Christianity is concerned with the relationship of man to God as revealed to us in Jesus. Economic life, roughly, covers that sphere of social existence, in which man's needs are satisfied with the help of material goods. What is the relevance of Christianity to this or, for that matter, to any other sphere of man's social existence?
The answer which we can deduce from the Gospels is peculiar to Christianity. It is also the key to the predominance of ethics in its social philosophy.
The Christian axiom about the essence of society is of the utmost boldness and paradox. It can be put in the simple phrase that society is a personal relationship of individuals. Now, to regard society thus means to disregard altogether the share of institutional life and of other impersonal forces in social existence. In a sense it is the complete denial of the objective existence of society. A tension is created between the phenomenal and the essential aspect of man's social existence – a metaphysical hiatus which in Christianity is bridged by a definite ethical urge. It is our task to make society conform to its essence. Christian social philosophy becomes the elaboration of an ethical axiom.
This position is the outcome of the Jewish inheritance of Christianity. Jewish society was a theocracy. Down to the most minute detail of its structure and functioning it was supposed to conform to the revealed will of God. Jesus accepted this reference of the will of God to society as self-evident. But his vision of society was different from the Jewish. For him society consisted essentially of individual human beings and the will of God was concerned with the relation of these individuals to one another.
The teachings of Jesus as well as the doctrines of the Church are, in this respect, merely reassertions and clarifications of a basic relationship between human individuals. The doctrine of love, of brotherhood, of the fatherhood of God, are parts of a definition of this kind of relationship between human beings which belongs to the essence of society.
No word in the English language seems to designate unambiguously this aspect of social existence. The nearest approach to it is community in the sense of an affirmative personal relationship of human individuals, i.e. of a relationship which is direct, unmediated, significant for its own sake, “a personal response to a demand of persons”. Community is, therefore, for us, not synonymous with society. Indeed, the dialectic of the relation in which they stand to one another is the key to the social ethics of Christianity.
Two negative assertions seem to follow from this position.
On the other hand, according to the Gospel, community between human beings cannot exist apart from actual society. According to the parable of the Good Samaritan, community between persons consists in actual material sharing, not in the mere ideal sharing of common traditions and creeds. According to numerous other parables, community, to be real, must be continuous. It is this continuous actual sharing of life in its entirety which makes the Christian concept of community coextensive with society, i.e. with the permanent form of the material organization of human life. In the same manner, it is as an obstruction to, or a vehicle of, the fulfilment of community that history alone matters to the Christian.
Incidentally, this explains the Christian paradox. Christianity is indifferent towards society and history as such. But if the claims of community press for change in society, the judgment passed upon society is inexorable. And when history points to the next step in the achievement of universal community, its claim to the allegiance of the Christian is unconditional.
Thus, in order to discover our actual relationship to God we must try to understand the relation of community to society in a given time and place. All knowledge about society derives its relevance to the Christian from the light it sheds on this point.
Community consists in a definite personal relationship of individuals. In the main they are the same for particular groups of person in a particular society, the technologically conditioned relationships, such as the economic being necessarily identical for all members of the group. Indeed these relationships are, to some extent, the same for all members of a given society, whatever their relative positions in it be. To this extent no single individual can escape the responsibility for the continued existence of the particular society of which he is a member.
In a primitive society such as ancient Jewry the position is fairly simple. The old Jewish laws defined the kind of society that God wanted his chosen people to live in. If they disobeyed the laws it was not difficult to see, where and to what extent they had strayed from the path. Even in medieval society it was possible to refer actual human relationships to the will of God working towards the establishment of a universal community; also, here again, as with the Jews, the whole of society was justified by its positive reference to the will of God. It is in our present competitive industrial order that it has become almost impossible to trace individual relations through the indirect channels in society, or to refer the whole society in a final manner to the will of God.
The call for a “Christian Sociology” arises ultimately out of these conditions. Its concern is with the achievement of community in society in terms of human relationships. Is an ordered knowledge of social facts possible in modern civilization which would help us to define actual human relationships in such a manner as to enable us to judge how far our social organization is meeting the claims of community in a given time and place? This is the question.
