[Published in Lumière & Vie, N°117-118 (Chrétien marxiste) [Mar 1, 1974)]
The chief pretension of our epoch is that of the beginning. History, which undoubtedly weighs very heavily on the people of my generation, is rejected today by young Christians, to which it appears as a heap of ignorance and mistakes. But, as is said: “those who want to ignore history risk repeating it”. Christianity did not start yesterday, nor did Marxism, nor their alliance and their confrontation. The discovery of Marxism by Christians took place in the 30s; it was increased and deepened in the wake of the war. Emmanuel Mounier, François Perroux, Jean Lacroix, Henri Desroches, Henri Chambre, Pierre Bigo, Jean-Yves Calvez [1] and some others have written pages on this subject which remain valuable. Many young Christians of the Resistance have passed through Marxism, and their experience merits being considered as well.
I do not say this so as to stop the debate. Let it be known only that it does not begin, it begins again. Certainly, its theoretical and practical bases are not the same anymore. But it is not certain that the core of the debate is different. The political awareness of many Christians, their revolutionary engagement, reproduces, by extending it, a phenomenon analogous to that which manifested itself during the Resistance. However, at the time, this confrontation involved two orthodoxies, who have since known a process of détente and almost dissolution. That gives the debate more variety and more liberty, but removes responsibility from it. What commits the Marxist who is no longer united to a party and a state? What commits the believer who is no longer united to a Church? What exactly does this, or rather these Marxisms and Christianities, mean?
Marxisms and Christianities
Such is the preliminary difficulty of a reflection on the subject. And such is, in my opinion, the reason to take it in the most rigorous manner, at the risk of disappointing those for whom the requirements of action prevail over those of reflection. It is, by the way, instructive to recall a point which is most often neglected by the two sides. The thought of Marx took its origin in a radical critique of religion [2]. For the young Marx, the confessional state constitutes a scandal and a contradiction: is it the private which spills over upon the public, also forbidding, in its very principle, juridical equalization, civic emancipation. To construct the state it is necessary to rid it of religious tutelage. But Marx goes further: this division between private and public is what produces religious mystification and opens the field to all alienations. To destroy religious superstition, to absorb it in history, is the necessary condition for reconciling the private and the public in a community organization of the economy. This critique targets much more than state religion, it founds an anthropology where faith in God, even conceived as a private affair, cannot find its place, since it is the principle which will never cease to produce alienation.
I know that, for Althusser and his disciples, it is a question here of an uninteresting and outdated stage; Marx would only become Marxist much later, after the “epistemological break”, of which Althusser has moved the date by about twenty years [3]. Marxism would in reality be a science, precisely the foundation of every science of man. That Marx wanted to be more and more scientific is an indisputable fact, and this should be an example for all those who claim to be inspired by him. But first, it is scientifically inexact that Marx renounced his historical and utopian vision to become a pure analyst of the capitalism of his own time: the scrupulous edition of his works, which Maximilien Rubel undertook, irrefutably proves this [4]. … The Althusserian interpretation is forced to substitute Marxist concepts guilty of Hegelianism (alienation, the leading role of the proletariat, generic man) with other concepts which are not any more scientific. By proclaiming that “philosophy is class struggle in theory” Althusser annuls not only religion, but all history of the human mind in search of the good and the true. By proclaiming that “history is a process without a subject”, Althusser eliminates not only God but the person conceived as a humanist mystification. In doing so, even if he takes liberties with Marxism, Althusser pushes to the extreme an essential element which E. Mounier had underlined: the primacy of the masses over the person, “the spiritual imperialism of the collective man” [5].
So, here we are in a vicious cycle. Either Marxism is a fundamentally anti-religious humanism, as most of those who have studied it these last years believed, or it is an anti-humanism, the science of social structures. In the first case, the problem of atheism is posed in the traditional manner: God must move aside so as to let man exist. But it remains possible for believers to explain that this all-powerful, conquering, and mystifying God is a false God. It remains possible, at least theoretically [6], to accept the challenge of communism: the man to come, rid of his idols, will recover the need and the true face of God. In the second case, the very possibility of a sort of resurrection of the Risen One is excluded[.] … First, because the event cannot take place in a system where everything that isn’t produced by the masses has no firmness, where, consequently, the event is unthinkable, because it cannot cling to any personal destiny, to anything other than collective moments where history is immobilized in an immense decantation, a sort of revelation in feedback.
