Читать книгу Communism and Christianism - William Montgomery Brown - Страница 14

The immediate aim of the Communists (Socialists) is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties; formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism.

All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favor of bourgeois property.

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonism, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labor, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has, to a great extent, already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?

But does wage-labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of getting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labor. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is therefore not a personal, it is a social power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class-character.

Let us now take wage-labor:

The average price of wage-labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence, as his labor merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only insofar as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In Communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

The version of the Marxian gospel which we have in the Manifesto is among the first of its versions. It was published about the middle of the last century. Within the short period which has intervened, it has changed nearly all of the ideas of a large and rapidly growing part of every nation about almost everything social; and before the middle of the present century, it will revolutionize all nations as it has Russia.

Ludendorff, the greatest among the military authorities in Germany, saw and terribly feared this, and called Europe to arms to prevent it. In his almost frantic appeal he said:

Bolshevism is advancing now and in a gradual progress from east to west and is crushing everything between the midland sea and the Atlantic ocean. It was easy to foresee that the Bolshevist armies would attack toward the middle of May and defeat the Poles, as they have now done. The world at large must, therefore, figure with a Bolshevist advance in Poland toward Berlin and Prague.

Poland's fall will entail the fall of Germany and Czecho-Slovakia. Their neighbors to the north and south will follow. Fate steps along with elementary force. Let no one believe it will come to a stand without enveloping Italy, France and England. Not even the Seven Seas can stop it.

Under the capitalist system most people are and must continue to be slaves. If you are a slave (all wage earners, as such, are slaves) the socialist literature, the greatest of all literatures, will thrill you with the hope of liberty. Read, note and inwardly digest it. No wage earner who does this will ever again vote either the Democratic or the Republican ticket. As a whole this literature is a brilliantly illuminating and almost resistlessly persuasive explanation of the most sane, the most salutary and withal the most promising movement towards the freeing of all toiling men, women and children (nine of every ten) from their body and soul destroying slavery.

Both Socrates and Jesus are recorded as teaching that the saviour of the world is truth. Among saving truths (there is no truth without some saving efficacy) the greatest is the one which was discovered and formulated concurrently by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and it is in substance this: all which makes for the good of mankind ultimately depends wholly upon the laborious constructors and operators of the machines for the cultivation, production and distribution of the necessities of life, not at all upon the owners of these machines, who at best are idlers and at worst schemers, and in any case parasites.

In the beginning was Work. All things were made by it; and without it was not anything made that was made. In it was life; and the life was the light of men.

The opening verses of the gospel according to John have been thus interpreted. The commentator acknowledges that they do not read so now, but contends for good and sufficient reasons, that, if there ever was any truth in them, something to this effect must have been their original reading. Certainly there is no truth in them as they have come down to us.

This representation to the effect that productive labor is the saviour of the world, its real god, the divinity in which we live, move and have our being, is the great truth, the gospel of International Socialism, the greatest of all movements, the movement which carries the only rational hope for the freeing of mankind from all its unnecessary suffering—and the most poignant sufferings, those imposed by the great trinity of evils: (war, poverty and slavery) are not necessary.

Capitalism and Christianism are alike not only in having gods which are symbols, but also in having great buildings set apart for the worshipping of them.

The representatives of the god below the vault worship him in banks under the leadership of a threefold ministry: presidents, cashiers and bookkeepers.

The representatives of the god above the vault worship him in churches under the leadership of a threefold ministry: bishops, priests and deacons.

Speaking particularly of Christianity and America the trouble is not at all with our Brother Jesus and Uncle Sam divinities, but wholly with what they symbolize, capitalism—the god of liars, robbers and warriors.

What our Brother Jesus and Uncle Sam should alike symbolize are the classless divinities: (1) law, the king of the physical realm, and (2) truth, the queen of the moral realm.

