanen dem eigenen Glauben unterwarfen. (Vielleicht aus diesem Grunde wanderten meine evangelischen Vorfahren im frühen achtzehnten Jahrhundert aus Oberösterreich nach Pommern aus.) Nachdem Preußen Österreich aus Deutschland drängte, verblieben im Kaiserreich sechzehn Millionen Katholiken - vor allem im Süden und Westen, im Ermland, in Oberschlesien und den polnischen Grenzgebieten - zu achtundzwanzig Millionen Protestanten.

Den Hohenzollern waren diese Katholiken nicht lieb, sie wurden als "inneres Frankreich" des Sympathisantentums mit äußeren Mächten verdächtigt, als Reichsfeinde gebrandmarkt und im Kulturkampf von Bismarck bekriegt: kurzum, die Kirche diente den Herrschern des Junkerstaates als Scheinfeind, um die eigene Macht zu sichern. Katholiken wehrten sich politisch durch die Zentrumspartei, viele traten auch der SPD bei. Zugleich formierte sich unter den Deutschnationalen Österreich-Ungarns die Los-von-Rom-Bewegung, die Antikatholizismus mit Antisemitismus verband. Protofaschisten wie Georg von Schönerer traten zu dieser Zeit zum Protestantismus über.

War der Nationalsozialismus offiziell konfessionsneutral, so stand er doch der katholischen Kirche von Anfang an als außerdeutscher Macht ablehnend gegenüber. Im katholischen Deutschland gelang den Nationalsozialisten niemals der Durchbruch, der das ländliche, evangelische Norddeutschland zu ihrer Hochburg zumindest nach Stimmenanteilen gemacht hatte. Alfred Rosenberg erklärte im Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, das Papsttum sei aus den haruspices, den Wahrsagern der Etrusker, entstanden und somit asiatischen, "nichtarischen" Ursprungs. Erst nach 1945 gewann der Katholizismus im Westteil Deutschlands Gleichberechtigung und konnte auch zum Kulturleben der Bundesrepublik oft entscheidend beitragen.

Natürlich betrachten die meisten heutigen Papstgegner diese unschöne Geschichte des deutschen Antikatholizismus mit Abscheu, viele werden auch gar nichts davon wissen. Jedenfalls ist die Ablehnung der katholischen Kirche kein unbeflecktes Gelände: ein Nein zum Papstbesuch muß mit einem Ja zum Existenzrecht des Katholizismus in Deutschland einhergehen. Auch stammen die wenigsten Papstgegner aus dem Umfeld des klassischen Protestantismus, sondern sind allgemein säkular eingestellt. Dennoch muß jede Papstkritik zum historischen Antikatholizismus in Deutschland Stellung beziehen und Katholiken klarmachen, daß ihrem Glauben und Brauchtum nicht allgemein das Daseinsrecht abgesprochen wird.

Eine Kritik der Papstkritik bedeutet nun keineswegs das unbedingte Ja zu allen Lehren des Vatikans. Die Gegner haben ja recht damit, daß zum Beispiel die Sexual- und Geschlechterpolitik Roms, auch der Umgang mit dem Mißbrauchsskandal sehr unzureichend war. Ich als Protestant melde natürlich weitreichende theologische Differenzen mit dem Papst an, von der Erlösung zur Ekklesiologie, dem Abendmahl und dem Bilderstreit. Das heißt aber nicht, daß man den Papst nicht einladen und ihm höflich zuhören könnte. Und wer den Papst ablehnt, der muß sich die Frage nach der eigenen Prinzipienfestigkeit gefallen lassen: würden dieselben Menschen ebenso energisch gegen Präsident Obama protestieren, der immerhin Tausende Menschen in Pakistan durch Drohnenangriffe hat töten lassen - was man vom Papst ja nicht behaupten kann?

Die säkulare Religionskritik wendet sich unterschiedslos gegen Protestanten und Katholiken, auch gegen Muslime und religiöse Juden. Sie muß sich dabei kritisch zu sich selbst verhalten und sich eingestehen, daß ihre Position oft zu imperialistischen Zwecken mißbraucht wird, wie es einst mit dem Christentum geschah. Westliche Kreuzritter wie Christopher Hitchens und Henryk Broder rechtfertigen mit der Religionskritik den Überfall auf muslimische Länder ebenso wie die fortdauernde Besatzung und Kolonisierung Palästinas. Sie muß also von ihren falschen Freunden genauso Abstand nehmen wie von ihren vermeintlichen oder wahren Gegnern. Außerdem muß sie ihr eigenes Vokabular überprüfen und sich klarmachen, daß es ihr nicht hilft, Christen für verblendet oder dumm zu erklären. Wer einen hochintelligenten Theologen wie Joseph Ratzinger als zurückgeblieben abstempelt, hat ein Glaubwürdigkeitsproblem.

Die weitestverbreiteten Strömungen des Säkularismus entstehen nicht aus dem Marxismus, sondern aus einem falsch verstandenen liberalen Aufklärungsdenken, und sollten von der Linken darum nicht unkritisch angewandt werden. Marx' tatsächliche Religionskritik ist untrennbar mit der Gesellschaftskritik verbunden, wie in Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie: Einleitung zusammengefaßt:

