John M. Hull

For most of the twentieth century access to some of the fundamental sources of European social criticism has been impeded by the political developments which these critical studies inaugurated in Eastern Europe. The rise of communism and the division of much of the world between Western and Eastern power blocks meant that social scientists, historians, economists and r theologians who sought to investigate this literature were easily suspected of being unpatriotic or simply eccentric.(1) As the triumph turned into the horrors of Stalinism and then into the economic collapse and tribal fragmentation of the present period, it might seem that an intellectual tradition at first merely unpopular has become discredited and unworthy of further serious study. In fact, however, the result of these historical developments is to remove the barriers which have made access to these sources difficult. The breaking down of the Berlin Wall is accompanied by the breaking down of an intellectual wall.

We now see the significance of the fact that the principal critics of Western industrial society had their roots in the West. Antonio Gramsci did his most important work in an Italian prison, (2) Karl Marx in the British Museum. We are dealing with the principal modem development of self -criticism within industrial societies. I am thinking of the studies by Friedrich Engels on dialectical thinking, (3) Georgy Lukacs on the history of class consciousness, (4) Antonio Gramsci on the relations between the state and middle class culture (5) and, above all, Karl Marx on money.

Lawrence Kohlberg has used the expression ‘justice reasoning’ to describe the cognitive patterns which enable us to think clearly about questions of justice; (6) I shall use the expression ‘justice enquiry’ to indicate the common feature of the literature with which I am here concerned. The search for justice is its most distinctive feature. Kohlberg showed us how thinking about justice involves a developmental pattern which is stimulated by participation within personal and public crises of justice.(7) The Marxist literature lays bare a method of justice enquiry which, if followed, precipitates justice reasoning by enabling us to understand that the contemporary social and economic crisis is fundamentally a crisis of justice. It offers models of analysis which stimulate that consciousness not through the occasional educational intervention, nor the once in a lifetime experience of a Vietnam or a Watergate (8) but by unveiling the implications of ordinary, daily life under the conditions of late modernity. Lawrence Kohlberg and, after him, Fritz Oser have made us familiar with the ‘dilemma intervention’ as a way of stimulating cognitive development in the moral and religious areas.(9) The tradition of justice enquiry enables us to realize that the greatest dilemma intervention of modem times is the appearance and character of modernity itself, (10) so that we are stimulated to think in more mature ways about the God of justice not only because of our exposure to concrete hypothetical dilemmas but because our entire society is in a dilemma. The complexity which will stimulate justice reasoning is not a pedagogical creation but a historical and social reality. We are forced on to justice reasoning and to justice theology by understanding that we are in the midst of injustice.

I select Capital because it is the most sustained example of justice enquiry in the social science literature, and because it deals with money as the supreme enigma of modernity. (11)

In spite of its impressive architectonic qualities Capital remains a complex work and, as one might expect, there is a substantial literature dealing with the problems of its purpose, meaning and interpretation.(12) Since my own discussion is limited to Capital as a suggestive resource for the Christian educator, I need not enter into the more general questions of interpretation. I will, however, briefly describe some of the themes of Capital which have emerged in my own study of it, and which will prepare the way for my reflections on it as a stimulus to Christian adult education.

Capital is a vast and detailed attempt to understand the nature of money in modem industrial societies. Money often appears to have magical qualities. What is money? .Is it gold, silver or copper coinage? Is it paper, plastic or electronic data? Is it based upon faith and promise-keeping and is thus basically a question of credit? How can the value of money fluctuate? Where does money get its strange capacity to breed, its apparently intrinsic property of self-expansion?

Through his detailed analysis Marx tries to demystify money, to explore both the benefits and the oppression which money has made possible, to give us a sense of both the past and the future of our society by seeing that money is part of a wider social evolution which is continuing, and to release money from its abuses so opening up a future in which money will serve a more humane and equitable society.

For the capitalist, the means of growth is the commodity. The miser rejects the commodity because it would mean parting with some of the money. The miser seeks for money in itself; the capitalist seeks for wealth through the interchange of money and commodities. For the capitalist, value oscillates between money and commodity; for the miser there is no oscillation. The miser is addicted to but one form of wealth; the capitalist is flexible and pursues wealth through many forms. The money of the miser is sterile because it dwells alone; that of the capitalist is productive because it engages in intercourse with other forms. The capitalist is committed to metamorphoses, to transformation, but the miser is committed to what can be touched and seen. The capitalist is more spiritual; he or she believes that money may come and go, may be seen or unseen, may be abstract or concrete. The miser is a concrete thinker, fascinated by the actual weight of the treasure, or the actual quantity of the bank balance. The capitalist is an abstract thinker, penetrating through the pictorial images to the concept or the essence.