The dialectic of the relationship between community and society must necessarily bear reference to the environmental factor, i.e. to the geophysical, technological, psycho-physiological and other accessories of permanent human groupings. Much of the actual structure of society is determined by this factor. It affects man as a physical being subject to the laws of mechanical causation; it affects him also as an animal being subject to the psychological and physiological laws of organic life. The urge towards community must seek expression inside the limits set by these laws, which determine the measure in which social organization can, under given environmental conditions, be based on direct personal relationships as against indirect and functional ones; the manner, in which the love and the fear motive combine in closing the group externally. The abstract ethic of community is transformed into the concrete ethics of a definite time and place.
But, how can we discover whether a move towards community is or is not warranted by man's environment? And is it possible to point out that aspect of social existence which, in a given time and place, represents the immediate obstacle to such a move?
At this point Marxism must be regarded as an outstanding contribution to so-called “Christian Sociology”, insofar as it takes its task seriously.
Almost exactly a hundred years ago Karl Marx started on his career as a philosopher with an unpublished work called “Kleanthes” (1836) which he himself described as “A philosophical and dialectical treatise on the nature of Divinity”, and its manifestations as pure Idea, as Religion, as Nature, and as History.” Although Marx destroyed the manuscript, it can be hardly doubtful that it was the natural starting-point of all his later work. The recently discovered brilliant manuscript of “Nationalökonomie und Philosophie” (another work not deemed worthy of publication by Marx) proves that anthropology was the background of Marxian philosophy. Marx's economics were, in fact, an application of his sociology to a special aspect of capitalist society, while his sociology itself was merely a part of his anthropology.
For the theologian, Marxism is essentially an effort to determine the actual relationship of mankind to God. Its preoccupation is with the definition of that which Christians call the “fullness of time”. It is an attempt to relate human time to eternal “time”.
According to Marx, the history of human society is a process of the self-realization of the true nature of man. In our present society the urge of our nature towards direct, personal i.e. human relationships is being thwarted. For the means of production are today the property of isolated individuals. In spite of the division of labour obtaining in society, the every day process of material production does not link up the producers in a conscious common activity, but keeps them apart from one another. Economic life is separated from the rest of life – it is an autonomous part of social existence, governed by its own automatism. Such a condition of things might have been morally indifferent as long as the material means of production could not be used or developed in any other fashion. But once technological and other environmental changes in the economic sphere permitted the ownership and use of the machines by society as a whole, the environmental precondition of a move towards a fuller realization of community was given and social ethics demanded a change in the property system.
The materialistic interpretation of history is an attempt to relate human time to eternal time, i.e. definite phases of history to the infinity of human evolution. This is achieved through the introduction of the principle of adequacy [or] inadequacy of the social system in relation to the environmental factor. According to Marx a social system is adequate if it safeguards the fullest use of the means of production available, while allowing human beings the highest self-realisation possible.
The immediate obstacle to a fuller realisation of community lies therefore, at the present stage, in the economic sphere.
The implications of this proposition from the Christian point of view cannot, however, be completely understood without some further clarification of Marxist views of the nature of the economic order.
The economic process, according to Marx, has a dual character. It is process between man and Nature, and between man and man.
The main economic process is production. In the course of this process by which mankind secures its material existence in interaction with Nature, definite relationships between man and man i.e. between the individual members of society are established.
Accordingly, the two original factors of production are man and Nature (or: Labour and Land).
Economic laws and phenomena proper are those deriving from man's relation to Nature. These are, indeed, “natural” and “timeless” in contrast to the merely historical laws and phenomena. The latter are an expression of the definite relations of man to man, i.e. of the actual organisation of economic life in a given time and place.
Thus we arrive at two series of laws and phenomena:
The distinction is of general validity. It is of special importance when dealing with the term “capital” in its two different meanings.
Capital proper is only another name for machinery, tools, plant or accumulated resources which are the precondition of production of almost any kind. In this sense capital is a “natural” and “timeless” category of economics.
Capital (with a C) as a fund of money value the ownership of which is a source of income, is a historical phenomenon obtaining only under a definite organization of economic life. Ultimately it is the outcome of the system of private ownership of the tools, plant, machinery and other means of production i.e. of capital proper.
In short, capital as a means of production is an economic category proper. Capital as a source of income is a historical category, i.e. it is part of a transient economic order.
But it is precisely as a historical category that capital assumes a dignity which is not its due i.e. that of an original factor of production alongside of Man and Nature.