Das Fundament der irreligiösen Kritik ist: Der Mensch macht die Religion, die Religion macht nicht den Menschen. Und zwar ist die Religion das Selbstbewußtsein und das Selbstgefühl des Menschen, der sich selbst entweder noch nicht erworben oder schon wieder verloren hat. Aber der Mensch, das ist kein abstraktes, außer der Welt hockendes Wesen. Der Mensch, das ist die Welt des Menschen, Staat, Sozietät. Dieser Staat, diese Sozietät produzieren die Religion, ein verkehrtes Weltbewußtsein, weil sie eine verkehrte Welt sind. Die Religion ist die allgemeine Theorie dieser Welt, ihr enzyklopädisches Kompendium, ihre Logik in populärer Form, ihr spiritualistischer Point-d'honneur, ihr Enthusiasmus, ihre moralische Sanktion, ihre feierliche Ergänzung, ihr allgemeiner Trost- und Rechtfertigungsgrund. Sie ist die phantastische Verwirklichung des menschlichen Wesens, weil das menschliche Wesen keine wahre Wirklichkeit besitzt. Der Kampf gegen die Religion ist also mittelbar der Kampf gegen jene Welt, deren geistiges Aroma die Religion ist.
Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend. Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüt einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volkes.
Die Aufhebung der Religion als des illusorischen Glücks des Volkes ist die Forderung seines wirklichen Glücks. Die Forderung, die Illusionen über einen Zustand aufzugeben, ist die Forderung, einen Zustand aufzugeben, der der Illusionen bedarf. Die Kritik der Religion ist also im Keim die Kritik des Jammertales, dessen Heiligenschein die Religion ist.

Zwar halte ich im Gegensatz zu Marx "die Religion", die Marx unzulässig als allgemeines Phänomen zusammenfaßt, nicht für eine Illusion. Dem Hauptargument der Marxschen Religionskritik aber kann ich zustimmen. Wer das Ende der Religion proklamiert, ohne zugleich für das Ende aller Zustände, die den Menschen auf ein betteres Jenseits hoffen läßt, zu kämpfen, der ist nicht nur kraftlos, sondern Apologist des Jammertals. Im Gegensatz zum liberalen Atheismus leitet marxistische Kritik nicht die Geschichte aus dem Aberglauben, sondern den Aberglauben aus der Geschichte ab; sie sucht die gegenwärtige Gesellschaft aufzuheben, statt sinnlos zu verlangen, daß der Mensch sie illusionslos zu ertragen habe.

Aber die linke Papstkritik ist nicht nur theoretisch, sondern auch strategisch falsch. Die Linke bemüht sich seit Jahren, ihr West-Ost-Gefälle zu überwinden: im Osten Volkspartei, im Westen oft kleinste der parlamentarischen Parteien, muß sie unter den Arbeitern Westdeutschlands Fuß fassen. Nun sind aber die Industrieregionen Westdeutschlands, wie das Ruhrgebiet und Rheinland, unter den am stärksten katholischen Gegenden. Wer dort den demokratischen Sozialismus mit Gott-ist-tot-Parolen anreichert, stellt sich selbst ein Bein. Linke Politik sollte sich den Arbeitern vorurteilsfrei nähern und von ihnen lernen, nicht ihre Anschauungen von vornherein für vorsintflutlich erklären.** Sie muß den Schulterschluß mit wirklichen Menschen wagen, nicht mit solchen, wie sie sie gerne hätte. Das erkennt die Partei ja seltsamerweise auch, wenn es um Palästina oder den Irak geht, aber in Dortmund soll es aus irgendeinem Grunde (der ja, man vergesse es nicht, auch anrüchig sein kann) anders sein.

Der Schwund des Christentums in Deutschland hat übrigens eine merkwürdige Nebenwirkung. Die Absage, die der Papst dem weiteren Zusammenwachsen der Kirchen erteilte, wertet die Presse als "Enttäuschung" für Protestanten, deren Hoffnungen der Papst zunichte mache. Er fühle sich Orthodoxen näher als Protestanten, sagte der Papst und brachte damit, so möchte man meinen, evangelische Kirchenhäupter zum Weinen. Das klingt, als seien Ost- und Lutherkirchen verlorene Söhne, die um das Wohlwollen eines unzufriedenen Vaters wettbuhlen und am liebsten so bald wie möglich wieder bei ihm einziehen wollen. Ich darf vermelden, daß meine Enttäuschung sich in Grenzen hält: die protestantische Tradition, sei sie lutherisch oder calvinistisch, reicht längst aus, um auch ohne den Papstsegen fortzubestehen. Das überstehen wir schon.

* Jugoslawien und Irland ähneln Deutschland in dieser Hinsicht.
** Natürlich hat diese Einstellung Grenzen. Frauen- und Fremdenfeindlichkeit sind z.B. stets abzulehnen, da sie die Arbeiter teilen und schwächen. 

UPDATE: An English paraphrase of this post can be found here. 

Stansted at night: dispatches from late capitalism

An artist's impression of Stansted Airport

My recent journey back to Germany was unpleasant. It began with a taxi driver who insisted on telling me that the Jews controlled the world's financial system, while the Vatican ruled the spiritual part of the new world order. From there, it was an uncomfortable four-hour coach ride to the airport. National Express has automated announcements now. In the good old days, the driver would tell us once, at the beginning of the journey, where we could find emergency exits and such; but there was a tacit agreement that nobody was listening, and the announcement was therefore not repeated. Now, however, the pleasantly voiced electronic lady will tell us to wear our seatbelts at every stop, over and over again. The machine is pitiless.

And so, at around four a.m., we arrived at last at Stansted Airport. I'd like to claim Stansted by night is pandaemonium, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but sadly it's a collection of exhausted people just passing through, trying to minimise the unpleasantness of the experience. The villainy is systemic and thus much less colourful. For example, one of the first things you see as you enter the airport is a large illuminated poster advertising courses in Grenoble. Beneath the slogan, 'Stand out from the crowd', there is a large number of people, some of whom are in focus, while the majority are pixelled. Learn this, passerby: unless you acquire the desired human capital by studying for a flexible part-time MBA in 'the Silicon Valley of France', you're not even human.

Stansted Airport is an ugly box in the middle of the beautiful Essex countryside. It's hated by the locals, who campaigned successfully against a proposed second runway. So, why do I fly, from Stansted or anywhere else? I shouldn't, really: compared to taking the train, flying releases far more carbon, is not much quicker and far more unpleasant to boot. But while the EU maintains frankly insane tax legislation, flying is that much cheaper, and that matters to a penniless student. I dislike it and I fly with a guilty conscience. So do most people, but for the time being I have little choice if I want to see my family.

