Socialism’s trending — it’s just like 1639
Marxism has been trending on Twitter of late. All sorts of people have got their panties/briefs in a bunch about it. Right-wing Twitter in particular is having the vapours about dangerous, scary, and outrageous leftist activities. Harry Styles is a Marxist for wearing a dress, apparently. And no less strangely, various right wing accounts are scolding Georgia senate candidate “@ReverandWarnock” for 1. (possibly) attending a church gathering a long time ago that was connected with the bete noire of conservative US politics, Fidel Castro; and 2. for saying Jesus was a “poor Palestinian prophet”. I’m no Biblical scholar, but the facts seem firmly with the Rev on point 2.
Let’s review the issues.
Poor? Tick. That Jesus eschewed worldly goods and preached the virtue of spiritual rather than material wealth seems beyond doubt — there’s the whole rich man/camel/eye of the needle/kingdom of heaven, thing as well as his basic, y’know, … poverty. 1–0, Rev.
Palestinian? Tick. Jesus was born in Bethlehem to Jewish, Palestinian parents (his mortal ones at least) so this seems indisputable on both geographic and cultural grounds. If we used FIFA regulations to decide the issue objectively, Jesus would qualify to play football (or soccer if you must) for Palestine on multiple counts (his best position is open to debate, but goal keeper has to be a good first guess). 2–0, Rev.
Prophet? Tick. 3–0 Rev. He was a prophet. He made prophesies; about being betrayed, being denied by Peter and deserted by his disciples, about the long future life his teachings would have after his death, to give just a few examples. If he’d been in the prophesying-for-profit line he could probably have made a decent living at it; especially given the size of the crowds he was pulling towards the end of his ministry (but see the earlier point under Poor). Of course, for a lot of people he was also/is the Messiah but Prophet and Messiah are not mutually exclusive categories.
I won’t pretend that I really get the problem that the right is having with all this. Their beef seems to be that (in their opinion) Rev Warnock is a Marxist (which is axiomatically bad) and so there’s something evil and Marxist about him saying Jesus was a “poor Palestinian Prophet”. However, the facts of Jesus’ life, just taken as facts, seem squarely with the Rev. As an observer, I’m also inclined to believe that since he’s a Reverend in the Christian faith he is probably qualified to talk about both the mortal and deistic attributes of the leader of his Church, irrespective of his political position. For what it’s worth, I also think if Rev. Warnock knows he went to a meeting that had some sort of association with the late Cuban leader he should say so; but I also don’t think it really matters much if he did. This one story, though, seems to encapsulate a lot that is perplexing to outsiders about how vexed people here can become at the very idea of anyone being politically to the left of Blue Dog Democrats.
The election in the USA, and the backwash from it, have made me think about the political landscape much more than I had previously. We arrived in the US in 2010. In some ways this is a different, and more foreign, country than the one we moved to a decade ago; in other ways it hasn’t changed at all, only my perception of it has altered. I’ve been thankful for the writings of Umair Haque over recent months to shake me out a kind of mental lethargy about the state of US politics and its wider social context.
The outright fear that many people seem to have of what’s called the left here is, to a European like me, astonishing. The whole political landscape in the US is so right-leaning compared with other western democracies that fears of creeping socialism or … brace yourselves… communism, seem laughable. For a start, there’s just the empirical fact of the body count. The toll of US dead and wounded fighting fascism in WWII is roughly 670,000 more than the total killed and wounded fighting communism in Korea and Vietnam combined. There’s also (perhaps) a tendency here, more than elsewhere in the world, to conflate Capitalism and Democracy. This leads people to think that anything which opposes one, automatically opposes the other. As Yanis Varoufakis and others have pointed out (from much better-informed positions than mine) it is perfectly possible to have capitalism without democracy; they are not the same thing at all. This isn’t a trivial point. The objective moral value inherent in democracy isn’t necessarily shared with it’s frequent bedfellow, capitalism — at least not in it’s unconstrained, neoliberal, incarnation.
In other democracies, openly socialist (or even communist — yikes!) representatives get elected and take their seats among the various flavours of: liberals, Labour parties, greens, social democrats, Christian democrats (and various other pairings of religion|political persuasion), Conservatives, nationalists, right-wing populists, and independents. They throw their horrific leftist ideas (like a National Health Service, offering treatment free at the point of delivery, or decent, free public education) into the political melting pot and everybody seems to cope. God forbid anything so liberated would happen here in the land of the free.
