Though Cowards Flinch

Mil has a short article which asks some penetrating questions about the relationship between belief, religious or cultural, and how we see the world around us, our perceptions of the interrelated phenomena which make up society. As a Marxist, these are questions which go right to the heart of any potential explanation about the relationship between our perceptions and reality. Marx, writing to evade the Prussian censors, wrote about the “base” and “superstructure” of society, where the base, the economic, determines the ideological superstructure.

On one reading, it would be too easy to regard that as a mechanistic explanation of all change. The result would be some sort of world where in order for contending ideologies to change, for one to defeat the other, they have to introduce a change in the economic “base” of society – i.e. the forces and relations of production. For every “speech-act”, of radicalism or conservatism, the true mechanic determinist would seek to find the element of the economic base which gives it meaning – which is as much true for religion as open politics.

Religion, after all, is what postmodernists would call a meta-narrative. By its assumptions, proscriptions and prescriptions, it aims to set out a totalising explanation of the world. Anticommunists commonly assert that Marxism is a religion, though their arguments are often facile insofar as they are attempting to accuse Marxists of being unselfconscious fanatics, associating with Marxism the excesses of fundamentalist religion. However the comparison can be apt enough, if we think about matters on a different level.

In the 1640′s, the revolutionary and the royalist equally held to a religious idiom. The world of the seventeenth century was immersed in its religion, and it was through religious idiom that the English Revolution of 1642-1660 would be fought. Republicans would usurp the discourse of the royalists, for example the metaphor of the King as head of the body politic (analogous to Christ being head of the church) was turned around by invoking the “heart” as the centre of the body, not the head. Religion became revolutionary.

This much is evident from any reading of the sources, from the pamphlet wars to the Putney Debates. However, the debate which Mil has opened provokes the question, to what extent did religion merely provide the ideological forms of the “real” economic struggle? For that matter, what might the “real” struggle even have been? To what extent is radical religion a rudimentary class consciousness, struggling to break through? How accurate can religion ever be as a means to interpret the events of the world around us?

Broadly speaking, in the English revolution there were three sides: the King at the head of an autocratic project, supported by many landowners, Parliament supported in its opposition to said autocratic project by many landowners, and “the people”, the small freeholders, the farm labourers and so forth that went to make up the Army of Parliament. The King, Parliament and the people each had disparate economic interests, which I’ll come back to, but economics could not determine who supported the King.

From the standpoint of the seventeenth century, the autocratic project was the way of the future, at least on the continent: a monarch, possessed of such a large fiscus that he would stand virtually independent from the other landowners of the kingdom. Why would any noble support that? Potentially each large landowner had interests pulling him in both directions – why side with either? The answer must obviously come down to ideology – the manner through which people consciously construct the world they live in.

Some of these issues will be religious – indeed there are case studies of individual familes where either a brother or a father supported one side, and his brother or son supported the other. Whole families split over the divine right of Kings. This is of course a dramatic simplification – to be factored in must also be struggles over the Prayer Book, the wars of the Tudors and Stuarts and the spectacle of the Grand Remonstrance, to name but few. The point is clear, however: economics is not a sufficient analytical factor on its own.

We cannot reduce the role of religion to its economic base, but nor can religion explain away underlying economic factors. Economics, the means of fashioning subsistance with all the antagonisms implied by the need to exploit labour, cannot be reduced to religion. The only thing left to do is explain the relationship between them – and Marxists come down on the side of economics as determinant in the final instance, i.e. it is the genesis of the contradiction which creates and directs other determinants, which in turn change economics.

This is why class-based analysis is so vital to a socialist project of emancipation; it recognizes each of these determinants but more importantly it stacks them in their proper order, without reducing one to another. As life’s idiom in the seventeenth century, the institutions of religion were bound to be torn between different classes, each waging a war against the other so that its own appropriation of religious discourse would become the dominant one. This battle was occasionally mirrored by actual physical battles.

In the 21st century, this no longer holds true. Religion was embedded in the feudal economy through the role of the church, whether Catholic or Protestant. The break with Rome in the 16th century did not change the fact that bishops were still huge landowners and benefactors of the arts. Religion is no longer embedded and central to the economics of the world, and though it is still the form through which ideological struggles are fought, a space is now open where we can talk about things as they actually are.

There is no longer the need to ground arguments in religious metaphor – indeed because religious institutions have almost universally been ceded to elements of the ruling class or those who hang on its coattails, religion has become utterly conservative and reactionary. Even during the seventeenth century, though all the people I revere as principled men of righteous conviction were religious, even then religion was by today’s standards reactionary, seeking at most a communal government of male small producers.

Argument might be made that this is not necessarily true in Latin America, where fifty years ago revolutionary theology was an emancipatory praxis but even there, the capacities of special church leaders to mobilize the working classes is often blunted by an inadequate theory of class.

Herein lies what I believe to be the crux of Mil’s problem: far from needing a formal architecture of belief in order to construct the terms of agreement or disagreement, we need a praxis shaped for today’s world. We shouldn’t be looking towards dialogue with religion, we should be putting arguments to the working class that they can see their own position in the relations of production for what it is, without the need to construct religious justification. Changing that position, bettering the lives of billions, should be justification enough.

Our praxis, our conjoining of theory and practice, needs to appeal against the “better” instincts of religion such as charity, against the “humanist” mask which obscures class struggle and blunts it. In this way, as Marxists, we can re-tool the religious (if not religion) to do what they want to do for humankind far better than they could ever do for themselves, so long as they continue to live within the religious idiom. The problem with religion isn’t that it sees what isn’t there, it’s that it doesn’t see what is.