Religion, Theology, and Class

Fresh Engagements after Long Silence

J. Rieger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137351371
• eBook ISBN: 9781137339249
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This important collection of essays addresses the question of why scholars can no longer do without class in religious studies and theology, and what we can learn from a renewed engagement with the topic. This volume discusses what new discourses regarding notions of gender, ethnicity, and race might add to developments on notions of class.

PART I

Basic Definitions and Challenges of Class

CHAPTER 1

Religion and Class

Richard D. Wolff

Discourse on class has been doubly repressed in the United States for many decades. In the first place, there is a widespread taboo on acknowledging the existence, let alone social significance, of class differences and conflicts. Second, when “class” is sometimes used analytically, its meaning is treated as known, singular, and universally agreed. Yet the history of class analyses over the millennia shows the profound social insights that such analyses have often achieved and their frequently far-reaching effects on politics, economics, and culture. The basic definitions of “class” have not been singular, but rather usually multiple, different, and contested, sometimes with great intensity. Indeed, the particular concept of class stressed in this chapter differs from those favored in several other chapters in this volume. The richness and diversity of class analyses applied to contemporary society and religion contradict today’s mainstream aversion to and superficial grasp of class analysis.

In fact, the meaning of class is—or, more accurately, the multiple and different meanings are—poorly understood. Two very different (and very old) conventional definitions of class are often conflated. In the first, class is a noun that designates a social subgroup according to what and how much property it owns and/or receives as income. Thus we have the propertied versus the propertyless classes, or the rich versus the poor. In the second and equally old definition, class is a noun that designates a social subgroup according to the authority it wields. Thus we have the powerful versus the powerless classes, or the rulers versus the ruled.

Needless to say, these two definitions of class—in terms of property and power—are far from identical. Subgroups that wield great power may not own much property and vice versa. Leading politicians and religious figures often wield much power while owning little personal wealth; so may police personnel. Very wealthy individuals and groups are often culturally or politically constrained from wielding much social power; Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and many lesser-known billionaires are examples.

However, partly because class concepts and analysis have been repressed, those utilizing class terms take little definitional care. The tendency has been to conflate both definitions and proceed simplistically in terms of one class with wealth and power arrayed against another one with neither. Of course, as with all such dichotomies, room is left for a myriad of “middle” groups, “middle classes” with varying quanta of property and power located somewhere in between everything and nothing.

In much of contemporary journalism, in most of the academy, and in all official political discourse, references to these conventional definitions of class occur rarely if at all. When the term arises, it occurs in vague assertions about how “in America everyone is ‘middle class’” or about an American exceptionalism where, because class is irrelevant in the social reality, it does not—and indeed should not—figure in politics or social analysis.

Within many religions and religious communities, ancient sacred texts have recognized the existence and conflicts of rich and poor, powerful and powerless. They also sometimes celebrated the poor and powerless. Thus religions have often been relatively more inclined to use the conventional definitions of class than journalists, academics, and politicians have been. However, in relation to the newer and different definition of class that has so profoundly shaped modern social history since the mid-nineteenth century, the religious communities have generally been as unaware as most other segments of modern societies.

A second or double repression concerns another, different definition of class introduced systematically in the mature work of Karl Marx (especially his Capital). Its existence is largely unacknowledged in the United States. Even in otherwise radical, leftist circles, it is rarely used for analytical or political purposes.¹ Yet it opens and enables a universe of new social understanding. It also raises the most profound moral, ethical, and religious questions. The purpose of this chapter is to articulate these questions and to offer some initial answers.

Marx’s Definition of Class²

Like other social theorists in his time, Marx inherited the two old (property and power) definitions of class. He too developed useful insights into the workings of society and history by examining the social distributions of property and power, class structures according to the old definitions. Marx was part of the generation inspired by the French Revolution to believe and expect that real democracy, social equality, and a pervasive capitalism were mutually reinforcing consequences of feudalism’s overthrow. He shared that generation’s revolutionary opposition to the polarized class structure of European feudalism: wealth and power exclusively concentrated in the upper reaches of the feudal hierarchy, the top landlords, and top church officials. He enthusiastically welcomed the democratization of wealth and power in and by the successor class structure, capitalism.

However, Marx’s own experience and observations of actual European capitalism provoked a developing study and then a critique of its relationship to equality and democracy. He eventually concluded that capitalism had not only failed to secure equality and democracy but was itself a major structural obstacle to their achievement. His commitment to the goals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité, the ideals of the French Revolution, led Marx to criticize capitalism. To that end, Marx became an eager observer of the major economic events of his lifetime (his observations and conclusions fill his many journalistic writings). He also undertook an exhaustive and close reading of the entire theoretical tradition of political economy. Published as the three volumes of Theories of Surplus Value, that reading prepared and grounded his own different critique of capitalism in Capital.

In Capital, Marx formulates a systematic analysis of capitalism that includes and applies a new and different concept of class. While Marx makes use of the older definitions of class as property-owning and power-wielding social subgroups, the primary focus of Capital is on his new concept of class. There he presents the insights into capitalism’s economic structure and social history yielded by the analytical use of his new concept.

