Chapter 51

Herbert McCabe (1926–2001)

The Class Struggle and Christian Love (1980)

While institutionally the Christian church has denounced Marxism as an atheistic and
dehumanizing creed, theologians and other church-people have from time to time
dialogued with members of Marxist parties and movements to explore common
themes and concerns. Aspects of Marxist thought may be discerned in the emer-
gence and development of political and liberation theologies, and in regions of the
Third World Christians and Marxists have found a common commitment to over-
coming oppression drawing them onto the same side in revolutionary struggles.
The essay from which this extract is taken was one of many writings produced
in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s by Christians arguing that the scriptural imperative to
do justice, practise love of neighbor, and represent the values of the kingdom of
God compels Christians to join with Marxists in their opposition to capitalism and
commitment to its overthrow. Whereas capitalism is predicated on human antago-
nism, McCabe argues, Christianity announces the possibility that people might live
together in peace. McCabe was a leading Dominican with British and Irish nation-
ality, who wrote and lectured widely on theology, philosophy, and politics. In 1967
he was briefly suspended from the priesthood by Rome.

Source

Herbert McCabe, “The Class Struggle and Christian Love” in Rex Ambler and David Haslam,
eds., Agenda for Prophets: Towards a Political Theology for Britain, London: Bowerdean,
1980, pp. 163–7.

Further reading

Peter Hebblethwaite, The Christian–Marxist Dialogue and Beyond, London, 1977.

Denys Turner, Marxism and Christianity, Oxford, 1983.
 The Class Struggle and Christian Love 273

José Míguez Bonino, Christians and Marxists, London, 1976.

David McLellan, Marxism and Religion, London, 1987.
J. Andrew Kirk, Theology Encounters Revolution, Leicester, 1980.
John Marsden, Marxian and Christian Utopianism, New York, 1991.
Tim Gorringe, Capital and the Kingdom: Theological ethics and economic order, Maryknoll,
New York: Orbis, 1994.

From The Class Struggle And Christian Love (1980)

The struggle of the working class is not . . . simply a struggle within capitalism, as
though it were a matter of reversing positions and ‘putting the workers on top’ (as in
the game of parliamentary elections); it is a struggle within capitalism which, insofar
as it is successful, leads beyond capitalism. As Marx puts it:

An oppressed class is a vital ingredient of every society based on class antagonism.

The emancipation of the oppressed class therefore necessarily involves the creation
of a new society . . . Does this mean the downfall of the old society will be followed
by a new class domination expressing itself in a new political power? No, the con-
dition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes.

. . . there are certain things we can say:

1. The class struggle is not a product of the envy of the poor for the rich; it
is not about establishing some ideal equality between people’s incomes.
2. The class struggle is not something we are in a position to start; it is a con-
dition of the process called capitalism within which we find ourselves. If anybody
could be said to have ‘started’ the class struggle it was, I suppose, those enterpris-
ing medieval men who found ways to get round or break out of the stifling
customs and traditions of feudalism and thus found ways to make products avail-
able more cheaply and more profitably.
3. The class struggle is not something we are in a position to refrain from. It
is just there; we are either on one side or the other. What looks like neutrality is
simply a collusion with the class in power.
Now of course everything would be so much simpler if the class struggle were
altogether perspicuous, but it is not; it comes in a variety of disguises. In the first
place the simple division into two classes won’t do. The basic antagonism that lies
at the root of society produces a whole series of mutually hostile groupings engaged
in shifting alliances and confrontations. It is almost never a simple matter to decide
in the case of any particular dispute which side is to be supported in the further-
ance of the emancipation of the working class and the consequent abolition of all
class antagonisms. Very familiar instances of these difficulties occur with national
liberation movements which are always a confusion of different elements strug-
gling for different and sometimes incompatible aims.
Nothing in Karl Marx that I know of and certainly nothing in the New
Testament provides you with a simple key to what to do in such cases. Marx said:
274 Herbert McCabe (1926–2001)

‘All the struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy and
monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc, are merely the illusory forms in which
the real struggles of the different classes with each other are fought out.’ No doubt,
but getting through the illusions to the reality is a difficult and delicate business.
What is wrong with capitalism, then, is not that it involves some people being
richer than I am. I cannot see the slightest objection to other people being richer
than I am; I have no urge to be as rich as everybody else, and no Christian (and
indeed no grown-up person) could possibly devote his life to trying to be as rich
or richer than others. There are indeed people, very large numbers of people,
who are obscenely poor, starving, diseased, illiterate, and it is quite obviously unjust
and unreasonable that they should be left in this state while other people or other
nations live in luxury; but this has nothing specially to do with capitalism, even
though we will never now be able to alter that situation until capitalism has been
abolished. You find exactly the same conditions in, say, slave societies and, more-
over, capitalism, during its prosperous boom phases, is quite capable of relieving
distress at least in fully industrialised societies – this is what the ‘Welfare State’ is
all about. What is wrong with capitalism is simply that it is based on human antag-
onism, and it is precisely here that it comes in conflict with Christianity. Capital-
ism is a state of war, but not just a state of war between equivalent forces; it involves
a war between those who believe in and prosecute war as a way of life, as an
economy, and those who do not. . . .