The “death of man”
This neo-Marxism places believers before an unexpected situation. After so many battles led by the Church against “atheist humanism”, here that atheism, in turn, condemns humanism. After so many efforts to pull down the pretensions of the creature to set itself up as the creator, here they are thrown together into the same tomb. The “death of man” is probably graver for the faith than the “death of God”. That man could lack God is a test that a believer can face in the hope of the Resurrection. But if God could lack man, then he does not exist, the very possibility of the Incarnation is excluded. This repudiation of the subject, this evacuation of individual liberty certainly has artificial and provocative aspects; they correspond however to the deep tendencies of the evolution of the industrial world which totalitarianisms have taken to the extreme, by denying liberty of conscience and the autonomy of the private [privé]. Certainly, one can consider Stalinism as a “deviation” of Marxism. It remains that Marx never specified what he meant by “man”, endeavoring to define the species by its condition of existence. The axis of Marxism is directed towards a totalization of humanity which denies all specificity, especially in the religious sphere as well as in the juridical and political spheres. The will to reduce alienation leads to suppressing these breaks, these “gaps” where the unhappy consciousness, the distance between the self and its destiny, between the self and the world — and consequently the power to resist the enterprises of suppression, are rooted. Marxism responds to multiple questions, but the question of personal existence and of its relationship to collectivity is not posed by Marx. Yet this is not only the question of the meaning of our life and death, it is also the question of our link to others, our sacrifice, that is to say, our militancy. The Gospel has no meaning outside of this choice against self-love [l’amour-propre] and for charity, which is prior to every collective situation, to every social determination. Marxism has aided us in realizing that the language of interiority has been discredited by centuries of bourgeois culture. But to renounce all language of interiority would be to belong to a world where praxis itself would lose its meaning, since there would no longer be a human act, strictly speaking, but a social mechanism against which revolt is interdicted from the moment that it claims to have the meaning of history for itself. It is not by coincidence if the protest which is making itself heard in the USSR, against the philosophical monopoly of the State, and the prohibition of opponents, has for its principle spokesperson a humanist Christian, Solzhenitsyn. A Marxist cannot turn away from the praxis of Marxism and treat as insignificant what happens in the states where Marxism is in power, a Christian cannot turn away from those who suffer persecution for justice and truth.
The truth of action
To talk about Marxism makes no sense today. There are many Marxisms. The entire question is to know which one we claim, and what one demands of it. Everybody puts in Marxism what they want. Christians should interrogate themselves on this point. Their encounter with Marxism is infinitely desirable; many (I am one) owe to it an implacable and irreplaceable instrument of criticism; the “beautiful souls” that we were more or less lost their historical innocence thanks to it, having left forever this climate of pious benevolence where generous speeches end in impotency or in the service of the established disorder. But I have the impression that it is not this discipline that certain Christians seek there, but on the contrary, an abstract lyricism whose themes reflect the symbols of their faith: alienation is the figure of original sin; the proletariat is Christ the Savior, the revolution, it is Paradise… “Le marxisme, une chic doctrine!” a head scout said to me after a conference I made in 1947. Frustrated by a religious dogma which is crumbling, they need a political dogma that has an answer to everything. Recently, a movement of Catholic action cheerfully proclaimed that it was “opting for the class struggle”, as if the class struggle were a matter of option.
I was one of those Christians disgusted by the politics of good intentions which had driven the M.R.P. [Mouvement républicain populaire] to make itself the enforcer of the base works of colonialism and capitalism. I believed, and I continue to believe, that Marxism is a fundamental element in all political consciousness. I believed, and I continue to believe, that charity proves itself in political action. But, one is deluded when one believes that a doctrine can confer, in politics, the kind of certitude that a believer finds in his faith. We hear a new word today, orthopraxis, which would be opposed to orthodoxy. But this notion of a “true action” is inconsistent. How many have acted in a spirit of truth who have been deceived. This was, in particular, the drama of the “Christien progressivists”, who, after the war, advocated, in the name of the “sense of history” that they deduced from Marxism, support for Stalinist politics. They can see today that they were wrong. They had the right to do so: to be wrong belongs to the risk of politics. But they did not have the right to link, as they did, the Gospel and the Christian faith to a hazardous historical choice. They did not have the right to mix the love of the poor to one of the darkest avatars of tyranny.