And so, as a genuine authoritarian fascist tries with increasing desperation, and shrinking chance, to kill off democracy from the right, while he and his cronies and enablers continue to stoke fears about the terrible threats that the country faces from the left — their strategy really does have no more subtlety than a playground bully saying “look over there!” and pointing one way while he tries to steal your lunch from the other — I’ve been wondering what it is that’s so unsettling to Americans about socialism? Especially since ideas that are Marxist in spirit were right here at the start, when white Europeans rocked up and started appropriating bits of the continent. That’s right, you read that last bit correctly; some of the early settlers were proto-Marxists. Given the right’s new-found love of originalism, I think this is an important point.
I’m talking specifically about this well-known “Marxist” idea: “From each according to his [sic] ability, to each according to his needs”. In an effort to understand the US unease with socialism I decided to research the origin of that expression. Is it just its association with Marx that makes it problematic? As so often happens these days, Google and Wikipedia made the anticipation of the search a lot more exciting than the actual search.
Like many other people (apparently) I had always attributed the phrase to Marx (Karl not Groucho, just to be clear), but it seems that it’s a much older concept; Marx was only one of many people to use it. Now I’d contend, taken in isolation, there’s nothing particularly scary or objectionable about the principle that the expression encodes; if you didn’t know it was socialism, would you think it was evil? To me it seems completely innocuous, and probably something any functioning democracy with a sense of social well-being would want to consider.
However, I concede I might lack perspective here. I grew up in an area of Scotland where there had been a Labour Party MP with a comfortable majority for as long as anyone could remember. People used to say you could put a chimpanzee on the Labour ticket in Central Fife and it would get elected; others (with that eviscerating Scottish wit that hardens us from an early age against the barbs of sarcasm) said that that was exactly what had been happening for decades. From as early as I can remember, and well into my young adulthood, the MP who was the butt of these jokes was Willie Hamilton. He had some national notoriety as a vocal republican (republican in the sense that he wanted to get rid of the institution of the UK royalty). A good Trades Union socialist, Mr Hamilton lost his first ever bid to get elected to parliament … you might want to sit down for this.. to a communist. As I said, I lack the perspective to understand how “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” sounds to US ears.
The writer(s) of the Wikipedia page about the phrase point out that the underlying idea can be traced much further back in history than Marx. Thanks to them I discovered the existence of the Guildford Covenant of 1639. I was initially misled by Guildford and covenant. The Guildford I know is a fairly ordinary town in the county of Surrey in England. It’s close enough to London to be expensive and crowded without having any of the actual benefits of being in London. In 1638 the Scottish Covenanters challenged the assertion of the Stuart Kings that the Stuarts had a Divine right to rule and also to be the spiritual leaders of the Church. So, when I read “Guildford” , “Covenant” and “1639” I wondered if there had been a similar plebeian uprising against the assumption of privilege by the English Crown. Not only did I not have the right sort of covenant I didn’t even have the right Guildford.
The Guildford in question is not the one in Surrey, it’s the one in Connecticut, and the Covenant was the founding document of what is now New Haven. To save you looking it up it reads as follows:
We whose names are here underwritten, intending by God’s gracious permission to plant ourselves in New England, and if it may be, in the southerly part about Quinnipiack, do faithfully promise each, for ourselves and our families and those that belong to us, that we will, the Lord assisting us, sit down and join ourselves together in one entire plantation, and be helpful each to the other in any common work, according to every man’s ability, and as need shall require, and we promise not to desert or leave each other or the plantation, but with the consent of the rest, or the greater part of the company who have entered into this engagement.
Socialists in New Haven in 1639, founding their colony on scary “proto-Marxist” ideas like giving what you can and getting what you need in return. Where would it lead? The word plantation is deeply troubling to 21st Century ears and I’m not enough of a history scholar or linguist to know if it follows blamelessly, as it were, as the noun from the verb in “to plant ourselves”, or not. Even if it does, however, it cannot escape all the horrific connotations the word has now. I’ll digress for a final time to point out that the descendants of plantation slaves just banded together with many other minorities and a minority of white voters, to stop a fascist from returning to power.
Not only was the idea from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, right there at the founding of the white European version of this country, those Connecticut settlers — with vision that seems all too relevant today — also recognized the social contract that was needed to make their venture a success — “and we promise not to desert or leave each other or the plantation, but with the consent of the rest, or the greater part of the company who have entered into this engagement”. Would that the spirit of public good was as healthy in the Republic today.