Christianity is deeply subversive of capitalism precisely because it announces

the improbable possibility that men might live together without war; neither by
domination nor by antagonism but by unity in love. It announces this, of course,
primarily as a future and nearly miraculous possibility and certainly not as an estab-
lished fact; Christians are not under the illusion that mankind is sinless or that sin
is easily overcome, but they believe that it will be overcome. It was for this reason
that Jesus was executed – as a political threat. Not because he was a political
activist; he was not. Although amongst his disciples he attracted some of the Jewish
nationalist Zealots, the Provos of the time, they did not attract him. Certainly Jesus
was not any kind of socialist – how could anyone be a socialist before capitalism
had come into existence? But he was nonetheless executed as a political threat
because the gospel he preached – that the Father loves us and therefore, in spite
of all the evidence to the contrary, we are able to love one another and stake the
meaning of our lives on this – cut at the root of the antagonistic society in which
he still lives.
Christianity is not an ideal theory, it is a praxis, a particular kind of practical
challenge to the world. Christians, therefore, do not, or should not, stand around
saying ‘What a pity there is capitalism and the class war’. They say, or should say,
‘How are we going to change this?’ It might have been nice if we had never had
capitalism; who can tell what might have happened? Only the most naive mech-
anist supposes that history has inevitable patterns so that you could predict every
stage of it. It is at least theoretically possible that there might never have been cap-
italism and that might have been nice, though it is hard to see how we could have
 The Class Struggle and Christian Love 275

gone through the enormous strides towards human liberation that were in fact
made under and through capitalism. The point is that all that is useless specula-
tion; we do have capitalism, we do have class war; and the Christian job is to deal
with these facts about our world. . . .

The Christian who looks for peace and for an end to antagonism has no option
but to throw himself wholeheartedly into the struggle against the class enemy; he
must be unequivocally on one side and not on the other. As I have said, it is not
always perfectly simple to sort out which side is which in the various protean dis-
guises that the class struggle takes, but given that they are sorted out there should
be no question but that the Christian is on one side with no hankering after the
other. The other side is the enemy. If you doubt this, watch how he behaves: he
will seek either to buy you or crush you. The world, as John has Jesus saying, will
hate you.
Now how will you carry on the fight? There are various pieces of advice that
might be given, but I would like here to reiterate some traditional ones. In the
first place be meek. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth; pray for
those that persecute you; be a peacemaker; do not insult your enemy or be angry
with him. Who, after all, wants a comrade in the struggle who is an arrogant, loud-
mouthed, aggressive bully? The kind of person who jumps on the revolutionary
bandwagon in order to work off his or her bad temper or envy or unresolved con-
flict with parents does not make a good and reliable comrade. Whatever happened
to all those ‘revolutionary’ students of 1968? What the revolution needs is grown-
up people who have caught on to themselves, who have recognised their own
infantilisms and to some extent dealt with them – people in fact who have
listened to the Sermon on the Mount.
It is a simple piece of right-wing lying that those who carry on the struggle
are motivated by pride and greed, envy and aggression. Real revolutionaries are
loving, kind, gentle, calm, unprovoked to anger; they don’t hit back when someone
strikes them, they do not insist on their own way, they endure all things; they are
extremely dangerous. It is not the revolution but the capitalist competitive process
that is explicitly and unashamedly powered by greed and aggression. The Christ-
ian demand for love and peace is precisely what motivates us to take part in the
class struggle: but more than that, the gospel of love, and in particular the Sermon
on the Mount, provides us with the appropriate revolutionary discipline for effec-
tive action.
We still need though to face the question of revolutionary violence. How could
that be compatible with the Sermon on the Mount? Well, first of all, in this matter
we should not lose our sense of humour. There is something especially ludicrous
about Christian churchmen coming round to the belief that violence is wrong.
There is probably no sound on earth so bizarre as the noise of clergymen bleat-
ing about terrorism and revolutionary violence while their cathedrals are stuffed
with regimental flags and monuments to colonial wars. The Christian Church,
with minor exceptions, has been solidly on the side of violence for centuries, but
normally it has only been the violence of soldiers and policemen. It is only
276 Herbert McCabe (1926–2001)

when the poor catch on to violence that it suddenly turns out to be against the
gospel.
But despite all this, the Church, since it is after all the Christian Church, has
never simply professed itself in favour of the violence of the ruling classes, the vio-
lence of the status quo. What it has done is to profess itself on the side of justice
and to note, quite rightly, that in our fallen world justice sometimes demands
violence. This seems to me to make perfect sense – my only quarrel is with the
way that justice has so often turned out to coincide with the interests of the rich.
Justice and love can involve coercion and violence because the objects of justice
and love are not just individual people but can be whole societies. It is an error
(and a bourgeois liberal error at that) to restrict love to the individual I-Thou rela-
tionship. There is no warrant for this in the New Testament – it is simply a frame-
work that our society has imposed on our reading of the gospels. If we have love
for people not simply in their individuality but also in their involvement in the
social structures, if we wish to protect the structures that make human life possi-
ble, then we sometimes, in fact quite often, find it necessary to coerce an indi-
vidual for the sake of the good of the whole. The individual who seeks his or her
own apparent interests at the expense of the whole community may have to be
stopped, and may have to be stopped quickly. To use violence in such a case is
admittedly not a perspicuous manifestation of love (if we were trying to teach
someone the meaning of the word ‘love’ we would hardly point to such exam-
ples), but that does not mean that it is a manifestation of lack of love. In our world,
before the full coming of the kingdom, love cannot always be perspicuous and
obvious. We must not hastily suppose that just because an action would hardly do
as a paradigm case of loving that it is therefore opposed to love.