Communism and Christianism / Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View

by William Montgomery Brown

II. My political faith is summed up in the following creed of twelve articles:

(1) As the universe in general is self-existing, self-sustaining and self-governing, so man in particular, who is but one among the transitory, cosmic phenomena, has all of the potentialities of his own life within himself, so that every man can say of himself what the makers of Jesus had him say: I and my Father are one.

(2) Man has set a far-off and high-up goal of an ideal civilization for himself, and is finding the way to it by his own discoveries, and is walking therein by his own strength, so that he is not in the least indebted to any of the gods of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion, either for the setting of the goal, or for what progress he has made towards it.

(3) Nor is humanity indebted to its outstanding representatives for the advance in the way of civilization, as is evident from the fact that, but for the gods, it would have long since been far beyond the point where the English-German war would have been within the range of possibilities, and these gods are the gifts to a blind humanity by its blind leaders.

(4) Humanity is not indebted to its physical scientists any more than to its spiritual prophets for its advance in the way of civilization, because the scientists have always worked, as the prophets have preached, in the interests of the profiteers of the existing system of economics. Economic systems have been the chief, if not indeed, the only promoters of war, and the world war with its tremendous horrors would not have been possible but for science.

(5) So, then, the history of civilization has been what it is because of the economic systems by which the material necessities of life (foods, raiments and houses) have been produced, not because gods have made spiritual revelations, nor yet because men have made great discoveries and persuasively taught them. According to Marx, who discovered the key to the door of history, it is constituted neither by the gods in the skies, nor the great men on earth; but by economic systems. These create the divinities and the leaders, not they them.

(6) Thus far in the history of mankind every civilization has rested upon the institution of slavery and there have been, speaking broadly, three different forms of it, with their correspondingly different civilizations, chattel, feudal and capital. Each of these forms of slavery has been the foundation for a superstructure of a civilization peculiar to a distinct period of history. Chattel, feudal and capital slaveries respectively constituted the foundations for the superstructures of ancient, mediaeval and modern civilizations. The second of the two great discoveries by Marx was that the wage slavery of capitalism, by far the worst of all slaveries, is due to surplus profits.

(7) Since civilizations have their embodiments in religious and political institutions (churches and states with what goes with them) so clearly as to justify the contention that religion and politics are the halves of one and the same reality—civilization—it follows that I am right in carrying my materialism over from the realm of religion into that of politics.

(8) A system of economics is about the most materialistic thing in the world, yet it is the only key which will open the door to the temple of human history. Having opened it with this key, the first thing to be seen is a world divided into two classes, one class whose representatives live by owning the material means and the machines for production and distribution; and another class whose representatives live by working in making and operating these machines, with the result of producing and distributing the material commodities by which the world is fed, clothed and housed, but to the surfeiting of the owners who as such produce nothing and have everything and the starving of the workers who produce everything and have nothing.

(9) Capitalists and communists agree that when the goal of humanity has been reached the world will find itself to be one all inclusive co-operating family.