One might think an airport would be somewhat empty in the middle of the night, but since budget airlines fly either very early or very late, it's actually quite crowded. Tired people queue endlessly before Ryanair counters, desperately hoping their luggage will not incur the wrath of the company's regulations. (Ryanair employees are victims in this just like everyone else, and there's little as pitiful as seeing an employee and a passenger haggle over the size of carry-on baggage.) The vanquished customers tend to suffer what they must silently, so there was something deeply refreshing about the person who walked past five or six queues, exclaiming 'Fuck Ryanair. Fuck Ryanair. Fuck Ryanair' all the way.

Long I wondered why Ryanair irked me so. Now I believe it is the company's total refusal to lie to me. Like most things, Marx had something to say on this in the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Human beings can't live this way: they struggle to reconcile themselves to their own commodification. Making people feel like things is bad for business, and so companies had to reinsert 'feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations'. They had to introduce the notion that Nike (Apple, BMW, ExxonMobil) loves you and wants good things for you. Processed foods must pretend to be made Grandma's way, politicians must see you as someone worth listening to rather than just another vote, and airlines must make a show and dance of caring about you as a human being to conceal the fact that really you're just another piece of cargo, if a particularly capricious one.

Well, Ryanair won't create that illusion for you. At Ryanair your personal worth is quite obviously resolved into exchange value. They'll cheerfully try to cheat you out of as much money as possible, creating blatantly fraudulent surcharges for card payment and luggage, thinking little of inconveniencing you with pop-up windows advertising car rental and hotels. They'll treat you as cattle in the most obvious way. They plaster advertising all over their planes and plague you with sales pitches for soft drinks, scratch cards and overpriced foodstuffs over the loudspeakers so you can't even sleep.

All that is quite horrible, and I cannot find Ryanair's honesty at all refreshing. I like my illusions. I don't need to try very hard to convince myself that Lufthansa cares about me: although obviously untrue, it's preferable to knowing you're just another commodity. Ryanair disrupts the smooth workings of capitalist exchange by being so obviously mercenary; its 'naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation' pushes you right into the reality of the way we live. It's a flying, kerosene-guzzling disturbance in the Force.

Stansted is a place where the dispiriting cheapness of reality and the sparkling dreamworld of advertising coexist in the 24/7 Spar and the billboards. It's noisy and awful, and I admire the people (a great many people, perpetually giving the place the appearance of being in the aftermath of some catastrophe) who manage to sleep on their luggage while waiting. It's not that it's soulless: it's that all signs of human use, of the history of the thousands passing through, is obliterated with industrial cleaner. Its small chapel (in reality, a broom closet with a couple of holy books and a prayer mat) is the only place that provides some quiet, and even there the noise of the airport can be heard through the walls, barely muffled.

Last but not least, it's a violent place. Airport police have now switched from the Heckler & Koch MP5, a submachine gun using pistol rounds, to the G36C (pictured left), a compact version of a popular assault rifle. As the magazines are made of a transparent polymer, you can see the rounds as you walk past - and 2¼ inch length rifle rounds are terrifying. The government tells me they're there to keep me safe and wants me to be grateful that several groups of Middle Eastern people were subjected to 'random' searches as I walked past, but I don't quite believe them. When I was a child, military lorries going past us on the motorway terrified me: I always thought they might kill us. That feeling, however irrational, hasn't quite left me.

Stansted by night, then: a place where the glittering fantasy world of consumer capitalism dissolves into sheer exhaustion, a place people want to leave as quickly as they can. There's quite a lot of shopping at Stansted at five in the morning, fuelled by sheer boredom. No-one wants or needs the things they purchase there. Perhaps we're past that: maybe we've reached the stage where, if we're still lucky enough to have any disposable cash, we buy just because we're supposed to, not because we desire things anymore. Well, at least we're doing our patriotic duty.

Ed Miliband: cowardly man trapped between two different forms of cowardice

Ed Miliband spoke at TUC Congress today. While much of his speech was crowd-pleasing, Miliband refused to budge on a central point. 'While negotiations were going on, I do believe it was a mistake for strikes to happen [he said in reference to the 30 June walkouts]. I continue to believe that. But what we need now is meaningful negotiation to prevent further confrontation over the autumn.'

Well, that sounds familiar, since it's the only statement available to Miliband in recent months. Apparently he's still not impressed by the argument, eloquently made by Mark Serwotka back in June, that the 'negotiations' are a sham. Mary Bousted reiterated the basic point: 'Just for information, the government are not prepared to negotiate. All they are prepared to do is negotiate how to implement the changes they have decided. There are no real negotiations going on. We can give you chapter and verse about that.' This sort of fake 'consultation' favoured by managerial types is well known to anyone who's ever been involved in conflict with our rulers.

The real kick, however, came during questions, when Miliband outlined his idea of what trade unions should be. Highlighting the need to increase unionisation in the private sector, he said:

Unions can offer businesses the prospect of better management, better relationships, as you did during the recession. Of course the right to industrial action will be necessary, as a last resort. But in truth, strikes are always the consequence of failure. Failure on all sides. Failure we cannot afford as a nation. Instead, your real role is as partners in the new economy.

This phony 'vision' for trade unions is quite familiar to me. I've been involved in negotiations with employers, and that's what they want unions to be: 'partners' helping them realise their aims. Channels of communication. Enablers. Miliband is parroting the rhetoric of Thatcherism, but in nicer-sounding New Labour packaging. Unions aren't useless relics, they can help the capitalists realise their profits! Let's all pull together! Unions should reject Miliband's patronising notion that they can be 'partners in the new economy'. To reiterate a basic point New Labour has always pretended not to grasp, workers and employers are locked in an antagonistic relationship, and a refusal to recognise that means surrender to the business owners.