Law is what nature does. There is no other law, and this law is the god of the physical realm. The gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, and all the rest) are personifications, or symbols, of this god, or else they are superstitions.

This representation is proved in practice to be true, on the one hand, by the fact that no one needs to live with reference to any among those gods, not even the god, Jesus; and, on the other hand, by the fact that none who fail to live with reference to this god, law, lives at all.

Every act of nature, that is, every physical and psychical phenomenon which enters into the constitution of the universe, is a word of the revelation of this god, and there is no other revelation. All men must constantly live with reference to it or else immediately die.

Truth is the interpretation of this law in the light of human experience, reason and investigation with the view of making human life, that of self and of all who come or can be brought within the range of one's influence, as long and happy as possible.

Any one who desires and endeavors rightly to learn, interpret and live this law to these ends is moral. In everything is he wholly good and in nothing at all bad.

Religion is not anything good, except only as it is a synonym of such morality, and this is equally true of politics.

War shortens much life and fills more with misery, hence it is utterly immoral, and this is equally true of poverty and slavery.

In what I say here and in some other places about war being essentially evil, the wars referred to are those by which the world has been cursed through all the ages—wars between different groups of owners with conflicting interests, not the war between owners and workers which is now on. This war will bless, not curse, the world, because it is for the emancipation of the slave class, not for the enrichment of one group of the masters at the expense of another group, at the cost of increased misery to all the slaves on both sides.

If there is any truth in the representation that real religion and real politics alike consist in desiring and endeavoring to make terrestrial life (there is no celestial life of which aught is known) long and happy, the advocate of war is the worst of heretics against Christianism and the worst of traitors against Americanism.

War is a necessary characteristic of vegetables and animals, because they cannot make and operate machines for the supplying of their needs.

Peace is the necessary characteristic of humans, because they can make and operate machines for the supplying of their needs.

Wars between capitalists are inevitabilities, as much so as the wars between two hungry dogs, when one has a bone upon which the lives of both depend. The only difference between capitalists and dogs is, that dogs do their own fighting, whereas capitalists first rob the laborers who produce their commodities, and then persuade or compel them to fight their battles with fellow capitalists in their competitive efforts to distribute them.

On the one hand it is true that a few capitalists do lose money in wars, and still fewer their lives, but on the other hand it is equally true that the majority of them are made richer and that producing and distributing laborers ultimately bear every cent of the enormous financial burden, and that for every machine owning master who is killed or wounded there are a hundred wage earning slaves.

Yet neither the making nor operating of machines constitutes a man a human. It is co-operation which does this. Nor will co-operation in itself suffice. Bees and ants co-operate and even capitalists do so, yet with all their co-operating bees and ants remain animals and so do capitalists. The co-operation which converts animals into humans is the one which is purposely inaugurated and sustained with the view of securing to each one the fruits of his labor while at the same time increasing them for all—that deliberate co-operation which consists in conscious living, letting live and helping to live.

It is this co-operation which constitutes the most essential difference between the animal and the human. Only animalism can exist and flourish on a competitive basis, yet this is the basis upon which men who falsely claim to be humans are living.

Until mankind begins the construction of a civilization on a foundation of co-operation in the production and distribution of the necessities of life, it should not set up a claim to humanism for itself, because meantime it cannot sustain such a claim.

It is perfectly natural and absolutely necessary for dogs to have belligerent contentions for bones, because they cannot peacefully co-operate in the making of them; and yet men who can do this are more fierce by far in their competitive struggles for the bones which are necessities to their lives.

Revolutionary socialists of the Marxian or Bolshevikian type offer the only solution of the two great questions of the world at this time: (1) how to save it from its intermittent and lesser hell of suffering by the bloody wars between rival sets of capitalists, and (2) how to save it from its perpetual and greater hell of suffering by the bloodless wars between the machine owning masters and the machine operating slaves, which wars, if less excruciating, are yet more destructive of both life and happiness.