The semblance of the independent existence of capital is not, however, the only semblance of an objective reality that we encounter in our present society in the economic sphere. The objective or exchange value of commodities is an instance. Indeed the very commodity character of goods under our present economic system is only another result of the working of that subtle process for which Marx coined the term of “fetishisation”.
What exactly did Marx mean by the term fetishisation? And in what manner do the categories of exchange value, Capital and so on result from the workings of this mysterious process?
The theory of the fetish character of commodities is rightly regarded as the key to Marx's analysis of capitalist society. It is, in fact, another outcome of Marx's basic distinction between economics as a relation between man and Nature and economics as a relation between man and man.
In dealing with the problem of price, Ricardian economics was brought up against the question of the origin of objective or exchange value in commodities. Commodities are goods produced for sale on the market. Their value seems inseparable from them. They sell at a price more or less determined by their value, they are exchanged for other commodities in proportion to their relative values, they disappear from the market when prices fall below their value, they reappear again when prices rise – in a word, they come and go, change hands, remain on stock, or are consumed, according to their objective or exchange value. Thus the movements of the commodities on the market appear to be governed by a force (their value) which resides in the commodities themselves as if these objects were endowed with a secret life or spirit of their own which makes them act according to its will.
Of course, this is no more than a semblance. Like the stone or tree into which the savage projects his own spirit turning thereby the lifeless object into a superstitiously revered fetish, the goods produced for the market “possess an exchange value” as a result of a similar process of unconscious introjection. What appears to us as the objective exchange value of the goods, is, in reality, merely a reflection of the mutual relationship of the human beings engaged in production of the goods. Though the producers of boots or milk respectively are unaware of carrying on their production for one another, the relative exchange values of the boots and of the milk are the outcome of their relationship as producers, more especially in reference to the amount expended on producing these goods. Thus, in capitalism producers are determining the prices “behind their own backs”. Unconsciously, they are the originators of a process upon the result of which their own economic existence depends. Commodities are things ruling over their own creators. Still, when and where production for the market is the rule, the fetish character of commodities is inevitable.
Now let us return to Marx's inquiry into the nature of Capital.
Under the present economic system, Capital is the dominant factor in economic life. The flow of Capital determines the conditions of the creation of wealth. Labour without the help of Capital is incapable of producing almost anything. The ownership of Capital is a source of income. This income derives obviously from the “productivity” of the Capital owned. Whether Capital takes the form of plant or raw materials or the abstract form of money and securities, it is the principal agency in economic life. Not only Labour but Nature herself seem barren without the Capital necessary to gain access to her treasures and to make them available to the industrial community. It is the scarcity of Capital which prevents potentially rich countries from developing their natural wealth in spite of the abundant labour power at their disposal. If there is one concept firmly established in middle class thinking it is that of Capital as a primary factor of production.
In view of the Marxian analysis of the pseudo-reality of historical economic categories the illusionary character of this concept of Capital is obvious. A glance at society as a whole is enough to destroy the superficial notion of capital as a primary factor of production alongside of nature and human labour. For the tools, raw materials, machines or food supplies called capital (whether conceived of their actual reality or represented by the purchasing power necessary to acquire them) are no more than different combinations of the two actual primary factors, human Labour and Nature – the result of the interaction of these.
The illusion that Capital is a primary factor of production is due to the social organization of economic life under our present order. This point is of the utmost importance. The private ownership of the machines implies that the owners of the machine appropriate the result of the work done with the help of the machine. Not the worker but the machine appears as the procreator of the wealth produced with the help of the machine. Moreover, the productivity services of the tools are attributed not to the instruments themselves but to their owners, whose willingness to supply them is essential in securing their participation in production. Ultimately, the creation of the product is credited to the owner of the machine. The income derived from the mere ownership of the machine can be thus explained (and justified) as a result of the productive functions of ownership. From here it is only a step to regard money as productive on account of the machine and other means of production that can be procured by its help.
The series of imputations is an outcome of the false perspective created by the distortion of economic phenomena proper in a society where the means of production are owned privately. It is this false perspective which accounts for the common acceptance of the fetish-concept of Capital under our present economic system.