Miliband topped it off with the beautiful reassurance that trade unions were a 'huge asset' to the Labour movement, adding that '[t]hey should never ever feel like passive or unwanted members of our movement. I want them to feel part of it.' Well, that's nice of you, Ed, if a little patronising. But the Labour party was founded to be the political arm of the working class - nothing more, nothing less. Unions are not an 'asset' to Labour: they are what Labour is about, or else the party is nothing. Despite his assurances to the contrary, it hardly seems that Miliband has any plans to reverse New Labour's efforts to subjugate the unions.

You might say that Miliband is caught between a rock and a hard place. He must at least pay lip service to trade union struggles; at the same time he's afraid of what the gutter press will do to him if he appears to openly challenge the neoliberal settlement. (And maybe there are actual political convictions in there somewhere: he never appears to believe what he says, but who really knows?) But this is not the time to be concerned with popularity. Miliband's fear reveals that he is not interested in the wellbeing of the working class, but in his political fortunes and, more broadly, those of his party: and that points to a politician who has seriously lost his way.

Property crowned and uncrowned

The classes team up to take down the monarchy.

 

According to the Guardian, sixty-seven per cent of Britons believe the monarchy is 'still relevant'. That figure, of course, is rather worthless since it tells us nothing about approval. We'll all agree that Nelson Mandela is 'relevant'; so, I'm sorry to say, is David Cameron. The point stands, however: the monarchy does not inspire abject hatred. But neither are most Britons of the flag-waving loyalist variety. Before the royal wedding, only 37% professed interest in the event; according to YouGov, 35% would do their 'best to avoid' the whole affair. Indifference seems to be the prevailing attitude towards the House of Windsor.

Among sections of the Left there's a long-standing puzzlement about the British monarchy. It is assumed that a democratic republic is the 'typical' form of bourgeois government and that, accordingly, Britain represents an anomaly. A more Marxist response, surely, would be to argue that 'typical' forms of government hardly exist and that historical materialism is a critical method rather than a template for understanding every historical event. Indeed, the notion that republics are natural forms of government under capitalism can be quite easily refuted. Before the First World War, of the Great Powers only France and the United States were republics; Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia and Britain were all monarchies of varying types. Indeed new monarchies were constantly being created at the height of nineteenth-century capitalism. In the century following the Congress of Vienna, new monarchies were installed in France (which didn't last), the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece; both Germany and Italy were unified under conquering monarchies. Where these crowned heads fell at the end of the Great War, this was caused by proletarian revolutions that threatened the entire propertied order.

The French Revolution was a revolution against royal absolutism - yes, but what does this mean? Was it a revolution against untrammelled executive power, against the constant subordination of the periphery to the centre, of the part to the whole - a revolution for 'checks and balances' as Montesquieu advocated them? (This advocacy led Carl Schmitt to dismiss Montesquieu as, essentially, a medievalist.) On the contrary: the Revolution not only displayed all these characteristics of the ancien régime, it shattered all the obstacles to absolute rule the king had been unable to remove. It is in this sense that the Revolution was fulfilled by Napoleon. Lord Elton was right to claim that the twin principles of the revolutionaries of 1789 were order and equality: the removal of all the inefficiencies, corruption and arbitrariness caused by privilege - and the removal of decision-making from a single, weak individual, controlled by advisers, mistresses and outdated noblemen: in short, the replacement of the unchecked rule of a monarch by the unchecked rule of a class.

The reasons for the creation and fall of the Second French Republic (1848-52) are laid out by Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The July Revolution of 1830 had led the bourgeoisie to embrace not republicanism but the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe. The July Monarchy, however, struggled against proletarian uprisings and increasing hostility from those sectors of the bourgeoisie that felt left out by a state that mostly represented high finance. The February Revolution of 1848 left no option but a republic as the system that divided Frenchmen least (Adolphe Thiers). It was simply impossible to hand the crown over to yet another dynasty, although Louis Napoleon was waiting in the wings. The uprising of the masses in June 1848 was defeated by the bourgeoisie in alliance with the lumpenproletariat and the petite bourgeoisie. Thereafter the country was run by a parliament mostly composed of monarchists that could not muster the strength to resist Louis Napoleon's bid for power.

As the French bourgeoisie discovered in 1830 and 1848, it is very difficult to have a revolution against monarchy and privilege without opening Pandora's box: revolution, where it happened, constantly threatened to create a maelstrom in which the bourgeoisie, having participated in the overthrow of the old order, would itself be destroyed by the propertyless classes. This happened, of course, in Russia in 1917, and was a distinct possibility in Germany, Hungary and Italy after the First World War, France in 1871, Spain after 1931, and others. The result was that, where it perceived a threat from below, the bourgeoisie would prefer to work with rather than against the old order. Sometimes, of course, the bourgeoisie simply repeatedly failed at wresting power from the ancien régime: thus most infamously in Germany.

The accommodation that the bourgeoisie reached with monarchs as well as aristocratic and ecclesiastical elites removed the need for a republican form of government. Today, in Britain at least none of the main bourgeois parties advocates republicanism, although republican views are presumably more commonly held by Labour and Liberal supporters than they are by Tories and the associated Church-and-King mob of the gutter press.

The conclusion must be that the abolition of the monarchy is now quite impossible without a wide-ranging reconfiguration of British society as a whole: in other words, revolution. (The argument that a socialist society would of necessity be republican need not be made here.) The sort of liberal republicanism that impotently mocks the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in the pages of the Guardian rightly elicits little more than pity from the Right. They may not have chosen it, but republicans and revolutionaries can only achieve their aims together.

Impressions from London: which side are you on?

I’ve just got back from the great anti-cuts march in London. Estimates of numbers are still confused – the number most often cited is 250,000, although the Guardian claims half a million. One of the most paradoxical aspects of attending a demonstration of this size is that while you’re there, you have no idea what’s happening on a larger scale; it takes leaving and reading the news to gain an impression of the whole. But I thought I should record a few impressions.

