If your neighbour worships twenty gods: a note on biblical law and religious toleration

Christians are used to seeing secular society - whose institutions favour no particular faith - as a dire threat. To John Piper, for example, '[t]he modern secular world... tries to remove God from his all-creating, all- sustaining, all-defining, all-governing place [and] has no choice but to make itself god'. In other words, a secular society is blasphemous by definition. Against this conservative appraisal, I'll suggest secularism is most fruitfully understood not as a menace destroying western civilisation from within, but as a blessing longed for by those who did not enjoy it, made possible by Jesus' death on the cross.

At the same time, I'll argue that the liberal understanding of secularism is ahistorical and impossible to square with biblical evidence. Here, for example, is the excellent blogger Fred Clark, arguing against the US Catholic bishops' attempt to stop contraceptive services for women:

'It does me no injury,' Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.' The advocates of burka-logic [sic] disagree. They insist that the very presence of such irreligious neighbors does them an injury - the injury of constraining their freedom to live unperturbed by the constant reminder of such blasphemies.

This quintessentially liberal argument - my neighbour's religious predilections do me no harm, so I have no business constraining him - cannot survive an encounter with the God of the Old Testament. At Sinai God makes a covenant is with Israel as a community to ensure correct religious observance and moral behaviour in the land (Deuteronomy 1:1-14). The Mosaic Law does not offer any room for religious toleration. Indeed the Israelites are explicitly commanded to destroy all traces of Canaanite paganism if they wish to enjoy the land (Deuteronomy 12:1-4).

Contrary to Jefferson, under Old Testament law my neighbour's heterodox religious observance does pick my pocket and break my leg. The Religious Right's notion of 'individual responsibility' is quite absent in the Bible. God repeatedly threatens to punish people for sins they have not themselves committed, 'visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and fourth generation' (Exodus 20:5, Exodus 34:7, Numbers 14:18, Deuteronomy 5:9, and many more). Positively, God considers whole communities more kindly on account of a few righteous people (Genesis 18:22-32, Romans 11:28).

The insistence that Israel is judged as a whole for the actions committed in its midst rather than as individuals is perhaps best encapsulated by Deuteronomy 21:1-9:

If in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess someone is found slain, lying in the open country, and it is not known who killed him, then your elders and your judges shall come out, and they shall measure the distance to the surrounding cities. And the elders of the city that is nearest to the slain man shall take a heifer that has never been worked and that has not pulled in a yoke. And the elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a valley with running water, which is neither ploughed nor sown, and shall break the heifer's neck there in the valley. Then the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come forward... And all the elders of that city nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley, and they shall testify, 'Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it shed. Accept atonement, o LORD, for your people Israel, whom you have redeemed, and do not set the guilt of innocent blood in the midst of your people Israel, so that their blood guilt be atoned for.' So you shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from your midst, when you do what is right in the sight of the LORD.

Here the murderer is unknown and unidentifiable, but the nearest settlement is required to offer a sacrifice in atonement for the sin committed lest it be visited upon their heads. The action, not the acting subject, is the primary term. Nor does the Bible consider the motives of offenders. Distinguishing murder from accidental killings, for example, is an innovation of the ninth century, when earnest scholars attempted to settle matters humanius (more humanely) than the often harsh Church Fathers. (So much, incidentally, for the notion that a concern for human welfare reveals a 'man-centred' world-view.)

We tend to take a modern legal understanding of individual responsibility for granted, but it can seriously distort our reading of the Bible. The concept of bloodguilt - that sin, if unatoned, will return to haunt even those who have not themselves committed it - is accepted by New Testament writers (Luke 11:50-51, Revelation 6:10). Augustine's notion that original sin is passed on through biological parenthood - logically consigning those who die in the womb to damnation - would also be impossible without bloodguilt.

But that isn't the whole story. In the New Testament, God's people are not told to enforce obedience among their nonbelieving neighbours. Indeed the New Testament is marked by disinterest in secular power at best, and outright hostility at worst (Revelation 17:1-6). The death of Jesus at the cross changes everything. From that point onwards, it is not biological descent from Abraham but faith that determines membership in the people of God (Romans 9:30). The ethno-religious boundaries of ancient Israel have been shattered. God's people are now of every nation and tongue, no longer identifiable with individual peoples or states.