Because Marx’s new concept of class entails such profound implications for moral, ethical, and religious concerns, it requires a brief elucidation here before exploring those implications.³ Marx conceptualizes class in terms of a surplus, a quantity of output produced in excess of the consumption of output by its producers. Class refers to the following aspect of any society or community (of any size): some of its members—the laborers—produce a total output that is more than the portion of that output the laborers themselves consume. That more is what Marx means by surplus. Because class refers to the production and distribution of the surplus products of labor, it is an economic concept.

This surplus exists in all societies, past and present. After a society accomplishes the production of a surplus, it always also distributes that surplus among its members. What distinguishes the alternative class structures across human history are their different ways of organizing the production and distribution of surpluses. That is, human societies’ class structures have differed in terms of the following:

Who is socially designated to be a producer of output?

How much of that output is consumed by those designated producers?

Who receives and then distributes the surplus (total output less that consumed by the producers)?

To whom are what portions of the surplus distributed?

Marx’s conception comprehends a dialectical relationship between class and society as a whole. That is, the other nonclass aspects of the economy (aspects other than the production and distribution of the surplus such as lending, saving, exchanging, investing, exporting, etc.) influence the class aspect and vice versa. Likewise, the natural, political, and cultural components of the society mutually interact with the economic (both class and nonclass) aspects. To capture the dialectical relationship between the class processes in any society (producing and distributing surplus) and all the other economic, political, cultural, and natural aspects, I use the term overdetermination.⁴ It specifies that all the nonclass aspects of any society, together and in their interaction, constitute the structure and dynamic of their class aspects. It also specifies that the class aspects of any society participate in constituting the structures and dynamics of all its nonclass processes. This fully relational specification of how the class and nonclass dimensions of society constitute and transform one another comprises Marx’s notion of human history.

Marx’s overdeterminist formulation of class and class analysis is not compatible with the many variants of determinist reasoning that have arisen inside and outside the Marxian tradition.⁵ In the overdeterminist formulation, class aspects are no more (or less) determinant of social development than nonclass aspects. Class and nonclass aspects are qualitatively different and constitute one another in qualitatively different ways not reducible to quantitative measures. Nothing is a more important determinant (in some absolute, quantitative sense) of social structure and change than anything else. Class is the focus of Marx’s work not because he assigns it a greater explanatory role in human history than other aspects of society, but rather because it has been repressed from consciousness generally and from the consciousness of capitalism’s critics in particular. Because he sought to overcome that repression, Marx devoted his work to the analysis of class and its social effects.

The moral and religious qualities and implications of Marx’s new conception of class emerge in his formulation of the five basic alternative kinds of class structure he found in his historical researches. They were (1) communist; (2) slave; (3) ancient; (4) capitalist; and (5) feudal. Despite differences among them, three of these—slave, feudal, and capitalist—shared one quality of their organization of the surplus. Marx called that quality—note the language—exploitation. He deplored exploitation itself on moral and ethical grounds and likewise deplored many of exploitation’s social effects.

By exploitation Marx meant clearly and precisely an organization of production in which the people who produced the surplus were different from the people who received and distributed it. The latter exploited the former and then used the surplus to secure their exploitative positions (as slave master, feudal lord, or employing capitalist) to reproduce the class structures over which they presided. He differentiated those three exploitative class structures from the ancient and communist alternatives. In the former, an individual labored alone, produced and appropriated the surplus that he or she produced, and then distributed the surplus to reproduce the ancient class structure. Marx used the word “ancient” because his prime example was taken from preslave Rome, an economy characterized chiefly by what would now be called “self-employed” peasants. Modern examples of ancient class structures—where individuals combine producing and appropriating/distributing the surpluses—include doctors, architects, lawyers, software producers, dressmakers, and others who work alone in their respective enterprises. While the ancient class structure was, for Marx, not exploitative (since the producer and appropriator of the surplus is the same person), he never praised or advocated it. He found it technologically backward and prone to dissolution when in competitive coexistence with slave, feudal, and capitalist class structures

The class structure that Marx favored, that he celebrated in some of his polemical writings and championed in his political activism, was communism. It entailed a collective rather than individual labor process such that the collective that produced the surplus was identical to the collective that received and distributed that surplus. Marx’s Capital, which was devoted to an exhaustive critique of the capitalist class structure, made only occasional, passing references to the alternative of production by “associated workers” to signal where he hoped his critique would lead. Because he did not believe in spinning utopian visions of future societies (recall his and Engels’ critique of “utopian socialism” in the pamphlet “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”), Marx never articulated a systemic notion of the communist class structure.

Marx’s subtle theorizations of class in terms of the social organization of the surplus—and the extensions, elaborations, and critical transformations of those theorizations since—present religion with a serious challenge that the rest of this chapter aims to present and discuss. What is at stake is nothing less than the exposure of a profound ethical and moral problem at the core of capitalism, in its organization of the production of goods and services that modern society depends upon. The question is whether and how religious sensibilities and commitments can and will respond to that challenge rather than pretending it is not there.

The Problem of Exploitation

In contemporary societies, most of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   Why Class Matters in Religious Studies and Theology
• Part I   Basic Definitions and Challenges of Class
• Part II   Understanding Class in Historical Contexts
• Part III   Class in Relation to Poverty, Gender, Race, and Ethnicity
• Index