 

We got off the Unison coach at Euston and proceeded to ULU where we joined a students’ feeder march. Upon reaching Embankment, where we joined the main march and the trade unionists, the previously tense atmosphere, changed markedly. The mood was one of cheerful defiance as we moved on to Parliament Square and from there to Trafalgar Square. (Being the largest demonstration I’ve ever attended, it was also the slowest.) The news reports will tell you about ‘protesters’, as if these were isolated people; but the overwhelming impression on the ground was that we were with the working class, union banner by union banner. And what banners! We were near the CWU and (massive) RMT contingents most of the time, and they were not alone in having the most fantastic and individual banners for local sections, clearly painstakingly sewn and painted; many were decades old but clearly beloved. I – and as a child of the bourgeoisie I felt like an imposter – was quite overwhelmed by the pride these workers had in their self-organisation, their struggles and their past: many banners referenced the labour tradition. There was great solidarity between the unions as well, a shared sense of having come here to defend working people. When I say ‘working people’, I include teachers and others in accordance with the Marxian tradition – a sense that will hopefully be revived as all who need to work for their living come together to resist the class warfare of this government.

What I mean to say is that there was love: a recognition that public services are an expression of love for one another, and a willingness to smile and talk to total strangers recognised as comrades. Sure, the usual suspects were around: in Hyde Park the CPGB-ML, the CPB, the SWP and the SP had their stalls quite close together. There were plenty of hooded activists, but the day was not about destruction of property (which I do not oppose), unlike the student demonstrations. Instead, it was dominated by this peaceful celebration of the working class. I hope that the march will have helped create a working-class sense of solidarity that goes far beyond any individual cut but recognises the government as attacking working people as a whole. The fight-back must begin in practical terms very soon. There need to be occupations of government buildings and of public spaces, actual disruption of the smooth running of the machinery of power. Defeating the cuts practically is the only way to honour this country’s great tradition of working-class struggles.

Economic apotheosis, with reference to South Park

In the South Park episode ‘Margaritaville’, Randy becomes a preacher, explaining the Great Money Disappearing Event to a rapt audience:

We have become lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of the Economy! There are those who will say that the Economy has forsaken us! Nay! You have forsaken the Economy! And now you know the Economy's wrath! O thoust can shop at a sporting goods store, but knowest thou that the Economy will take away thy Broncos' cap from thine head! Mock the Economy without fear! Thine own stockbrokers... now lie dead by their own hand and thou knowest that thy stockbrokers did not fear the Economy! Well here we are, my friends! You have brought the Economy's vengeance upon yourselves! … We must all wear sheets instead of buying clothes that need detergent! Instead of cars that take gasoline we can get around on llamas from Drake's farm! Instead of video games that take batteries and software, our kids will play with squirrels! We must let the Economy know that we are capable of respecting it! No more needless spending! The Economy is our shepherd. We shall not want.

Modern society, whose elites pride themselves on their rationality, has made ‘the economy’ into a god. Not an ever-kind and smiling one, mind you: this one puts the Greek gods to shame in its fickleness. Economists, who are its priests, cannot predict its actions; governments cannot tame it; its victims must bear its wrath cheerfully as the vengeance of a power beyond comprehension. And yet ‘the economy’ is fundamentally a set of relationships between human beings: it is man-made. Where does this mystification come from?

According to Nicos Poulantzas, the concept of the ‘free labourer’, who owns nothing but his labour power,

generates the relative separation of the State and the economic sphere… a separation which underlies the characteristic institutional framework of the capitalist State, since it maps out the new spaces and respective fields of the State and the economy. This separation of the State and the space of the reproduction of capital is therefore specific to capitalism: it must not be understood as a particular effect of essentially autonomous instances composed of elements that remain constant whatever the mode of production. (State, Power, Socialism, p. 18.)

In feudal society, by contrast, producers owned (that is, lived on and tilled) the land and the tools, so extracting their product involved the direct application of legitimate state violence; and the guy who took away your produce was quite obviously the same person that ruled you politically. I want to suggest, however, that there is a different approach to the question of why ‘the economy’ appears as a thing capable of action in capitalism. The explanation, I think, lies in capitalism’s capacity to produce periodic crises.

We tend to accept as given that economic crises happen; despite the protestations of bankers and politicians, everyone knows that the next crisis is certain. In that environment, it is difficult to remember that internal crisis was simply unknown in feudal society. Since commodity production was only a tiny proportion of overall economic activity, there could be no crisis of overproduction; since finance in the modern sense hardly existed and was only employed by a narrow sector of society, financial crises were also impossible. Crises of confidence could not occur where economic activity was not based on investment and information travelled very slowly, preventing panic. The feudal economy’s need for natural resources was insignificant compared to the enormous appetite of today’s productive sector, and hence no supply crises could occur. Thus internal systemic crisis was impossible as long as capitalism as a mode of production was restricted to a small part of the urban population. The feudal economy was not based on explosive growth, but could exist in equilibrium.

Not, of course, that feudal society was incapable of crisis per se. External crisis not only existed, but could have harrowing consequences. Droughts, floods, excessively cold winters and other natural disasters easily led to famine. The low productive surplus feudalism generated often resulted in large loss of life in such crises. External crises could profoundly affect social relations, of course. The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century killed so many English peasants that the position of the remaining peasants vis-à-vis the nobility was immediately strengthened by the shortage of labour power. King Edward III cracked down in 1351, laying down laws to limit peasants’ gains. The Black Death led to a wave of migration to the cities and the creation of opportunities for women, as economic sectors previously monopolised by men opened up because of mass death.

