Beyond personal differences lay the critical question of the meaning and validity of a class analysis of American society. As [Victor] Berger, Heath, and some of the Massachusetts members groped toward a more orthodox position, one that took Marx and Engels seriously, the majority in the party, including Debs, remained rooted in an older, classless vision of society. In an editorial in November 1897 the Social Democrat urged caution in preaching class consciousness, as it may "do mischief." It "is a good servant but a bad master. Socialism is something more than a mere labor question. It is a demand for equalizing of burdens nd equslizing of benefits throughout the whole society. Class consciousness for the laboring man is safe where it is made part of a high moral demand in the interests of society as a complete organism and not of one class only." Noting that many earlier Socialist activists and thinkers, from Ferdinand Lassalle and Marx to John Ruskin and Karle Liebknect, came from the middle class, the official paper of the party concluded: "An effective American Socialist Party must ... make its campaign on the highest moral grounds. We must not make socialism obnoxious to the people."
Wayland, editor of the popular Appeal to Reason, expressed this idea more succinctly. "There should be but one class of people," he wrote, " a working class, men and women doing useful things required for a high state of civilization." But, as would be the case in years to come as well, Debs, himself, best expressed the gulf that existed between Berger's theory and, a more traditional American approach. Speaking in Newark, New Jersey, he asked rhetorically, "What is Socialism?" His answer frustrated Berger: "Merely Christianity in action. It recognizes the equality in men."
Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist By Nick Salvatore
The academic writing over the religious thought of Eugene Debs might make a good case study for the extent to which ideological predisposition determines what is said about history by whom. The passage I typed out is within a really fascinating study of the early years of Socialism as a political party and movement in the United States and, itself, is a good place to look as to how Socialism which was inspired by irrelevant and uncharacteristic assumptions and observations failed to take hold in the United States. The struggle over the mind of the very popular Eugene Debs and the failure of even the pragmatic Victor Berger to understand that Debs' own socialism was founded on the traditional values of American liberalism and so could be counted on to be more acceptable to Americans than European Marxism could probably tell us a lot more about how to make progress instead of repeating mistakes.
As Salvatore points out, Debs made some rather large concessions to those such as Berger in order to make organizing possible, I strongly suspect that a lot of what he said about Christianity was crafted with that in mind. Liberal Christians have, generally, been more flexible in asserting their thoughts than Marxists have been. I'm not sure that wasn't a bad idea, in itself and am confident there isn't anything to be gained by making concessions to their descendants, the neo-atheists who offer nothing but the stalemated failure of the atheist left.
The extent to which Debs was trying to modify his presentation of Jesus, The Supreme Leader in 1914 to convince the scientific-materialists in the movement to tone down the anti-Christian rhetoric is worth considering. I get the feeling that he was doing a sort of tight-rope act which I don't think he found entirely convincing, himself. If he was a Christian, as I believe he was, is unknowable though I am certain that the often encountered de-Christianized Debs is false, an ideological distortion, itself.
While I can't read the paper due to it being behind a pay wall, I did find this abstract interesting.
Eugene Debs underwent a transformation over the course of his life that compelled him to replace a brand of unionism rooted in nationalism with a variant of socialism based on internationalism. As a trade and industrial unionist, Debs employed American political traditions linked to citizenship to attack the inequality and injustice engendered by corporations. After he became a socialist, however, Debs seriously questioned the values of citizenship and the heritage of the American Revolution, ultimately transcending the ideological framework he had utilized as a unionist. Previous historians have missed this shift in Debs's thought because they have presented his Christianity as an extension of his preoccupation with citizenship and the American Revolution. Debs emerged from a republican tradition, but his concern with the fate of humanity led him to substitute his earlier focus on American citizenship with the interests of a worldwide civilization. This process of growth caused Debs to elevate socialism in order to denigrate capitalism, exchange the particular virtues of independence and liberty for the universal values of interdependence and brotherhood, and swap the founding fathers and their revolution for Jesus and his revolutionary gospel. In the end, Debs was more concerned with perfecting the internationalist goals of civilization than the nationalist values of citizenship, and he believed that the perfection of humanity endorsed by Christianity was also the overarching goal of socialism.
Anyone who doesn't think that would have been entirely more likely to succeed as an American socialism than the dialectical materialism of Marx doesn't know the first thing about Americans or, I would argue, people anywhere in the world. One of the conflicts between Victor Berger and Eugene Debs in the late 1890s was based on Berger's security in his own intellectual superiority based in his superior knowledge of Marx and Engels (see Salvatore's book linked to for details). I think as a political matter, he was wrong about that. I suspect he learned as much as time went on and practical politics took over from sterile theorizing.
But there was a deeper conflict within Marx, between his genuine horror at the violent and cruel treatment of workers, his desires to improve the lot of working people in the brutal 19th century industrial capitalism and his own intellectual pride and pretensions based in the scientism and atheism common to his intellectual class. Nothing in his materialism could be found that asserted that the working poor had any right to have a better life, to be treated as more than industrial raw material used and expended for the maximization of profit, exactly the means to which they have been put by most of the "Marxist" governments which have ever gained control over a country, one of the major sources of the rejection of communism by any informed group and, in fact, by those who lived under those regimes as soon as they could get rid of them.
If socialism had not taken that course and had followed something more in line with Eugene Debs' original, pre-indoctrination, pre-compromise concept, things might have been entirely different.
