My Conception of Socialism
I have been a socialist all my life and I openly identify as a socialist. The argument I make in my work is socialist. But what I understand by socialism and what others understand by socialism, whether they are for or against it, may well be very different. I don't waste time in any war over words. I find the whole issue of whether you can be a socialist and a Christian utterly tedious. It all depends on what you mean by those terms. I see bigotry on all sides here, so to atheist socialists who loathe religion, I'll openly state that I am not a socialist (not you're kind) and to Christians whose loathing of socialism is exceeded only by their fear of it, I'll openly state that I am not a Christian (not you're kind). But I've never been a nominalist. I see people circulating the Rafael Cruz quote: “socialism requires that government becomes your God.” Why end there? A modern humanism that thinks human beings grown up enough to be able to cast God aside and go it alone hunkers after any number of God-surrogates. Capitalism requires that capital becomes your God, liberalism requires that we, the discrete, self-contained, self-possessing individual, become our own God, and so on. Reason, Nature, Science, Technology, there are any number of God replacements in the modern world, and one after the other has dropped the baton. That's not my concern here, only to say that Christian anti-socialists need to put their anti-socialism to rest, lest their exclusive obsession, to the neglect of other, more potent, false idols be taken as an indication that their political concerns are much more important than their religious ones. I reject idolatry in all its forms, and point to this as a result of the collapse of transcendent standards into a self-legislating human reason.
“We have created new idols. The worship of the ancient Golden Calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose.”
That sounds like Max Weber, who said that the modern capitalist economy determines our life with “irresistible force,” proceeds “without regard to persons,” and has turned the “light cloak of faith” into an “iron cage” that confines us all. It sounds like Marx's alienation thesis, too. Marx was big on criticizing the fetish systems of power, politics, and production that constituted the modern world. I shall say more on this in this article. I shall be concerned to argue that the socialism that anti-socialists reject is not Marx's socialism but very much the alien politics under the auspices of the state form that Marx himself rejected. The quote is actually from Pope Francis. And he's right. And my view is that to overcome alienation, we need to identify it for what it is: idolatry based on a prideful self-worship and an anxiety and neurosis born of estrangement from the nourishment of the true God, the God that is close and forgiving, not remote and vengeful.
To begin on the right foot, I'll give you a very clear indication as to what I mean by socialism – it is a social-ism, with the accent on the proper constitution of the social order over against any commitment to an overriding ideological and institutional 'ism.' I argue that the collective forces which govern the world involuntarily need to be subject to a collective constraint voluntarily assumed through appropriate and effective media. These media are institutional and organisational but also ethical and psychological. In other words, I emphasize the character-forming culture of discipline through family, work, and community, which serves to conform the individual to common standards and ends. I am a critic of an emotivist or expressivist ethics of subjective choice, something which reduces morality to irreducible subjective preference and opinion. And I argue that the large-scale projects of common action which we need to check the 'global' forces produced by incremental individual and sectional actions need to be buttressed and powered by a small-scale practical reasoning grounded in identity, belonging, oikophilia or love of home, and a moral sense of place. The 'social' in socialism, in other words, is constituted by much more than economics, material interests, and class (although it certainly possesses a strong socio-economic dimension and is nothing without it)..
My thoughts here have been provoked by the familiar definition of socialism as state ownership and control of the means of production and the central direction of economic life. That definition is precisely what socialism is not to me. This is the precise form that socialism takes when issues of common concern come to be abstracted away from the social realm and channelled through a political realm that is removed from the social body. In the context of the institutional separation of state and civil society, which is the hallmark of the liberal order, any attempts to secure the common good through politics will end up with the top-down bureaucratic imposition of an abstract good upon society. That has the true relation the wrong way round, and serves only to bring about the very opposite of what is intended. Hence Marx's critical focus on 'inversion' and 'separation' as key figures in the 'bourgeois' (liberal) capitalist order.
This begs some serious questions which people need to consider at length, particularly at a time when the idea of a system change putting an end capitalism is gaining support. I'm not afraid of deep structural transformation, but I am very afraid of human beings underestimating the complexity of such an ambitious project, neglecting important institutional and moral conditions, and thus blundering into economically ruinous modes of action through overly ambitious political action.
Wishful thinking is a blight in politics. Not only does it fail to secure the aims and objectives desired, it can inflict a political and economic wasteland on the rest of us. I've written a few thoughts on this below, which really summarize a position I have developed at length in my work over the years. People who feel the need more more extensive treatment should consult my main work. I shall supply references at the bottom.
I present below a couple of passages from Marx, which are merely two of many that I could have cited from Marx. These are passages which indicate why I consider any state-centred socialism to be a contradiction in terms, an idealistic political imposition on the social that cannot but take a bureaucratic form that is repressive of freedom. In that, it constitutes not an alternative to the capital system, but an extension of it, a culmination of rationalistic desolidarisation. I try to make this point to socialists who are hooked on the identification of socialism with nationalization, state ownership and public control. I make the same point to conservatives who take such socialists at their word and think that this collectivist political control constitutes the definition of socialism. If that is socialism, then I am against socialism. And so were Marx and Engels. Engels lived to see the newly formed socialist parties identifying socialism with state ownership and nationalization, and he explicitly repudiated the association:
“But of late, since Bismarck went in for state ownership of nationalised industrial establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating now and again into something of a flunkeyism, that without more ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic.”
Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific; Moscow, 1970, page 70
Engels emphasized that state ownership “does not do away with the capitalist nature of the productive forces . . . The workers remain wage-workers – proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with.” Precisely. That's the point I emphasize in my own work, most recently in the Marx and Meszaros books I wrote in 2018. Unfortunately, many powerful socialist leaders have subscribed to Bismarck’s “spurious Socialism.” One of these was Lenin. In The State and Revolution (1917) Lenin wrote this: “A witty German Social Democrat of the seventies of the last century called the Postal Service an example of the Socialist economic system. This is very true.” (Central Books edition 1972 based on the 1969 edition published in Moscow. Page 47) That is not true. Unfortunately, it did become a dominant conception of socialism. Lenin proceeded to insist that the German Post Office model be applied to Russian industry, only with all official, technicians etc. coming to be paid “a workman’s wages”. Like the nationalized industries under not just Labour but Conservative governments in the UK, the idea of removing inequalities of pay and instituting workers' control and industrial democracy was rejected in Russia. Following Lenin’s lead, the Communist Parties of the world continued to embrace "spurious socialism," leading workers into the dictatorship of the officials and bureaucrats, channelling socialist efforts and energies into the sterile channels of state capitalism. Critics of socialism are happy to take these misguided socialists at their word, failing to see that the state socialism they condemn is actually a form of the capital system they defend - the dynamic based on capital rule is precisely the same, and the bureaucratisation and rationalisation are both forces arising within the capital form.
That definition of socialism as state ownership and control/nationalization is an anti-socialism. To make this clear, it is necessary to press beyond names and definitions and address realities, institutions, and practices.
The idea of state socialism is contrary to Marx's view. It is an easy matter to prove this by textual references. Marx from first to last defined socialism in terms of the practical restitution of power from the abstract state to the social body, reorganising communal purposes from the base upwards. There are tactical questions of state action in times of political struggle, where Marx does argue for government control of economic life. We are right to be sceptical as to whether any government, for whatever idealistic reasons, is ever likely to relinquish control of power whenever it has become so used to having and exercising it. I would be cautious here, emphasizing the strength and vitality of popular organs of social control in the socialist transdformation of 'the political.'
Of course, the issue goes deeper than the actual texts. There is a question as to whether what Marx proposes with respect to the practical reappropriation of social power by the self-governing communal body is so utopian and unrealistic that it impels, contrary to Marx's intentions, the reintroduction of what Marx called “the abstraction of the political state” (Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State) as a surrogate community and common good. In that case, we get not the democratization that Marx intended but the bureaucratisation that Weber predicted.
The question can only be resolved by proper thought and practice with respect to the institutions of governance and economic systems of exchange and provision. Sadly, and dangerously, this is not done nearly enough at the level of political commitment. For want of the social, organisational, and ethical conditions of social self-government – the formation of the right character within appropriate modes of conduct, social proximity, community architecture, consensual devotion to common ends, social relations - socialism will become precisely what critic Max Weber insisted it would necessarily become: not an alternative to the bureaucratic order of capitalist modernity but its culmination. Weber described socialism as preparing the 'housing for the new serfdom,' realizing not Marx's “dictatorship of the proletariat,” but the “dictatorship of the officials” over the proletariat and the people. I don't know if nature truly abhors a vacuum, but politics certainly does, and will fill any institutional and ethical gaps - the space in which individuals are equipped organisationally to act for themselves in unison with each other - with a bureaucracy which acts for them. Such a bureaucracy will claim to know the public good better than any of the individuals who are subjected to it. Critics of socialism make these criticisms, little realising that these are precisely the criticisms that socialists like me make of the "spurious" identification of socialism with state nationalization programmes.
I have done extensive theoretical work in this area over the years in the hope of guiding people in making the changes to the social system they aspire to. You can't play around with this issue. You can have the best of intentions, but they need to be institutionally informed and practical. I have a feeling that people ignore the important clauses and qualifications I add – most of all my insistence on the need to set such political and institutional questions within a devotion to a God that encompasses all things. They see I'm a socialist and presume I'm arguing for the same things they argue for, and ignore the rest. The danger is that I merely end up misguiding them into the very things I caution against. Such is the world of politics, with too many people merely seeing what they want to believe. In which case, the real case against socialism is that it wildly overestimates the capacities of human beings to be rational and logical and god-like in always seeing and doing the right thing. A more prudent approach would begin from a sound awareness of the human capacity to err.
Here's an interesting passage from Marx to ponder. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx re-affirms that:
the material interest of the French bourgeoisie is most intimately imbricated precisely with the maintenance of that extensive and highly ramified state machine. It is that machine which provides its surplus population with jobs, and makes up through state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of profits, interest, rent and fees. Its political interest equally compelled it daily to increase the repression, and therefore to increase the resources and the personnel of the state power; it had simultaneously to wage an incessant war against public opinion and mistrustfully mutilate and cripple society's independent organs of movement where it did not succeed in entirely amputating them.
Marx EB 1973:187
Restoring “society's independent organs of movement” is key to the socialism I subscribe to. This is a social restitution which is concerned to check and curtail all those political and economic forces which abstract vitality away from human relations in society.
That's a view of socialism that I find consistent with the conservative case presented by the likes of Tocqueville, who emphasized the role of intermediary associations in nurturing a sense of identity and belonging on the part of individuals within proximal relations that are constitutive of the good. Not only does this serve to check the power of abstraction within the state, it overcomes the separation of individuals from each other and from sources of community and meaning in a fragmented society.
Tocqueville's conservative emphasis on communitarian self-organisation within the associational space of civil society is quite consistent with Marx's critique of the state as a ‘parasitical excrescence upon civil society’ (Marx CWF 247). Marx explicitly condemns the way that this 'abstraction of the political state' (Marx EW CHDS) subjects civil society to a suffocating bureaucratic control from above. It is important to establish that Marx is not merely opposing civil society to the state here. Such an opposition remains within the liberal institutional separation of state and civil society, the source of abstraction and bureaucratisation in the first place. Instead, Marx demands the transformation of civil society so that communal purposes abstracted away to the state come to be restored to society, putting an end to the abstract state in the process. Marx is concerned with the recovery of community. His argument is that human beings are social beings requiring a community, what the ancients conceived as public life, in order to be themselves. This commonality is denied in modern atomised relations. What is denied in the real, Marx argues, comes to be projected outwards and upwards, with common purposes coming to be enjoined on the abstract state. This is the source of top-down bureaucratic control. Far from being the alternative to capitalism, this arrangement is very much integral to the capital system: the state is the political command centre of the anarchic capitalist order. This is precisely what Marx criticizes.
