In the letter pages of the ‘Observer’ (16.05.2024) Christine Crossley, a religious studies teacher from Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, claimed that socialism is rooted in Christian socialism and chapel and also rooted in Marx.
The first root she claims, “tends towards a dignity of the individual bound together in society and working towards the kingdom of god here on earth”. The second Marxian root, she believes, tends towards “a totalitarian collectivism inherently hostile to religion”.
It is true that Marx was critical of religion. In his essay “Towards a Critique of the Philosophy of Hegel”, Marx argued that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed soul, it is the emotion of an emotionless world, and, in the same way that it is, as it were, the spirit of a spiritless system, so religion is the opium of the people”.
Here, Marx uses the metaphor of drug addiction to show that religion possesses the important social function. Religion provides for believers an empty consolation similar to addicts who find their “fix” as an escape from the real-world which they find harrowing, brutal and bleak.
Religion lets capitalism off the hook. Instead of understanding that the problems of poverty, poor housing and health, war, discrimination and social alienation derive from the private ownership of the means of production and distribution by a minority class of exploiters, religious believers look to heaven and God.
In other words, Marx meant that people who were unable to cope with the exploitation, competition, violence and sheer unpleasantness of capitalism looked towards an afterlife where these oppressive conditions no longer existed and all was “milk and honey”. Religion was a form of childish escapism rooted in material reality.
Crossley is also wrong to conceive the Marxian roots leading to totalitarianism. The root of socialism and socialist ideas is the condition of the working class under capitalism. A working-class majority who are forced to sell their ability to work for an employer. Workers are exploited in the productive process producing what Marx called “surplus value” from which the unearned income of rent, interest and profit derives.
Marx’s critique of capitalism gives a clear understanding to the working class that they have no interest in commodity production and exchange for profit and that politicians can never make capitalism work for workers and their dependents.
Marx was for working class freedom not totalitarianism.
He gave three guiding libertarian principles with respect to revolutionary socialism:
1). “…we shall have an association [in socialism], in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (‘Communist Manifesto’).
2). ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’ (Critique of the Gotha Programme).
3. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto, ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system’ (Value, Price and Profit).
As for religion, ‘Christian Socialism’ is a contradiction in terms. Christianity is not rational but faith based where people cravenly worship a god and have religious leaders telling them how to think and what to do. Socialism, on the other hand is the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
Socialism has no leaders nor a group of people who wish to be led. Workers who become socialists are expected to think for themselves. Marx said, ‘question everything’. Workers should reject the leadership principle found in capitalism and uncritically accepted across the capitalist political spectrum., question everything and reject the capitalist leader principle.
Marx was for working class freedom: freedom from the labour market, freedom from buying and selling of the commodity labour power, freedom from employers and the capitalist class and freedom from the coercive state whose principal function is to defend private property ownership.
There will be no coercive state in socialism, instead there will be an administration of things not people The attributes of the dignity of the individual based together in society is nearer Marx than Crossley imagines.
However, to realise freedom from capitalism requires the working class to take democratic and political action to establish global socialism the common ownership, etc. rather than the mysticism of the kingdom of god.