Under no circumstance is action a criterion of truth. Quite the contrary, it supposes a choice of value and a reading of history. “Orthopraxis” supposes an intellectual operation and it cannot boast of any superiority over reflection. It is because one “reads” the Gospel in a certain fashion, it is because one analyzes the historical data in a certain way, that one chooses in one sense or another. This reading must be discussed, both with regard to text and with regard to political efficacy, and it cannot claim any immunity. “Acting right” poses even more problems than “thinking right”. Let’s say that both are linked by a common obscurity, by a common difficulty. After all, thinking is easy when it’s not a question of acting. But if there were a “science of politics”, if Marxism gave us the means of comprehending history and acting, we would know that. Fully armed as they were with the theory of the class struggle, the German Marxists (the most scientific of all the Marxists) had taken a long time to see clearly, and their error aided Nazism’s coming to power. So generous as they were, the Chilean Marxists did not glimpse the peril which menaced them. And to speak of those Latin American countries, where Marxist analysis seems more appropriate, more operative than in hyper-industrialized societies, one cannot count the changes of tactics, the ruinous back-and-forth, with regards to the guerrilla for example. If Marxism offered this scientific and luminous analysis that some claim, it would not have so many hesitations and errors. It is precisely because, within Marxism itself, the options are multiple, that orthopraxy fatally leads to orthodoxy and dogmatism. A “science” susceptible to multiple divergent interpretations can only subsist if an authority, a State, imposes its own. Hence the philosophies of the State and totalitarianism. Stalinism or Maoism. When I read from the pen of a young Christian the praise of China, ‘this immense obligatory convent’, I tell myself that we will definitely not stop history from starting over again and Christians from finding in politics what it can never give them.
The need for security and shame for the past
Deep down, this generosity masks what has been called “a subjective need to secure the agents of history” [7]. We want to be reassured, we want, at all costs, to sort out the good from the bad. Such was once the role of Action Française [8]: to offer a compensation for the insecurity of the faith when engaged in what was then called “the temporal”, to rely on “positive” (we now say “scientific”) knowledge of the laws of politics. But temporal and spiritual are not an entrenched distinction. And those Christian Marxists, who specifically refuse it [the distinction], should ask themselves if they are not bringing it back for themselves, since to fully apply Marxist analysis to the temporal inevitably leads to spiritual repercussions. Thus, the class struggle: it is one thing to consider it as a major element of the interpretation of history; but to accept it in its Marxist formulation, where it is the motor of history, is to inevitably adhere to a conception of determinism and conflict which modifies our personal position, spiritually and practically. It is appropriate, at the very least, to be aware of it, and to not practice this kind of irenic compromise oneself that one rightly denounces elsewhere.
If so many Christians resort to Marxism as the constituted science of praxis, it is linked to the shame that they feel from the long solidarity of their Church with the regimes of exploitation and dictatorship. But we must ask ourselves if, by doing so, they do not fall back into the error which they deplore. Throughout the centuries, obedience to the established order, conceived as a replica of the divine order, has been preached to Christians. Now that revolution is preached as a replica of the subversion of God, the working class becomes a substitute for the poor. Yet, other than that the working class is, in a great number of countries, a reactionary factor, it is regrettable that believers, as they did not so long ago with the Nation-State, are putting their hope and charity in the idealized historica subject. At the risk of shocking some comrades, I must recall that workerism has always played an anti-political and reactionary role in the Church, as the history of social Catholicism shows. In 1945, we young managers of the A.C.J.F. [Association catholique de la jeunesse française] had to make an important political choice: join in the S.T.O. [Service du travail obligatoire] or resist on the spot. A certain number of renowned priests then encouraged us to join up in Germany with our “brother workers”. At the time, the German working class was intoxicated by Nazism, and a number of French workers, like it or not, went to work in Germany. We refused to discuss this matter. Had the entire French working class gone to Germany, we would not have gone there. We had fight for the liberty of peoples and the dignity of men, for what is called today, with a scornful smile, “humanist values”. I do not see that situation has changed much. The class struggle is an essential reality, but it is not the only one. I have often promised a large reward to whoever could cite to me an event of worldwide importance from 1936, in which the determining principle was the class struggle. I still have not received a response [9]. This is because the class struggle is itself caught in a network of forces of which no theory today is capable of accounting for. National, cultural, and religious determinations have played and play a considerable role. Why bring them back to the determinism of production? Why refuse to admit that a man can hold to his soil or to his language to the point of risking death for them? Christians should be the first to discern these cultural and spiritual motivations which make history at least as much as economic determinations. But nothing is more unreal than certain “realisms”.