Marx directs some harsh words against the abstraction of the modern state. The centralised state machinery, he says, with its 'ubiquitous and complicated military, bureaucratic, clerical and judiciary organs, entoils (enmeshes) the living civil society like a boa constrictor', was formed by the bourgeoisie in its struggle of emancipation from feudalism. In this struggle, the anarchy of conflicting medieval powers was replaced by 'the regulated plan of a state power', based upon 'a systematic and hierarchic division of labour'. The first French revolution centralised power so that the state's 'supernaturalist sway over real society' 'took the place of the medieval supernaturalist heaven'. 'Every minor solitary interest engendered by the relations of social groups was separated from society itself, fixed and made independent of it and opposed to it in the form of the state interest, administered by state priests with exactly determined hierarchical functions' (Marx First Draft CWF FI 1974:247).
Read that again, and try and tell me that Marx was a 'state socialist.' These words follow his consistent criticism of both the state and capital as alienated social powers, powers abstracted away from the social body, to be restored to origins and reorganised as social power.
Marx states his view of revolution clearly in terms of this restitution of social power. All previous revolutions, Marx states, had 'only perfected the state machinery instead of throwing off this deadening incubus’.
The fractions and parties of the ruling classes which alternately struggled for supremacy, considered the occupancy (control) (seizure) and the direction of this immense machinery of government as the main booty of the victor.
Marx First Draft CWF FI 1974: 247.
From the very beginning of his career in 1843, Marx wrote that 'a state can be a free state without man himself being a free man' (Marx EW OJQ 1975: 218). Human emancipation in general transcends the limitations of a political emancipation that remains within the abstract form of the state. A state can be a free state within alienated conditions that render human beings unfree, slaves of their own powers and relations. Marx is entirely consistent on this point. It is a bedrock principle in the socialism that he defined. He makes precisely this same point more than three decades later, towards the end of his life. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx rejects the new Social Democrat Party's commitment to the 'free state.' 'It forms no part of the socialist programme,' Marx insists, 'to make the state free.' Marx states his definition of freedom clearly and concisely, in terms that mirror his words from the beginning of his career:
freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed on society into one thoroughly subordinate to it.
Marx CGP FI 1974: 354
‘The German workers' party thus shows that its socialist values do not even go skindeep’ since, instead of treating society as the basis of the state, 'it treats the state as an independent entity with its own “intellectual, ethical and liberal foundations”’ (Marx CGP FI 1974: 354). Marx condemns the existence of the state ‘in so far as it forms through the division of labour a special organism separate from society’ (CGP PI 1974: 356).
The argument is clear – Marx explicitly repudiates the idea of the state as an entity with an existential significance and ethical independence of its own, over above the heads of the individuals whose social power constitutes it.
Marx states this view very clearly in his early writings. The reasoning can strike modern minds brought up on liberalism as a little convoluted, but it is cogent all the same. I'll summarize in crude terms in order to spell out the meaning clearly: in the context of the split between the reality of an atomized civil society of self-seeking individuals and the heavenly political community of the state sphere, political emancipation is limited to rights which confirm the separation of individuals from one another, the rights of individuals as egoistic beings in civil society and as legalistic beings in political society. Here are two passages from On the Jewish Question which flesh those ideas out:
'The perfect political state is, by its nature, man‟s species-life, as opposed to his material life. All the preconditions of this egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside the sphere of the state, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained its true development, man – not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life – leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.'
'All emancipation is a reduction of the human world and relationships to man himself.
Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person. Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.'
I could duplicate passages such as these many times over. Instead, I refer people to my extensive work on Marx and socialism.
Such textual analysis shows that Marx is quite the opposite of the state socialist he is frequently portrayed as being. In my doctoral work I emphasized that Marx retained a principle of authority that is concerned with establishing the conditions of a 'rational freedom.' Marx began as very much an Hegelian philosopher, arguing that 'a state which is not the realization of rational freedom is not a true state.' His economic studies revealed to him that the existing state was not a 'true state' at all, merely the surrogate of private interests. He proceeded to elaborate on the conditions required for the realization of rational freedom, and this entailed the practical reappropriation of social power from the state back to the (transformed) society from which it originated.
This analysis begs a couple of worrying questions.
Firstly, there is the question as to why so many socialists either don't know or don't understand the nature of Marx's socialism, ignoring his critical analysis concerning the alienation of social power, and instead insist on the expansion of state control as a condition of socialism. A misunderstanding of this order will serve only to drown society in a ubiquitous bureaucracy that will stifle economic life, cause penury and division, and impel the imposition of centralised political command that will stifle individual liberty.
With respect to the relative merits of socialism and capitalism as economic systems, I extolled the virtues of the German social market economy in my masters work in economics. It's not often appreciated that the social market was the creation of Catholic social thinkers. The German term used here actually means “socially responsible market.” It sets economic activity within an ethical context. If citizens choose to pay increased taxes for public goods, as in Sweden and Denmark, then that is their choice, determined in the political realm. The governed are entiotled to determine the nature of their government. I think it is unsustainable in the long run, and undesirable in any case. This model doesn't appeal. I prefer a society of volunteers who respond to problems and act on account of right character and appropriate modes of conduct, self-organised and self-administered within popular organs of social control.
The problem is stated well by Max Weber, the great critic of Marx. Weber was in favour of private capitalism but was aware of how the system, cut off from the religious values which animated it in the first place, came to undermine its own foundations. Over time, monetary power becomes an end in itself, a new god or idol, with everything else reduced to a means to its endless expansion. Weber notes the connection between the Protestant Ethic and the Rise and the spirit of capitalism, but warns of how economic motives come to take on a life of their own as they shed the ethical base that spurred effort and served to keep economics within moral bonds.
