An und für sich

Hard left Labour party member, philosophy of logic liker, Catholic and avid coffee drinker Simon Hewitt has been doing an excellent series on Marxism and Christianity and seemingly he hasn’t even heard yet of Roland Boer‘s work!

In the first post, Simon sets the scene, in the second he discusses the meeting ground for religious and atheistic Marxists in a something like Aristotelian style naturalistic ethics – among other gems include that as grace completes nature we can all agree socialism from nature anyone with any sense should overthrow capitalism, and that Marxists should only worry about religion being opiate when it destroys commitment to socialism. Some of the moves here remind me a lot of similar ones I attempted in my essay for After the Post-Secular and the Postmodern (US, UK) where I attempted to sketch a non-atheistic (and also non-theistic) account of the generic secular as pluralism, that would please neither Dawkins and Hari or aggressive theological anti-secularists. The third (and not final) post in the series discusses the ethics of revolutionary violence and whether Christians could support it. This is done partly via Herbert McCabe’s classic required reading ’The Class Struggle and Christian Love‘ wherein everyone’s favourite editor of Modern Theology claims that since class struggle is an objective reality which it is impossible to stay neutral in (‘it is just there; we are on either one side or the other’) Christianity must be on the side of the proletariat, against myriad soggy Christian socialisms and distributisms which only prop up the system and must consider revolution as one of its aims on the basis of the Sermon on the Mount – Christian pacifists beware!

Speaking of soggy distributisms that only prop up the class struggle ideologically on behalf of the rich (cough recent missives from the radically orthodox stable supporting the Conservative reforms in higher education that will free marketise the whole system and destroy the humanities as such as part of a larger scheme of austerity which will throw almost a million children into absolute poverty over the next three years), Simon also has a post on Phillip Blond et al that is worth reading. Among other points that amuse and inform, in the sense that RO is utterly unable to locate and self-critique itself within class society then it is in fact, pretty similar to liberalism. Oh and that Red Toryism shares many similarities to other third ways, ie, close to fascism. Enjoy!