Spirituality and Class Struggle
Following a recent talk on “spirituality and political liberation”(*), a friend wrote to me: “I would like you to share your view on spirituality and class struggle.” A good challenge in 2021, a year and time of so many pandemics, many more than that of COVID 19 in all its virulence. Here are some basic notes, with more questions than certainties.
- It is exactly 50 years ago that Giulio Girardi, Salesian priest, university lecturer, pioneer of the dialogue between Marxism and Christianity, invitee of the Second Vatican Council, published his short and inspired “Christian Love and Class Struggle” (1971), a real bestseller. Those were times brimming with promise across the world and throughout the Christian churches. A time of revolution, decolonization, liberation processes. Echoes of May ’68 and the Second Vatican Council, the emergence of countless dynamic grassroots ecclesial communities across Latin America, a powerful liberation theology in America, Africa and Asia. Countless militants, prophets and martyrs (Luther King, Camilo Torres, Ché Guevara, etc.). The class struggle was undisputed and the liberation of the oppressed seemed possible. Basically, the book is still relevant today because, 50 years later, it is clear that the world has not only not improved, but has also worsened.
- At the same time, everything has also become more uncertain and confusing, even the very term “class struggle”. In a strictly Marxist sense, the expression means the economic confrontation between the class that owns the means of industrial production and the exploited working class. But the fact is that, according to many present-day critical Marxists, it can hardly be argued that this is the only “class struggle”, nor necessarily the first and foremost in all cases, however decisive it may always be. Nor can it be said that economic relations are the first and last determining factor in history.
- “In the beginning” was the economy, certainly, but not just the economy, not just the production of consumer goods (not even hunting and gathering), not just the class struggle, not just the struggle, full stop. “In the beginning” was everything: the air we breathed, the light that welcomed us, the warmth that sheltered us, the body from which we were born, the breast that suckled us, the earth that sustained us, the starry night. In the beginning was matter that is the animate matrix of all life, matter that is pure energy –we do not know what it is, where it came from or why–, and the Mystery surrounding all things. At the dawn of our history it was fear and hope, anguish and joie de vivre, love and hate, competing ambition and generosity. In the beginning was everything and everything was linked, and every cause was also an effect, and nothing was “before” anything else, but together with everything. And so on and so forth. Nothing can be reduced to nothing, because everything interacts, and everything has to be considered simultaneously, knowing that thought is never first or last. And in the midst of all the mists, the Deep Breath of Life invites us to open our eyes and recognise that the pressure of peace is the beginning out of which everything is born.
- Only two decades ago we were in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution that is shaping a world that is very different from the one Marx knew in 19th-century industrial Germany, Belgium, France and Britain. The diversification and digitalisation of work, the increasing complexity and globalisation of all production and commercial relationships, the progressive financialization of the economy, the increasing subordination of both “business people” and governments themselves to a handful of speculative financial bodies, artificial intelligence, the Internet of all things, the growing automation of production and even of decisions, etc., are placing us in a very different world from the one we have known. Soon all the factories will disappear, and what will the world be like then? We already live in a world in which it is difficult to distinguish the boundaries between the physical, the biological, the political, the computerised and even the “spiritual”, and the boundary between the human species and the great apes and the little apes and all living species. A world in which the human being is no longer the centre and meaning of the earth, life, or cosmos. A global planetary world that is more unequal and inhuman, more threatened than ever, that’s the terrible thing…
- In today’s world, concepts such as “production”, “ownership of the means of production”, “social class”, “working class”, “class struggle”, “capitalist”, “proletarian”… can scarcely any longer be merely understood as they were 150 years ago. Is the speculator who brings down companies, parties and governments a capitalist in the strict sense of the word? Is the small entrepreneur who seeks to share decisions and profits from the surplus value with the workers of his/her enterprise a capitalist? Are the workers with high wages that many small businessmen would like for themselves proletarian in the strict sense? A football team is a company for making money, but are the first division football players in Spain with an average annual salary of 4 million euros proletarian, while the first division female football players earn an average annual salary of 17,000 euros? Is not the unpaid working woman who takes care of the children, the house, the parents… more proletarian than anyone else? And who is the capitalist who oppresses her? What are civil servants? What are workers in a cooperative enterprise who struggle to compete in order to survive? What are the self-employed? And what are 98% (that’s putting it mildly) of the people of Africa, who count for nothing, who are nobody and who are exploited by “nobody”?
- The concepts become entangled, but one thing is certain: classes exist, there are many more than just “capitalist” and “proletarian” classes, and inequalities are greater than ever, because wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The oppressor class and the oppressed class do exist, and the struggle between them is more real and deadlier than ever, but also increasingly unequal and blurred, as the very real but invisible powers that hold the levers of the global economy and policy are increasingly turning the struggle between oppressors and oppressed into a struggle between the oppressed. I acknowledge that I am both oppressor and oppressed.
- The neoliberal capitalism that has been spreading and imposing itself everywhere since the 1980s is the ultimate institutionalisation of the most inhuman impulses: the greed for wealth, the ambition for power and, deep down, the irrational fear of being less powerful or having less than others. It is an iniquitous economic system, the root cause of the worst wars, and more deadly than all wars put together. It destroys bodies, relationships, equality, democracy, family, peoples, the planet, Life.