Such crises have much in common with capitalist crises. Both strike suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, and destroy livelihoods and fortunes, leading to a decline in living standards and in many cases to starvation and death (be it directly or indirectly, through ‘structural adjustment’). Both tend to lead to political polarisation and a rise in tension and. Both, in short, rapidly destroy the lives their stunned victims were accustomed to and create a new, much more unpleasant reality. But of course there is a key difference between the two. The sort of crisis that could ravage medieval society was caused by acts of God. Capitalist crisis is man-made: indeed natural disasters tend to create wonderful opportunities for capitalists rather than impoverish them. The former sort of crisis was caused by the mode of production’s vulnerability to external events; the latter kind is inherent in the mode of production itself.

That difference, it seems to me, neatly explains how ‘the economy’ became a sphere of life quite distinct from others – politics and everyday life. The inexplicable natural disasters that befell medieval society were attributed to God; but since, at least officially, economic life is man-made and God has no hand in it, he cannot be held responsible. The system can inflict punishment all by itself. Thus begins ‘the economy’s’ reign of terror as it smites its terrified victims. We must propitiate the economy and treat it well, or expect awesome vengeance.

Of course, in reality ‘the economy’ is an abstraction from sets of social relations, productive and commercial. Mystification, the elevation of the abstraction into a godlike being (alienation), serves dominant interests because it denies individuals’ and classes’ specific roles and responsibilities. Blame the bankers? Not if Bob Diamond has anything to do with it. Failure is an orphan, and when crisis strikes it can only be ‘the economy’ that somehow malfunctioned. Economic crises become as natural as the seasons rather than being, as they should be, associated with a particular form of society – one that can be overcome.

The non-existence of ‘the economy’ in pre-modern society also points us to what will happen to this strange god if an alternative form of life is attempted. For, as people begin to take control of their own lives, as the profit motive is removed, production is for use rather than profit and crisis disappears, ‘the economy’ will lose its dreadful power and, like all false gods, will wither away.

Die rote Bedrohung vom Karl-Liebknecht-Haus

Gesine Lötzsch verlangt eine Parteidiktatur sowjetischer Prägung in Deutschland, und zwar sofort. Inspiriert von Stalin, Mao und Pol Pot will sie unser Land in den strahlenden Morgen der kommunistischen Utopie versetzen, selbst – nein, gerade! – wenn es Abermillionen Menschenleben kostet.

Könnte man meinen, wenn man in der letzten Woche die bürgerliche Presse durchblätterte. Der „Spiegel“ hatte die Alarmglocken geläutet ob eines Artikels, den Gesine Lötzsch, Parteichefin der Linken, in der „Jungen Welt“ veröffentlicht hatte, Titel: „Wege zum Kommunismus“. „Klartext bei der Linken“, fand „Spiegel“-Autor Stefan Berg. Jan Fleischhauer setzte noch einen drauf: die Linkspartei nehme Frau Lötzsch „vor allem übel, dass [sic!] sie den Leuten so direkt auf die Nase gebunden hat, wohin die Reise mit der Linkspartei geht, sollte sie wieder [sic!] an die Macht kommen“.

Die Linke, eine Bande gemeinster Verschwörer! Aber sehr marxistisch kann man solches Doppelspiel kaum nennen. Heißt es nicht im „Kommunistischen Manifest“: „Die Kommunisten verschmähen es, ihre Ansichten und Absichten zu verheimlichen. Sie erklären es offen, daß ihre Zwecke nur erreicht werden können durch den gewaltsamen Umsturz aller bisherigen Gesellschaftsordnung“? Da gleicht die Linke dann wohl eher jenen roten Komplotten, die die Phantasie der Kalten Krieger Amerikas zirka 1950 bevölkerten.

Daß der „Spiegel“ sich gerne ab und an als staatstragendes Hetzblatt betätigt, interessiert hier nicht. Es hülfe den Herren Berg und Fleischhauer aber möglicherweise, den anstößigen Artikel auch zu lesen. Reichlich seltsam nimmt sich zum Beispiel Stefan Bergs Ausspruch aus, daß Lötzsch die „Blutspur“ des Kommunismus vergesse: „Kein Wort verliert sie über die Opfer des Kommunismus, über die Lager in der Sowjetunion, in China oder in Korea, die alle im Namen des Kommunismus errichtet wurden.“ Es ist kein Wunder, daß diese Opfer nicht erwähnt werden – lehnt doch Lötzsch einen leninistischen Kurs ausdrücklich ab. Sie spricht sich aus für den „Linksradikalismus – [diese] ‚Kinderkrankheit des Kommunismus‘ (Lenin)“. Für Rosa Luxemburg, deren Ideen hier bewundert werden, war der Sozialismus „kein fertiges Ideal, kein genial entworfener Bauplan, sondern etwas, das aus den realen Kämpfen wachsen würde“, ganz im Gegensatz eben zu den Ideen Lenins und Trotzkis, die zur gleichen Zeit das Sowjetsystem aufbauten.

Tatsächlich tritt Gesine Lötzsch in diesem Artikel ein für etwas, das früher Revisionismus geheißen und vor hundert Jahren noch von der SPD als rechtssektiererisch verdammt wurde: die graduelle Verschiebung des Machtgefüges durch die Demokratisierung und Sozialisierung von Institutionen und Wirtschaftsbereichen, das „Zurückdrängen“ kapitalistischer und imperialistischer Kräfte: „die Profitdominanz über Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft zu überwinden, die Ansätze einer neuen Gesellschaft ‚hineinzupressen‘ in die alte, bis sich beweist, daß dem demokratischen Sozialismus die Zukunft gehört“. Nun ist das natürlich nicht mehr als die seit Jahren aus Wahlprogrammen und dem Parteiprogramms-Entwurf bekannte Strategie der Linkspartei, nicht ganz korrekt präsentiert als ein konsequentes Umsetzen der Ideen Rosa Luxemburgs. Aber so schreiben sich keine reißerischen Artikel: nein, der Russe muß her, wie er mit Plattenbau und Kalaschnikow die abendländische Kultur bedroht.