Secularism - a society no longer compelled to enforce religious obedience among its subjects, on pain of judgment - is thus made possible by the death of Jesus. When an individual puts her faith in Christ she cannot become his without also becoming part of the people of God; God's covenant is made with his people as a whole. There is no salvation for the individual outside the collective salvation of God's people (which is why I continue to find Calvinism's emphasis on Christ's successful purchase of a definite people compelling). It is because of this ingrafting into the people of God that baptism - a public symbol of membership in God's family - is important. But it no longer coincides with membership in an earthly nation or obedience to a set of temporal laws.

If the potential for secularism was present from Jesus' death onwards, that potential had to remain unrealised in pre-modern societies, which functioned through personal relationships and localised hierarchies sealed and enforced through oaths. Public declarations of political and religious loyalty - which are quite superfluous in modern states - were vital to rulers who lacked the centralised bureaucracy necessary to enforce obedience among their subjects. (For example, a modern state knows who all its subjects are and where they live, something the ancients could not have imagined in their wildest dreams.)

Even the Roman state, often praised for its tolerance, could not solve the problem of religious diversity by becoming secular - atheist as a state - but only by being radically inclusivist, declaring all faiths valid and adding foreign deities to its pantheon. Still, it required that its subjects subordinate their loyalties to the imperial cult, and those who could not comply - Christians, most famously - had to suffer its wrath. Pre-modern societies that did not compel everyone's conversion (the political entities of the Islamic world, for example) nonetheless had to privilege one faith.

It was only with the vastly increased capacity of the state from the French Revolution onwards, and its sweeping aside of motley feudal ties and privileges, that overwhelmingly Christian societies could provide freedom of religion for their subjects without breaking down. Our nonconformist forebears - the very people from whom modern evangelicalism is descended - ardently campaigned and prayed for a secular state that would not exclude them on the basis of religion, and eventually obtained that sweet freedom.

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.

A thousand shall fall at thy side

It's rare for a film to preach an imaginary moral as zealously as Red State does. Director Kevin Smith, known for indie comedies like Clerks (1994) and Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), fancies himself the voice of one crying in the wilderness warning of the dangers posed by... what exactly? Red State (2011) is a transitional film, if a transition to not much: Smith swears his upcoming two-part Hit Somebody will be his final feature.

It's no wonder Smith struggled to find the funding for the production or that he was subsequently unable to find a distributor, leading to the director's infamous 'implosion' at Sundance and the apparently spontaneous decision to self-release the film instead of auctioning it off. During its limited theatrical release, Red State sank like a stone (its total domestic gross stands at $1.065 million) and was eventually foisted on a reluctant public through the uninspiring means of video-on-demand, Blu-ray and DVD.

The director's puzzlingly ill-informed invective against 'belief' will, sadly, turn out to be very much the most charming of Red State's flaws. We open with a teenager, Travis (Michael Angarano), being delayed on his way to school by fundamentalists protesting the funeral of the latest victim in a series of homophobic murders. Clunky plot-dumping reveals that the protesters are members of the insane Five Points Trinity Church, pastored by Abin Cooper (Michael Parks).

That's by the by for Travis, though, for he is a teenager in a Hollywood film and thus concerned only with fornication. His opportunity comes when he and his friends Jarod (Kyle Gallner) and Billy-Ray (Nicholas Braun) drive off to meet an older woman Jarod has connected with online for group sex. On the way they scrape the car of Sheriff Wynan (Stephen Root), who's engaged in a homosexual affair, but they flee before recognising the lawman. Arriving at the trailer of Jarod's floozy somewhere in the backwoods, the hapless teenagers are drugged by the supposed sex partner, Sara (Melissa Leo).

When Jarod wakes up, he finds himself in a cage at Five Points Trinity Church, where Cooper preaches an impromptu sermon on the role of homosexuals as Satan's agents on earth straight out of a Chick Tract. This scene, by the way, is genuinely quite good: it's an exaggerated portrayal but still a terrific evocation of folksy fundamentalism. Then the children are led outside by Sara's daughter Cheyenne (the lovely Kerry Bishé, in shorts of a length no God-fearing Christian would abide), and Cooper's sheep kill another prisoner (Cooper Thornton) by wrapping him in plastic and shooting him.

Travis and Billy-Ray, locked beneath the church, manage to escape and find the Five-Pointers' massive underground weapons cache, but Billy-Ray is killed in a firefight with the fundamentalists while Travis hides. The gunshots, meanwhile, attract the attention of a Sheriff Wynan's deputy (Matt Jones), whose investigation is cut short by a shotgun blast to the chest. Before long, a tactical team of the ATF, led by Joe Keenan (John Goodman), has surrounded the church compound, and a siege and vicious gunfight ensue as the agents attempt to force their way in while the surviving teens are trying to get out.