Can capitalism be compassionate? I think the issue is whether we can recover an authoritative moral framework that subordinates economics to true ends whilst permitting it to perform its legitimate functions in supplying social needs. The recovery of that overarching moral framework which once depended on God is the key issue. In my view, nothing in politics, no political ideal, whether left or right, can work without divine Justice, and will likely backfire on its human creators should it aspire to the absolute. And I do think capital is an absolutist power. I think the modern world is evidence of that, for all that we are inclined to miss real human achievements on the way: I repeat the claim that human beings are better fed, better educated, longer lived, healthier and wealthier and in much greater numbers than ever before in history – I think the failings are in ethical and social cohesion around shared identifies, culture, and moral language, starting always from proximal relations, love of home, and small scale practical reasoning. That is most certainly the conservative aspect of my thought, as against external impositions of grand, large scale ideals through suitably large scale and abstract institutions. And I think that these commonalities and solidarities are undermined by the monetization of life under the auspices of capital.
I have come to the conclusion, contra very many friends on the left, that not only can socialism not work in atheistic form, in that form it is an invitation to a political and moral wasteland in inducing human beings to see themselves as gods or in expecting them to live as gods in order to make socialism work. It won't work. I also fear an institutional vagueness on the part of socialists demanding system change. I'm all in favour of system change, but one based on hard institutional analysis and an awareness of the conditions of institutional building. Vagueness and wishful thinking here invites bureaucracy as a surrogate common interest. I insist on the alternate institutions requirement – it is beholden on those who would change things to establish institutions and systems that not only do not share the problems criticised in the prevailing system to be transformed, but perform the same functions at least as well, command widespread popular support and legitimacy, and establish incentives so that all will put a shift in and perform the economic functions necessary to make for a viable society. That's not an anti-socialist argument, that's an attempt to secure the coinditions of a viable, feasible, successful socialism.
Rather than attractive ideals with imprecise institutional forms, I insist on a proper economic analysis in which the requirements to ensure economic functions are performed properly are in place. Without that, we have mere wishful thinking, a sure-fire recipe for economic disaster and political authoritarianism. That's why I insist on markets. I'm not sure my socialist friends get this. They produce any number of variants of democratic planning to show why we can eliminate markets. (see Pat Devine on participatory planning, which I do like). There are too many individual transactions in a modern economy for an economy without markets to work. Remove markets, and you cannot avoid decision-making coming to devolve to collective agencies and bodies that are bureaucratic in character. It doesn't matter if we call them 'democratic,' they will still be bodies imposing a particular view of the common good divorced from the views of the actual individuals whose good it is supposed to be. It is an invitation to an ever expanding bureaucracy, elites further and further removed from the people they are supposed to serve, but whom in truth they merely order.
Coming to the second question, and relating to the above, there is a deeper point concerning the overestimation of human potentialities. It seems to me that Marx has an ideal of human perfectibility based on an optimistic anthropology. If he sees God as he sees the state and capital, as human power and potential in alien form, then he must entertain a notion of human beings becoming gods through the restitution of power. That is a delusion and, for me, the real flaw in Marx's position. Religion is not about power in the same sense as politics and economics, but is about the power of humility, service to others, sacrifice. Marx's expectations for imperfect human beings seem inordinately high, as if all the problems that beset humanity are ones of social relations – of accident and environment and not Original Sin. We can be sympathetic to the generous view of human nature. But such a position renders idealists vulnerable to the reality of evil. In expecting human beings to be gods, we are encouraged into social and political activities that very easily backfire. Peaceful, reasonable, generous individuals rely on natural sympathy and presume all others will be as they. They are defenceless when they find that they are not. It is possible for an individual to be moral without God and religion. But can society? Can all individuals? It merely takes some who do not reciprocate, who instead look to free-ride, to subvert the whole. Natural sympathy is not enough.
Ultimately, I think the flaws in Marx's view derive from his false view of religion, something which leads to Marx's words themselves coming to be reconstituted as a marxism which takes the form not of a critical and emancipatory praxis philosophy – as Marx intended – but as a false, seductive and incredibly powerful but dangerous and dehumanising religion.
I think it is clear that Marx sought the abolition of the state as a social power alienated from the social body. He saw the state as an alien power derived from the social body. He went on to pursue the same reasoning with capital, which he saw as the power of labour in alien form. He saw both as leading to an abstraction that unleashed collective forces removed beyond the control and comprehension of individuals. Restituting that power to a self-governing, self-ordering society, with individuals no longer atomised as self-choosing beings on a market but organising themselves within functional groups and associations, is the condition of socialism as it exists in my understanding. Socialism in this sense is based on the proximal relations and associational activity which serve to draw individuals together. My view also involves a notion of individuals making personal moral effort, taking responsibility individually as well as collectively, so as to give active anthropological content to any notion of common good. With this emphasis on individuals putting a shift in, such a socialism not only excludes incentives to the free-riding which dissipates a common stock, but creates the moral character in which individuals do the right thing for no other reason than it is the right thing.
Marx explicitly argued against the statist conceptions of the early socialist parties formed in his name (the Critique of the Gotha Programme, for instance). There is certainly a principle of government and authority in Marx, concerning the question of the governance of what are collective economic forces beyond individual control. Marx left the institutional features of such governance imprecise. This is not an evasion on his part but a considered position that places responsibility on and gives freedom to individuals as creative agents acting within specific social relations. Marx states that he is not writing kitchen recipes for future individuals to follow. The problem is that this point concerning the responsibility and autonomy of the agents is not properly appreciated by those – socialist or otherwise - who seek to impose an ideal programme based on a priori principles/wishful thinking divorced from actual potentials on a recalcitrant reality and unconsenting individuals. Proceed in this manner, and you produce not socialism but a top-down bureaucratic imposition, with predictable results in terms of economic incompetence and political totalitarianism. All too predictably, this is the model that people demanding change tend to go for in politics. It's a political shortcut to Heaven which serves only to unleash Hell on Earth. The corruption is based on the overrating of human power and creativity, ignoring the imperfection and weakness. That is an arrogance born of the Enlightenment and of the scientific and democratic revolutions which, in their youthful advances, gave the impression that human possibilities are unlimited. Instead of bewailing the human greed, stupidity, and aggression that has stood in the way of creating Heaven on Earth, we would do better to remember Original Sin, call back the soul, and seek redemption. 'Redemption comes from below,' I wrote in one of my earlier papers on Marx. My Director of Studies struck it out, saying 'it's a bit Biblical.' We need to be a lot more Biblical if we are to be serious about salvation.