The ambiguity of history
Here appears to my eyes the strongest point of contradiction between Christianity and Marxism. That Marxism erects its theory on the negation of God appears to me less frightening than the reduction which it inflicts on history. As Pascal had profoundly sensed, God is clear only in the obscurity of the world. The greatest of mystifications is to imagine that a doctrine can account for the totality of the real. Because mystery is not only in Heaven, it is on Earth, there would be no mystery of the faith if there were not a mystery of history. We act and will continue to act sicut in enigmate — in the phosphorescent ambiguity of history, and not in this full light that the doctrinaires promise us. If we possessed the secret of history, the God of Christ would not exist; revelation would be elsewhere: in a class conceived without sin, or in a “last instance” to be delivered from its parasitic links with bourgeois humanism. We cannot at the same time know Christ and the last word of history. In the same way, we cannot truly disalienate ourselves without confessing our creaturely alienation. Our finitude conditions our liberation, as our ignorance of tomorrow conditions our hope. We are only fully in history because an absolute transcends it. History is not our absolute. If it were, it would abolish itself, and it is in this that Althusser finally delivers us the logical culmination of Marxism.
If one saw in these conclusions a reason to turn away from the study of Marx, one would be wrong. Marx has entered into our common thought like Descartes one did. Christian can incorporate Marxism, and they must, as atheists once incorporated Cartesianism. We can no longer think seriously apart from Marx. But he did not think about everything. There are so many on earth and in heaven of which he has not spoken. So many things which matter to our life and which should enter into our politics… Marxism, like all dogmas, has become an impediment to living, to understanding, to acting. While we Catholics take distance from ours, will this [rapprochement with Marxism] be to revive it? In the very name of the revolution, in the name of the liberations to be made, let us begin by liberating ourselves from anachronistic venerations.
Notes
[1] I cannot give a complete bibliography. I will content myself with recommending the reading of: J.-Y CALVEZ, La pensée de K. Marx, Ed. abrégée, (Coll. “Politique”, 39), Paris, ED. du Seuil, 1970; cf. also: K. Marx Œuvres, Paris, La Pléiade, 1963, t. I, F. Perroux’s masterful preface.
[2] This point has been well studied by J.-Y. CALVEZ, op. cit., in his chapter on the critique of religion.
[3] He currently places it in 1867, which no longer leaves much time for the “true” Marx to exist.
[4] Cf. K. MARX, (Œuvres, Paris, La Pléiade, 1963, t. I et ll. On the Althusserian interpretation, cf. J.-M. DOMENACH, “Un marxisme sous vide”, Esprit, January, 1974.
[5] E. MOUNIER Manifeste au service du personnalisme, Œuvres, Paris, Ed. du
Seuil, t. l, p. 520.
[6] I say theoretically because the experience of communist states shows that, contrary to the spirit which animated the young Marx, they have become clerical states, that is to say, states where an ideology becomes official and where the holders of power are at the same time those who speak the truth. We have to note moreover that the “religious liberty” which is granted to the citizens of these states is that which Christians rightly refuse in struggle against the bourgeois spirit, which reduces the faith to a private affair.
[7] G. M. COTTIER [Georges Marie Martin Cottier], “Sur la théorie de la praxis”, Nova et Vetera, Oct-Dec. 1973. I deeply recommend the reading of this brief and dense report.
[8] It’s remarkable that the doctrinaires of the A.F., like those of Marxism today, while claiming to be committed to positivity (today we say praxis) and direct action, shied away from anything that could lead them to a practical verification of their theses.
[9] There was recently the crushing of the Chilean government by the putschists. It’s an abominable and significant event, but I’m not sure it’s an event of global significance. I have already specified that the zone where the Marxist analysis is the most convincing is precisely Latin America, although with many precautions since Chile, where the proletariat had acquired a certain strength, is distinguished from the other countries of Latin America. Moreover, the determining factor in the case of Chile was constituted by the middle classes with regard to which the Marxist analysis remains in its infancy (as we have already realized, alas, in Europe, when Nazism took power).
New Earth 