Our plot rests on an impossibility: we're supposed to believe that the church - whose members proclaim the imminent outpouring of God's wrath on the LGBTQ community - has been secretly stockpiling hundreds of automatic weapons and murdering homosexuals without raising suspicion. (Cooper blatantly confesses to these crimes in front of his captives, in the best tradition of Bond villains.) What's more, I daresay that if the Five-Pointers are actively ensnaring horny teens to murder them, they'll have their hands full; yet this, being the reason our heroes are at the church, is the conceit underpinning the whole film.

The bizarre behaviour of the church is a direct function of Smith's total confusion as to their theology. That excessive 'belief' is bad, stated baldly by Goodman's character at the end, is the film's moral; but there doesn't actually seem to be too much content. Cooper's church appear as a wacky combination of Westboro Baptist Church and the Branch Davidians: fearful of the government, which it believes is under the control of homosexuals, suspicious of the 'Zionist media' and awaiting the Rapture, Five Points Trinity isn't like any religious group in the real world. Sure, there's a general paranoia underlying the various groups of the religious right, but Smith's liberal bias leads to him simply conflating every cliché he can think of into a chimerical menace.

That leaves Red State oddly crippled in its ambition to be the earnest message picture Smith intended. Is it supposed to warn us of Westboro Baptist? But they're not armed. David Koresh? Dead. Fundamentalism as a whole? But Red State's church is a grotesque, largely unrecognisable caricature of the real thing (which, for the record, I oppose). There's an element of liberal chauvinism to this. The painfully awkward Southern dialogue, used exclusively by Cooper's faithful, suggests Smith believes some rather ugly things about everyone south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Smith's mess of a script leaves us no-one of the huge cast to root for, although Goodman comes closest. Michael Parks strains mightily against the millstone Smith has put around his neck, and his is the standout performance of the film, mixing ruthlessness with real affection for his congregation. In the second tier, there are a couple of actors familiar from vampire TV series (Marc Blucas of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Kevin Alejandro of True Blood). Ultimately the efforts of the capable cast are undone by the wanton cruelties of a script that delights in killing off characters just for the hell of it.

Smith is relatively new to directing action, but he acquits himself well with some rapid camera movement and Snorricam during chase scenes. Such flourishes, however, can't help stretch out the essentially shapeless plot - despite the large cast, Red State comes in at just 88 minutes including credits. Whatever Smith's intentions, it's full of sound and fury, signifying nothing whatsoever. There's little as irritating as being lectured by an ignoramus, especially one moralising from a privileged position.

'Host populations'

Will Hutton thinks that the left needs to smarten up its attitude towards immigration. The argument: the far right is gaining ground across Europe. The notion that 'the left must make the case that immigration is a force for good – it makes Europe richer' is 'denial'. If we are to win the debate on immigration, the left must argue for 'a good capitalism that will drive growth, employment and living standards by a redoubled commitment to innovation and investment' and 'accept that immigration offends basic attitudes to fairness' by allowing immigrants to 'get benefits without paying anything into the collective pot'.

Let's set aside that the likelihood of a 'good capitalism' is slim. Let's also set aside that Hutton is a liberal who has a deep fear and distrust of 'the mob'. His argument is a fairly standard one, one that has been repeatedly touted by the last Labour government and is now being championed by Maurice Glasman: in order to prevent a violent, barbaric racism we must embrace a legal, enlightened racism. In other words, we must wean racists from the racist far right by showing them their demands are being addressed.

But I really feel the need to seize on the term 'host population', which Hutton uses quite casually. It hardly needs saying that this phrase has two meanings, and this ambiguity serves the right. First, a host is someone who puts up guests and looks after them. Second, a host is the victim of a parasite. That, of course, is how the far right (fascist or otherwise) perceives 'the British': as a host body (the nation as an organism) that is being sucked dry by foreign leeches. Using a term like that is to walk right into racist discourse. One can only advise Hutton to stay away from it.

Aaron Porter's contortions

So, Aaron Porter – remember him? – warned ahead of yesterday’s student and trade union demonstrations in Manchester and London that ‘[s]tudent infighting harms our cause’ and that the correct strategy is ‘peaceful protests and engaging with politicians – not the violent tactics of a hard-left minority’. That Porter would decry ‘infighting’ in an article that is nothing but is ironic, or would be if he still commanded even a sliver of student support. Generally there is no reason to listen to, much less discuss, Porter’s pathetic mewling as he battles Nick Clegg for the prize of Least Relevant Person in Britain Today. But he uses a number of fairly insidious rhetorical sleights of hand, and those are worth taking apart.

