Communism and Christianism: Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of ViewBrown, William Montgomery
Religion
Communism and Christianism: Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View
Brown, William Montgomery
Christian socialism; Communism; Communism and Christianity
Fear not the tyrants shall rule for ever,
Or the priests of the bloody Faith:
They stand on the brink of that mighty river
Whose waves they have tainted with death,
It is fed from the depths of a thousand dells,
Around them it foams and rages and swells,
And their swords and their scepters I floating see
Like wrecks in the surge of eternity.
--Shelley.
My revolt against the existing capitalist system of economics and the
capitalized political and religious systems which support it is
complete, and the end which I have in view in this booklet is that of
primitive Christianism, as it is taught by Mary in the Magnificat, the
putting down of the owning masters of the world and the exaltation of
the working slaves, only that I do not recommend, as she did, that the
masters should be banished to starve but rather that they should be
allowed to become producers and to live then as such, not as robbers, as
they now live.
This is bolshevism. It is not anarchy, but a new dictatorship instead of
the old, that of the proletariat in place of the bourgeoisie. But this
dictatorship (though necessary during the period of transition from the
capitalist system, by which commodities are made only for the profit of
a few to an industrial system by which they will be made only for use of
the many) is not the goal of socialism. Its goal is a classless world--a
world in which all who are able to work shall directly or at least
indirectly contribute their due proportion, according to their abilities
and opportunities, towards feeding, clothing, housing and educating it.
Perhaps the truest thing in the Bible relates to the utterly corrupt
condition of civilization, nor was it ever truer than now, and it always
must be equally true while the world is divided into master and slave
classes under the dictatorship of the masters:
The whole head is sick and the whole heart faint. From the sole of
the foot even unto the head, there is no soundness in it, but
wounds and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been
closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.
Capitalism and Socialism differ fundamentally in that the former always
has sought and always will seek to exercise a permanent dictatorship,
whereas that of the latter is to constitute the temporary bridge over
which the world is to pass from the economic system under which
commodities are competitively made for the profit of the few, to the
economic system under which they will be co-operatively made for the use
of the many.
It is contended with much show of reason that the dictatorship of the
proletariat will not lead to the goal, because human nature being what
it is the slaves will automatically develop into another class of
masters.
But those who raise this contention proceed upon the assumption that
human nature is a constant quantity so that it cannot be essentially
changed and that it has made the economic systems, what they have been.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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