Marx makes some big demands of human beings here, indicating a very optimistic view of human nature. That is very much to his credit, in the view of many. And I was once very much one of those who rated Marx most highly for this. And I still rate him highly, but with certain key critical reservations. The reasons behind Marx's anthropological optimistic are interesting to pursue.
Marx's argument is one centred on power and its alienation to external bodies – the state and capital. For Marx, this power is to be reclaimed by the self-organising social body, transforming civil society from below and putting an end to the abstraction of the state in the process. The idea socialism as top-down state control is really the opposite of Marx's argument, for whom government refers to a self-constituted social body equipped with communal organs of control.
Can it be done? If it can't, we will end up with an extended state as the embodiment of an impossible political ideal – Heaven on Earth shorn of its theological assumptions. The rejection of religion here is the fatal error to the whole enterprise. It gives us a false religion and an all-encompassing totalitarian politics.
I say it can be done, but only with conditions and qualifications so strict that Marx's anthropological optimism needs to be tempered by a recognition of Original Sin. I'll state it plainly and not water it down. Because if we are serious about freedom, then we need to call it happiness as true fulfilment, and set it in terms of redemption and salvation. To be saved is to be released from the burden of sin – and that means we have to see, identify, and name sin in the first place. And confess.
Marx's error was one born of the idolatrous worship of power. He's not alone in this idolatry among the moderns, of course. As I argue in A Home and a Resting Place, Marx modelled his critique of alienation on a false view of God and religion. He saw God as an ideal projection of human perfection. In place of the view of human beings as being made in the image of God, Marx saw God as being made by human beings in the image of their own best qualities. He took the view from Feuerbach. It sounds liberatory. It is not. It enslaves human beings to themselves, to the flaws of their own natures, to their own subjective choices, to immediacy and empirical necessity. In time, it disorients and demoralizes.
In other words, Marx modelled religion on a view of power. That's a big mistake and one that has serious consequences. Religion is about humility, service to others, sacrifice, based on the example of Jesus as one who was stripped down to earthly powerlessness on the cross. By inverting the true relation between humility and power, Marx effectively took religious ideals to be projections of human power, and sought to realize them through the political world. In other words, he committed the oldest mistake in the book: he reduced religion to political ideology and gave us a false eschatology. As a result, he delivered a bogus religion, one that is the expression of a prideful self-worship on the part of human beings. With predictable results. Many centuries ago, peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri warned of the deleterious consequences of human institutions coming to appropriate God's plan of justice for themselves. Dante praises the Gryphon for respecting abstention and prohibition with respect to transcendent standards:
“Blessed are you, whose beak does not, o griffin,
pluck the sweet—tasting fruit that is forbidden
and then afflicts the belly that has eaten!”
Dante, The Comedy, Purgatorio 32: 43-45
Dante's point is clear: Human institutions are subservient to transcendent standards and conform themselves to and orient their activities by those standards – they are not meant to do as Marx sought, to realize and simultaneously abolish those standards. Once they have been consumed, they are gone for good. You cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too. If you eat God's Justice, you will suffer an affliction. Do that, and you are left with nothing but an endlessly contentious conventionalism based on no more than human assertion and counter-assertion.
To that extent, socialism becomes merely an extension over the whole of society of the capital system that Marx sought to abolish. Shorn of its transcendent moorings, the promises of universal brotherhood will instead be realised as a universal hatred; instead of social self-government there will be universal self-hatred.
Those who read my argument here as anti-socialist are mistaken. My point is that socialism can only be realized by being set in a wider frame than humanism. The same goes for all the other ideals of the modern liberal and secular age. (Insofar as such ideals can be realized and are worthy of realization, which is another question. Not all are).
What I try to do is invert Marx's critique to bring all that is valid in Marx back – and bring people back - to the Judaeo-Christian foundations which is its most enduring and most appealing aspect.
Marx was a fine critic and analyst and his critique of alienated social power generating abstract forces and institutions beyond human control and comprehension is cogent. I would not have written two books on Marx last year if I did not think this to be true. But the misreading of religion on his part is positively dangerous, and I made this very point in a third volume of studies. In thinking human beings could overcome what Marx considered to be the illusion of religion, he gave us instead the idolatrous humanism of men as gods. This is a dangerous delusion. Human beings are flawed and, in politics, are divided. The political world in which we live is structured around a power struggle in which might is right and justice is the interests of the strongest. That is effectively what humanism reduces to, with ideals of universal brotherhood drowned in an icy world of self-interest and hard calculation. The ideals that Marx espoused, and which I support, will not prevail when shorn of their transcendent, divine, supports. And the same point applies to liberalism when it sheds its theological and metaphysical underpinnings to become an overtly political doctrine. Instead of a recognition of human frailty, there is an assertion of human power and perfection. That sounds liberatory, and appeals to the prideful human self-image. Yet humans are flawed creatures standing in need of divine grace. Remove the theological underpinnings, and the whole thing becomes inverted and imbalanced, bringing about the very opposite of what is intended.