Of all practical conclusions drawn from this fantastic concept of Capital one of the most important is the inference that the solution of the social question lies in the cooperation of Labour and Capital are on equal footing. Such a cooperation is regarded almost as the outcome of a natural law which makes them joint partners in the task of production. Under the wages system this is indeed a truism. For nothing could be more “natural” than that the two parties to a contract should have an equal standing and should collaborate with one another as equals.
From the Christian point of view the notion of parity between Capital and Labour is a fantastic misconception. It means the equation of humanity with a fetish. Labour is human and personal, Capital is Labour, self-estranged. Labour represents an aggregate of human beings; Capital is merely their distorted reflection. Its separate existence is a semblance which derives from the system of private property. Where the means of production are not in private hands, neither does there exist Capital as opposed to Labour – the only valid distinction is between present Labour and past Labour, Labour spent on consumers’ goods and Labour spent on producers’ goods. The equation of Labour and Capital by Christian thinkers is worse than a misunderstanding – it is a proof of the lack of any serious effort on their part to gauge the spiritual nature of modern economics. The persistent reiteration in the resolutions of the various oecumenical conferences of the suggestion of cooperation between Labour and Capital on a basis of parity as the solution of the social problem must be regarded not only as an outstanding example of the failure of representative Christian gatherings to formulate in adequate terms what is the greatest social problem of our time but also as a symptom of a fateful decline of common religious sensibility.
We can appreciate now more accurately the meaning of the Marxian proposition that at present the immediate obstacle to the self-realisation of man in society lies in the economic sphere.
In view of the double dependence of the individual for his material existence on Nature and on his fellows, the important role of the means of production in determining the possible relationships of human beings to one another is apparent. The sharing of material existence is part of human community. The achievement of community cannot, therefore, be independent of the conditions of material existence. These inevitably enter into the determination of the adequacy or inadequacy of the actual organisation of society, whether political or economic proper.
It is this economic organisation of society proper which, according to Marx, forms the immediate obstacle to the fulfilment of community at the present state of development.
The economic organisation of society is based today on the private ownership of the means of production. This has come about by the introduction of machinery into a system of production which was adapted to meet the demand of ever widening markets. Competitive machine production destroyed the imperfect community, the “democracies of unfreedom”, of the Middle ages, but failed to create new community, a democracy of freedom.
Human consciousness is being reformed in our epoch.
Man's consciousness of self was born out the recognition of death. His consciousness was reformed by the discovery of the true nature of man – that life is personal and free. In our time the form of man's consciousness is being changed by the recognition of society.
Society is inescapable. We cannot help living our lives at the expense of others. Man in society is, though unwittingly, generating power, and is thereby coercing other men. He cannot contract out of it. Even public opinion is itself a form of power to which each man contributes whether he likes it or not. There is no withdrawal from society except in imagination. Freedom from society is gained at the moral expense of disowning our debts to others. In the very attempt to safeguard personality we lose its content.
Like the knowledge of death, so the knowledge of society is final; by it we grow mature. That freedom which we lose by the recognition of society is illusory; the freedom we gain is valid. In the acceptance of our loss, in the insistence on the fulfilment of our nature in and through society; in the certainty of ultimate attainment, our consciousness is being re-grounded in reality.
The discovery of the personal nature of life and of the ultimate freedom of the individual is linked in the Gospels with the denial of the need for compulsion and coercion. Human beings are there regarded as a community of persons needing neither law nor organisation, and rejecting both for the sake of community; nobody rules; it is a state of ideal anarchy. Community transcends society, which is at best tolerated.
Still, the Gospels insisted on social and economic justice, on the transformation of social institutions. Community, to be real, must both transcend society and transform it. Even the comparatively simple society of the times could not be ignored.
Under a complex division of labour, embracing greater and greater numbers, society is “destiny unshunnable, like death.”2 The idealist community of the anarchist does not overcome society in reality but merely in imagination.
To the new consciousness the condition of man under capitalism appears for what it is – a state of self-estrangement. By being estranged from other men, man is estranged from himself. The socialist transformation is recognised as the only means by which self-estrangement can be overcome, and personal life re-claimed in a complex society.
In the cataclysm of our time it is Christianity that is destroying this civilization and bringing in a new one. The Christian force in history is asserting its creative nature by annihilating an order of things which is attempting to negate that force. We find ourselves sure of Christianity and not anxious for its future; our sole concern is for the future of the working-class movement, the chief instrument of the transformation.