Das Zahlenspiel über Opfer, das die „Spiegel“-Autoren begeistert herbeirufen, könnte man mitspielen, aber eine solche Instrumentalisierung ermordeter Menschen gereicht den Beteiligten nur zur Schande. Daß aber der Kapitalismus, der in imperialistischen Kriegen, durch Hunger, Krankheit und Schufterei seit über zweihundert Jahren Menschen systematisch hinwegrafft, im Namen der Menschlichkeit verteidigt wird, ist an Zynismus kaum zu überbieten.

Socialism, liberalism, and the student movement

The emerging student movement has seen activists from a huge range of different political backgrounds join forces to resist the government’s onslaught on education. This diversity is one of our strengths, but it will inevitably lead to debates – not just philosophical ones, but concrete disagreements as to the correct course, what allies to choose, how to interpret the cuts etc. This piece examines one ideology common among students, liberalism, and how socialists might best interact with it to help our cause. The terms used here are classically Marxist ones, so be warned if that’s not your cup of tea.

Liberalism is older than socialism. It emerged properly during the enlightenment, as a critique of the repressive authoritarianism of the ancien régime. Liberals championed freedom of speech and conscience, and declared universal human rights considered inviolable by the state. The crucial point here is that liberalism posits a conflict between the individual and the state: the individual is its basic reference point, and that basic unit’s rights are to be defended against the encroachments of the alien, authoritarian force of the state.

It is not difficult to see that liberalism was the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (first merchant and manufacturer, then factory owner), for the hostile state was the still largely feudal establishment that attempted to resist the shift in the economic and political balance of power in favour of the bourgeoisie. In championing the freedom of the individual, liberalism defended a rising class against its opponents: it effectively functioned as a tool of class struggle. That’s not to reduce liberalism to merely a class ideology, for many of its ideals are transparently universally valid, but to see it as also useful to class struggle, and therefore naturally an ideology popular with the bourgeoisie in the late feudal state. The individual central to liberalism appears here as the early capitalist entrepreneur, desiring to pursue his affairs without undue interference.

If liberal ideology was a weapon in the struggle of the bourgeoisie against its aristocratic opponent, its role changed fundamentally once the bourgeoisie had prevailed, either almost completely as in France or by arrangement with the old elites as in Britain. Certainly, a liberal ideology of reason, civilisation and enlightenment was employed in the nineteenth-century imperial conquest of the globe, with the bourgeois state as Hegel’s ‘march of God in the world’. But once it was in power, a strong defence of individual liberty became more of a liability than an asset to the bourgeoisie. As the ruling class – particularly in the financialised, monopolised form capitalism took in the second half of the nineteenth century – the capitalists had no use for these remnants of their own rise. As Adorno explained, liberal ideals fell by the wayside as capitalism created an increasingly total society in the twentieth century, creating ‘enemies’ and persecuting dissenters more subtly but no less effectively than the dictatorships of the East.

But now an interesting moment had come: liberalism regained its critical potential. In the nineteenth century, liberal thought was already invoked in both jingoist and anti-imperial rhetoric (witness, for example, arguments about the British occupation of Egypt in 1882). As capitalist society became total and increasingly authoritarian in its habits of thought and action, liberals began to criticise its excesses: McCarthyism, segregation, the colonial wars in Kenya, Algeria, Vietnam etc. Although their critique was often less fundamental than that put forth by Marxists, liberals nevertheless provided vital opposition to the capitalist and imperial order, especially in the United States where no labour movement comparable to those in Europe had developed. Dissent during the ‘war on terror’ has been liberal to a very significant extent. It is unsurprising that many liberals have also rebelled against the authoritarianism of the current British government, even as a supposedly liberal party is in coalition with the Conservatives.

It follows from liberalism’s class origins that it was an ideology of the privileged. Even today, liberal ideas do not have much traction with the working class, but are mostly espoused by sections of the bourgeoisie, particularly the intellectuals. If liberalism was marked as a bourgeois ideology in its insistence on the individual as the fundamental point of reference, socialism is a proletarian ideology through its casting of classes as the fundamental subjects of history and politics. That’s not to say socialism is somehow the ‘natural’ ideology of the working class: as Lenin recognised, socialism was conceived in the universities, just like liberalism before it, and then carried into the working class, quickly becoming the chief ideology of that class for its clear expression of the workers’ fundamental interests (the socialisation of the means of production and overthrow of the exploiters).

Socialism has always put class front and centre. It does not demand ‘human rights’ in the abstract, but concretely the emancipation of the working class and classes similarly exploited – not because it does not believe in human rights, but because it recognises that only a successful revolution of the working class can end the conditions of oppression and exploitation that affect all of humankind: that is, by recognising the proletariat as the fundamental revolutionary subject. Not the individual’s liberation from an encroaching state, but the proletariat’s self-liberation from its oppression and exploitation is the crucial step towards a society without oppression and exploitation. Liberalism’s revolutionary potential in capitalist society is limited, partly through the largely bourgeois class character of its adherents, partly through its atomised view of society; socialism, by recognising and organising large social forces capable of challenging established power structures, creates that potential. Socialism insists on class as the fundamental reference point because the condition of the worker in industrial society is precisely not one of isolated individual activity, but of labour in mass conditions (factories, call centres, and so on).

Liberalism was and is central to the resistance against the neo-liberal programmes of enriching the wealthy by taking from the working class, e.g. through privatisation, regressive taxation and the dismantling of public services. Liberals have been particularly active in struggling against the attacks on individual liberty of the last ten years, such as ‘anti-terror legislation’ and more recently the practice of kettling and other repressive police tactics. The massive cuts and tuition fee increases in higher education have also spurred liberals who insist on free education as a human right to action.