I have a 'friend' I made on Facebook. (I know .. hence the inverted commas – but we share common views, diverging in other ways, too. I learn from him, and I would hope he learns from me). His name is Patrick Deneen and he is a professor of political philosophy. I would describe him as doing from the right as a conservative what I have been seeking to do from the left as a socialist. We are converging from different directions, and differences, I don't doubt, remain. His book Why Liberalism Failed offers a critique of the libertarianisms of both the right and the left in the modern world: a free market capitalism that destabilizes economies and creates division within society, on the one hand, and an ethical and cultural relativism that undermines communities and internal cohesion, making values a matter of mere personal choice, on the other hand. In both cases, we lose transcendent standards – God's plan of Justice, as I call it above – the ethics which stand outside of human subjective choice, (whether these reduce to money or to subjective choice trumping public good).
Hence I argue: you cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too. Marx, I think, had fine ideals. But shorn of their transcendent source in God, they become merely human creations and therefore political conventions, with no objective standard to support them. Once you realize them – or think you have realized them – politically, then they are gone for good, and ethics is then explicitly merely a human invention, which can be reinvented at will, according to power and might. Ironically, it is the poor and powerless whose condition Marx sought to abolish who lose the most in such a sophistic society. The rights conferred by the state can just as easily be withdrawn. To whom shall the poor and the powerless then cry for redress? Rousseau broke with the Philosophes on this very issue, seeing the emergence of new elites on the basis of new wealth and power in place of the old feudal elites, condemning atheism as 'the philosophy of the comfortable.' Voltaire, the petted Lucifer of the salons as Lewis Mumford called him, was very comfortable. The only thing that discomforted him was the thought that his servants may one day come to murder and rob him. Hence he felt the continuing need for God and religion to keep the lower orders passive, content with receiving their reward in the after life. If God didn't exist, Voltaire said, it would be necessary to invent Him. That's a false religion which says everything about liberal hypocrisy and hollowness.
We have learned that the capital system – which is something much more than the mere institutions of capitalism – is not a public domain, amenable to legal regulation, moral persuasion, and democratic control, but a regime of private accumulation and totalizing alien control imposing inexorable economic imperatives. “Accumulate, accumulate,” Marx wrote, is “Moses and all the prophets.” Keynes agreed: “‘Modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.’ Keynes, J.M., ‘A Short View of Russia’ in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932). In the past, I have made the case for Germany's Sozialmarktwirtschaft, often called the “social market,” but which translates more accurately as the “socially responsible market” economy. The problem is that the capital system is a system that is fundamentally subjectless and uncontrollable. The responsibility we seek, either in terms of a legislative and regulative framework conducive to the public good or moral force via the cultivation of character, modes of conduct or virtues, is insufficient to constrain the force of capital's accumulative imperatives. Capital is the new god. The constraints sought by a Smith or a Montesquieu have proven insufficient.
We have still to address the passages with which Max Weber closes The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, we have not yet come to terms with the disenchantment of the world and Nietzsche's “death of God”:
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order.. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the 'saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment'. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of religious asceticism - whether finally, who knows? - has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfilment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanised petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved’.
Weber 1985 181/2
Any notion of a Christian Democracy, or a democracy of function premised on solidarity and (co)responsibility at every level of society, entails a degree of faith in the fundamental controllability of a capitalist economic system that is inadvisable in light of all we have come to know this past century or more. Many continue to express that faith. Take the work of Philip Pettit, who compares the capitalist economy to a tiger. He rejects the free market right for unleashing the tiger and allowing it to predate upon society, dividing it from within; he rejects, too, the socialist left who would seek to kill the tiger, destroying economic life in the process (in Pettit's view). Instead, he argues, we should seek to ride the tiger through an appropriate regulatory framework. Social liberalism and reformism, then. To which I would ask: haven't we been trying and failing to do precisely that for the best part of a century? It sounds like a restatement of Hegel's Sittlichkeit to me, with the state as the agency of the universal interest, grounded in a rich interimbrication of social institutions, family and civil society, with the economy as 'the system of needs' serving human interests in its own sphere. It is an appealing view, once that Marx believed in in his youth, only to find through his economic journalism that it was a delusion.
'You cannot skin a tiger claw by claw; vivisection is its trade, and it does the skinning first.'
Those were the words of R.H. Tawney, a Christian Socialist rather than a Marxist. Tawney also writes:
'Modern capitalism', writes Mr Keynes, 'is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.' It is that whole system of appetites and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of its triumph, while the plaudits of the crowd still ring in the ears of the gladiators and the laurels are still unfaded on their brows, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on the lips of a civilization which has brought to the conquest of its material environment resources unknown in earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself. It was against that system, while still in its supple and insinuating youth, before success had caused it to throw aside the mask of innocence, and while its true nature was unknown even to itself, that the saints and sages of earlier ages launched their warnings and their denunciations. The language in which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader too murkily sulphurous; their precepts on the contracts of business and the disposition of property may seem an impracticable pedantry. But rashness is a more agreeable failing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is less pardonable to be silent than to say too much. Posterity has, perhaps, as much to learn from the whirlwind eloquence with which Latimer scourged injustice and oppression, as from the sober respectability of the judicious Paley - who himself, since there are depths below depths, was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by George III.’
R. H. Tawney Religion and the Rise of Capitalism 1926 ch 5
Tawney believed in God rather than capital or Marx. So who or what is God? Some equate God with a system of rational restraint for the efficient management of resources. I kid you not. I'd prefer to say proper functioning owing to the ordering of all things to their true ends, leading to true fulfilment.
Elinor Ostrom gained the Nobel Prize in large part for explaining that there’s a method of societal organisation that involves neither the markets and property rights of capitalism nor the state control and regulation of socialism as a bureaucratic order.