1. As to the bloody wars, a league of nations could prevent them only while the dogs are sleeping off their exhaustion.

Nor could government ownership be depended upon for protection. It would increase the armies and navies, making it next to impossible that more than a decade or two should pass before our children must suffer as much as, or more than, we have by the recent war between the bull dog and the blood hound.

We are not at all indebted to the victory of the bull dog (England) over the blood hound (Germany) for what we have in the way of a guarantee against future wars, but wholly to the presumption of the Newfoundland dog (Russia) which has quietly walked off with the bone of contention while the belligerents were scrapping over it.

Notwithstanding all appearances and impressions to the contrary, this bone never was really Paris or Berlin, but first one and then another country—the Balkan States, Mexico, Persia, Morocco and Russia.

Of late Russia has been the chief bone of contention. Hence all the snarling against Russian Bolshevism, one of a large litter of puppies born to the Newfoundland since the beginning of the war, representatives of which have already made their way to several countries of Europe, and the prospects are that they or their offspring will soon be in evidence everywhere throughout the world.

When all these Bolsheviki are grown-ups, they will make the world safe for democracy sure enough—not the competitive democracy of the bull dogs and blood hounds, but the co-operative democracy of the Newfoundland dog. Then, and not before, will the world be safe against war.

Since the beginning of the armistice there has been, every now and then, a widespread fear that it might not be permanent, because of a successful effort on the part of the bull dog to put over another war on account of the Russian bone; but for many this fear has now been almost quieted by the total collapse of the Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich and Wrangel uprisings from within, which were strongly supported by the Allies; and by the repulsion of the Polish invasion which had England, France and the United States behind it.

An astonishing illustration of the truth of the Marxian theory concerning the materialistic or economic determination of history, is furnished by the melancholy fact that the representatives of big business in the allied countries would gladly respond to Gen. Ludendorff's call to join the junkers, against whom they so recently fought, in a war against Russia, of which war Germany would be the battle field. A concerted effort was made to organize such a war, but the wisdom learned in the school of the world war by the working-men of all the countries to which the call was made and their consequent opposition to the effort caused it to fail.

2. But great as the suffering of the world is on account of the bloody wars of capitalists with each other, it is but a drop in the bucket of sorrow as compared with its suffering on account of the bloodless wars between masters and slaves—between the machine owners and operators. When this bloodless war ceases, as it will with the triumph of international socialism, the bloody wars will cease and not until then.

Under the capitalist system every institution (state, church, school, legislature, court, business, yes, even charity) is necessarily a robbing instrumentality by which a small class of non-producers, fat masters, rob a large class of producers, lean slaves, and rob them twice, each time thrice:

1. The master non-producers rob the slave producers of the three great necessities of physical (body) life—food, clothing and houses.

Even in the United States of America, "the land of plenty," at this time and at all times, seventy-five out of every one hundred are insufficiently fed, clothed and housed.

2. The master non-producers rob the slave producers of the necessities of psychical (soul) life—the liberty to learn the facts of nature, the liberty to humanly interpret and live them and the liberty to teach their discoveries and interpretations.

Even in the United States of America, "the home of political and religious freedom," there is not one who can learn, live and teach the truth without danger of being put out of a synagogue and into a penitentiary; and this will continue until imperialistic capitalism and supernaturalistic Christianism, the father and mother of the whole brood of robbers, liars, persecutors and warriors, have been dethroned.

The gods of the capitalistic interpretations of politics and the gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion, symbolize the same reality, parasitic robbery.

Yet within the religious realm the trouble is not with the Jehovahs any more than within the political realm it is with the Sams, but only with what they symbolize.

For one I should feel that both the religious and political realms, which are but halves of the same realm—religion the ideal half, and politics the practical half—would be poorer without their respective Jehovahs and Sams, even as the realm of childhood would be without its Santa Claus.

If symbols are not absolute necessities to the religious and political realms, nevertheless they always have been, now are and probably ever shall be ornaments of them; I hope for their continuance, but as subjectivities, not objectivities.