Marx now enlivens the distinction between the miser and the capitalist by introducing a series of theological jokes.(13) The capitalist, he remarks understands that commodities are ‘inwardly circumcised Jews’.(14) They do not carry on their outward parts the sign of their true lineage. This is now concealed within them, like the circumcision of the heart. The spiritual essence or the heart of the commodity, its inner sacred quality lies in its monetary value. It is because of this motion, which it has through its cycle of transformations, its series of incarnations, that capital takes on dynamic qualities. It acquires velocity; it takes on a self-propagating force which appears almost occult in its results. Just as the Father, notes Marx, in the Holy Trinity differentiates himself from the Son in the process of the eternal begetting of the Son and yet the Father and the Son remain one, and are also of one age since neither has a temporal priority, so capital differentiates itself into money and into commodities. ‘The Son, and by the Son the Father, is begotten. So soon does their difference vanish and they again become one.’(15)

It makes itself known in various forms but what is the secret of its mysterious power? If we were to believe that the secret of capital lies in the market place, we would have failed to distinguish between commerce and industry. We would not have distinguished merchant capital from industrial capital. If we believed that the essential value-increase occurs when commodities are bought at less than their value or sold for more than their value, we would have psychologised the character of money by reducing it to preference; value would then be a question of supply and demand, and the central figure in the process would not be the manufacturer but the sales agent and the customer.

To find the essential difference between industrialized economies and mere trading economies, we need to study the circulation of capital within the process of manufacturing. We begin with money capital, which we turn into productive capital. This latter is divided between the money invested in the means of production (the plant, machinery, raw materials and so on) and the money laid aside to pay the employees. Marx calls this wage capital. When the product comes out of the factory into the warehouse, it may be described as commodity capital which, having been exchanged in the market, returns to money capital again. Merchant capital thus occupies only the last part of the cycle. The essential increase of value has already been inserted into the commodity before it comes on to the market.

This is where labour comes in. Value is always the product of work. Some of the value injected into the product by labour is paid for by the wages; some is in effect unpaid. It is this latter element, surplus value, which is the fundamental cause of the growth in the quality of capital. In the market place, the value is more or less realized (depending on a number of factors including competition) but not created.

The workers are also involved in the cycle of capital. Their wages are wage capital from the point of view of the industrialist. It is an investment. The capitalist will receive more than the value of the wages back in the value which the workers will insert into the product, and the workers will also spend their wages on the market purchasing the commodities which they have helped to create.

Capital not only reproduces itself in an expanded form as it passes through its cycle; it also reproduces both the material and the social/spiritual conditions which will encourage this. Education, religion, the law and the arts will also play their part in creating a culture which has as its ultimate goal the continual expansion of capital. Three stages can be discerned in the history of this expansion. In the earliest stage, only a small surplus of production will be available for the market. Most will be consumed in daily living. In good years, or when improved methods of production increase output, a small surplus will be available for exchange. In the second stage the relationship between use-value and exchange-value will dramatically alter. Virtually the entire national product will be available for exchange. The labourers in the vineyard will not drink the product of the vine; it will be exported. Those who labour on building sites with bricks will live in mud houses. The entire production of bricks is for sale. In the final stage, exchange-values will not only have swallowed up the production of goods (all goods will become commodities) but will also have penetrated thoroughly the world of ideas and of culture. Health, education, literature, religion, sport-human life itself will have become an exchange-value. Human beings will have become personifications of money.(16)

Just as the character of capitalist accumulation is misunderstood when it is reduced to the psychology of the exchange relationship, so Christian theological education is prone to psychological reduction. When Christian education aims merely at personal fulfilment, individual potential, or (in brief) at happiness, it loses the right to be taken seriously as a programme of theological education under modernity. Christian education must be Church education. It is the education of the ecclesia. Education becomes ecclesial when it is appropriate to the whole body of Christ, when it deals with the solidarity of the Church within the solidarity of humanity. The church member is not to be educated as a soul but as having the consciousness appropriate to the social class within which he or she is situated together with the consciousness appropriate to membership of the ecclesia. A good deal of theological education within highly developed countries will thus become the evangelisation of the churched or semi-churched middle classes. At the same time, ecclesial education places class consciousness within worldwide consciousness, and within a renewed awareness of being Church. (17)

Theological education must not co-operate with this ideology of individualism. For example, in terms of church policy and the commitment of Christian families, theological education should strengthen support for comprehensive education and should weaken support for a class-stratified system of education which perpetuates asymmetrical relations of power.

The major theological resource for such an education will be the Bible. It would be appropriate at the present time for theological education to re-emphasize those aspects of the biblical doctrines of sin and salvation which are evidently corporate. The central image of the new society in the teaching of Jesus is the Kingdom of God and this kind of education could rightly be called a Kingdom of God education. Christian education thus moves away from inwardness towards participation in social relationships.