Ostrom was concerned to refute Garrett Hardin's conclusions with respect to the Tragedy of the Commons. If demand for a resource exceeds regenerative supply, then with open access that resource will soon become exhausted. Anyone and everyone is free to come and take what they want. Therefore, it is necessary for access to be limited in order to preserve a resource for future use. This can be done in two alternative ways. The capitalist way is to parcel out property privately, limiting access by way of price backed by property rights; the socialist way - in this analysis - is to limit access by collective constraint backed by bureaucracy and regulation. Ostrom offers a third way: a self-regulating access to the resource among all those concerned. Proximal relations and trust relations are key. That's the socialism I advocate, as against notions of state control and bureaucratic intervention and regulation. Ostrom wouldn't and didn't call it socialism, but is it that small-scale self-regulating, self-organising, self-governing society that makes most sense of Marx's projection of social restitution. I would be concerned, too, to define this notion of 'self' more clearly, in an expansive sense, setting economic agency within a comprehensive framework entailing notions of common good. We need to accommodate questions of scale and quantity. Without these qualifications, Ostrom’s system fails at groups larger than 2,000 to 3,000 people. We need to scale up as well as scale down in a world of 'global' political and economic forces. Hence I will continue to make the case for socialism. It is easy enough to limit access to a grazing commons, but problems like globalised economic relations and climate change can’t be managed in the same way. Problems caused by the incremental actions of seven billion humans require appropriately scaled mechanisms and media of collective constraint. That's the case for socialism.
I don't quite know what to make of the next bit, but it refers to something called 'the God Threshold.' In truth, I have never seen God as a solution to cracking the problem of collective action, but there are logicians out there who are proposing some such thing. A study produced by Oxford University and Keio University in Japan has found that only ‘megasocieties’ consisting of one million or more people require the kind of cohesive belief systems associated with major world religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Buddhism. The argument is that societies that pass one million members require a moral and rational constraint best served by the existence of a moral deity. Frankly, I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the utter cluelessness of our logicians and technicians of ethics here. Even as a rationalistic or scientistic explanation of God and religion it merely begs the questions. Let's presume that such a constraining moral deity has been invented by large scale, populous societies, the question is so what? By revealing such a deity to have been invented to serve reasons of rational restraint, aren't we in danger of somewhat diminishing the awe and reverence required for the proper and effective worship of such a deity? Let the scientists just tell us that human societies stand in need of a moralising, rule-making deity in order to constrain individual desires and sustain a viable social order. And then let us get back to the one and true God, the one that self-same rational folk have kept insisting didn't exist. I despair of such folk at times, I really do. They totally overcomplicate a question, reduce it to mechanics, take it apart, then tell us we need to put it together again. Belief does not work that way.
The simple lesson with respect to socialism and self-regulation is this: certain ways of regulating a human society are effective up to a certain size and scale, but beyond that mentalities and modalities need to change. A society that develops an appropriate management system with respect to problems and resources survive, those that don't, don't. And when the point is applied to defining a system of rational restraint with respect to the management of resources, it is pertinent.
Learning to give ourselves a reality check is the task we've been saddled with. Hence I tend to linger long in the world of murk, bias, motivations, and interests (it's called politics and ethics, and it is necessary, unavoidable, and central). How to guide the misguided, and provide a curb, constraint and canalisation, with a little bit of reason - but not so much as to sail over the heads of the many – that's the task. That's a tough challenge indeed in a world in which reason, evidence, and logic - but not ultimate reality - are so easily trumped by self-interest, wishful thinking, prejudice, bigotry etc etc. But there's nothing new here, just some old lessons which, in our conceit of being clever enough to go it alone, we have lost. Our original endowments, which we owe to nature and God's grace, need to be properly cultivated and ordered to true ends for true fulfilment. It's an ancient wisdom. And God is more than a management tool.
I'm reading some critical comments on Bernie Sanders, many from supposed friends. If this is what they think of Sanders, Lord alone knows what they think of me! I just see timid, hypocritical liberals bailing out, as ever, when it comes to walking the walk. Rich Democrats don't dislike Sanders because he can't win, as they claim, but because they know he can win, and they are rich. Not my circus, not my monkeys - I don't vote Labour in the UK, and I wouldn't vote Democrat in America - such politics is an exercise in futility and hypocrisy, and the sooner it goes to the oblivion it deserves, the better.
I don't know enough about Sanders to launch an in-depth defence. Then again, these critical comments are actually not 'critical' at all, mere sweeping generalisation that would apply against anyone who is not complacently conservative, comfortably numb, and utterly inert in their moderation. I suppose anyone who is serious about uprooting divisions that are entrenched in society could also be caricatured as an "ideologue." Of course, as a critical concept, "ideology" refers to a system of views that serves to conceal/rationalize/preserve asymmetrical power relations, such as the ones we have today. Search all you like for your middle ground, you won't find it. Your evasion of the social divisions that feed political polarities is itself ideological. It's time for deep thinking, moral imagination and courage, serious action – by which I mean something much more than sloganeering, protest, demonstration etc etc: I mean reconstituting the public realm, something which involves an emphasis on character forming discipline of work, community, family and relations and responsibilities to others.
I'm finishing taking notes for my Gerrard Winstanley book. I think I am beginning to develop the answer to Nietzsche's “death of God,” offering against Nietzsche's “joyous science” the idea of Christians as “joyous revolutionaries.”
I've been giving some thought to the idea that Marx, as good as he is on the human species essence, has a rather abstract notion which, however strong socially and historically, is rather abstract, and dangerously so, when it comes to personal fulfilment. I think the Christian view is much deeper and much richer. I made this point in A Home and a Resting Place: Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience, where I argued that human self-alienation is, in the first instance, an alienation from God which, to be transcended, requires personal moral effort and not merely social or institutional transformation.
I think the various works I am trying to finish converge on this notion of the transcendent, the Everlasting Gospel, which cannot be reduced to and realized/abolished in time and place. You cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it without losing the very standards required to critically evaluate and, through action approximate, 'the kingdom' (if we want to put it that way).
They make an odd collection, but I think I can deliver works on Gerrard Winstanley, Dante Alighieri, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau which are consistent in terms of my own principles.
Notes from Andrew Bradstock, Faith in the Revolution: The Political Theologies of Muntzer and Winstanley.