All the imperialistic interpretations of politics and all the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion must be overthrown, else the world will be lost. The omnipotent, omnipresent saviour who can and will deliver us from them is already in the world. His name is International Communism, the greatest and holiest name which has ever been framed and pronounced; and the gospel of this saviour as it is translated by Thomas Carlyle is written on every wall so that it may be read by all:

Understand that well, it is the deep commandment, dimmer or clearer, of our whole being, to be freed. Freedom is the one purpose, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings, and sufferings, on this earth.

Morality is the greatest thing in the world because without it human life would not be worth the living, or even possible; but, paradoxical as the assertion may seem, freedom or liberty is greater because without it morality would be an impossibility.

One can attain to the very highest standard of morality, religion and sainthood without the least necessity of the slightest reference to what the gods of the supernaturalistic religions said or did, and this is quite as true of Jesus as of any other among such gods, but no man can reach even the lowest standard of morality, and so of course not of religion or sainthood, without constant reference to the god of truth.

Yet there is a difference between a law and a truth. The law is a doing or act of nature, and as such it is a fact or revelation. There are no other facts or revelations.

According to the traditional superstitious conception, a truth is the revelation of the will of a god, involving a service to be rendered directly or indirectly to him, and morality consists in a fulfillment of it.

According to the modern scientific conception, a truth is the interpretation of a fact involving a service to be rendered to men. On the scientific theory each man must have what truth he has, either by his own interpretation or by the adoption for himself of another's interpretation.

No man can live the moral part of his psychical (soul) life on the truth of another any more than he can live his physical (body) life on the meals of another. Every one must have his own truths, even as he must have his own meals.

Hence the necessity of freedom to morality. Hence, too, the impossibility of the moral life under restraint, such as is imposed by orthodox churches in their official dogmas, and such as is imposed by belligerent states in their espionage laws.

Capitalism is essentially competitive and therefore necessarily belligerent in character: hence a complete, an ideal moral life is an utter impossibility under it, but even the little of moral life which otherwise might be possible is lessened to one-half by official dogmas and espionage laws; if, then, the governments of churches and nations have any regard for the morality of their memberships and citizenships they will at once repeal them, and never enact others.

The democracy which means freedom to learn the laws of the physical realm of nature and to interpret them into laws for the regulation of human life (a democracy which will secure to each one the longest and happiest life which, under the most favorable of conditions, would be within the range of possibilities for him) must wait until the competitive system of capitalism for the production and distribution of the necessities has been universally and completely supplanted by the co-operative system of socialism.

The conclusion of the whole matter, as it is well put by an able contributor to the excellent Proletarian, is this:

What is needed is a complete revolution of the economic system. Private ownership of the tools of wealth production stands in the way of further peaceful social development and private ownership must be eliminated. The capitalists themselves will not eliminate it. That is certain. It remains for the working class to do so. In order to accomplish this task it will be necessary for the workers to take control of the institution by which the capitalists maintain their ownership of the tools of production—the political state. That is the historic mission of the working class. The mission of the Socialist is to organize and train the workers for this "conquest of political power."

Among the signs of the times which unmistakably point to the great day of the happy consummation of the movement towards the proletarian revolution, and the glorious sky is full of them, is the fact that the world has recently learned from the great war that man must work out his own salvation without the least help from the gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion:

And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die, Lift not your hands to It for help—for It As impotently moves as you or I.

—Omar.

Yes, and a god moves more impotently than a man; for, whereas the god is driven hither and thither by the laws of matter and force, according to which they co-exist and co-operate through evolutionary processes to the making of the universe what it is, and the god cannot help himself by making it or conditioning himself otherwise, the man, if only he will learn those laws, may combine, guide and ride them to almost any predetermined destination, even out of the class hell of competitive capitalism to the classless heaven of co-operative socialism.