Socialists have linked up with liberals and others in defence of free education, and must continue to do so. While recognising and stressing our philosophical similarities – evinced by the fact that publications such as the Guardian and the New Statesman unite liberals and leftists, sometimes awkardly –, we must also continue to push the argument, already well understood by many, that the cuts agenda is not merely ‘ill-advised’, but is part of a wider class struggle on behalf of the ruling class. This class struggle does not only affect students alone, but the working class too. In order to succeed, the student movement must ally itself to the organised labour movement: it must recognise, as socialists already know, that there is a very definite class enemy, and definite class allies. Appeals and civilised demonstrations – fighting the ruling class on the ground it has generously set aside for us – will not suffice. Direct action is needed, and for that we need a firm alliance of students and workers.

Julian Glover and the Thatcherite Left

The Guardian commentariat is divided into two groups: left-wingers of all shapes and colours on the one hand, and ‘progressive’ pro-European liberals on the other. It’s no secret where my sympathies lie, and so I must turn to the second group: for there we have, among many well-meaning, idealistic people, others who, having drunk deep at the well of Thatcherism, evince some very unpleasant tendencies.

Take Julian Glover. Glover often writes news items, but he’s also a fairly regular commentator, and not one you’d suspect of being ‘loony left’. ‘Smearing Labour’s new leader, a decent man, as Red Ed will backfire on his critics’, Glover warned upon Ed Miliband’s election, which was of a ‘peculiar and undemocratic nature’. In there, you have all the instinctive suspicion some ‘progressives’ harbour towards socialism and the labour movement: if Ed is a decent man, he obviously can’t be red. Those trade union crazies, it seems, are beyond the pale of common human decency. ‘Progressives’ draw up a political spectrum which, in including the wealthy and educated and excluding the working class, reveals their elitist nature.

Glover went further in this delightful piece: ‘The left should recognise that equality is undesirable’. His argument runs like this: life isn't fair. ‘[F]air opportunity in a liberal society’ (‘equality of opportunity’, that old Blairite watchword) does ‘not produce equal outcomes’. People are different, you see. ‘Life is an erratic blend of luck, ability and effort. We should encourage effort and hope for ability, and try to minimise dependence on luck. But we are fooling ourselves if we think we can eradicate inequality.’

There is an unacknowledged right-wing framework to all this, and before I lay out what is hopefully a more persuasive account of ‘opportunity’ and ‘outcomes’, let's take that framework apart. I can think of no better place to start than Glover’s own sub-heading: ‘It sounds horribly rightwing [sic], but a fair society may be one in which people have the right to strive for inequality.’

‘It sounds horribly rightwing’: Glover, of course, wants you to take his argument as something a ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ person can accept. But he's also, in advance, trying to belittle his opponents by using that word ‘horribly’, which suggests they are stuborn creatures of tradition. Enlightened inequality against the proles' ‘yuck’ reaction!

A ‘fair society’: as Glover himself points out, ‘fair’ is a popular word with politicians because you can use it to describe almost anything, projecting warm fuzziness all the while – unlike ‘equal’. ‘People’: there's the mindset of the atomised individual who ‘strives’ (yet to come!) for various things, possibly competing with others, but not working in a larger, constraining framework. ‘The right to... ’: and now the game is surely up, for that’s the language of big business: ‘free market’, ‘economic freedom’, ‘the right of management to manage’. The right always tries to paint accumulation as the exercise of freedom. ‘Strive for inequality’: there’s that word ‘strive’, which paints the capitalist’s accumulation of profits as an heroic quest. But in the phrase ‘strive for inequality’, Glover’s failure – wilful or otherwise - to comprehend inequality reveals itself, and that failure concedes the entire argument to the Right. Think in their terms – as too many nominally on the Left do – and it’s not surprising you end up with their conclusions.

It turns out that life isn’t really the way Glover imagines. In his mind, human beings are race horses: some will turn out to be faster and more successful than others, thanks to that ‘erratic blend of luck, ability and effort’, and to the victor go the spoils. (A left-wing government to Glover’s liking would presumably attempt to level the playing field – make sure all horses stand the same chance at the outset.) That view – some are just luckier, better and more hard-working than you and me – flatters the rich immensely. They rather like thinking of themselves that way, either as hard-working success stories or, as your Richard Bransons and Alan Sugars go, as big bad predators who out-competed the plebs. But this narrative conveniently forgets the most fundamental fact of capitalism, namely class.

Class in capitalist society means that a few people own and control what is needed to produce society's wealth – machines and factories (industrial capital), but also communications, infrastructure, financial institutions etc. The majority of the population – the working class – operates these means of production to produce goods and services, from cars and microwaves to wireless broadband, in return for a wage from the owner of the means of production – that is, they sell their labour power. The capitalist then sells the finished products on the market for a profit. Everything is owned by the employer, but nothing would be produced without the labour of the many.

Who produces social wealth: the corporations? No, it is the working class. If no-one worked (if no labour power was expended), the means of production would be useless, nothing would be produced and sold, and the capitalist would be deprived of his profit. That is, it is the work of the majority of the population that makes the rich rich. Note that the reverse is not true: if the capitalist class was relieved of its power there can be no suggestion that all production would immediately cease, although we would need to imagine new ways of administering and coordinating economic life.

The bourgeoisie (let’s call a spade a spade, in the manner of the Deputy Prime Minister) may have become the capitalist class through ‘luck, ability and effort’, but once there they retain their position through the work of the many, enforced by the institutions of the state. There is no level playing field, nor can there be one so long as private property exists. The class system reproduces itself as people are born into ‘their’ class, grow up in their neighbourhoods, attend their schools and begin working in the jobs available to their class. The capitalist gets richer as he siphons off the value created by the workers, who take home a very small share of the social product (just how small is negotiated through trade union class struggle).

So I just thought I’d set the record straight. There is no capitalism without class, and class means that a few rule while many labour. The rich aren’t more successful, ruthless, lucky, able: they're just in a position to reap the benefits of others' work. It’s nonsense to demand the ‘right to strive for inequality’. People are not atomised individuals ‘competing’ with each other - they're engaged in a set of very definite social relations, a class system that holds the many down to enrich the few. Under capitalism, there can be no wealth without poverty. Time to break the structure up, eh?