You put me in mind, and not because of any connection to Communism, of Jim Hightower, a man I much admired who has pretty much disappeared from public view.
ReplyDeleteIt was Hightower who remarked, hearkening to the days when "outside agitators" where the problem with civil society, that the "agitator" was the thing in the middle of the washing machine that got the dirt out. He was a fine representative of Texas populism which enjoyed a brief moment in the spotlight until W. replaced Ann Richards and Rick Perry replaced Hightower and Agriculture Commissioner.
One thing Hightower was not, was overtly religious. If he was covert about it, he was VERY covert. Unlike Molly Ivins, Hightower wanted to inspire a movement. He didn't, and more and more I think that failure was in part a religious one. He needed the common currency of Christianity to inspire people to act together and work together and struggle together for justice.
King had it. The SCLC had it. Hightower didn't, and he never tried to. Today I see people outraged by Hillary Clinton's e-mail server, decrying the "corruption" this indicates, and certain that if we only remove people like her from the White House, we will as well remove corruption from the body politic.
Christians, like Reinhold Niebuhr, could deal with such sin far more realistically. Hightower, I think, thought people would see things his way and lead a cultural revolution that would expunge much of what is wrong in Texas politics and political culture. The more I reflect on it, the more I realize what a brittle and even immature posture that is: the utopia that will come if we just gather enough like minded people to make it so.
Utopia, of course, means "no place." Which is why the basiliea to theou is not a utopia. But it's hard to talk about the kingdom of God without talking about God.
Utopia is much easier to talk about; it's just a lot harder to find.
Debs came to socialism with the failure of Bryan's populist campaign.
ReplyDeleteI think it's entirely legitimate when pushing a political program that is full to the brim of things not only compatible with the religious tradition of the large majority of voters, but a requirement of it. To say, Oh, oh, non-establishment, we can't mention morality or, gasp! religion is about as nonsensical as not mentioning any other fact that is relevant and useful.
It's especially stupid of the left, considering the false assertions made by the fascists about Christianity.
I think we got suckered out of bringing the very basis of our moral and, so, political stands into the discussion because it will upset the atheists or members of small religious minorities when they have no right to demand our silence. Since the program of liberalism benefits their rights, it is stupidly short-sighted of them. The wall of separation only applies to the official acts of government and the direct establishment of a governmental religion. No one has a right to any more separation of it from politics than that, it isn't a gag order on liberal Christians though that is the de facto existence of it in contemporary American culture.
We could dump all of the atheists and the other censors and would probably still come out ahead, to their as well as our benefit.
Well, we abandoned Niebuhr, et al., didn't we? And ceded the stage to the fundies.
DeleteIn the 60's TIME Magazine recognized Niebuhr as the nation's leading theologian. Less than a generation later he is not only forgotten, he is impossible. All "true" Christians are right-wing whacko fundies; no one else is allowed to call themselves anything except deluded.
Or wrong about their religious beliefs.
I can't stand it; I just can't stand it.
There's a relationship between the silencing of liberal Christians in the period after the Supreme Court rulings on separation of church and state when atheists and those who resented the fact that most Americans are Christians browbeat Christian liberals into silence because "wall of separation", "no religious test" etc. were falsely asserted to apply to The People in their public and political lives. It was a misplaced sense of fairness and niceness that allowed them to do that and the results were not only a benefit to the Republian-fascists who used the charge of anti-Christianity,anti-God against liberals and also through the weakening and hollowing out of the very basis of American style liberalism. I think the second of those has been the most damaging to liberalism in the United States.
DeleteI think it's necessary to make those points and to point out that Christian liberals never owed atheists, agnostics, non-Christians their silence. None of those other groups has any hesitancy in expressing their ideologies, religions or cultural identities.
I have come to the conclusion that there was, in fact, an entirely outsized force and exercise of power by atheists within academia and the media which has also distorted things to the detriment of liberalism, both culturally and politically. Once you notice the frequent assertions that so-and-so is safely atheist or non-religious you will also hear the frequent excuses by Christians and assurances that they'll never let it intrude into their scientific or academic work, something that atheists routinely do and demand their right to do. Among other things, especially in pop-history, that has led to the absurd and false history of Communists and other such idiots as being the heritage of the left when the only productive left were seldom among them. Victor Berger is an interesting figure because once he gained office he realized that approach wouldn't work and that it would prevent him from doing anything. Interestingly, the one thing he wouldn't compromise on was the First World War, something that Wilson and the right used to take down the left. It was an entirely different thing from the Communists turning around from being the anti-fascists who mounted the Lincoln Brigade to sounding like business men who asserted that we could be friends with and work with Hitler, on orders from Stalin, only to turn around, immediately, when it turned out that Stalins brilliant pact with Hitler was a fools delusion.
I think the the Communists have been the left's worst enemies and their descendants, the neo-atheists have taken their place in that role.
Put in the context of "the left," it should be clear to anyone that MLK,Jr. was a "leftist." He was anti-war, pro civil rights, and died at a rally championing economic justice.
DeleteYet not only is he not considered a "leftist" (because the nation cannot idolize and memorialize leftists), he's not even considered a religious figure.
Because we can't allow Christians to be involved in public issues? Because we can't allow religion to guide our moral actions? Because the only "real" lefties are Commies, or radical socialists, or at least white people? Because no "true" Christian can be anything but a right wing loon?
Interesting....