- This is our world. Is it not a terribly bleak picture? It is, but for that very reason we cannot afford to lose hope, which is not about biding our time, but about walking with spirit and breath, about taking steps, small steps, in the direction of a necessary and possible world, a freer and more fraternal world, one that is fairer and at peace, more humane and ecological, more supportive and happier. It is about walking, even if we never get there. And about continuing to take a small step whenever we fail, and even if we always fail, we need to be moved by the deep breath that inhabits us and that we are, the deep breath that makes us more humble and stronger, more rebellious and peaceful. The Breath of life groans in the Earth that groans in labour pains. To live moved by that deep breath: that is spirituality, whether it is expressed in a religious or totally secular form, and it is always political, committed and liberating.
- I do not mean that everyone who is moved by spirituality should get involved in the “class struggle” in the same way or with the same ideas and analysis of reality or in the same specific socio-political projects. But insofar as they are moved by the all-transforming Spirit of life, wherever they are and in whatever way they can –in the political struggle, in social movements, in the fray of business and the outside world, in the domestic environment or even in the silence of a monastery–, they commit themselves with the same purity of heart, the same generosity and the same hope for the same liberation. Spirituality is not opium, but liberation. Is religion opium? It may be, but it is also, in Marx’s own words, the liberating cry of the oppressed creature.
- Spirituality –the depth of life and the cultivating of it– is therefore, by definition, active, political and liberating. Spirituality is integral peace of the internal and the external that we are, and integral peace can only come about in justice. It therefore entails confronting the powers that dictate market laws, which oppress individuals, groups and peoples. Spirituality is not only not alien to the struggle of the dominated classes against all forms of domination, but demands and entails it. Spirituality necessarily manifests itself in confrontation with those who seize land, hoard goods, prevent breathing, deny life. Not only does it not fear necessary conflict, it provokes it. “I came to cast fire on the earth,” said Jesus of Nazareth, “and would that it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49 ESV).
- To the point of taking up arms and killing for the sake of justice? A sore point. I can’t say that a spiritual person can’t, or even should never, do it for no reason (we kill living beings every day to eat…). But I refer to the conditions demanded by the wisest tradition –including Girardi– so that the option of armed violence can be regarded as inspired by the Breath of peace and life: 1) That the cause is just and vital; 2) That the just objective cannot be achieved by any other means; 3) That there is sufficient assurance that, through violent struggle, the aim will be achieved; 4) That there are sufficient guarantees that the good achieved will be greater than the harm done; 5) That the violent action is motivated by love of the common good and by love of the oppressor, who ceases to be the enemy. Spirituality strives to humanise conflict and struggle as much as possible.
- Moved by the fire of love for true peace, spirituality is committed to a radical, structural transformation of the murderous, ecocidal, neoliberal capitalist model. But we cannot go back to the past, nor can we repeat its worldview, its philosophy of life and its political agendas. The history of the last 100 years has shown that “real socialism” has frustrated the yearnings of individuals, peoples and nature for freedom and wellbeing. And that “social democracy” has betrayed both socialism and democracy, both equality and freedom, because it has succumbed to the interests of the ruling class and established the “welfare state” on the plundering of the Third World and the destruction of nature. Is there any alternative? I see no other than a feminist, global ecosocialism, nor do I see any better way of bringing it about than a cooperative, ecological model of decision-making, production and consumption on a planetary level.
- But is it possible? It will only be possible the day humanity truly wants it and reaches consensus, the day when there is a global personal and political will for such a planetary transformation. Or the day when the powerful who suffocate life see and are convinced that by suffocating others they suffocate themselves, that the future can only be a shared one, that there can be no liberation unless it is for everyone, starting with the those at the bottom. So that what is possible can become reality, it will be necessary for humanity, this powerful, frail, human species that is so unstable and contradictory, to transform its way of wanting and liking, and its way of being happy. An egalitarian and democratic global economic system will need to be established. And an education system that develops sensitivity, transmits humanity, communicates vital wisdom, beyond mere knowledge and technical skills. And it will be necessary for the sciences –neurosciences and biosciences, for example– to apply their technologies with the guarantee to correct genetic and neurological dysfunctions; although it is scary to say it, it has to be said: dysfunctions that make this human species such easy prey to so many fears and destructive desires, which prevent us from feeling evil and wanting the best for others as well as for ourselves, and from being happier with less, and being richer by sharing what we have.
- Spirituality –the awareness and exercise of our innermost being, the free desire for good, the taste and joy of goodness, the trust in Life in spite of everything– is both the outcome and the source of this global, feminist, egalitarian, liberating, wise, ecosocialist policy. Inspired by the deep breath of all that is and by the most ancient and recent vital wisdom of individuals and peoples, spirituality in turn inspires dreams, utopia and active hope. It encourages action and the march –even if we never quite get there– towards a world in which oppressions and classes will be eliminated and in which struggles and wars can disappear.
(*) In: https://youtu.be/YxYWPVZHvF4
Aizarna, Basque Country. 2 May, 2021
(Translated by Sarah J. Turtle)