First, Porter’s trying to reassert his leadership over the student movement. He wants to explode the notion that the NUS have been inactive, and he cites what he’s been up to. But of course the issue isn’t that the NUS are doing nothing; it’s that their actions are mostly symbolic and irrelevant. Does anyone remember their glow-stick vigil on 9 December, poorly attended mostly by, one imagines, people who couldn’t find the real protest that was taking place on Parliament Square where thousands were kettled by police for hours?

Now the man is trying to claim the Manchester demonstration while disowning the parallel London protest for being neither ‘supported by students’ unions’ nor having ‘adequate arrangements… for the safety of those involved’. This would be the Manchester demo where Porter had to be escorted by police to escape the wrath of students (so his safety was clearly adequately provided for – go NUS!) and the ‘largely peaceful’ London protest. In reality, of course, Porter is fighting a public relations campaign to persuade the public at large that he is still in charge; students know that he lost leadership of the movement the movement he supported the police and the media against protesters on 10 November.

That, then, is just nonsense. But Porter also claims that those who are in favour of direct action are a ‘hard-left minority’. There’s something really quite pathetic about the man who pledged his support for the UCL and other occupations (after the fact, of course) to now turn on those students and rhetorically marginalise them. First, Porter insists that those in support of and involved in direct action represent a minority of students. Although in my experience they greatly outnumber those who actively support the NUS, in absolute terms Porter’s point is irrefutably true – the majority of students are not well informed or involved. But it does not follow that they are therefore impostors and Porter himself the true embodiment of the will of the student body.

As Rosa Luxemburg wrote, the superstitious belief that ‘in order to carry anything, you must first have a majority’ is a product of ‘parliamentary cretinism’. ‘The same, they [the cretins] say, applies to revolution: first let’s become a “majority”. The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority – that’s the way the road runs.’ (The Russian Revolution, Ch. 1.) Substitute ‘struggle’ for ‘revolution’ and Luxemburg is clearly right even today.

Without the direct action of tax protests, would corporate tax avoidance have become an issue in the public consciousness? Without direct action at Millbank, on Parliament Square etc., would the student movement have been paid more than cursory attention in the mainstream press? Hardly. Determined minorities can create majorities, and there is nothing undemocratic about that. Opinions are not pre-existing notions stuck in someone’s head; they are created, shaped and reshaped by real events. Direct action is necessary, not in violation of but to create majorities.

Second, Porter claims that because most students’ unions are not opposed to him, the ‘radicals’ are a minority ‘pushed by outside forces on the hard-left of the political spectrum’. It’s not new for Porter to claim that mysterious ‘outside forces’ are the source of his troubles, but the main argument is more interesting. It’s intended to convince not students but readers of the Guardian who may not be aware that one of the major grievances of the ‘radicals’ is that they feel students’ unions as a whole with some laudable exceptions are unrepresentative, opportunistic and conservative.

The reasons why SU sabbatical officers are so often among the most reactionary of the student body are manifold and not relevant here, but it’s important that Porter seeks to hide the struggle between student activists and structurally conservative SUs. As these have often failed to support or sabotaged even the mildest action, real opposition to fees and cuts has in many places been forced to act outside the SU. Thus Porter’s argument is entirely circular: ‘the people who support me support me; therefore the complainers are wrong. QED.’ At many universities student activism is being driven by extra-SU forces, with the SU either totally isolated or being dragged along while bleating feebly about ‘moderation’ and ‘responsibility’. (And oh, see Porter’s insistence that the NUS must ‘play the hand we are dealt’, i.e. capitulate, a lapse into the futile ‘moderate’ NUS policy of the last decade-and-a-half that saw no real NUS opposition to the introduction, trebling, and now trebling again of tuition fees.)

So, let’s just stop listening to this man. But let’s have a debate about the NUS: can it be reformed or should it be ignored and bypassed? Ultimately I tend to the view, adapted from Lenin, that the students must be sought and engaged wherever they are to be found and that to this end working within as well as outside the NUS is important, if only to definitively break down its reactionary structures and revolutionise it to become a genuine fighting organisation for students’ interests. Either way, direct action is the way forward as students seek to unite with the wider working masses in our fight against this government.

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.