A Deeper Meaning to the Struggle
Miguez Bonino has suggested that only on the basis of a conviction that death is not the end can one make sense of the human cost of the struggle, the self-sacrifice of those revolutionaries who are 'ready to go beyond what is demanded, to pay in their own person … the cost of transformation'; 'only a faith that transcends death,' he writes, 'can responsibly undertake the awful decision of indispensable but costly transformations.' In a passage which echoes our earlier discussion of the kingdom, Bonino argues that, for Christians, because tragedy, suffering and death do not have the last word, and because beyond all our own efforts lies the certainty of God's own promise 'there is nothing contradictory, but quite to the contrary, the deepest secret and ethos of Christian spirituality, in Paul's paradoxical exhortation: “Rejoice in suffering!”' Indeed, Moltmann argues that Christians ought to be the 'joyous revolutionaries' because they recognize that, 'even in martyrdom, a revolution can look like a procession of the liberated.' With their belief that God is present in the revolution Christians ought to 'laugh and sing and dance as the first to be liberated in creation'!
While recognizing that Marx himself was a man of deep compassion and sensitivity, Bonino's view is that Marxism suffers from a profound inability to make sense of deep experiences – 'joy, personal fulfilment, hope and love' – which many revolutionaries, through their commitment, beautifully illustrate. Taking the question further, Lash alludes to the 'abstract character' of Marx's account of human essence, 'an account unduly neglectful of the mortality both of the individual and of the species.' Klugmann offers a partial corrective to this argument from a Marxist perspective: 'Death is never easy,' he writes,' … [b]ut a Communist who helps bring about the advance of humanity sees himself living in those that he leaves behind. Armed with the feeling that his contribution has been worthwhile he can look death in the eyes.' [120] This was a judgement echoed by the French Marxist Roger Garaudy (who later converted to Catholicism) when he spoke of Marxists conceiving life as having an 'eternal dimension' in the sense that the individual is defined in terms of her or his relationship with others and with all human beings 'in the totality of their history.'
To the Christian, the concepts of resurrection and immortality suggest a deeper understanding of humanity itself, of the intrinsic worth of the individual, and therefore of the meaning and praxis of liberation, which must ultimately include liberation from death. Assmann recognizes something of this when he suggests that the direction in which we should look for a 'specifically Christian contribution' is in 'what is specifically and fully human, in the line of fidelity to all that is involved materially in loving one's neighbour.' This is not a theoretical point, he argues, since Christians have an overall vision of humankind's ultimate purpose to urge us into action. Marxism's deficiencies in this area are also made plain: 'A truly historical reading of the Bible,' Assman writes, 'particularly of the message of Christ, leads to a whole series of radical questions to which Marxism has not paid sufficient attention, of which perhaps the most significant is the Christian affirmation of victory over death, that final alienation to which Marxism can find no satisfactory answer.' For Assmann, the central point of the Christian's affirmation of victory over death is not the (potentially selfish) belief in 'something after death,' but the importance, underlined by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, of life, human life: 'Since life is God's “medium”, he also wants it to be [our] sphere above all else,' and when this is understood 'we come to the marrow of the loving mystery of what it means to risk one's life for one's fellow[s]. Marxism asks all revolutionaries to be prepared to do this, but I do not believe it can really answer the question of the human sense of laying down one's life for others – so deeply relevant to revolutionary practice – nor that it has really tried to see the importance of the problem.'
Eagleton also makes the connection between an eschatological hope and a preparedness to lay down one's life, and argues that, as a consequence of their certainty with respect to both the coming of the kingdom and their place within it, there may be a specific space in the revolutionary struggle which Christians may be particularly suited to fill. What distinguishes Christians from certain other types of revolutionary is that they are neither utilitarian with regard to their own death, nor adventurist with regard to revolutionary engagement. Their perception of a 'deeper dimension' to revolutionary struggle rescues them from the former: their conviction that what might be lost to history might nevertheless be rescued for the kingdom means that their faith makes its difference felt most in situations where the fight seems historically fairly hopeless. And their certainty with regard both to the coming of the kingdom and of their place within it leads them, not to mere adventurism, but to a greater readiness to die than the revolutionary 'for whom the future society must, inevitably, be radically unsure, and for whom personal death is an absolute end.' All of which leads Eagleton to suggest that
'what would be extremely useful to any revolutionary movement would be the presence of a number of [people] who believed that what hinged on the degree of intensity with which they fought was not simply historical liberation for themselves and others, but eternal life. A number of non-Christian revolutionaries of my acquaintance would certainly be prepared to die, and gladly, if they thought that the action had a reasonable chance of furthering the revolutionary cause; not many, understandably, would be ready to face extinction if the chances of political victory were extremely slender. Yet there comes a point, in many revolutionary processes, where a precarious twilight area opens up between calculative probability on the one hand, and self-squandering adventurism on the other; and this may just be the area that Christians are called on to occupy.'
For Moltmann, the eschatological perspective of revolutionary Christians suggests for them a role as 'the fools of revolution,' those who, while being deeply committed to it, can at the same time laugh about it 'because they are the forerunners of a yet greater revolution, in which God will abolish even greater oppositions than any human revolution can envision.'
The doctrine of the resurrection is bound up very closely with what has been the central theme of this whole essay, the kingdom of God; it has something to say about the kingdom both in the sense of its being a future reality, and in the emphasis it places on the importance of keeping human values to the forefront of the struggle. We are back, in other words, with the question of eschatology, and the contribution that the doctrine of resurrection may be thought to make to the revolution must be seen in light of our earlier discussions. What, perhaps, could be underlined in conclusion is the claim that the Christian's confession of faith in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting is not to be understood in terms of a selfish hanging on to life, nor compensation for one lived in misery and oppression, but rather a confident affirmation of the ultimate triumph of God's love, of God's identification with humankind, and of the coming reign of God's kingdom of justice and peace. It is this eschatological faith which makes it possible for Christians to invest their lives in the struggle for a temporary and imperfect human order, with the certainty that neither they nor their effort will ultimately be meaningless or lost.
Pp 172-175
As I say, you can't have your transcendent cake and eat it too.