The biblical understandings of money will themselves offer both guidance and content to such programmes. Although cast in terms of a pre-capitalist mode of production, as is to be expected from societies which were agricultural and commercial rather than industrial, the Bible nevertheless conveys powerful messages about the falseness of exchange relationships (Mk 8:34-37) and an awareness of the contrast between grace and commodity values (Is 52:3, 55:1-3). There is a striking emphasis upon the deceitful qualities of money (Ps 49:5-9, Lk 12:16-21) and the exploitative relationships engendered by the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few (Jas 5:1-6). The values of life within the covenant and in the Kingdom of God offer a striking contrast to the values of a society based upon exchange-values (Lk 6:20, 24).18

‘In a social order dominated by capitalist production, even the non-capitalist producer is gripped by capitalist conceptions.’(19) A materialist or concrete conception of money is one of the principal illusions, and one of the main purposes of Capital is to enable readers to break through that illusion to the reality behind it. Riches are deceitful not only in the sense that they tempt people into vain and corrupting desires but in the sense that people take them for what they are not. The prodigal son rejoiced in the exchange-value of his inheritance, as if it were an independent entity (so many bags of gold) without realizing until it was almost too late that built into the exchange-value was the labour of his father and mother, his elder brother and the employees of the farm, as well as their corporate future. He literally did not know what he was doing, which is why the story says that ‘he came to himself’(Lk 15:17). He had been in a sort of dream, a madness.

Marx often contrasts the outward appearance of the industrial society with its inner essence. The phenomena do not in themselves offer an understanding. One must exercise a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ before the phenomenal veil can be penetrated.

Surplus value and the rate of surplus value are the invisible and unknown essence that wants investigating while the rate of profit and therefore the appearance of surplus value in the form of profit are revealed on the surface of the phenomena.(20)

 

The hidden reality of surplus is transformed into the concrete encounter between the buyer and the seller in the visible market place. The capitalist himself or herself, surrounded by a self-protective cloud of illusion, does not understand this, but attributes personal success to greater energy, or regards success as a mark of divine favour.(21) At this point, the ‘Christianity of a successful and happy life’ can be seen as the theological rationalization of the illusions of capitalism. The capitalist is someone who actually deals in human relations but believes that the dealing is in material substances. In that sense, the capitalist is a materialistic thinker, although as shown above the capitalist may be contrasted with the more materialistic miser. Nevertheless, capitalism is spiritually creative. The opportunities generated by wealth and leisure for personal refinement can lead to the cultivation of many kinds of spirituality.(22) What is lacking, however, is the analytic spirituality necessary in order to penetrate the materialistic illusion of capitalism itself.

It thus appears that if we are to take seriously the implications of Capital, the Christian education of adults must be seen not as offering additional knowledge, knowledge to be added to the previous stock of knowledge, but as transformatory. ‘Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind’ (Rom 12:2). It must be emphasized that these proposals apply only to societies in which religion has taken on superstructural characteristics, where religion has become the projection of exchange-values, part of the ideology which nourishes and sustains domination, and in which Christian subjectivity (including the sense of Christian identity as well as what is usually called religious experience) has to some extent become the reification of exchange-values. The character of Christian theological education in primal societies or in societies characterized by some form or another of pre-capitalist economy might well be different. This pattern of Christian education should also be distinguished from that which prevailed in communist countries before 1989 or thereabouts, where the relationship between religion and the state was different.

These reflections flow from the philosophy of history which we find in Capital and other works by Marx.(26) The concept of historical periodicisation which claims that capitalism is itself a transitory historical phenomenon, being preceded and followed by other forms of human society, suggests that the task of Christian education should similarly be periodicised. There is no universal or perennial Christian education, since Christian education is always a branch of practical theology.

Karl Marx has taught us how to read modern society. As we read Capital we learn something about the complexities of reading a printed text.(29) Marx read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and noticed certain features of it which had been illegible to earlier readers, such as the role of labour-values. By the same token, Adam Smith himself had read society and certain things remained invisible to him which to Marx became entirely visible.(30) By reading Capital and then re-reading the phenomena and the texts of our current church life, we can learn to perceive that which is invisible in church life as we have received it. Through an illuminative Christian education, we can learn how to bring those invisible parts into the light of day. Louis Althusser observes that from the way Karl Marx has taught us to read, we can learn something about the nature of scientific progress. Scientific research not only focuses attention upon areas in which human knowledge is fragmentary, or upon the sheer unknown, but upon that which sounds hollow within it. ‘A science progresses and lives by knowing how to hear what sounds hollow in it.’(31)

A reading of Capital draws our attention to aspects in our own church life under faith which sound hollow. We can learn to exchange background for foreground, to reverse that which has been inverted, and so to understand why it is that for Christians under capitalism the character of Christian testimony has become flawed: There is no longer a translucent reading of Christian texts; Christian self-consciousness is no longer unambiguous; it .can no longer be assumed that Christianity is as it thinks it is and says it is. Against the structures of deceit must be placed the structures of a Christian theological education inspired by the Kingdom of God. Reading Capital can make our understanding and. our practice of Christian education both clearer and stronger.

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